Page 5 of Pain

I knew he was out of control, and that someone was going to need to do something about it before anyone else got hurt. I just hadn’t wanted to step in and put my own club at risk. My own family.

But if I was right, and Saraya had more injuries peppering her body...

Then it meant he’d been abusing her, too. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t I know the girl. Didn’t matter that she’d looked at me like I was Satan himself, come to life.

Didn’t matter that she wasn’t part of my club, and she certainly wasn’t my responsibility.

She was a girl, and smaller and lighter than he was.

She was a girl, and if he’d been hitting her...

If he’d been hitting her, there was no way on earth I was going to be able to let him get away with it.

CHAPTER 3

SARAYA

I tried to stop crying. Tried to stop the heaving, horrible sobs that kept coming out of my mouth, tying my body into knots and making it nearly impossible to breathe.

But I didn’t have much practice with crying. Even when Devil was in the middle of thrashing me, I’d kept myself quiet and contained, knowing that I just wanted to get out of the situation, and it would happen more quickly if I kept my mouth shut. So I didn’t have a lot of practice with this whole tears-and-sobs thing, and it turned out it was harder to stop than it had been to start.

I couldn’t believe I was crying in the first place. I wasn’t a crier. I never cried. I prided myself on being tough as nails and getting through shit without losing my cool. But I’d been through a lot over the last couple of months, and then I’d been shoved into a truck and blindfolded, and I was hurt, and I’d hit the sidewalk so hard, and I didn’t even know where I was, and when Knight started asking questions...

Hell, the fact that he’d even bothered to ask, in that voice that said he actually cared about the answers, had hit me in a place I’d forgotten had existed. Someplace dark and fragile and nearly broken, and a place no one had touched in...

Ever. I didn’t know if anyone had ever touched me there. My parents sure hadn’t, because they hadn’t cared whether I came or went, and Devil had never bothered. He’d been too concerned with the club and staying on top to bother with something like showing me he cared.

So yeah, I could have been crying because I was hurt or scared or lost. But instead, I was crying because some guy—my boyfriend’s enemy—had sounded like he actually cared about whether I was okay or not.

Pathetic.

I stopped crying right then and there and looked up at him, returning to my previous attitude of suspicion and defensiveness. Because I might have been in trouble before, on the way to who-knew-where with the prospect and not knowing what was going to happen to me when I got there, but now...

Now I was in that exact same situation with someone who had absolutely no reason to like me or treat me kindly.

But that didn’t mean I was just going to give up on getting through this. I might not be an MC president myself, but I’d always been a believer in my own ability to keep on keeping on. I might be currently facing the man that had declared my boyfriend his sworn enemy, the man I’d only ever known as the Big Bad Guy.

That didn’t mean I was going to just throw in the towel.

“Hi, Knight,” I said quietly. “We’ve never actually met. I’m Saraya.”

I watched him swallow heavily. Watched him try to figure out how to handle this, and how he felt about staring down at an ally of the Devil’s Steed. I knew the history between them. I knew that Devil had been Knight’s best friend, his second-in-command. I knew that they’d started Knight’s MC together... and that Devil had decided he wanted to be more than just a runner-up. When the group nominated Knight as president and relegated Devil to second-in-command, Devil had managed to frame Knight as the perpetrator of a bomb that went off at the local police station. Then, while Knight was locked up, his MC suffering without a leader, Devil had split and started the Devil’s Steed... then laid into Knight’s crew at every possible turn. He’d worked to undermine everything Knight had built. Kill his family.

Leave him with nothing to come home to.

Yeah, I knew the history. Devil hadn’t told me himself, of course. He never would have told me anything that made him look like the undermining, cheating SOB he was. But once he started hitting me, I started doing some digging. I had questions about who the man I’d allied myself with actually was, and it turned out there were members of the MC who had answers.

One of them was the guy Devil had caught me with that first night, when he hit me in the mouth. Dutch had been telling me then about how Devil started his MC, and he’d told me more over the last year. He’d told me exactly what Devil did to Knight and how heartbroken Knight himself had been about it.

Devil had found out and shot Dutch for it. But that didn’t change what I now knew.

It also didn’t change my assumption that Knight would hate me on sight. I’d always known him as nothing more than the enemy. And he knew me as Devil’s girlfriend. He’d shown me kindness in those first moments. Now that we were talking, though, I didn’t expect it to continue.

“I know who you are,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen you around.”

He didn’t say anything else, though I gave him at least a minute to say... anything. And the longer the silence went on, the colder I started to feel. My head hurt, and my shoulder was killing me. I was pretty sure my ankle was broken from hitting the pavement. The prospect was long gone with the truck, but he’d left only because he’d seen Knight.

If Knight left me here, the prospect would come back and get me. Take me to wherever he was supposed to take me.