“So no way am I going to ever introduce something that could take me away from that. From my sober and lucid everything. Because I don’t deserve that. Not now, not ever,” I vowed.
Gage
The second she had spoken in that cold, fucking bone-shattering tone, he had frozen.
Every fucking part of him.
Because no way should this warm, complex, and cute-as-shit woman ever sound like that. But she did. And it was worse, because his warm, complex, and cute-as-shit woman felt that every fuckin’ day.
Someone didn’t speak of trauma with such cold emptiness unless it was a trauma that had scraped their souls from their bones.
And he’d known there was something underneath all her soft. Her glasses, her statistics, her reserved smiles, her fire, her quiet. He knew there was something loud underneath that. Something screaming.
Gage knew demons. Excelled at recognizing other people’s. Or he thought he had. But fuck, hearing her talk, every word ripping at his skin, flaying him, he realized he didn’t know shit. Because no fucking way had he expected Lauren’s demons to be that dark.
Only because someone with demons that dark didn’t rebuild their life. They didn’t smile, didn’t live in a fucking apartment radiating light. Didn’t do kind shit for other people daily, like Lauren did.
The people with those demons, they withered. Escaped into the bottom of a bottle. Fucked their way through half a state. Gambled. Hurt other people so they didn’t hurt themselves. Caused other people pain because they wanted someone else to experience the utter agony they carried around with them every day. Because they wanted to spread that pain so the whole fucking world could pay.
Gage had done all of that.
And more.
Yet Lauren didn’t touch anything that might offer her even a moment of respite. Not even a fucking soda.
He’d encountered some fucked-up people in his life—not including the most fucked up of them all, the man in the mirror. Had also seen some of the strongest human beings to walk the face of the earth.
People who gathered the ashes of their lives, carried them with them, but also used them to fertilize, grow something new.
Bull.
Bex.
Lucky.
Mia.
Gwen.
Rosie.
Not many people knew, but Ranger.
People usually showed him their fucked-up shit because he wore his depravity on his sleeves. Literally. When you showed the world you were crazy, most people shied away from it, crossed the street to avoid it. But not because they were afraid of him. No, because of what he would make them see about themselves.
Only the bravest of people wanted to open up with their crazy, and they did it with him because it didn’t seem as bad to expose those demons to someone who had bigger and worse ones.
So he had a list.
The list went on. In fact, it included almost everyone in his club.
The men, not so surprising, since they had to be strong in order to keep drawing breath, keep from eating bullets.
The women were a little less obvious, but not by much. Their struggles were laid out for the world to see, because they’d had to fight a war to get them to where they were. Gage had seen a lot of it.
A lot of it—like Bex, chained to a bed, strung out and being raped—was burned into his brain.
The rest he’d heard about, seen the aftereffects of.
But with Lauren, it blindsided him.
“Because there’s only one thing in the world that’s worse than your soul being ripped apart, and that’s not caring that it’s happening.”
The words were rebounding inside his head. One of the strongest and bravest sentences he’d ever heard someone say in his fucking life.
And it was coming from his woman.
His little woman who wore skirts that never brushed higher than her knee. Who talked about the dangers of fuckin’ subway grates. Who still bitched at him about wearing a skull cap.
He knew she was special. Fuckin’ priceless.
But he’d still been a fool.
Because she had done something he’d been unable to do—live with the pain. Grit her teeth against it and not succumb to the temptation of nothingness.
He was frozen as she spoke.
Cataloguing every inch of her pain, sorrow, and then feeling it tenfold. Adding it to his own. Because that shit was his now. Every inch of her pain.
And he was also cataloguing every inch of her.
Because the second she fuckin’ spoke, he knew it had to be done. The thing he’d been stewing on all day since leaving her. The thing that had him physically unable to look at her during dinner. He had to get the fuck away from her before his poison polluted her life.
His fucking addiction.
The one that had killed her brother. He had survived, with no one to mourn him, no one to care—his parents were better off without him in their life, because it would kill them to see the monster he’d turned into—and her brother, the other fucking half of her, had let the needle drain away his life in the pursuit of a high.