Page 251 of Bitter’s Sweet

And if Bitter Adams ever gets anywhere near the softest parts of me again, it will be because he proved he knows the difference between protecting what he loves and controlling what was never his to own.

Chapter Fourteen

Bitter

I spend the night outside Sweet’s door with my back against the wall, blood dried beneath the bandage on my arm, my shoulder throbbing every time I breathe too deep, shame sitting in my throat, and the woman I love crying quietly on the other side of the wood.

Love.

The word I have been dodging like a bullet finally catches me in the ribs sometime between midnight and dawn, while the funeral home settles around me and Mercy keeps opening Sweet’s door just wide enough to glare at me.

She does it four times.

The first time, she brings peroxide, gauze, and the kind of look that makes grown men remember sins they never bothered feeling guilty about. The second time, she brings coffee strong enough to raise Raven out of his rider’s coffin. The third time, she tells me if I so much as touch Sweet’s door handle without an invitation, she will introduce my balls to her embalming scissors.

The fourth time, she says nothing at all. She looks at me sitting there against the wall like a dog somebody left on a porch, shakes her head, and closes the door again.

Fair.

Sweet told me no.

I listened.

That might be the only decent thing I managed after everything I did to break nearly every reason she had to trust me.

Downstairs, brothers move in low voices. Razor is locked in the lower room with Hyde, Nevermore, CSI, and questions he is apparently less interested in answering than he was in running his mouth beside the murder hole. The Ravenfork van turned up behind an abandoned feed building with burner phones, stolen event badges, rope, duct tape, guns, maps of the festival grounds, and enough notes about our shipment routes to prove Razor’s obsession with Sweet had been riding on the back of something bigger.

Worse, somebody gave Ravenfork access they should not have had. My apartment code. Camera loops. The same roads we use when we move custom work.

That problem is club business. Real club business. The kind I would have used before all this to justify every rotten choice I made because apparently putting the words for the club in front of betrayal made it easier for me to swallow.

It does not anymore.

A real threat does not turn betrayal into protection just because the man doing it wears the right patch.

I can fight. I can dig. I can make another man regret having teeth. I can stand in front of a bullet, behind a shovel, or over a grave and feel more useful than scared.

I cannot punch my way out of what I did to Sweet.

That leaves me with empty hands.

I fucking hate empty hands.

Through the door, I hear Mercy murmur something. Sweet answers too quietly for me to make out the words. Her voice sounds rough from crying or sleep or both, and every sound scrapes.

Razor stalked her, terrorized her, hit her, dragged her toward a sixty-foot hole, and held a knife against her body.

Those sins belong to him.

Mine are different.

I promised Sweet the club would not use her fear, her car, her phone, her location, or Razor’s obsession without her say-so. Then club business got inconvenient enough, and I decided my reasons mattered more than her answer.

When she looked at me afterward like I had become one more man who believed wanting to protect her gave me the right to make her choices, I panicked.

So I climbed into a coffin with Trixie and cheated on Sweet less than a day after looking her in the eye and promising there would be no other women.

That was not an accident.