She winked again.
At her words, and the memory of Gage pulling me out of a burning building and knowing he was coming back, I relaxed into the bed. Something I never would’ve done under normal circumstances.
But normal was a construct.
Thankfully.
Gage
“Who could’ve done this?” Cade demanded the second he sat his ass at the gavel.
It didn’t escape Gage that Cade was looking straight at him when he uttered the question. Now he was faced with his president’s blame along with his own.
Not that it added to the weight he’d felt the second he’d pulled up to Lauren’s house. Drove past as he had every single night for the past week, but didn’t toy with going in like he had before. He’d climbed off his bike the second he pulled up to the curb. When he’d seen the fucking flames. Felt the smoke snatch away his oxygen, even though he wasn’t near enough to breathe it in.
She had been near enough to breathe it in.
That was enough to suffocate him.
The mere fucking prospect of her not drawing air on this earth.
The reality of it was enough to kill him.
He didn’t speak immediately, mostly because his fucking throat was paralyzed by the thought of losing her, so Cade continued.
“We aren’t running shit that’ll get us killed anymore,” he said, voice hard, mimicking his face that was the default when sitting in that chair. Despite the relative peace they’d been enjoying, Cade was always bracing. As were the rest of his brothers at the table who had it.
Something Gage vowed he’d never have.
Something to lose.
Because living a hard, fast, and deadly life was fucking great if you were young and stupid or old and tortured. And only if you were willing to get right with the fact that death was something you dealt as well as dodged every day.
But the second you grasped on to something you never wanted death to fucking breathe on, let alone touch—that’s when you were fucked.
And Gage had watched the men around him finding that shit, getting fucked, almost losing everything that mattered to them. He’d brushed away the demons that had clawed at his mind when he’d done so, and his resolve had strengthened to never be in their position again.
Sure, they had good women who they thought invented fucking Harleys, a family that brightened this shitshow called an existence, but all that could go. Instantly.
Gage’s chest tightened as those demons gained hold.
The ones that were as old as he was, and the newer ones, ones that smelled like strawberries and had skin like peaches and cream.
He tightened the grip on the knife he’d been clutching, itching to sink it into flesh. To stain it with the blood of whoever was responsible for nearly taking his woman from him.
Because it had to be someone. There weren’t just accidental fires that almost took away his entire world. No, that shit didn’t happen.
It had to be a real, tangible enemy.
“So what you got going on the side to bring in circumstances that’s getting a woman’s house burned down, almost with her inside it?” Cade snapped Gage from his thoughts of sinking that knife into someone’s flesh.
He met hard gray eyes that had lost a fuck of a lot of their menace thanks to a hot wife and two kids.
“I ain’t runnin’ nothing on the side,” he bit out. “Well, nothing that would have people burning down my woman’s house, almost with her inside it. If they wanted revenge, they’d go for me. And if they were gonna go for her, they wouldn’t be going for almosts and burning down a house. They’d be putting a bullet in her brain.”
The second the cold and seemingly empty words left Gage’s mouth, he wanted to snatch them from the air, rip them into fucking pieces so they didn’t exist in this world, so the prospect of his woman staring at him with lifeless eyes did not fucking exist.
He clenched the arms of his chair with enough force to splinter the wood.
“Any way this could’ve been what the fire inspector is thinkin’?” Cade asked. “Accidental?”
Gage thought on the possibility of a fucking accident almost taking Lauren away. A breach in some wire. A stove left on.
Accidents didn’t exist in his world.
Not when it came to life and death.
“No,” he growled, standing, unable to take the itch for nothingness a second longer. “Someone did this. We’ll find them, and I’ll flay the skin from their body.” He thought of Lauren’s blistered and charred palm and fought the urge to carve out his own hand just so she wasn’t suffering alone.
But she wasn’t.
No fucking way she would be again.
He’d already been trying to find the strength to walk through her door, swallow his words and his demons and give her something. He was never going to be able to exist much longer without everything, not without chasing the nothing of the needle. She was his cure, and he was her disease, but that wasn’t stopping him anymore.