Page 173 of Savage Hearts

It wasn’t a romance, even if my brain had tried to convince me so, as if I was trying to protect myself from the reality of my situation.

This was a horror story.

And that was all there was to it.

24

SILAS

I leanedmy head against the door, my fists clenched at my side.

Why the fuck had she gone down to the basement?

Years of living in the MC should have taught her not to go where she knew she wasn’t supposed to be, but goddamn it. It obviously hadn’t taught her shit, ’cause she still went down there, still saw me using that fuckingwhip?—

I had thought it was symbolic. Taking a whip to a man sent by Sebastian Cline, but fuck me, the way she had looked at me, looked at the whip…

I closed my eyes. The urge to kill something, someone, to destroy, was strong.

I could go back down with the fucking bastard, but I didn’t trust myself not to kill him at first sight, and we still needed to question him to see if he knew Cline’s whereabouts and why he had put out a three-million-dollar reward on her.

Everything I knew about the club, and the limited knowledge I had of Cline, didn’t tell me he would pay so much, risk so much for Mila, even if her father had agreed to marry her off to him. There was something more to the story, something more as to why he placed so much value on Mila.

Footsteps bounded up the stairs.

I didn’t turn around to face my brothers.

“Fucking hell. What was she doing down there? Who let her freely roam the house?” Killian asked.

Maverick and I didn’t answer him.

This wasn’t something we discussed, but, like me, Maverick hadn’t put up much of a fight with Mila about walking around the property.

We didn’t think it mattered because we hardly ever took our work home with us. The only reason that bastard was tied up in the basement of the house was because he was captured here.

“Silas?” Maverick asked.

I shook my head and pulled away. I could hear some vague shuffling noise inside the room, and I could guess Mila had walked away from the door.

I faced them, shaking my head.

“What do you want to do?” I asked because, hell, I was so fucking lost. Before, Mila had only looked at me with expected hatred. The kind that was given from a captive to her captors, but this was something completely different.

I had never exposed the kind of demons that played inside me around her, and neither had Maverick nor Killian, but what she saw…

The expression on her face would fucking haunt me.

She had been absolutely terrified of me.

I blinked away the memory, but it was still there.

“Give her time,” Maverick said.

“How much time?” I asked, and I hated the undercurrent of desperation in my voice. Killian and Maverick shared a look. They had caught it, too.

“How much time would be enough for her not to be scared of me? How much time would it take for her to forget?”

We all knew the answer. She would always remember. There was nothing I could do to take away the memory. Just as there was nothing I could do to take away the fear that had been so clearly present in her eyes.

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