Page 51 of True Bastard
“The brothers saw the patch, Morpheus. We are bound. We have to go.”
“I FUCKING KNOW THAT!”
Standing before the window, his shoulders slumped and he whispered, “She wasn’t supposed to be involved, Firestride. What am I going to do now? I can’t walk away from this. She’s family.”
It was a rare moment of compassion. I knew the pain, the horror that Morpheus suffered because of this life. Because in a way, I was just like him. A carbon copy. The same blood flowed through our veins, only I distanced myself from the truth, while Morpheus embraced it. Not that he was given a choice. Still, he endured, survived, and now he wore the fucking crown.
Heavy is the head and all that shit.
“Brother, let’s just find the crazy motherfucker, save him, then you can kill him yourself.”
He turned toward me. “He gave her his patch, Firestride. She’s his. They are married. You know the fucking rules. We can’t touch her.”
“No, we can’t, but we can touch him. He still owes this club a debt. One way or another, everyone pays their debts. Call Reaper and find out what that fucker has done now. We don’t want to be wading into a war that isn’t ours.”
Morpheus took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to reign in his anger. The silence between us was heavy, each of us deliberating what we had to do. The air was thick with tension, but there was no room for hesitation. Too much had happened. Too much was at stake. We moved as one, driven by duty and blood, knowing this night might change everything—for all of us.
Placing the call, Morpheus put the phone on speaker when he heard the call connect. “What the fuck do you want?”
“What the fuck did he do?”
Growling, Reaper said, “You mean what didn’t he do? That fucker took off to look for Yuri Nikitin because that son of a bitch put hands on Amber. Fucker is going to get himself killed. To make matters worse, your fucking son went after him. When I get my hands on the both of them, I’m going to kill them myself. I’m done with this shit. You know what? I’ve got bigger problems. This is your fucking mess, Morpheus. You fucking deal with it.”
Then the line went dead.
“How do you want to play this, Morpheus? It won’t take Ravage long to find Massacre. That is, if Yuri hasn’t already killed him.”
“Let’s go find the bastard before he gets himself killed.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Kyllian
The second he put me on my feet, I swung, punching him in the face.
He didn’t even budge.
The air in his room was thick with the intoxicating scent of him, a perfume that had once been a strange allure, now a suffocating shroud of his ownership. He stood before me, a dark, imposing figure silhouetted against the moonlight filtering through the barred window. His eyes, those obsidian pools that had once held a flicker of shared cynicism, were now chips of flint, hard and unforgiving. The fire he’d spoken of, the one he’d claimed to admire, had been reduced to a smoldering ember, a faint glow in the encroaching darkness. He thought he had broken me, molded me into his obedient toy, but he was wrong. He had underestimated the resilience of the human spirit, the unyielding strength that bloomed in the face of despair.
“You think you can just lock me away again?” I spat, my voice raw and ragged, each syllable a defiance I clung to like a lifeline. My body still throbbed with the memory of his touch, the brutal claiming that had left me feeling both violated and disturbingly, undeniably alive. But beneath the pain, beneath the shame, a different kind of fire was igniting: a righteous fury born of betrayal and a desperate need for freedom. He had shown me his true colors, not just as a brute, but as a manipulator, a puppetmaster who reveled in control. And that knowledge, that stark revelation, was the spark that would ignite my rebellion.
He smirked, a predator savoring its prey, his gaze raking over my disheveled appearance. “You’re mine now, Kitten,” he growled, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through my very being. “And if you ever walk away from me again, I will hunt you down and kill you.”
His words, a brutal brand on my soul, sealed my fate as he turned and left the room. The second I heard the lock click, the sound resonated with the finality of a tomb sealing shut. I stumbled back, my breath catching in my throat, as the familiar scent of him surrounded me and I screamed, “You motherfucker!”
I didn’t know what game Firestride was playing, but I wanted nothing to do with it, or him, for that matter. He revealed his true self to me when I walked into the clubhouse and saw him fucking that club whore.
Not that I really cared.
Okay, so maybe I cared a tiny bit. Did it hurt seeing him shove his dick into another woman so soon after he supposedly claimed me? Yes. But I would never tell him that. I would rather burn in the fires of hell than give him that hold over me.
The silence pressed in, broken only by the frantic pounding of my own heart, a stark counterpoint to the calculated cruelty I’d just witnessed. I saw the way his eyes widened a fraction when I walked into the clubhouse. He was shocked to see me, then came his regret.
Yeah, I saw that too.
Too bad for him, it had no effect on me, and when he realized I wouldn’t take the bait, he tried to prove his dominance by fucking that whore in front of me. But all that did was show his weakness and my power over him. I saw it—the flicker of something raw, something desperate, in his obsidian eyes. Itwas a sliver of the man I’d glimpsed before, the man I’d hoped, foolishly, might exist beneath the layers of leather and brutality. It was a flicker of vulnerability, and in that moment, I knew, with a chilling certainty, that the game had irrevocably changed.
He thought he held all the cards, but he was wrong.
