Page 97 of Carrick
Her voice dropped suddenly—low and dangerous.
“But I can’t even havethat, can I?”
Deacon’s voice was steady. “We understand what you’ve lost, Bellamy.”
She froze. Then turned.
And when she faced him, it wasn’t with pain.
It was with fire.
“Do you?” she whispered. “Do youreallyunderstand?”
Her eyes scanned the room—cutting into each man like a blade.
“Because it doesn’t feel like anyone here is trying to understand me at all,” she said, voice sharp with fury barely contained. “You want me to be grateful that I’m not in a body bag, and sure, I am. But this? This isn’t living. This is containment. Its exile with a smile. You stripped my name, my home, my past, and now you expect me to thank you for the view from my prison? Fuck that.”
The words dropped like shrapnel. No one answered. No one even shifted. They just stared—every one of them looking at her like she was a live grenade with the pin halfway pulled, waiting for the blast radius. Then she turned to me, and my stomach hollowed out.
Her voice, when it came again, was lower. Trembling. Not weak—never weak. Just raw. Stripped down to something unguarded, something naked enough to bleed. “Carrick?”
It wasn’t just my name. It was a lifeline thrown across a chasm. She was asking me to take her hand. To choose her. To see her when no one else would.
And fuck, I wanted to. I wanted to wrap her in my arms, shield her from all of it, throw her on the back of my bike, and never look back. I wanted to find that goddamn necklace myself and put it around her throat like a promise.
But I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Not in front of the others. Not with Niko’s shadow at my back and loyalty gnawing at my conscience. I stayed still. And that silence—my silence—hurt her more than any words could have.
Her face fell. No drama. No theatrics. She just… dimmed. Like a light was flickering out inside her. “Right,” she whispered.
She turned away from me and walked out of the room with her head held high, her spine straight—but the storm she left in her wake could’ve drowned the whole damn house.
Jax exhaled slowly, blowing out a breath like he’d been holding it the whole time. “That was intense.”
“She’s not wrong,” Sully murmured, eyes still fixed on the door she’d vanished through.
Niko shot him a hard look. “She’sdesperate. There’s a difference.”
Deacon finally spoke, voice low. “Desperation is a hell of a motivator.”
Sully nodded slowly. “If we don’t meet her halfway, she’ll go without us.”
“She won’t get far,” Niko said flatly, folding his arms across his chest.
“She doesn’t have to,” Deacon replied. “She just has to want it badly enough.”
Niko’s jaw flexed. “Then she’ll learn the hard way.”
I didn’t say it aloud. Didn’t need to. Because we all knew Bellamy didn’t wait for permission. She moved when she felt cornered. And right now?
She was feelingcaged.
The stables wereon the far side of the property, tucked behind a rise of pine and ash trees, down a narrow gravel path most of the team never took. You couldn’t hear the house from here. Couldn’t see the roofs or the cameras or the expectation.
This part of the property was all silence and stillness, and tonight, it felt like walking into someone else’s grief.
I found her exactly where I knew she’d be.
Bellamy sat on the edge of Storm’s stall, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, chin resting on them like she’d folded herself into a fortress of bone. Her body looked small at that moment. Not fragile—but curled inward like she was trying to keep everything from spilling out. Storm stood nearby, the big gelding unnaturally still. Horses could feel emotion. They knew grief better than most people. He didn’t nuzzle her. Didn’t move to comfort. He just waited.
