Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

And it needed to come out now.

So I pulled back from Gage. He let me.

“Is that what they’re from?” I asked, running my fingers lightly over the skin. I knew I could only do it that way, for a short amount of time, especially now that all his pain was on the surface.

Even though I barely made contact, Gage still flinched.

I flinched inwardly too, at the thought of all that history mangled in scar tissue, still paining him.

He was a man without limit, without fears.

Until it came to his own skin. What lay beneath it.

“Did someone do it to you… after?” I choked, unable to say the words.

“After my wife killed my daughter and I murdered my wife?” Gage asked coldly, with such impact that it was my turn to flinch.

I nodded once.

“No. Well, fuck.” He lifted his arm, gazing at it as if it were an unfamiliar map. “Some of them might’ve been from someone else. I was too high to notice pain for a good while. It all melded into one. Into nothing. Don’t remember any wounds when I surfaced. Then again, I didn’t notice anything but my need for junk. The horror in my reality.” He shrugged. “But most of them come from that, from reality. The need.” His eyes moved from mine, the first time he’d ever averted his glance. He seemed… ashamed?

“Gettin’ clean is different for everyone,” he said. “Some people do it ’cause they’re locked up and got no other choice. Most of those people don’t stay clean for long, because if someone needs junk, they’ll find it, no matter where they are. The Devil always provides for sinners who ask. Rest of ’em take up somethin’ else to distract from the need. Smokin’. Eatin’. Fuckin’. Some got support, but support means shit. You’re born alone, you die alone, and you battle addiction alone. ’Cause addiction is birth and death all rolled into one—you can’t separate the two. Methods to get clean, stay clean… not many of them are healthy, because addiction isn’t healthy in the first place, so the cure sure as shit isn’t gonna be. Obviously my version of a cure was a lot more fucked up than your garden-variety junkie, and that’s saying something.” He chuckled, the sound ugly and wrong. Full of the truth. He glanced down to his arms again, then gripped the knife that was always at his belt.

My stomach roiled at the meaning.

But it couldn’t be that.

Even with Gage, it couldn’t be that.

“Every time my skin cried out for nothingness, I gave it pain, blood,” he said, confirming my worst fears. “’Cause that’s exactly what junk is. Someone said it’s like being taken to Hell and thinking you’re going to Heaven. But it doesn’t matter where the fuck you’re goin’. You don’t care. That’s the whole point, not caring. The pursuit of nothing. Not Heaven, not Hell, nothing. So I had to give myself the opposite of nothing to get clean.”

I couldn’t speak for the longest of moments because my vocal cords were paralyzed in horror. In the time Gage and I had been together, the time I’d come to love him more than anything else in my world, I’d entertained all sorts of nightmares about his past.

And even my depraved imagination couldn’t have come up with that.

I knew he’d lost someone, because when someone loses an important person to them—when that person is stolen, brutally early—it does something to the complexion. Shadows behind the eyes, like a superimposed image on top of the flesh. Like an invisible tattoo is only visible under ultraviolet light, this pain, this loss, is only visible by people who’ve known death.

So yeah, I’d known Gage’s story would break my heart.

I didn’t know it would shred it to pieces and then lay them at my feet.

He’d lost his daughter.

I found myself desperate for some kind of instrument to turn back time. To reach into the past and grab onto her when she’d been alive, pure, beautiful. Because she was a piece of Gage before he’d lost himself to the darkness. And he was beautiful in his darkness, but her, with his light?

I should’ve been more bothered about the admission of murdering his wife. That was kind of a big deal. When your boyfriend tells you he killed the mother of his child, it should rip apart any future you’re entertaining with him.

For me, it only solidified it. Because I’d said goodbye to all of my black-and-white conventional beliefs when I’d climbed on Gage’s motorcycle that night, when I’d sacrificed the last piece of myself and lost myself to the darkness.

And my darkness pulsated with the need for Gage’s wife to be alive, only so I could kill her again. I didn’t have violent, homicidal thoughts. I got dark, but never that dark. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t even wish the man who’d sold to David dead.