Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

But the knocking persisted.

And I was one of those people who, when I was awake, I was awake. Once I had abandoned my dreams—or more accurately, my nightmares—I was ready to proceed in getting through another day.

For once, I wasn’t just ready to proceed and get through another day.

I was terrified of what the day would hold.

And it meant something. That I was alive. Properly and truly alive.

Gage was little more than a dead weight, and it took considerable effort and jostling just to get myself from under him—yet he stayed asleep. I wondered how tired a person must need to be to sleep that deep. Something warmed my terrified heart, because a person can’t be just tired to sleep that hard. A person had to feel safe, utterly and completely safe, in order to render themselves so vulnerable.

And a lot of people might argue that something like sleeping deeply when one was super tired wasn’t something you could control. I disagreed. Because I had the sense that Gage controlled everything about himself. His violence and menace weren’t borne out of chaos. No, it was structured. Controlled. He controlled it because if he let his guard down, his demons would eat him alive. So he chose to live in danger and violence in order to keep the demons at bay.

Much like I controlled my safety and logic in order to survive.

He just went a different way.

Okay, maybe a way different way. On a different planet type of way.

And yet somehow he was there. Naked in my bed, the sheets riding low on his hips so I was treated to the full glimpse of his muscles from the sun streaming in the windows. I didn’t think men had eight-packs in real life.

Gage did.

I doubted he had any body fat percentage, he was that ripped.

His entire chest was tattooed in such an intricate design, the art of it beyond anything I’d ever seen. And that was saying something since art was my life. My secret life, but my life nonetheless.

Though I knew I had to get up before the knocking finally woke Gage, I paused to feast my eyes on his chest.

It was like Gage himself, beautiful and ugly at the same time. Savage in its construction but painfully stunning to look at. From shoulder to shoulder, spanning his entire chest to the middle of his ribs, were the gates of Hell. It couldn’t be anything else. A hooded skeleton with illuminated eyes was perched in the middle, his hood and plumes of smoke snaking up toward Gage’s neck. Shadowed clouds were the background of the piece. Then, downward, merging into the skeleton’s body were two open large gates, their light giving way to darkness. Right in the middle of them was the Devil himself, holding a sword in one hand and beckoning with a clawed talon with his other. He stood on a floor of flaming human skulls.

That was the tattoo on close inspection. At first glance, the entire design and the details within it were in the shape of a human skull. The talent was incredible.

What it meant was horrifying.

Gage was literally wearing Hell above his heart.

And if that was on the skin above it, it was agony to think of what lay underneath.

But I couldn’t think on that now.

Not with the morning sun illuminating the darkness.

So I forced my eyes down, to not linger in the pit of pain.

His glorious abs had no ink and I was glad of it. Right where his hips went into that delicious male V was where the tattoos started again. A dark garden of decaying roses and crumbling ruins spanned his hips and moved downward.

My stomach hungered to yank the sheet down, expose the tattoos and more of the dark hair creeping upward from his groin.

I ached to explore him in the sunlight, to trace every inch of the beautiful artistry with my fingers. And my aching and ruined body craved something else. I clenched my tender thighs at the mere thought of it. The memory.

Desire for him consumed me in a dark way that definitely wasn’t healthy.

My eyes jerked to his arms, splayed along the bed now that I wasn’t encased in them. In the harsh light of day, the scars were just that—harsh. Brutal. Evidence of something literally ripping at his flesh, grinding it up. It didn’t look real.

It couldn’t be real.

But it was.

Because reality was always stranger than fiction. And it was always uglier. Harder to swallow. That’s why everyone preferred the candy cane fiction. Why happy-ever-afters always earned more than the tragic endings.

Because people didn’t want to be reminded that reality was harsh and cruel. They wanted to pretend, until the last possible moment, that life was like a Disney movie.

But there was no Disney here.

A tear ran down my cheek. I knew, was certain those scars—and the story behind them—were the key to him.