Ignite (Savage Disciples MC Book 4)

by Drew Elyse

  “It’s Damien.”

  Expected, yet having it confirmed still served to ratchet up my anxiety tenfold. Unable to choke out any kind of response, I decided to hit the button to buzz him in. Bringing my phone up, I snapped down the line, “He’s here and I still have no idea what to do!”

  “Just breathe. Tell him the truth. If he can’t respect your marriage to his brother, it just proves you shouldn’t be around him.”

  She was right. This was going to be uncomfortable. There was no way around that, but we were both adults. I took a fortifying breath.

  “Right. It will be fine,” I declared. “I should go before he gets up here.”

  “Call me once he’s gone,” she ordered.

  I agreed before clicking off, and not a moment too soon. Before I could let myself descend back into panic, Damien was knocking on my apartment door. I was still standing there at the buzzer, but I gave it a second before I opened the door. My logic was I didn’t want to seem too eager, which wasn’t quite sound since he had just rung up. I knew he would be there in a moment. It was normal to be at the door already.

  Thinking all of this meant my intentional pause became a very long delay. I was batting a thousand, and Damien wasn’t even inside yet. I was frantic as I flipped the lock and yanked the door open, but managed to pull together a measure of decorum by the time it swung wide enough for him to see me.

  I was struck again by the reality that he was in that chair. I invited him in while I ruminated on the fact that facing that made me feel terrible, since I hadn’t been there for him the days right after the accident when he hadn’t yet left his hospital bed. Damien hadn’t been the closest friend I’d ever had—Max would be distraught if I even entertained the thought—but he had been a friend all the same. Being so caught up in things with Ace, I hadn’t been one to him when he’d likely needed it most.

  That thought led me to another I meant to censor before my confusion showed. It was clear I failed at this endeavor when Damien said, “I know that face. Go ahead and ask. It’s fine.”

  Not wanting to make it even more awkward by holding my tongue, I asked, “How did you reach the buzzer?”

  “Ah,” he said on a nod, as if he’d been wondering what question out of the myriad of ones he’d gotten was in my head. He held up a finger, indicating for me to wait, then leaned over to do something with his chair.

  I watched in awed silence as he locked the wheels on his chair, then braced himself on both arms, and stood.

  “You…you’re…”

  He smiled. “A lot of physical therapy,” he explained. “I can’t do it for long, but I can get to my feet and even take a few steps.”

  “That’s amazing.” I remembered clear as day the doctors had said even that much improvement was a long shot.

  Damien settled himself back down, and I resisted the urge to rush over and assist. “It has been helpful in managing by myself,” he downplayed it. He moved on from that by holding a hand out toward the door. “Shall we?”

  I was tempted to ask about how he got around, whether he’d outfitted a car with hand controls and was able to store his chair on his own, but that was at least as much a stall tactic as it was true curiosity about the obvious strides he’d made.

  “I actually wanted to talk,” I said.

  “Is everything alright?”

  “Well, not exactly.” I decided direct, truthful answers were best, to a point. “I can’t go to dinner with you.”

  “Is there something going on? We can reschedule.”

  It was unceremonious to think, but I wished he wasn’t such a gentleman. It would have made things simpler. “That’s not the issue,” I admitted. “It’s actually about A—Jack.”

  Somehow, I’d become so used to Ace, I’d almost forgotten to call him Jack.

  The warm smile he’d been displaying since I saw him at the library fled in an instant at the mention of his brother, and the sight made my stomach sink.

  “Jack.” It wasn’t a search for clarification, it was more like a condemnation.

  Regardless, I said, “Yes. I don’t know what you know about our relationship since your accident, but we had a bit of a…rough patch.” I wasn’t sure summarizing two years of separation as a rough patch was fair, but I decided to roll with it. “Recently, we’ve reconciled and are committing ourselves to repairing our marriage. It’s not my place to tell either of you how to handle the issues you have between you, but I also don’t want to be in the middle of it. I don’t think that’s good for either of you, me, or my marriage.”

  His expression only registered fully when I stopped talking. It was dark—darker than I had ever seen from him. There was a true malice there that rocked me hard enough, I fell back a step.

  “You’re going to stand by him when he took my legs from me?” Damien spat.

  “I…I’m not sure that’s fair,” I hedged.

  “You want to know what’s not fucking fair?” he demanded. “Being stuck in this goddamn chair for the rest of my life.”

  I wasn’t sure I had ever heard him swear before that moment, and the way he spat the words only made it all the harsher.

  “Damien, what happened to you was a terrible accident, but—”

  “Yeah, it was a motherfucking accident. Did your husband tell you he was with me that night?”

  This was so much worse than the uncomfortable conversation I had been anticipating.

  “He did. He told me everything.”

  Damien scoffed harshly. “Yeah? He told you he was there to rub it in my fucking face that he married the woman I was in love with?”

  I froze.

  Did he just say he was in love with me?

  There was a horrible, heavy silence that seemed to suck the very air from the room.

  “He didn’t tell you a fucking thing,” Damien bit off viciously into the dead space.

  I still had nothing. Not a thought, not a word, just abject shock.

  “You can put that asshole on whatever pedestal you want, but it won’t change anything. He’s a no good, lying criminal.” Damien was on the move, headed back to the door he’d come through only minutes before. “He took everything from me. You tell him he’s going to know the feeling.”

  “Damien,” I choked out.

  “Right. You don’t want to get in the middle of it. Guess what, Quinn? You’ve been in the middle of it the whole fucking time.”

  He left, the door staying wide open in his wake. I didn’t move to close it. I didn’t move at all, not even when my phone started ringing, stopped, then rang again. I was cemented to that spot.

  Did your husband tell you he was with me that night?

  He married the woman I was in love with.

  You’ve been in the middle of it the whole fucking time.

  What had just happened?

  The fucking ringing went on and on.

  “Answer your phone,” I commanded under my breath, like that would make any difference. It didn’t. Quinn still didn’t answer.

  I was running hot. Ready to fucking blow worse than I had been while those cops were systematically tearing apart our clubhouse. No, that anger meant nothing compared to knowing it was my own fucking blood who set that shit up. I had to tell the brothers I chose the asshole half-brother I’d been born with was the reason that shit was coming down on us.

  Now, I couldn’t reach Quinn. I felt like a major dick for the way I’d talked to her when she’d called earlier. I wasn’t in any better place now, but she deserved an apology, and more importantly, Damien was making moves, and I didn’t know whether he’d drag Quinn into that or try to take me out and win her.

  Whatever the fuck we were all about to face, I needed to let her know and make sure she was okay—something I couldn’t do when she wouldn’t answer her phone.

  Shit.

  “Got an address for Blackhorne,” Jager said, coming out into the lounge from his room. I took the paper he held out for me. Reading it didn’t surprise me
at all. Damien had moved himself in not even ten minutes from the house he’d grown up in—we’d grown up in once I got stuck there.

  “Thanks,” I said, folding up and pocketing the information. “I’ll take care of this motherfucker.”

  “Sure you want to do that alone?”

  If I were smart, I’d bring someone with me to keep me under control. If I were really smart, I wouldn’t take care of it at all. I’d let one of the brothers confront him. I wasn’t smart.

  “I’ve got it.”

  Making it quick, I went back to my room and threw together a bag. Meanwhile, I called Quinn again. That time, when she didn’t answer, I left a message.

  “Babe, really wish you’d answer. Sorry I was a dick earlier, but there’s shit going down here. Long story, but I’m heading to you right now. Won’t be able to get to my phone while I’m on the bike. Be there in a couple hours.”

  Not exactly elegant, but it covered all the bases. It was enough that I was able to get on my bike and on the road to her. I’d deal with the rest once I got there.

  The four-hour ride took me three. I even tried to slow down a couple times, since getting pulled over was the last thing I needed when I was that close to snapping, but I couldn’t maintain a lower speed.

  Luckily, Quinn’s apartment building had parking, so I didn’t have to fuck with hunting down a spot. It took no time to get in, park, and get to her door. When I rang up, she buzzed me in right away. I didn’t like that. Shit going down or not, she shouldn’t just let someone into the building without knowing who it was.

  She opened the door to her unit as soon as I knocked and moved back right away to let me in. I launched right in with, “Can’t just buzz people into the building like that, babe.”

  “I heard your bike outside,” she said. “I looked out the window and saw you coming.”

  Her flat tone got my attention off throwing my bag aside. Her face was blank too. Still, I was struck by seeing her. She was so fucking beautiful. A few days without that face, without those eyes, and I was blown over by the sight of her.

  “Fuck, I missed you,” I breathed as I stepped toward her. I needed to feel her against me, to taste her sweet lips.

  Only, I didn’t get to.

  Quinn moved away from me, ducking to the side to avoid my touch.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I called you earlier,” she said, her voice still flat, putting me on high alert.

  “I know, babe. I’m sorry about how I answered. There was shit going on and—”

  “I know about the search warrant,” she cut in to say. When she noted my surprise, she tacked on, “Max told me.”

  “Right. It’s not an excuse anyway. I shouldn’t have been so short, and I’m sorry about that,” I admitted. She didn’t respond at all, which was more than a bit unsettling. I forged on, despite the tension. “Anyway, Jager was able to get a line on the source of the so-called evidence they had to get the warrant.”

  I paused for a moment, coming to grips right then with the reality that I was going to have to tell her everything. There was no way to keep parts of the story under wraps anymore. Before I could start again, she spoke instead.

  “Damien was here.”

  She showed no reaction to how startled I was at that news.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I called you earlier,” she repeated instead of answering.

  There was no way to miss that it was something she needed to say.

  “You did,” I acknowledged. “Why did you call, baby?”

  Quinn started walking agitatedly across the room. She approached the couch like she might sit, then turned at the last second and just stood in the middle of the living space. I followed her, but also stayed standing.

  “I was at work and he came in,” she started. I had to bite down until it felt like my teeth might have cracked to keep from blowing up. I wasn’t going to, not at her. I definitely wasn’t going to lose it before I knew for sure where she was going with this. “He said he was just nearby, but one of our volunteers told me he was there twice while I was in Hoffman.”

  “Damien?” I forced out, needing her to clarify.

  I held it together by sheer will when she nodded. “He asked me to go to dinner with him.”

  That was when my control snapped.

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  She didn’t flinch or show anything, even with my reaction. I didn’t want her to be scared, even when I was fucking pissed, but that wasn’t about trusting in me. That was something else—something not right.

  “He asked me to go to dinner with him tonight,” she reiterated. “That’s why I was calling after work. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “Tell me you did not go to dinner with that asshole,” I demanded. When she didn’t respond right away, I pressed, “Tell me you didn’t say yes.”

  “I said yes,” she answered, but before I could get anything out, she went on, “but I didn’t go.”

  Christ. I was going to lose it.

  “Babe, I need you to tell me everything, yeah?”

  “You need me to tell you everything?” she echoed.

  If this were a fucking cartoon, she’d have a giant, blinking, caution sign above her. There was a venom to those words—the first real sign of life I’d gotten from her since I’d walked in, and that did not bode well.

  “Quinn—”

  “That’s funny, because I thought I’d made it pretty clear I needed the truth from you. When we started this again, it was only because you finally told me the truth instead of keeping everything to yourself. Except, you didn’t tell the truth, did you? At least, not all of it.”

  A million thoughts about what I would do to Damien once I got my hands on him swirled through my head. He’d come to my wife—my fucking wife—and tried to fuck up our marriage.

  I wasn’t going to deny my involvement in this. I had kept that shit from her. Fuck, I’d planned to keep it from her my whole life. I never wanted her to know why Damien and I had been fighting that night.

  There wasn’t anything to say to her accusations because they were the truth.

  “That night, before his accident, you were fighting about me?” she sought confirmation of what Damien had told her.

  Fuck. I couldn’t keep it from her now. Not without guaranteeing I’d lose her.

  “He wanted you,” I told her. “Before you and I even met, I guess. I didn’t know that. Didn’t even know you knew each other until after we were married.”

  She didn’t comment. I went on. “He cornered me once after he found out we got married. Laid it out that I didn’t deserve you. He didn’t say shit about wanting you, but I had my suspicions. Then, I got the call that night.

  “It wasn’t even him who called me. It was a bartender telling me I needed to come get him. At least that’s what they said. I don’t know why the fuck they would call me, and any bartender who’d make that call probably wouldn’t let someone leave as drunk as Damien was.

  “When I got there, he laid right into me. He was saying shit about how you were his. How he fuckin’ loved you. How I didn’t come close to deserving you—like I didn’t fucking know that. He was saying all this shit like I didn’t know every moment from that first smile you gave me on I was a lucky son of a bitch for you even giving me some of your time. I tried keeping it together because it was clear he was drunk off his ass, but I lost it when he started talking about how you’d eventually see the light and leave me, then he’d have you.”

  I was ready to break something again just thinking about the shit he’d said that night. I didn’t care if it was time for honesty, I would never repeat the shit he was spewing about her. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to get through the images he’d taunted me with, the shit he said he was going to do to her when he could.

  “I hit him. Just the once, but it was enough to knock him on his ass. I don’t know how long he was down. I didn’t give a fuck.
After that, I just took off. Then, I got the call a couple hours later about his accident.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me all that?” she demanded.

  “Think back to the time we spent at that hospital. You were a fuckin’ wreck over what happened to him.” Her face stayed impassive, but I knew she would get there even if she wasn’t yet. “You think for even a minute I wanted you to know we’d gotten into it over you before he took off in that car? You think I wanted to even risk that you might turn that around into the same fucked up guilt already eating me alive? Because it was. As much as I wanted to kick his ass, I felt like it was my fault he was in that wreck, and that’s why him saying so hit the mark so damn easy.”

  There was a crack in her armor hearing that, and she didn’t hide it.

  “I thought we were done with the secrets,” she said, the hurt that had her donning that armor showing now.

  Certain there was at least a fifty-fifty shot she was going to shove me away, I moved to her. She didn’t fight me as I pulled her against my chest.

  “No more,” I swore. “Not a single thing, ever again. You get all of me.”

  She face-planted into my chest. “He was so angry.”

  Any calm I’d gotten from having her close evaporated.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When he got here, I told him I couldn’t go to dinner with him because it felt wrong to get between you two. I told him we were fixing things. He got so mad. He said…” she trailed off, then jerked back and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. “He said you took everything from him, and you were going to know the feeling. He wanted me to tell you that.”

  Crap. I shouldn’t have told him that.

  “He said what?” Ace demanded.

  “He was upset. He…” I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure there was a way to justify the way Damien had been when he was there earlier.

  “He got some asshole who’s going down for a shitload of drug chargers to lie under oath that the club was involved in his shit so that fucker could negotiate less jail time and throw us under the bus,” he informed me. “Damien set that shit up because he wants to take my fucking wife from me.”