I needed him.
It didn’t matter if he was Jagger. If he was a member of the Sons of Templar MC. That there was ink all over his body I didn’t recognize. A scar ripping across his face evidence of a pain I was ignorant of.
It only mattered that somewhere in there, was Liam. And he was alive.
I even lifted my foot in preparation to launch myself off. Then something caught up with me. Sense. Fury. Hurt.
I placed my foot back down. “What do you think, Liam?” I whispered.
His face wasn’t empty anymore, confronted with the brokenness of my tone. Of what I guessed my face looked like. Everything hard about him melted. His body physically sagged as if ten thousand pounds had just been dropped on his back.
He lifted his motorcycle boot. “Peaches.” The word was a plea.
It unraveled me.
Somehow my backbone kept me together. I folded my arms. “Has the club decided on what you’ll do with me? I have a life to get back to. If you’re not going to kill me, that is.”
Could he kill me?
I couldn’t think about that. Because I wasn’t sure if I’d survive the answer. The truth.
His expression shifted and the weight left. Or maybe he got better at hiding the fact he carried it around. “You’re not getting back to anywhere,” he all but growled. He looked around again. “I’ll get a prospect in. Clean this shit up.”
“You think it’s that easy?” I hissed at him.
He clenched his fists at his sides. “Nothing about this shit is easy, Caroline. Nothing about the past fourteen years has been fucking easy.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, I bet it’s been so fucking hard for you. Here drinking whisky, fucking whores, and living outside the law, being free.”
He was across the room before I could blink, wood crunching beneath his boots as he crushed parts of his dresser. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t need to. Every inch of him was pressed into the air, inches from me.
“I’ve been a lot of fucking things for the past fourteen years, Caroline,” he rasped, never taking his eyes from me, stealing the breath from my lungs. “Only thing I haven’t been is free.”
He let the words hang between us, a dare for me to do more. To ask more. His chest was heavy with exertion, the veins in his neck pulsating as if he were practicing some sort of epic restraint.
My eyes traced the puckered marks of the scar that dominated the face I once used to know so well. Pain lanced down the exact same spot on my own as agony speared through me with the knowledge of something tearing at his skin like that. Of him having to recover from that without me.
But then again, he made me recover from scars worse than that.
You just couldn’t see them.
I sucked in a visible breath and stepped back purposefully, as if the mere foot of distance did something to insulate me against him. The grave hadn’t insulated me against him.
He rolled his shoulders back, resting his hand on his belt. “I’ll arrange for that prospect to come in here, clean it up.”
“If the club is going to keep me prisoner here, I’m not staying in this room,” I declared, searching for some leverage in this situation, some control. And I couldn’t stay in this room. Even though it was devoid of personality, it showed nothing of the boy I used to love. That was the point. Its very emptiness would swallow me whole.
Something flickered in his eyes. “You don’t have a choice in the matter.”
I sank my fingernails into the skin of my palms. I itched to argue. I sensed it wouldn’t help. The man in front of me was likely hardened to arguments, to pleading. I was aware I needed to be thankful for the fact I was alive at all. If that’s what this was.
“Then don’t send a prospect, I can clean this up myself. I’ve had practice.” It was petty, but I felt petty.
Though there was no victory in his visible flinch.
This war had no victors.
He nodded once. “I’ll get you something to eat. Coffee. I assume you take it the same.”
I sank my fingertips in harder. There was something intimate about someone knowing the mundane things about you. I wanted it to have changed. But though many things about me had changed, what felt like my entire genetic makeup, the way I took my coffee had not.
“Don’t bother,” I snapped. “I won’t eat or drink anything you give me.”
Again, another stupid move. I didn’t gain anything from going on some stupid hunger strike. If anything, I needed to keep my physical strength up if the opportunity to escape presented itself.
Not that it would.
There was no escaping this. Even if I did find a way out of this highly secure compound.