MY ALPHA BIKER SAVIOUR

CHAPTER TWO

JUNE

I didn't want to die. The genuine truth of it broke over me the same second the tears did — at this point, they were impossible to hold back, my chest felt tight and heavy. I didn't want the dark, I didn't want any of this.

I didn't want my father's arms waiting somewhere I'd have to fall to reach him and I was sure he didn’t want the same thing either. I wanted to live. To be happy again. To be free again. To be good, the way I used to be before any of this happened.

"I don't want to die," I told him, my voice raw, barely mine. "I want to live."

“Please, I don't want to die…. Not like this,” I whispered brokenly as I looked up at him with teary eyes.

"Then live." He didn't soften it, didn't reward me with anything close to gentle. "Go down there and do every single thing you've wanted to do for three years. Slap him. Scream. Stand on what's yours." Three years of being tortured and subdued and he was handing me permission to do these impossible things?

He pulled me up and over the railing like I weighed nothing at all. The second my feet hit solid ground, the fear roared back in, faster than the relief had come.

The last time I'd stood up to Aidan — the only time, once, three years ago, over something so small, he'd made sure I understood exactly what saying no cost. A whip. A week without food, the kind of hunger that makes you dream about a pinch of bread.

I still flinched at leather belts hanging in closets, at the sound of a buckle coming undone in another room. My legs remembered before my mind caught up. They shook so hard I nearly lost my balance again.

"It's a party," he said, already walking away, like my terror was small and ridiculous "You think he'll beat you in front of everyone?" He paused for a moment before he resumed walking away.

I shivered for a moment and pulled myself together.

I made my way back into the house anyway, shaking, one hand on the wall the whole way down, my bare feet remembering every step of that staircase even in the dark.

The party swallowed me whole the second I stepped through the doors. I hadn't seen this many people in one place in three years, hadn't heard this much noise, seen this much light, and it hit me like walking straight into traffic.

People were everywhere, eating off the food I'd cooked with my own hands. Some were seated at the table I'd set that morning until my back ached.

Drinking wine my father's money had bought, standing on floors my father had paid for, laughing under a roof my father had built for a daughter he thought would always be safe in it.

Everything that had once been his, picked over and desecrated by people he'd made out of nothing. He'd built half the lives in this room. I recognized faces in that crowd — men who used to shake my father's hand and call him a brother, women who used to send flowers when I was a sick kid home from school.

Not one of them had called me since the funeral. Not one of them so much as glanced my way now, like grief really was contagious and they'd all quietly agreed not to catch it. My anger rose up through the fear like heat cutting through ice.

Someone spotted me first. A whisper, then a turned head, then another, spreading out across the room like something spilled. "Isn't that Aidan's wife?" I heard. "I thought she died along with her father. We haven't seen her in — God, look at her."

Aidan and Natasha weren't expecting me. That much was written all over their faces in the seconds it took them to cross the room, jaws tight, furious in that quiet way rich people learn so no one ever has to see it.

Aidan's hand closed around my arm hard enough to leave a bruise, hard enough that every ounce of rage I'd carried down those stairs disappeared at once, replaced by something small and cowering.

"Get lost," he hissed against my ear, "or I promise you, you'll regret. You’ll definitely be taught a lesson once this is over"

He let go and turned back to his friends, already laughing. "Lucky for her, only her old man died. Her b***h father's gone, and all he left behind is his maid." I stopped moving completely. Something in my chest went white-hot and very, very quiet.

Her b***h father. The man who'd driven through ice for Natasha. The man who'd handed Aidan a career out of nothing but decency. His maid? I had scrubbed floors on my knees for a man who talked about my father that way. I had cooked, and served, and disappeared upstairs on command, for people who talked about my father that way.

I turned back to the table, picked up the nearest glass, and threw it straight into his face. The gasps came first, sharp and collective, then total silence, then Aidan's voice cracking through both of them. "What is wrong with you?"

I found the last of my strength and spent every bit of it at once. "Get out. All of you. Get out."

Nobody moved. Nobody dared to breath. Two hundred people who'd eaten off my father's money for years and never once called to check on his daughter, all of them frozen now, waiting to see which one of us would break first.

He moved to slap me. I flinched, but I didn't run, didn't drop my eyes the way I always had before. There was one thing Aidan cared about more than money, and it was standing in a room full of witnesses right now, watching him decide what kind of man he actually was.

I held still and let him see it. "Slap me," I said, louder. "Beat me. Punch me in front of everyone. Do it."

Natasha caught his arm before it landed, her nails digging into his sleeve, her whole face begging him to think about the room full of people watching before he did something he couldn't undo in front of them.

"This is my father's house," I said, loud enough for the whole room this time, my voice finally not shaking. "He bought it for me. Get out, or I call the police."

Natasha moved first, hands raised, voice gone sickly sweet. "It's fine, everyone, let's go, let's just go." She leaned in close enough that only I could hear it. "You'll pay for this."

They left. I hadn't actually believed it would work, not really, but they left, one by one, Aidan spitting on my father's marble floor on his way out, blood on his knuckles from the broken glass. The door slammed behind the last of them, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd heard in three years.

It took two, maybe three seconds to understand what had just happened. Free.

For the first time in three years, I was alone, and I was free, and my whole body didn't know what to do with either.

I ran. The last time I'd made it this far down this same corridor, they'd caught me by the hair and dragged me back inside, and I'd learned after that not to try again.

Tonight, every step landed and nothing stopped me. My legs moved like they belonged to someone braver. The front door. The driveway, gravel biting into bare feet I couldn't feel. The wind on my face, real, cold and mine, and I laughed and sobbed at the same time because I couldn't tell anymore which one I was doing, or if there was even a difference between them tonight.

I hailed a cab at the end of the street and gave the driver an address I hadn't said out loud in three years.

My father's grave, the one I hadn't visited once in three years because Aidan said it wasn't good for appearances.

I don't remember the drive. I remember the grass, damp under my knees, and my hands flat against the cold stone with his name carved into it, and the sound that finally tore out of me when I let it, ugly and loud and three years overdue.

I cried until there was nothing left in me to cry with, curled over the one person who used to keep me safe, gone now, and somehow still the only place in the world that felt like home.

I told him I was sorry. Sorry I hadn't been strong enough sooner. Sorry I'd let them do what they'd done to the people he loved most. Sorry it took nearly dying to remember what he used to tell me, over and over, until I believed it — that I was a Davis, and Davises didn't beg.

I froze when I didn't hear footsteps, I heard my name instead.