by Anne Malcom
Cade breathed heavily, wild eyes focused on Fernandez with a predator’s determination. Then he moved to me, communicating a lot of things with that look. I tried to communicate back. Tried to tell him this was just a battle, that the war was ours.
He slackened in Luke’s and Brock’s grip, shaking them off. He focused on Fernandez. “This shit isn’t over,” he promised.
Fernandez smiled. “Oh, once you chat with your sister, I think you’ll find that it is.”
And then he walked forward. An uneasy moment passed when I thought that Cade might not move, might change his mind and blow them all away right there.
He stood to the side with a granite jaw. The rest of the men followed suit.
The second Fernandez was out the door, Luke was on me, shoving his gun into the back of his jeans and framing my face with his hands. I thought he’d talk first but he didn’t, just plastered his mouth to mine. Not closed mouth. Not short. It was like he was sucking every part of me out to make sure it was all still there.
“He hurt you?” he demanded when he pulled back, eyes running over every part of my wrinkled but still intact outfit.
“No,” I whispered.
His eyes met mine, fear, death, and love shimmering within them. “He had you for twenty-four hours, Rosie. Twenty-four fucking hours.” He took my hand and placed it on his chest. “First time my heart’s beat in twenty-four hours,” he murmured.
“Rosie?” Cade’s gruff voice demanded, breaking our moment.
Luke didn’t move at first. His eyes roved over every inch of me, as if he had been away from me for years, decades, and he was trying to catalogue the changes that’d happened in his absence. Like a man deprived of water for almost long enough to kill him and then presented with a whole glistening lake of it. He pressed his lips to mine again, like before, hard and intense and most likely not appropriate for an audience.
I kissed him back. Fuck the audience.
I’d been deprived of water too. Of everything, really.
Then he let me go to reveal everyone standing around, like they didn’t quite not know what to do with themselves since they weren’t surrounded by bodies.
Cade’s eyes went to Luke’s firm hold around my shoulders. “Let her go, Crawford.”
The grip tightened. “Not a fuckin’ chance in hell.”
I savored the feel of my safety for a second longer, inhaling deeply. Then I reached up to graze Luke’s fingertips. “Luke,” I whispered.
He glared down at me. “This is the first time I’ve had you in my arms in twenty-four hours,” he growled. “During those hours, I was forced to entertain the idea that I might never fucking do this again. Or I’d have to hold the broken pieces of you, with nothing to put you back together with.” His eyes went to Cade. “I’m sure with Cade’s experience, he knows what the fuck he’s asking and if the situation were reversed, he’d have the same response as me, which is fuck right off.”
My mind whirled at the deep of the emotion in Luke’s voice, how it shook just a little, noticeably. He didn’t care about showing these men that emotion. Mostly because he knew they’d all felt it before.
I squeezed his fingers. “Yeah, and I get it. I’m pretty darn pissed at my brother right now, but I owe him an explanation,” I murmured.
Luke didn’t move. “You can explain from here.”
I touched his jaw. He gazed down at me. “I’ll be two feet away.”
He frowned as if the two feet were as wide as the distance between us months before.
Then he let me go with a tight face.
I kissed his jaw.
Then I stepped forward, expecting a lecture, a lot of swearing and yelling from my brother.
Instead, he yanked me roughly and tightly into his arms.
“Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again,” he murmured into my hair, kissing it.
I sank into his hold, clutching at the sides of his cut. “Don’t really plan on it.”
He kept a hold of me for a while longer, not seeming worried about time or witnesses. Then he let me go slightly, his hands going to my neck so I met his icy gray eyes. “Been scared a lot of times in my life,” he growled. “Man enough to admit it. That’s when the irreplaceable things in my life are taken from me. When I have to do nothing but think about how easy it is for fuckers to destroy me without touching me. You can take care of yourself. I know that.” His eyes went behind me. “You’ve got a man who would die to make sure I don’t live a nightmare of having a big fuckin’ hole in my heart. That the club doesn’t live with a big gaping hole where the soul of it was.”
Tears ran down my face. “You’re not going to yell at me?”
He smiled. “Maybe later. But Luke was right. You would give your life in a fucking second just so I could go to sleep with my family every single night. But you ain’t doing that because if you do, I’m not sleeping easy for the rest of my days. I know that decision wasn’t something you had a choice in. Hate it, but I know you’re not givin’ up. That’s not my Roe.” His eyes twinkled.
“Yeah, now that we’re done with the sappy shit, you’re gonna tell us we can kill them all, right?” Gage interjected, scratching an itch at the top of his head with the barrel of his gun.
I made eye contact with Gage and the three other personalities inside him, all anxious for blood.
“Eventually.”
It was safe to say the men were furious when they saw the photos and therefore the reason that deadly force was not what they could use to protect the people in said photos.
There was swearing, anger and a lot of “he’s fucking dead.” But then there was a reasonably rapid exit as the respective men went back to their families, to make sure a murderer was true to his words.
Death and revenge didn’t mean shit if you were going home to an empty house with an empty heart. So we went home without revenge, but without any more holes in our family.
“Never been more scared in my life,” Luke murmured against my head.
We were naked on the sofa. We hadn’t even made it to the bedroom, our desperation to find peace in each other too chaotic to make things like proper horizontal surfaces seem important.
Nothing was really important but each other right then.
“Me either,” I admitted.
He stroked my hair. “You went willingly, with him. Knowing you might never come back. Never be right here with me again.” His voice wasn’t hard or angry. It was soft, proud.
“You know I had no other choice,” I whispered.
“I know, Rosie. You were protecting everyone, just like you always do. “That’s what scared me the most, still fucking does. You have a choice like that, there’s no hesitation, even though I know how hard it is to make. I’m not gonna beg you to not to make a choice that will take you from this world, take my world from me, ’cause I know that’s never gonna happen. You’re a warrior first, and you’ll always fight. Just askin’ you to let me be by your side while you fight.”
That right there was what made us us.
He knew that my life was never going to be normal, that I wasn’t normal. I needed action and I needed a man by my side, not in front of me, trying to protect me. I needed him to know that I could protect myself and not want to change me into something that made him feel more like a man and me less like a woman I was proud to be.
He was proud of the fact that I was strong, and he was man enough that it didn’t make him look weak.
“I’ve got a strong woman. She can fight not just for herself but for everyone in her life, including me.” He paused. “Me shooting Kevin that day, it wasn’t me damning myself and saving you. It was you saving me. From the fucking bars I’d trapped myself in. You’re so fucking strong, and that doesn’t make me weak. It makes me into the best man I could ever be. Any man who would think different ain’t a man at all.” He kissed me hard and deep. “Plannin’ on being a man, your man, till this world is done and the next one begins. After that too.”
Sometimes in real life, the good guys didn’t win, love didn’t conquer all. Mostly because in real life, it wasn’t as simple as creating good guys and bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys were the ones who did the most good. Or the good created the most evil. Most of it, the world—me included—was gray.
Love did a lot. Destroyed a lot. Put some of it back together.
But it didn’t conquer all.
Four-point-five million people are trapped in forced sexual exploitation globally.
The shadow of Fernandez’s threat still hung over our heads. We hadn’t given up. That wasn’t our style. We were playing the long game, which wasn’t exactly our style either, but we were adapting.
We settled into routine, slowly gathering intel, slowly figuring out how to bring the operation down without a single drop of Templar blood hitting the ground.
It was going to take a while. A long while. Because Wire told us that he’d dropped off the face of the earth again, but he would almost certainly be watching us.
So we had to appear like things had gone back to normal while we looked for ways to end it.
Our version of normal wasn’t exactly normal.
“You want to shoot him, babe, or should I?” I asked Luke.
Luke grinned. “Well, it is Valentine’s Day. Consider it my gift to you.” He gestured with his gun.
I smiled. “You get me the best gifts.”
The boom of the gunshot ricocheted through the empty warehouse, the bullet finding its home just above the kneecap.
The man screamed.
“Remember that pain, my friend, the next time you think about breaking the restraining order your wife has against you and beating her so bad she can’t walk for three weeks,” Luke said. “If you do, maybe we won’t be back to do the other one.”
The man continued to scream.
I wandered up to Luke and kissed him while I waited for him to stop. “Love you,” I whispered against his mouth.
His arms went around me. “And I love you, babe.”
There was a lot of shit that stopped my life from being completely perfect, but those three words meant it didn’t matter if it was or not.
Luke
One Week Later
“Rosie know you’re here?”
“What do you think?” Luke sat down at the table that he’d thought he wanted to destroy. Strangely, it felt right, easy, slipping into the seat and looking around at the men of the Sons of Templar. “I value my fuckin’ balls, so yes, she knows,” he continued. “Told me she was ‘sick of chattering like a bunch of women’ and we were to call her ‘when the action started.’”
Cade shook his head, grinning. “She never really was one for patience.”
“Don’t I know it,” Luke murmured.
She was chaos, and he knew it. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. There used to be days when he lived for order, structure. He thought that was him, that was right.
Fuck was he glad she proved him wrong.
“Might be a good thing she’s not here,” Luke continued. “Been talking to my contact at the state department. They’re building a case against Fernandez. A case that’s almost airtight. They just need some more info.” He glanced to Wire.
“You honestly telling us you expect us to fucking snitch?” Lucky spat.
Luke regarded him. “Yeah, I know it goes against everything you stand for. Want to ride in with bullets and blood. But that leads directly back here. To your home. To your women. Make no doubt about it, we need to do this another way. A way that would never trace back to us, and the strong arm of the law would never lead back to men who would rather die than help out the law,” Luke said.
“Damn fucking right,” Gage muttered.
Brock eyed him. “I’m hoping you’ve got a plan once he’s arrested? You’re not asking us to be happy that he’s getting three square meals a day and a warm bed behind bars?”
Luke regarded him. Then the table. “Of fucking course not. It’s after that that the blood comes. We take the whole fucking operation down.”
Cade smiled.
“Then maybe we can work something out.”
And Luke knew they could.
They fucking had to. Because no way would he sleep easy knowing that fucker was sleeping, eating, breathing, fucking on the same planet as Rosie.
They’d get him.
And he’d die.
And Luke couldn’t fucking wait for that day.
Epilogue
Rosie
One Year Later
I hate to say things like ‘the end’ and ‘we lived happily ever after.’ Because neither of those things would be true, even if I could see the future. I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know this wasn’t the end. No way, no how. And I was smart enough to know that Luke and I wouldn’t always be happy. Humans are never always happy. Even with the only person on earth they’re meant to be with, there’s going to be anger, pain, tears. But the joy, love, and laughter outweigh that.
But for the sake of it, it was the ending for the time being.
The ending, so far, had been soft.
Anticlimactic.
We got married about two weeks after we found the perfect house. A home. I didn’t care about marriage, really. But I wanted Luke to be mine. Legally. If that was one law I’d stick with for the rest of my life, I’d be happy.
Our lives were still chaos. We were a husband and wife team who doubled as bounty hunters and beat up lowlifes for hire. So chaos was the nine-to-five. And we liked it that way.
But in each other, we found peace.
There were dramas. Cupid wasn’t finished with the Sons of Templar, so there were dramas. Fucking big ones when we finally got Fernandez. And his death was proving to last a long time.
There were also other dramas. But they weren’t our own.
We’d had enough.
To fill up one lifetime. To fill up three.
So we deserved this soft—kind of—ending, for the beginning was hard and full of pain.
There was still pain. Because you can’t have life, can’t have love, without it.
But that pain was bearable. Because that pain was meant to be.
Because that pain was us.
About the Author
ANNE MALCOM has been an avid reader since before she can remember, her mother responsible for her love of reading. It started with magical journeys into the world of Hogwarts and Middle Earth, then as she grew up her reading tastes grew with her. Her love of reading doesn’t discriminate, she reads across many genres, although classics like Little Women and Gone with the Wind will hold special places in her heart. She also can’t get enough romance, especially when some possessive alpha males throw their weight around.
One day, in a reading slump, Cade and Gwen’s story came to her and started taking up space in her head until she put their story into words. Now that she has started, it doesn’t look like she’s going to stop anytime soon, with many more characters demanding their story be told as well.
Raised in small town New Zealand, Anne had a truly special childhood, growing up in one of the most beautiful countries in the world. She has backpacked across Europe, ridden camels in the Sahara and eaten her way through Italy, loving every moment. For now, she’s back at home in New Zealand and quite happy. But who knows when the travel bug will bite her again.
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