CLAIMED BY THE TRIPLET BIKER ALPHAS: A STEAMY MC ROMANCE

CHAPTER 18 – RUN FROM ME

LAYLA'S POV

He looks at me with those grey eyes, and his face is completely open for the first time since I've known him.

"I'd do it again tonight. I'd do it a hundred times. The oath can take whatever it wants."

Something clean and cold rises in my chest. Not at him. At my father – at Jack making a sixteen-year-old boy swear an oath about ME without asking me, without telling me, using someone else's loyalty as a cage for a woman he never gave the chance to choose freely.

"I don't care about a promise you made when you were sixteen. You were a child." I step closer. "And you don't get to use an old man's oath as an excuse to run from me."

The word lands. Run. Rafe Ashford does not run from anything and we both know it.

Something in his composure cracks just enough for me to see what's underneath, and what's underneath is a man who's been holding himself together with both hands for weeks and just ran out of grip.

I grab the front of his jacket.

He catches my wrist – wraps his fingers around it and presses my palm flat against his chest, and I can feel his heartbeat slamming against my hand. Frantic. Undone. Completely contradicting every calm line on his face.

"It’s not because I don't want to," he says, barely a whisper.

"Then stop running."

He moves. I move. We collide.

His mouth hits mine and it's nothing like the first time. The first time was grief and salt and desperation – I was drowning and he was air. This time we both know exactly what we're doing. His hands are in my hair, pulling my head back, and his mouth drags down my throat with his teeth scraping my skin and I'm already pulling at his shirt because I need it off NOW.

"Rafe – take it off–"

He pulls it over his head one-handed and I see the mark and grab his wrist and press my mouth against the vine. He makes a sound that goes straight through me.

"Don't," he says, but his voice is wrecked.

"Make me stop."

He doesn't make me stop. He lifts me and my legs wrap around his waist and my back hits the wall and his hips pin me in place. I can feel how hard he is through his jeans and I grind against him and his forehead drops to my shoulder.

"You're going to kill me, softie."

"Good."

He carries me to the bed and puts me down and strips my clothes off with the kind of efficiency that tells me he's been thinking about this the entire time he was avoiding me. My shirt. My bra. His mouth on my breasts before my jeans are even off, his tongue circling one n****e while his hand works the other, and I'm arching into him and grabbing his hair.

"I spent three weeks not touching you," he says against my skin. His voice is low and rough and nothing like the controlled Rafe I'm used to. "Three weeks of watching you walk past me in hallways and sitting one seat away and keeping my hands to myself."

"That sounds terrible–"

"It was hell." He pulls my jeans down and his mouth follows – my stomach, my hip, my inner thigh. "I'm done being disciplined."

His mouth finds me and I cry out. He's not patient this time. Not controlled. He's hungry in a way I've never felt from him – his tongue working me relentlessly while his hands grip my thighs hard enough to bruise, and I'm gripping the sheets and saying his name like a prayer.

"Rafe – f**k – right there – don't stop–"

He doesn't stop. He doesn't pull back at the edge like last time. He takes me over it with his mouth, and I come so hard my vision whites out and my back arches off the bed and the sound I make fills the room.

He doesn't wait for me to come down. He's unbuckling his belt before I've finished shaking, and when he pushes into me, the sensation is so intense on top of the orgasm that I grab his face with both hands and pull him down and bite his lower lip.

"Harder," I whisper against his mouth.

He gives me harder. He f***s me like the oath isn't burning up his arm with every thrust, like the vine isn't spreading, like the cost doesn't exist. His hand finds mine and pins it beside my head and our fingers lace together – the marked wrist, my hand pressing directly against the vine – and I can feel it pulsing under my palm, warm and alive, but he doesn't pull away.

"Look at me," he says, and his grey eyes are dark and wild and completely unleashed. "I want you to see exactly what you do to me."

I see it. I see the man underneath the control – the one who's been wanting me since he was fifteen and has been paying for it since the first night and would pay for it again without hesitation.

"I see you," I say, and his composure shatters completely.

He comes with my name on his mouth and his hand gripping mine and the mark burning between our palms.

Afterward, we lie in the dark. His breathing slows. I reach for his left arm and he shifts so I find his right one instead. I don't challenge him on it, but I already know – the mark is worse. He's being destroyed by a promise the same way I was being destroyed by poison. Both of us dismantled by the men who were supposed to protect us.

He gets dressed. Goes to the door. His hand rests on the frame, his back to me.

"Don’t think too much about it." he says without turning around.

I don't ask what he means. I already know.

He walks out.

I lie in the dark and look at the ceiling and think about what it costs a person to keep showing up for something that's marking them from the inside.

And I think about how I'd let him show up again tomorrow.