Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

“Guns,” he said, his rough voice cutting through all other thoughts in my mind, yanking me to the present.

“We ran guns,” he continued, thumb rubbing my inner thigh, almost brushing the area where my drenched panties lay beneath my pants.

Almost.

Then he moved downward. Rubbing.

Bruising the skin, no doubt.

But still not looking at me. Not speaking to me.

“Used to?” my grandmother asked, her voice still easy, curious, not a hint of disapproval. Though it took a lot to earn my grandmother’s censure. Or a little, depending on how you looked at it, considering her tone had been saturated with it when she’d been talking to my last boyfriend about his job in investment banking.

Gage nodded once. “Characteristic of the life. Blood. Pain. Death. It’s the price of freedom. Every single brother wearing a patch knows that. Willin’ to pay that price in order to live the life we want. To live the life you want, you gotta be willing to die the death you don’t want.” His words were no-nonsense, flat, as if he were speaking about stock options.

A vision of Gage bloody and lifeless assaulted my mind, and I tasted bile from the mere thought. It was so real that I had to shove my hand atop his on my thigh just to remind myself that he was warm and alive.

His entire body tightened with my touch, his jaw hardening, his breath pausing. But he still didn’t look at me. After a beat, his hand lifted slightly so I could snake mine into it.

“Patched members are willin’ to die for the club,” he continued. “But we’re not willin’ to lose something more precious than our lives.” He paused, his hand tightening around mine to the point that my very bones protested. “That’s our heart. The innocents.” His hand relaxed on mine slightly, but I didn’t find relief in the receding pain. Because I wanted to feel more of it, because Gage needed more of it. I wanted him to give it to me. To hurt me in ways that made him hurt less. Or at least feel less lonely in his pain.

“One of my brothers lost his woman in a club war over territory nearly seven years back,” he said, voice hoarse.

I knew that. Everyone in Amber knew that. It was a blow that wounded the entire town. The beautiful, innocent woman named Laurie who was brutally kidnapped, tortured, and finally killed. It was barely healed, that scar.

The club had been a fixture in town since before I could remember. And they had been loud. There had been violence. Some deaths. Blood. But nothing that really stained the town in a way like Laurie’s death.

Because this was violence that even the men with chaos in their blood couldn’t handle. It had given way to an ugly and dark time for the town. Not long after which Gwen, Cade’s wife, had entered the picture and things began to change.

There was still violence. A lot of it. Most of it centered around the new women entering the club, trying to fit around the wound made by Laurie’s death. There was still pain, but there was also more light and happiness. Even an outsider like me could see that.

“My president, Cade, almost lost his own woman to this shit,” Gage continued. “Price for that kind of freedom became too high, so we stopped runnin’ guns, started runnin’ legit. The club, at least.”

My grandmother’s eyebrow arched. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. “The club?” she repeated, her question clear.

Gage nodded once. “Price of my freedom is still high enough for me to need to pay it in ways the club doesn’t.”

He didn’t say anything else on the subject.

And my grandmother didn’t probe.

Because of the exposed nerve.

The huge freaking land mine we’d stumbled onto that would level everything and everyone around it.

The night lightened after that.

As much as it could.

And with my grandmother around, it was a lot. Though not enough to make me feel at ease around Gage. Not enough to shove away the bone-deep fear that his silence and coldness toward me was a harbinger of doom.

So my smile was bright and totally fake when my grandmother released me from her embrace in my doorway at the end of the night, once we’d gotten back from the restaurant and she’d informed us that she was off on the next adventure.

“Please be careful, and call me often,” I asked, my voice low.

She grinned, squeezing my arms. “That’s supposed to be my line.”

I smirked. “Well, I’m not the one who gets wild hair and goes running with the bulls at seventy-nine years old.”

She winked again, releasing me. “Hmmm, I think you’re running with something a lot more dangerous than the bulls,” she murmured, eyes on Gage, who was returning from putting her suitcases in her trunk, her car was idling in the ‘no parking’ spot.