I awoke feeling like shit. Not an unusual occurrence since I liked to party hard, and partying hard meant hangovers.

And I also had experience of being punched, being in a car accident, and almost being blown up—and I knew waking up the day after was not fun.

But that morning was like all of those experiences packaged into one. Everything hurt. My eyeballs hurt. My ribs screamed. My cheek was on fire, the skin stretched uncomfortably tight over the bone, pulling at my face.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was the wounds inside that worked to push against my lungs, chain me to the bed with the force of my pain.

My shame.

Kevin’s fingers were inside me once more, shredding me, dirtying me, defiling me.

I clenched my teeth against the tears that wanted to fall, the scream yearning to escape from my throat.

I didn’t for a lot of reasons, a big one being the smell of coffee and the sound of life coming from the direction of my kitchen. My kitchen rarely had sounds of life coming from it, unless it was the blender making margaritas. And since Bex moved out, there was never sounds of life coming anywhere that wasn’t from me.

Luke was here.

It wasn’t the cliché rushing of the events of the night before that came with waking. I knew what happened the second I opened my eyes. I didn’t have a luxurious second of ignorance. My gaze wandered to the space where my rug used to be.

Luke hadn’t left.

Luke was in my kitchen, presumably making coffee. By the sounds of the clanging of metal, breakfast too.

He was doing that because he was a good guy. And that was what good guys did for the women who they’d held in their arms the entire night, not letting go, giving them silent strength. Giving them silence.

My eyes went to the pinkish stain once more. Then, with pain, I craned my neck to my bedside table.

His badge was still lying there. I had a terrible premonition, looking at it, that it wouldn’t be going back on him again.

Because of that stain.

Because of me.

He wasn’t blaming me. He hadn’t left. Escaped. He’d made a choice to pull the trigger. To dump the body. To take off the badge. To stay the night. To make me breakfast.

It was the choice I’d wanted, been waiting on for years.

But it was a forced choice.

I’d killed a man. In front of him. Forcing that choice.

Then I’d forced it even more by making him kill someone too.

My violent life caused this.

I yanked back my covers, intending on just as violently getting out of bed, forcing myself to stomp into the kitchen and end this beautiful thing born out of violence before I could make it ugly.

But the pain hindered that.

So I was forced to gently and gingerly get myself up, tiptoe to my robe, every step, every movement a jolt to muscles and bones that resented me for it.

The time it took me to get to the kitchen was also time for the smell of bacon to drift through my house. I followed it to see Luke’s corded and muscled back, bare, in front of my stove.

I froze, all intentions forgotten with the picture of Luke shirtless in my kitchen. The back of his hair was still mussed from bed. The one he’d woken up with me in.

For a second, I entertained the idea that I could have this. That I’d wake up without all these injuries and pain, step over carpet that wasn’t stained with blood, find Luke in the kitchen and not have to expel him from it. From my life. I could live it with him inside it. That we could somehow fit.

But when you loved someone, truly loved someone, you’d never shave away parts of who they were, cut them up. Which was what I’d have to do if I was to make Luke fit in my kitchen, my life. Cut him to be able to somehow slot into my life. Take away things that made him him.

I couldn’t do that.

I wouldn’t do that.

Because he was an alpha male, and a cop to boot, he sensed my presence.

“Rosie!” Within seconds he was in front of me, hands resting lightly on my hips as if he expected me to topple over. “You’re not meant to be out of bed.” He frowned at me, anger glittering as his eyes went over my face. Featherlight, his touch followed the pattern of what I guessed was an epic shiner. “If I could kill him all over again, I’d make it much slower,” he gritted out, the fury and violence in his voice utterly foreign.

I flinched at that, the readiness to once again unleash something that wasn’t meant to be inside him.

Because he was Luke, the good guy—kind of—he immediately pulled his hand back, fear that he was hurting me filling his eyes.

“Sit down, Rosie. Where does it hurt?”

He gently placed me in a chair and I let him.

He pushed the hair from my face, his own expression granite. “You need a hospital.”

I frowned. “I don’t.”

He glared at me. “I hate that that’s a fucking lie, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to go to one, does it?”

I gave him a smile. It was faker than the Chanel bags sold out of trunks in the Valley.

He frowned deeper. “Remember what I said last night, Rosie. You don’t have to be okay here. You don’t have to be strong for people. You don’t need to shield your feelings from people who you’re scared of hurting or burdening more. I’m not here because you need to protect me from shit. I’m here for the opposite reason. I’m here to be your fuckin’ shield.”

The intensity of the words stole all my oxygen, stole even my heartbeats. There was a second where it all hung on the edge and I almost did it. Let go of everything, let it overtake me, let Luke do that for me. Showed him the Rosie no one had ever seen me be.

Almost.

“Your bacon’s burning,” I said instead.

His face flickered with a lot of things, but then he turned, because his bacon was indeed burning.

He didn’t rush toward the burning bacon. No, Luke didn’t do such things. He purposefully turned his head back to me as he sauntered toward the smoking pan.

“This isn’t over,” he promised.

I waited until he had his back to me to reply, whispering, “It has to be.”

* * *

I waited until after we ate, maybe because I was a total fucking masochist. Or because I just wanted one memory to hold onto. Eating the breakfast that a shirtless Luke made me. Chewing on bacon with him across from me.

I could sink into a fleeting fantasy that we were that simple, breakfast and snatched glances.

Granted, he was watching me like a hawk, his eyes haunted as my bruises stared at him harder than my eyes did.

But it was all I could have.

So we ate.

He washed up.

I stayed sitting, watching him.

He sat back down. “You haven’t called Cade,” he said, observation more than a question.

I shook my head.

“You’re not going to.” Another observation.

Another head shake. “I’m not dragging them into this.”

He regarded me. “They’ll be upset, to say the least, if they find out about this. If they find out you didn’t tell them,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes. “Since when do you care about my family being upset?” I snapped.

“Since I realized they’re an extension of you,” he said quietly. “So them being upset is hurting you.”

“You just realized that? It’s not been a secret,” I said, my voice harsh. “Especially not in the years that you tried to destroy everything I know and love.”

His face was blank. “Yeah, and that’s something I’m going to have to pay for. Rest of my life.”

“What is this?” I whispered, not understanding where these forever promises were coming from.

His face was no longer blank. It was so full of something I thought I’d dreamed up. It hurt to look at. “You know what this is, Rosie. What we’re meant to be. What we should’ve been all along.”

I let those words swim in my soul for a little before I hardened myself. “It can’t be. We can’t be,” I said, wishing my voice was firmer, more resolute.

His jaw hardened. “Yes, we fuckin’ can. We tried it that way, that other way, for all these years. That way, that’s what we can’t be. Not anymore.”

“What? So you bury a body for me and that counts as going steady?” I snapped.

He grinned. “You could say that.”

I let the grin bounce off the shield I’d constructed in those moments, the one I had to construct or else I’d melt, thinking pretend promises and grins were all we needed to make things right. “It’s not that fucking simple, Luke. I pushed you into this choice. You’re here because I fucking trapped you. Stopped you from being who you are.”

“That’s bullshit,” he growled.

I tilted my head. “Is it really? Because I don’t know what the truth is anymore. All these years, you were so blinded by hate that you didn’t see….” I caught myself before saying ‘you didn’t see I loved you.’ “Me,” I finished lamely instead.

He pushed out of his chair, kneeling beside me so his hands were clutching either side of my neck. I thought he was going to speak some more. Say those beautiful words that hurt so much.

He didn’t.

Instead he did something much worse.

He kissed me.

Years of running around each other, of lies and pretending and other people who meant less than nothing. That’s what that kiss was.

And so much more than that. So much more painful than anything he could’ve said. Because it was magnificent. Perfect. Taunting me with what I couldn’t have.

“Yeah, I was blind,” he said huskily, pulling back. “Don’t think the phrase is ‘hate is blind,’ though.” His thumb moved over my bottom lip. “I see you, babe. I saw you. In black motorcycle boots at five years old. Beautiful and unique, even then. I watched you blossom into an incredible beauty, the most spectacular individual. But in the middle of something I could only see as violent and bloody and dangerous. Something that endangered my spectacular individual.” He paused, watching me, drinking me in. “And I hated that,” he continued. “Hated my visceral reaction to that. Because the idiot boy inside me thought that gave me purpose. To be the hero. And to be a hero, I had to create a villain. And I did that. Just didn’t realize it would turn out to be me in the end.”

I blinked rapidly, trying to recover from the life-shattering words. The life-shattering kiss. Trying to gather all the broken pieces of me together so I could make my escape.

“And that’s just it, Luke,” I whispered. “You’re not meant to be the villain. We’re not meant to be anything, period. I’m not living my life blaming myself for turning you into that. I can’t.” I shoved my chair back, ignoring the hurt in my body and my soul as I did so. “I don’t know what this is now, this change of heart.” I waved my hands between us. “But it won’t last. You’ll stop seeing me as the victim the second my bruises fade, and then you’ll see me for what I am, or what you’ll come to think I am. Just like my family. Which is something I’m proud of. And you’ll make me ashamed of that.”

I sucked in a breath, waiting for him to say something, to tell me I was wrong, anything.

The words didn’t come.

“La douleur exquise,” I whispered, almost to myself, in the moments that came afterward. “The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.” My eyes met Luke’s.

And then I walked out of my own house, barefoot and bruised.

Hotwired my own car and drove around for hours.

I was hurting, hungry and exhausted when I got home.

To an empty house.

Though it wasn’t empty. The emotional muscle memory of the past twenty-four hours pulsated from the walls.

So I packed a bag.

And left.

And ran.

Again.

* * *

Luke

He let her leave.

It would haunt him for two hundred and forty-four days.

That knowledge.

Knowing that while he stood paralyzed by her words, shocked at the pain in them, he’d missed the pause. That moment, that lingering moment every woman gave the man she loved before she left him. Truly left him.

That chance.

That pause in the middle of the storm to give him a chance to grasp on to them, to her, fight for what they had before it was all too late.

Now it was.

Hindsight being 20/20, that pause lasted a lifetime, the memory of it taunting him with his failure.

He tapped at a thick file sitting on his desk in front of him. The one he’d been staring at, unopened, since the moment he got there at 7:00 a.m.

There was something beside that file.

His resignation letter.

He’d hand it in, but he’d given himself a few months leeway to train a replacement. Really, it was to utilize whatever meager resources he had to find Rosie. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a few months.

He’d written the letter at 7:15 a.m.

Then he’d stared at them both, not really seeing them. No, instead he was staring at the memories that were both trapping him and out of his grasp at the same time.

“La douleur exquise. The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.”

At the time, he’d missed the moment, the pause. Barely saw it pass him by because he’d been blindsided by her words. The passion in them. The fucking pain and heartbreak.

All of that, he’d caused.

He would’ve utilized that fucking pause, fought until his last breath for them. That was, of course, if he hadn’t been so blind.

It would haunt him, that last moment. Because it cost him a year. A year that had a thousand lost lifetimes crammed into it.

Not that he could know that while sitting in an office that felt cold and foreign, tapping at a file that contained his life’s work.

He glanced down at it.

Opened it.

A black-and-white image of Lucky and Bex coming out of a warehouse. There were dark stains of blood on both of them. The next photo showed who the blood belonged to.

The man he’d later learned had abused Bex as a child.

He clenched his fist.

Turned another page.

Brock and Bull leaving the flaming remains of a mansion in New Mexico. The mansion where Amy had been held captive and tortured for a week. The home of one of the most ruthless and notorious criminals in the world.

He turned another page.

A sworn statement from the inmate who had stabbed Jimmy O’Fallhan, saying that Cade Fletcher had ordered the hit.

The same Jimmy O’Fallhan known for raping and murdering women. Brutally. The same Jimmy O’Fallhan who had nearly raped and murdered Gwen. Brutally.

He sucked in a rough breath, slamming the folder shut and pushing back in his chair.

The folder he’d been collecting since the second he got on the force. Waiting. Biding his time for an airtight case. It had been airtight for years now, but something had stopped him from doing anything with it.

The very thought of it felt wrong.

Because of the someone he’d be destroying, completely and utterly, if he did anything with that file.

Rosie.

But not just her.

The lives of all those broken and brutalized women who had been put back together gently and with care by members of one of the most ruthless outlaw motorcycle gangs in the country.

Luke rubbed at his jaw.

He’d be setting flames not to a handful of families, but to whatever chance remained for his future.

For his happiness.

With her.

That thought had him acting without hesitation. The file was flaming in the garbage before he even blinked.

He watched his years of work burn away in seconds.

He’d never felt like he was doing the right thing that whole time. Not really. He’d convinced himself that he was. Made himself think that so he could sleep at night. But this was the only time in all those years that he knew he was doing the right thing.

He wasn’t happy as he watched his misguided and fucked-up form of righteousness burn up in flames. He couldn’t be happy knowing that Rosie was somewhere hurting, nursing both physical and emotional wounds alone.

No way he could be happy with that knowledge.

But something settled inside him as the smoke dissipated and the flames started to disappear, revealing only ashes.

Something like satisfaction.

Maybe relief.

* * *

The door to his office swung open, rattling on its hinges.

“What the fuck have you done to her?” Cade bellowed, fists clenched at his sides as he stormed into the room, murderous eyes glancing around to make sure Rosie wasn’t hiding behind the file cabinet. Satisfied she wasn’t, the grim and hot fury of Cade’s glare settled somewhere it was quite familiar with—Luke.

One of Luke’s deputies scurried in behind him, hand on the butt of her gun, face flushed with uncertainty. “I’m sorry, Luke, but he didn’t stop,” she said, eyes darting to Cade like she expected him to shoot up the place at any moment.

Luke stood. “It’s okay, Lara,” he said calmly, eyes on Cade.

She swallowed, hand still at her gun. “Are you sure?”

Luke nodded tightly. “You can shut the door on your way out.”

The quiet click of the door behind Lara seemed to echo in the loaded silence that she left behind. Though it didn’t stay silent for long.

Cade stalked the remaining distance to Luke’s desk, slamming his palms down on it, knocking off case files and framed pictures.

He didn’t even blink at them.

Likely he would’ve if it’d been the Sons of Templar case file tossed open. If that case file wasn’t now ashes that he’d never recognize being the end of his entire family, his entire life.

Not that Luke would ever educate him, or anyone, on that. He wasn’t that much of an asshole. He was also ashamed of himself, not for making that file in the first place—he was a stupid kid who thought he had something to prove at the beginning. No, after, when he began to know better. Began to realize just how deep his feelings for Rosie ran. How deep they’d always ran. When he knew that using that file would hurt her beyond comprehension.

So it wasn’t all selflessness that had him swearing to himself that he’d never utter a word about that file. It was the opposite, actually.

Cade’s murderous face demanded his attention even more ferociously than his demons did.

“You have ten seconds, Crawford,” Cade bit out, “to tell me what the fuck you did to her and where the fuck she is. After that ten seconds, if I’m not satisfied, and I suspect I won’t be, I’m going to start smashin’ shit.” His fists clenched. “And I’m going to start with your face.”

This wasn’t an empty threat, Luke knew. Normally, with the club going legit and Cade having his family to worry about, even Cade wouldn’t assault the sheriff in the middle of a police station for anything but the most extreme of circumstances.

His sister, his love for her, and the thought of something threatening her, were considered by Cade as the most extreme of circumstances. Luke didn’t doubt that Cade would put a bullet in his brain right here and now if it meant that Rosie wasn’t hurt for another day in her life.

Which was why, among many other reasons, Luke didn’t say shit about the fact that Cade was threatening a police officer.

“I don’t know where she is,” Luke said instead.

Cade’s façade flickered for a moment at his response, but he recovered quickly. “Like fuck,” he spat. “Got witnesses that place your fuckin’ cruiser right outside her house all fuckin’ night two days ago,” Cade seethed. “Two days ago, when she disappeared without a fuckin’ trace.”

Luke sat forward in his chair, suddenly choked with fear. “You mean she didn’t say anything to anyone? Just left?” he demanded. He’d been haunted for the past two nights, sleepless. The only reason he hadn’t torn apart the country looking for her was because he assumed she’d left of her own free will. As much as Luke hated it, she could take care of herself, better than most men could take care of her.

Especially him, or the man he’d been in the past.

But Luke knew how much she treasured her family, knew she’d never put them through the pain and worry that they’d be feeling to just disappear without a trace. She was far too fucking selfless for that. She’d cut her own hand off to spare anyone in that club a second of pain.

Cade didn’t reply immediately, only stared at him.

Luke’s own anger, fueled by fear and worry, erupted at that moment, and he pushed out of his chair so hard it clattered to the floor. “Tell me!” he roared. “Did you or did you fuckin’ not hear from her that she was goin’ somewhere?”

The fury in his voice almost scared Luke. It didn’t scare Cade—the man lived in the face of fury every day—though it did surprise him. Luke could see that.

Cade didn’t answer immediately. Luke knew it was a power play, and fuck if it didn’t make every square inch of his skin crawl letting the asshole have it.

“Yeah, she called me, left a message. Texted Gwen.”

Luke sagged. Visibly. Every ugly thought about her coming to more harm than she already did had rendered him immobile, the blame for anything happening to her settling firmly on his shoulders for letting her go.

“You better start fuckin’ talkin’, Crawford,” Cade demanded, still watching him closely. “You sure as shit know somethin’ about this, and I’ll beat it out of you if I have to.”

This was Luke’s time to stare him down. “I don’t doubt you will,” he said. “Though you might wanna wait until I hand this in before you do, so you’re not assaulting a cop.” Luke nodded to the letter on his desk.

Cade’s head snapped down. “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

Luke stayed impassive. “You know what I’m talking about. So you can beat me, shoot me, whatever, but I’m not sayin’ shit about Rosie, because it’s not my shit to say. I know you’re tryin’ to protect her. Know you’ve been doing that your entire life, in your own way. That’s the only reason I’m talking to you calm-like. But you’ve gotta realize something that I’ve come to realize. Protecting Rosie is caging her. I’m sure that’s the last thing you’d want to do with that woman, but it’s the truth anyway. She can’t be protected, because the greatest danger that she’s ever gonna face is herself. I’d do anything to change that shit, but I know it won’t.” Luke eyed Cade, who was openly gaping at him. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to look for her, and I’m sure that doesn’t mean you won’t either, ’specially with all this comin’ from me. But maybe it might make you think twice about chasin’ her if you find her. Yanking her back to a cage.”

Luke took out his gun and laid it on the table.

Cade watched, still gaping.

“I’ve got some chasin’ to do, and I don’t wanna have the law on my side when I do. Took a long time to realize that’s my cage. Gotta chase freedom now.”

And with that, he walked out the door. He half expected Cade to snatch him by the back of his collar and beat the shit out of him. He might’ve even deserved it.

But he didn’t.

So Luke walked, unobstructed, toward freedom. Finding it, though, possessing it, that would take him through Hell and back.

Not that Luke minded. Not when Rosie was the destination.