“You don’t need that choice. You’re coming with me. We’re going to a meeting,” he declared.
My eyebrow rose, the only outward reaction to his words. Inside, my stomach dropped and my mouth went dry. “A meeting?” I repeated.
He nodded. “Yep. Get shoes on.”
I didn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to go to a meeting,” I informed him sharply.
He didn’t move. “I didn’t ask whether you wanted to or not. I said we’re going.”
I felt my hackles rise at yet another alpha throwing his weight around. It was better than the shame of every single one of these people knowing about me. Knowing what I was. An addict.
“You can’t make me,” I declared, crossing my arms and regarding him with defiance. With confidence I was faking.
He could. He mostly certainly could make me do whatever he wanted me to do. The thought soured in my stomach and made my skin crawl. He was big. Every biker in the goddamn club was big. Not all were tall like this motherfucker but almost all were built like brick shithouses. Some of the older members had let themselves go and a beer belly covered what would’ve been a healthy six-pack in their heyday, But even with the extra pounds they held muscle. I could only think of two men who didn’t conform to the ‘must be muscled and menacing to enter badass club’ rule. Wire, the skinny guy who constantly had an energy drink in his hands and spent most of his times with computers, and Skid, the gangly prospect I’d met what felt like years before.
Gage was like neither of them. He was much taller than me, but that wasn’t saying much.
He was attractive, another rule of the club. Though it was in a darker way than most of the other men. They were badass motherfuckers, don’t get me wrong, but there was a hardness to Gage that I recognized. His muscled arms were decorated with various ribbons of scars, a hint at the reason for the dark that lay beyond those eyes.
“I could,” he answered, reading my mind. “But I won’t,” he added and, despite myself, I deflated slightly. “You need to go.”
I scowled at him. “You have no fucking idea what I need,” I hissed, anger starting to bubble past everything else in my mind, which was good.
“Got some idea,” he replied mildly.
I stepped forward. “What? Those eyes have some kind of magical mind-reading power?”
“Nope.” He moved his hand to his pocket and threw me the small item.
I caught it on reflex. I stared at him a beat, then moved my attention to the small plastic object in my hand.
“Four years sober,” he said quietly.
My head snapped up at his words.
“No one’s demons are the same. Helps to know that people other than you are fighting their own, though.”
I continued to stare at him in disbelief. Then I moved my gaze back down to the chip in my hands, contemplating it. I couldn’t fathom it. Since Lily had hooked up with Asher—and, by extension, the Sons of Templar MC—I had met almost all of the men in the club. Got to know them. One rather intimately. They were all strong, solid. Dauntless. And most could be romance cover models. That was neither here nor there. I never considered any one of them having the weakness that I was ashamed to possess.
And if I could have picked one, Gage would have been my last. Granted, his icy eyes were unsettling, and sometimes almost devoid of anything human, but he seemed stoic, unflappable.
“Shoes,” he repeated.
I wanted to argue, throw sass. Stamp my feet. Anything but actually agree to go. But something in his gaze, in his admission, had me throwing the chip back to him and soundlessly padding to my room to put on shoes.
“Does anyone else know? About you?” I asked after we’d been driving in silence for a good ten minutes.
Gage had silently waited for me to put on my wedged sneakers—not for everyone, but I thought they were kick-ass—and quickly change my top.
I wanted to swamp myself in another huge baggy hoodie like the one I had been wearing before Gage made me spill soda all over it. I wanted to cover every inch of my body in something shapeless that I could hide behind.
I didn’t.
I wouldn’t.
I wouldn’t give those men power over me. What they did to me irrevocably scarred my soul, my insides. There was no changing that. But I would not let them stop me from at least outwardly being who I used to be. Even if the tight black jeans and cropped racer-back tee were an illusion of strength, a way of denying the depth of those scars, so be it.
I hadn’t been able to look in the mirror. I couldn’t be confronted with myself again. I felt dirty looking at my scantily clad body. The shower was the worst, naked and exposed to it all. I fixed that by putting the water to scalding and scrubbing myself until I was raw. I had three showers a day. It was an improvement on a week before when I damn near lived in the thing. Rosie and Lily hadn’t said a word about it.