I stared at the wall of my den as I sat there in the darkness.

Mostly I felt numb. Like a fire had burned away every nerve ending in my body, somehow without touching the rest of me. Just a corpse with a pulse… a dead man walking.

But underneath that, I knew the pain was lying in wait. Like somebody had torn out my insides and replaced them with shards of glass. Heart, lungs, guts… all of it gone. Just broken bottles and razor blades in their place.

While the numbness was still there, I couldn’t feel it. But as soon as the numbness wore off, I knew it was gonna be hell.

I’d felt enough agony for one night. When Lou got the truth out of Fiona, I didn’t believe it at first…

…and then I saw her face.

When Sloane asked for a divorce, it didn’t hurt one tenth as much as tonight. The end of my marriage had been a long, slow decline. I’d had two years to spread out the pain.

Tonight, in the space of two minutes, an atomic bomb had gone off, leaving me without a future, without hope, without my old life.

Without the woman I’d loved.

Fiona was as dead to me as if Lou had shot her in the Roadhouse.

Deader, even. If he’d shot her, at least I could have grieved for her.

That is, if I hadn’t found out she was a traitor before she died.

“Nice of the cops to bring my bike along and leave it at the Roadhouse,” Kade said from the leather recliner across the room. “Even left my keys in it.”

I looked over at him in a daze. I’d forgotten he was there.

He poured some more scotch into his glass. “Of course, they were probably just covering their asses. If Lou shot me, they didn’t want any evidence they’d helped him hanging around the impound lot.”

His voice was unemotional as always. You never would have guessed that an hour ago, corrupt cops had handed him over to his former friends for what could have been a gangland-style execution.

Kade lifted the glass of scotch and took a gulp. “Still, it was nice not having to ride bitch back here on your bike.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped.

“Small favors.”

“Well, could you not right now?”

His face didn’t betray an ounce of emotion at my chewing him out. He just sat there in silence and went on drinking my scotch.

I turned back to the wall and resumed my thousand-yard stare.

I got about thirty seconds of silence before Kade said, “Could’ve been worse.”

“‘Could’ve been worse?’ We just lost the fuckin’ club. We got backstabbed by a motherfucking son of a bitch who threw us out on our asses like bums. We’re laughingstocks. Worse, we’re fucking targets. Every douchebag who wants to prove he’s a tough guy is going to be spoiling for a fight. After we punch his lights out, he’s going to get all butt-hurt, then come around later and try to shoot us in the back.

“The cops, who are now completely under Lou’s control, are going to make our lives miserable. And without the club’s protection, we’re open game for the Santa Muertes – or any other asshole who wants revenge.

“Once word gets out about tonight, nobody in town is going to want to cross Lou, so they’re not going to come to the body shop, which means we lose the business and any means we had of supporting ourselves. Selling my house is out of the question, because nobody’s going to cross Lou on that, either. The bank will probably just do whatever Lou says and foreclose on it after I miss a couple of payments.

“Not to mention that every effort we ever made at fixing the club? Making shit legal and aboveboard? That’s gone. Up in smoke. We’re gonna be broke and homeless and walking around with bullseyes on our backs. Our only option is to move to another state without a penny to our names and start over again completely – and Lou is probably still going to put out contracts on us, because that’s exactly the sort of psychopathic asshole he is. And you think it could’ve been worse.”

Kade shrugged, completely unaffected by my anger. “We’re alive.”

“Not for long.”

“Got our health.”

“Again, not for fucking long.”

Kade took a sip of his drink, then mused philosophically, “Your anal virginity is still intact.”

“My anal – ”

I started laughing. A little at first, then uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it. Big belly laughs that kept going and going until tears were rolling down my cheeks.

Throughout it all, Kade just sat there, unsmiling, watching me, and all the while the bastard kept drinking my goddamn scotch.

It took me a couple of minutes to get control of myself. When I finally did, I said, “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?”

“That’s what my mother always told me.”

“Give me that fucking bottle.”

He tossed it through the air. I caught it one-handed, unscrewed the cap, and took a long slug.

“I notice you didn’t include a certain person on that list,” Kade said.

“Don’t,” I warned him.

“I’m just pointing out the obvious.”

“She fucking stabbed me in the back, Kade.”

“I’m not saying she didn’t. But she had a pretty good reason for doing it.”

I glared at him. “After all you lost tonight because of her – ”

“I didn’t lose anything because of her. I lost it because of Lou. Tonight didn’t come out of nowhere – he’s been planning this for a long, long time.”

God damn him. I hated when he was logical. Even worse, I hated when he was right.

“She lied to my face.”

“She did,” Kade admitted.

“She put both of our lives in danger.”

“She did that, too.”

“And she didn’t warn us when she had the chance. When I explicitly gave her that fucking chance.”

“No, she didn’t,” Kade agreed. “But if somebody gunned you down in a back alley, I know I’d fuck over every last person in the world just to find out who did it so I could kill them.”

I looked over at him, stunned. It was the most emotional thing he’d ever said to me in all the years I’d known him. Even him delivering it in that flat voice of his couldn’t disguise that fact.

“I’d do the same for you,” I said quietly, and I meant it.

“Then you should be able to understand why she did it.”

“You just want to let her off the hook, scot-free?” I snarled.

“We both saw her in the parking lot when we left. She didn’t get off scot-free.”

The image was seared on my brain: Fiona kneeling in the gravel, hunched over, sobbing uncontrollably, her face contorted in agony. As much as I hated to admit it, that memory hurt like hell. I wanted to feel righteously angry, like You made your bed, you fucking bitch, but I couldn’t. No matter what she’d done to me, I couldn’t think about her like that and still hold onto my rage.

But there wasn’t any law that said I had to keep thinking about it.

I turned back to the wall. “I don’t want to hear another fucking thing about her. You got that?”

“Okay.”

He was as good as his word. We both drank in silence until we passed out – or at least I drank until I passed out. A whole bottle of scotch before the darkness finally descended and blotted out my pain.