Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

His expression tensed. “Are you threatening me, Lauren?”

I obviously didn’t get to answer, because someone ripped Troy backward and then punched him in the face.

More specifically, my boyfriend, the member of an outlaw motorcycle club, punched a police officer in the face in broad daylight.

“You’re in so much fucking trouble,” a feral voice growled.

Not directed at Troy.

But at me.

Gage was arrested.

That was after Troy had taken a long time to push himself off the sidewalk.

It felt like forever.

Because after Gage uttered his threat, he had just stared at me. Hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t touched me. Just stared, promise of punishment radiating from every pore.

I’d expected him to fight when Troy drew his gun, cuffed him, and placed him under arrest.

He hadn’t.

He hadn’t said a word, just continued to stare at me until Troy closed the back door of the cruiser after shoving Gage inside.

Troy’s nose had finally stopped bleeding at that point.

“This really the life you want, Lauren?” he asked softly, giving me a look before getting in the car and roaring off, leaving me standing on the bloodstained sidewalk.

Obviously I’d called Amy.

Who called Brock.

Who called me and told me, “Don’t worry. This isn’t the first cop Gage has punched, and it won’t be the last.”

I was worried.

Enough to drive to the station, even though Brock had urged me the club “had it sorted” and to “sit tight.”

No way I could sit, tight or otherwise, in my freaking apartment after my boyfriend had just been arrested.

So I went to the station.

“Oh shit,” Lucky said as he watched me storm in.

Obviously I had a certain look on my face. Hence the “Oh shit.”

I ignored him. In fact, I ignored the whole sea of leather congregated in the precinct.

Until a large body stepped in front of me, a ‘President’ patch on his cut.

I’d met Cade briefly at the party the week before.

He was intimidating. Not because he was hot—which he freaking was—but because of something else. The darkness that rippled out from around him. Not like Gage’s. No, nothing could be like his. Because his was chaotic, unrestrained.

Something about Cade was controlled, chaos somehow tamed.

Still menacing nonetheless.

But I was feeling pretty menacing myself, having worked up to it on the drive over.

Hence me jutting my chin up and meeting his steely gaze.

“Lauren,” he began, likely to try to relegate me to the place of the woman, which was fretting someplace where she couldn’t do something like get in the way.

I wasn’t one to be relegated.

“Okay, I know you’re the president of the club, and therefore your word is law.” I glanced around at the uneasy officers in the precinct. “Or the exact opposite of it. But I’m not here to listen to laws, on either side. I’m here for my man. And with all due respect, Cade, I’m not about to let you stop me from doing something because of your position at the top of the club. My position is at Gage’s side. And right now, my position is yelling at the cop who put my boyfriend behind bars.”

My voice rose to a yell at that point, my eyes catching the man in question and my anger getting the best of me.

Cade, who had approached me with an iron face, was now looking at me with something resembling shock, though the corner of his mouth was turned up in something resembling a grin.

I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He stepped back, giving me a clear pathway to Troy, who was emerging from one of doors off the side of the large room.

“This is not going to end well,” Cade muttered at the same time Lucky declared, “This is going to be awesome.”

I was in front of Troy before I actually knew what happened.

“Let him out right now,” I hissed, not worrying about the audience.

Troy’s expression hardened. “Lauren, let’s talk in the office,” he said, gesturing to a door I knew to be an interrogation room, based on previous stories I’d written about renovating the precinct.

I anchored my feet to the floor. “No. I don’t intend on being here for long, so we’re talking here. And you’re letting Gage go.”

“He assaulted an officer, Lauren,” he sighed. “You know, since you were a witness.”

I arched my brow. “Yes, I do know. Since I was a witness,” I sneered. “And I was a witness to a police officer grabbing me, touching me without my permission and not letting me go when I told him to take his hands off me.”

Troy’s eyes widened in shock.

“I know my boyfriend saw me being assaulted by a police officer, and he likely was witness to my pleading with that same police officer to take his hands off me. Therefore he did what he could to forcibly take those hands off me. So unless you want me to press charges, then write a story on an outlaw coming to the rescue, I suggest you drop the charges and let my man go.”