Dauntless (Sons of Templar MC 5)

“You deserve Mary Sue,” I whispered, my voice finally cracking. “You deserve someone who wasn’t broken the moment she was brought into the world. Someone who wasn’t born dirty. Someone who had their innocence stolen before she knew to protect it. Someone who didn’t get corrupted, defiled before she even knew what was happening.” I sucked in a breath. “Someone who didn’t take her clothes off for filthy men. Who didn’t shoot filth into her veins as if the dirt covering her soul wasn’t thick enough before that. Someone who wasn’t….” My mind ventured somewhere even I wasn’t strong enough to go. I took a deep breath. “Someone who wasn’t raped. Repeatedly. Raped and was too high to even care,” I spat out the words, like maybe if I said them, they’d stop torturing my soul, bouncing in my head, taunting me. Lucky’s body flinched each time I said that ugly word, as if it were a bullet piercing his skin. “Do you know what I was thinking about while they were doing that?” I asked, trying to ignore the way rage had seeped into the air and seemed to thicken it, turning it into something to swallow and not breathe. Something bitter. I’d had experience with bitter—it was my life—so I sucked in a breath. “Nothing. Nothing except my next hit. Except the next time I could chase away the filth and fill it with the void.”

“Stop,” he growled. His head jerked up and I flinched when I saw wetness in his eyes. “You need to stop fucking talking,” he commanded. I never thought pain could manifest in one word. Encompass it. Until that moment. I never thought I’d feel fear either, not until that moment. Terror choked me as I belatedly realized what I’d done. Laid my broken, used, ugly soul right at his beautiful feet. I’d done it. Presented him with the true me. Now he would rear away in disgust. I felt physically sick at the thought of losing him. I welcomed the loss of my left arm before that.

He came forward, yanking me to his body. “None of that is true,” he growled. “None of it. That shit that happened to you, it’s the stuff of fuckin’ nightmares. I can’t take it away, but I can show you, tell you every single day how beautiful, how clean you are. Always have been.” He paused. “And you were, even when I first saw you, strugglin’ with demons I couldn’t see, you were breathtaking. You were like autumn. I was so caught up in your beauty, the fuckin’ colors.” He touched my cropped hair. “I was so fixated on that shit that I didn’t see that you were withering away. Thank fuck you made it through to summer, baby.”

I flinched at his words. “Is this summer?” I asked in a flat voice. “Despite everything I was before, despite how broken and totally fucked-up I was, I was always alive. I always had some sort of spark, even at the depth of my addiction. Even lying in that hospital bed after I’d almost killed myself, I had fight left. Not a lot but enough. Something. Now I don’t feel it, the fight, the zest. I just feel tired. So fucking tired of fighting. Of everything. I’m not going to swallow a bottle of painkillers or anything, but I just can’t fight anymore. Even if I could, there’s nothing to fight. Just darkness. You can’t punch a shadow. So I don’t know what I am, because I’m not living. And in the absence of life, there’s death. Not the six-feet-under kind, but something different, something worse.”

He clutched my face, pulling our foreheads together. “No, babe, in the absence of life, there’s fuckin’ love,” he rasped. “The love I got for you, it’s gonna burn well after I’m in the ground, till the world turns to dust,” he promised. “You feel like you’ve lost your fight for now? I say for now ’cause I know this shit is temporary. That you’re gonna come back to me, light up my world again. Find your zest. But for now, you don’t want to fight? I’ve got enough fight for the both of us. I’ll fight for you, firefly. I’ll never be too tired, too old, or too fuckin’ anything for that. I’ll fight for you till my last breath. Or until you’re ready to fight for yourself again.”

I should have said no to that. To someone fighting my battles when he had his own to focus on. But I was weak in that moment, having fought the hardest one, crushing the syringe under my feet.

“Okay,” I whispered.

His body sagged and his arms tightened around me.

“I need you to come somewhere tomorrow,” I said to his chest.

“Anywhere.”

He was right on that. And since he’d already ridden to hell with me, group sessions should be a breeze.