Page 56 of Freeing Souls

Ryker immediately storms towards us, and as Cade sets me down, he wraps his arms around me. Feeling all three of my guys close ranks around me lets all my walls come crashing down. As my knees give out, Ryker lowers me to the ground with the others close behind, and I break.

I don’t remember much after I fell apart in the arms of my men. I allowed them to take over and let myself mourn, feel everything I needed to feel. Which is too much. It all feels like too much, and as we pull up to the club, it hurts even more.

To see everyone standing there, waiting for our arrival, it becomes too much. “I can’t do it.”

“What’s wrong?” Grayson asks from the front seat.

“I can’t see everyone. Please–” I whimper.

“Okay. Hang on,” Ryker says and hops out of the truck. A few minutes later, he scoops me out of the truck, not even giving me the option to walk. Heading inside, he takes me straight up the stairs and into my room in the club. The others follow close behind us.

When he sets me back on my feet, I glance around at the space I became comfortable in and notice how the bed is unmade and the guys have clothes scattered around.

“We slept in here a lot when you were gone,” Ryker says quietly, rubbing the back of his neck. “What do you need right now?”

“I’m just going to shower, and then I want to sleep,” I tell them and disappear into the bathroom before more can be said. I feel like I am crumbling around the edges, and I need to just–I don’t even know, besides get in the shower and scrub myself raw.

Turning the water on as hot as it will go, I strip down and force myself to stare in the mirror. Slowly, I pull the bandage on my chest off and stare at the burnt skin that reads TANK and all the small cuts and bruises scattered across my body.

More scars.

More reminders.

The urge to slam my fist into the mirror takes over, and without a thought, I raise my hand. But before I can do it, a hand wraps around my closed fist, and Ryker yanks me back from the mirror so he can step in front of me. His eyes scan me from head to toe, and I see the moment he notices the brand on my chest. His eyes darken, and he tenses before meeting my eyes again.

“Don’t. If you need to hurt something, it won’t be yourself. You can hurt me, but not yourself, not even your reflection. There is nothing wrong or broken about you, and you aren’t going through this alone, Harley.”

I try to blink the tears away and pull away from him. “I need a shower,” I mumble. Stepping under the burning water, I bask in the way it feels as I begin to scrub my skin. Tears roll down my cheeks the longer I scrub, realizing that cleaning myself isn’t going to make me feel clean. There is no feeling clean after everything that has happened.

Ryker is wrong. I am broken.

“Let me, beautiful,” Grayson murmurs in my ear as his front presses against my back. He takes the washcloth from me and gently cleans me. Once he is done, he takes the shampoo and guides me as he washes my hair while I silently cry.

I don’t want to cry. I’m tired of feeling so much all the time.

As he finishes, he turns me towards him and wraps his arms around me. I immediately cling to him and bury my face in his chest. “We have you.”

When I step out of the shower, Cade is waiting there with a towel he wraps around me and guides me to stand in front of the mirror again. Wiping away the fog, he steps behind me and kisses each shoulder before meeting my eyes through the mirror.

“We have you.”

Once I’m dry, he guides me back into my bedroom, and Ryker helps me into one of his shirts. Grayson gets in the bed with me while the others disappear and come back a few minutes later freshly showered.

Ryker lays between my legs with his head on my stomach while Grayson and Cade are on either side of me. “Sleep, Harley. Nothing else needs to be worried about right now. Just rest,” Ry says, and I let my eyes fall shut, truly sleeping for the first time in over a month. No matter how hard I seem to fight it, Grayson, Cayden, and Ryker have me.

Blade (Noah)

“We can’t let this stand,” Axe growls, turning his pain into anger as we all process the death of our president.

“We won’t. This ends now. We will find Killer and his second hand, Tank. We will destroy them and make sure any connections they had around here are gone. We will bring downthe Wilsons once and for all. Harley will get her revenge. This is our town, and we need to make it known again,” Sugar seethes.

That fucking cunt. She destroyed my nightclub. Tammy and her piece of shit husband burned it to the ground, and they didn’t even try to hide it was them. And now they are back in town at their house, as if nothing is wrong. This isn’t the end. They are after something, and we won’t stand for it. I won’t stand for them killing multiple of my employees. People who did nothing wrong. People who were just trying to live their lives and take care of their families. They took my baby from me. I turned that nightclub into what it was. I worked my ass off to make it something I could be fucking proud of, and now, I have to start all fucking over again.

“And a funeral?” Axe asks.

“We have three days. Vance and his guys got Rage for us so we wouldn’t have to–” Sugar drops his eyes to the ground before clearing his throat. “But the funeral home he was taken to said we need to get a move on with it.” He leaves out the part about how his face was so badly beaten, you could hardly recognize him. and none of us would have handled moving his frozen lifeless body well.

“I’ll get on it. We need a last ride and then a celebration,” Axe tells him.

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