I sat on the sofa in her living room, waiting for her to get dressed. We hadn’t exchanged any words since we’d arrived back to her house. I ran her a bath, I sat in the bathroom with her while she allowed her body to relax and gain some kind of brain function back again.

I noticed last time she had this kind of episode—while it was much worse then—that it took her the rest of the day to feel somewhat normal again. She’d been on edge, sudden movements spooked her, she wanted to have simple conversations and just relax her body. I guess it helped her mind to regenerate from what seemed almost like a trauma.

So I was waiting… waiting until she was ready to talk. Because frankly, I was done, and I had questions that needed fucking answers.

Seeing her car outside Eric Deanwell’s office building almost made me crash my bike into a line of traffic. I’d been over there checking out one of the girls from X-Rated, where she lived, and what she was up to given that today was her day off. Everything seemed fine, and I found her at home babysitting two younger siblings while her mom picked up an extra shift at the hospital. I was heading across town to check on another when I spotted Sugar’s car.

To say I was fucking pissed, would be an understatement. Not only was I ready to rip Deanwell a new asshole, but I was minutes away from calling fucking Optimus and letting him deal with it. I didn’t know whether I could hold my temper without tearing shit to pieces.

Yet, what I found, definitely wasn’t what I expected.

“You didn’t call, Op,” Sugar stated quietly as she stepped into the living room, drying her wet hair with a fluffy blue towel. Her movements were slow, but I could see in her eyes that she was alert. I knew I shouldn’t push it, but I was struggling to find any fucking reason in the world for her to be in that office. That combined with her strange behavior over the past month or more, and I was beginning to get pretty damn concerned with what the hell was going on.

Was she working with him?

Was he forcing her to give him information on the club?

What in God’s fucking name was the connection?

“No, I didn’t call him,” I answered, before adding. “Not yet anyway.”

She cringed but nodded as she walked over to the small laundry area and tossed the towel on the washing machine. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me just yet. Because if I don’t get some answers soon, I’m gonna call him over and there ain’t no way he’s gonna let you out of his sight ever again.” I laid it down thick. I knew that if Op knew right now what had happened, he would hit the fucking roof. And if I had to, I would fucking tell him. Even it if meant putting my own ass in the shit, just to protect the club.

“I get it,” she said quietly as she took a seat on the other end of the sofa. She hung her head, but this didn’t seem like it was out of exhaustion, the look on her face was rather one of shame, embarrassment, and guilt.

“Please,” I begged softly. “I need to fucking know what the hell I’m dealing with here… it’s been going on for too long now. We both know you’re hiding something, and we both know how much better you’ll feel when yo—”

“I’m bipolar.”

The words fell from her mouth in a rush, like she forced them out in the moment before she could convince herself not to. Her eyes stared straight ahead, staring into nothing, emotionless.

“Bipolar?” I questioned, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. I knew the term, had a basic idea of what it was but wasn’t really sure why it was important. “What are you trying to say?”

She stared at me like I’d grown two heads. “I have Bipolar Affective Disorder. It affects my emotions, gives me extreme highs and sometimes debilitating lows.”

“The panic attacks…” I said, my brain catching on to what she was telling me.

She nodded slowly, pulling her knees to her chest and continuing to avoid my eyes. “It started when I was a teenager. I’d have weeks where I felt like I was invincible finding it hard to sit still and focus at school. I was defiant and a little crazy. I just wanted to go out, have fun, do stupid things and screw the consequences.”

I could tell even as she explained her emotions and her actions, that she was playing them over and over in her mind like she was watching an old movie of herself.

“Then the lows started to hit me. I’d refuse to leave the house, not wanting to acknowledge that there was a world outside. I felt hopeless and empty. My parents didn’t help at all, they only wanted a perfect daughter. One that they could show off and use as competition against their friends…” She shook her head, her voice a soft whisper that I strained to hear even in the complete silence of the room. “But what they got was me. If I wasn’t wreaking havoc and embarrassing them, I was refusing to eat and sitting in my room contemplating giving up on life.”

I wanted to reach over and pull her into my arms, feeling the broken energy surrounding her. I wanted her to know that I was here, but I knew by now that I didn’t have to say the words. She felt comfort around me, even if we were sitting in silence, she felt at ease, and that was all I wanted her to know as she bared her soul to me.

“They thought I was crazy. People looked at me like I was a freak, some kind of sideshow act. In the world I grew up in, it was something that was always buried away with the skeletons in the closet. But everyone had already noticed, so there was no hiding that something was wrong with me.” Her fingers were playing with a loose thread on her sweat pants, tugging at it, twisting it in her fingers. “They finally diagnosed me when I was around seventeen. But as far as my parents were concerned, I’d already tainted their reputation too much. I was broken, and they wanted to quietly pass me on to someone else to deal with.”

I finally reached out and took her hand, threading her fingers through mine. She finally looked over and met my eyes, I could see the pain reflecting back at me. This was hard for her, she was baring her soul, and like every person in her life who knew about her disorder, she was expecting me to run.

I wasn’t running.

“You’re not bipolar,” I told her softly.

She looked at me with a frown. “Yes, I am, I’ve been living with it for over ten years.”

I squeezed her hand. “You are not bipolar… you have bipolar disorder. It doesn’t define who you are, it’s just a part of who you are.”

Her eyes started to well, and she squeezed my hand back. I could tell how much those few words meant to her like no one had ever taken the time to explain it that way before. She grew up in a world where secrets and problems were hidden away from society, and you plastered on this mask of perfection. She was looked at like she was an outsider, and she was made to feel shame and disgust toward this part of her personality that she could never change.

And I wanted to punch every single one of those people in the face.

Who were they to say that that part of her was not welcome?

Family should be accepting of the people they cared about, loving them as a whole despite their flaws. We all had them. The club was full of men and women alike, who all had pieces of themselves missing or things that they struggled with daily, but as a family, we supported those people. We never looked down on them because of their problems.

“That’s not where it ended,” she whispered, her body tensing up.

I held her hand in mine, preparing myself for anything she could lay on me. I knew though in my heart it would never change how I felt about her.

“I’m married,” she said, her body curling in on itself and a tremor running through her. My mouth went dry, it opened and closed, but I was unable to find any words. She took in a harsh breath, and her fingernails dug into the arm of the sofa as she continued, “His name is Peter Davenport, we’ve been married for over six years.”

The math wasn’t hard to figure out, but I was still shocked. “You were married before you met Optimus?”

“During,” she answered, turning to look me in the eye. “We got married the day I left pregnant with Harlyn. Op never knew, and finding out about Harlyn and Op’s decision to send me away to protect me was my saving grace and when he offered, I jumped on it.”

I grabbed my cap and twisted it so it was on backward, scrubbing at my short hair first before placing it down. “I don’t fucking understand. Who is this guy, and why’d you need to hide from him?”

She gestured to the sofa. “Sit down…please.”

I clenched my jaw but did as she asked, turning my body to face her as she took a seat at the opposite end. “Peter was a man my parents had chosen for me to marry. Like a lot of rich and uptight families, it was all about connections and growing wealth, and who was who over real feelings and emotions.” She shook her head almost as if she was disappointed with herself. “The time he came around and starting courting me I was feeling out of place in that world already, like I wanted to run but had nowhere to go. When I met him he was sweet, almost understanding of my… illness, and started making promises that I thought were genuine. Like maybe he was the one who would give me an escape.” Tears welled in her eyes as she stared at me, the emotion in her voice a mix of frustration and shame.

“Let me guess, he wasn’t that at all,” I growled softly, finding it hard not to reach out and pull her into my arms. I wanted to comfort her and tell her that everything would be okay, but I needed all the information first because if this asshole had hurt her, I was going to bring the mother-fucker to his knees where he would beg me not to kill him.

“Peter’s family owns a company that develops and tests medications for different illnesses and disorders. They have been very successful in the past, so the brand is strong and almost untainted,” she continued to explain. “What I didn’t know at the time was that there was a specific reason he’d chosen me. He wanted to use me as his personal crash test dummy, he wanted to see just how far he could push my limits.”

I shoved off the sofa, not able to sit still any longer, the rage building inside me was taking over. I paced across the room while Sugar sat, her eyes watching me as I stomped back and forth.

“I need to know what that means. And I need you to understand that when you tell me, I may get fucking upset, and angry, but that it’s not directed at you.” I knew I had to give her some kind of warning. I could feel that what she was about to say wasn’t going to make me feel any fucking better and that I would probably struggle to not storm the fuck out of here with my gun and hunt down this asshole.

She licked her dry lips and nodded. “He started me on this medication…” Her voice was husky and raw. “I’d been on others before, they worked for the most part, but I still had episodes. Peter told me that was because they weren’t strong enough.”

“What did it do?” I hissed, trying to keep myself calm but needing her to get to the point before I lost it.

She hung her head. “You already know what it did, because it was the same drug you were talking to Deacon about the other day.”

My eyes widened as I fought to remember the name of the medication Deacon had said was making waves in the trafficking business. It hit me. “‘Manic’?”

She looked up and nodded as a tear streaked down her cheek. “He got me addicted. The pills, they made me feel numb… they blocked out all the noise and the crazy, and I just kept wanting more and more.” Her hands began to shake, and the tears streamed. “It got to the point where I would do almost anything to have them… anything.”

“Fuck,” I cursed, moving forward. I bent down and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her to her feet. She grabbed onto me like I was her lifeline, sobbing into my chest as I cradled her in my arms.

“I didn’t want anyone to know,” she cried. “I’d already spent so long being looked down on for my disorder, looked at in disgust like I was dirt. And then he used it against me, turning me into a person I never wanted to be, making me an addict.”

I held her close, feeling my own tears brim my eyes as I felt her pain and anguish coursing through her body and into mine. Murder was in my veins, I could feel it burning inside me. Right now, all I wanted to do was kill him, and it wouldn’t be fast. He needed to feel the slow torturous pain that drove you to the edge of the cliff, but that wouldn’t let you jump off the side.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I pulled back, hooking my finger under Sugar’s chin and lifting her bloodshot eyes to mine. “What does this have to do with you being in Deanwell’s office?”

She swallowed, her fingers digging into my club cut. “I needed to protect the people I care about, I needed to keep Harlyn from my mistakes.”

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means Peter can’t use her or hurt her to get to me… because she’s not mine anymore.”