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Revelations

The space looked different now—the restraints cut and discarded, the bed sheets rumpled and stained with blood and antiseptic. Evidence of what had passed between us over the past week. A record of transformation. The scene felt obscenely domestic, like we were just any couple finishing a shower, not two damaged people with a week of torture between them. A week of torture and fifteen years of hell.

I sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly exhausted beyond measure. Seven days of methodical carving, of sleep deprivation, of emotional warfare had caught up with me all at once. The adrenaline that had sustained me through the forest chase and everything after was draining away, leaving only bone-deep weariness in its wake.

Jace moved around the room with easy familiarity that made my stomach twist. This was the space where I’d made him scream, where I’d methodically broken him down, and yet he navigated it like it was home. He gathered clean clothes from the duffel I’d packed for myself, tossing me a worn club t-shirt before pulling on a pair of boxers he found in the same bag.

“You came prepared,” he observed, eyeing the clothing that would clearly fit him. The corner of his mouth twitched upward, the ghost of the man who’d once made me laugh.

“I had contingencies,” I admitted, the confession bitter on my tongue. Plans for every outcome except the one unfolding before me. “For different outcomes.”

“Including this one?” he asked, gesture encompassing our current situation—him free, me acquiescent, both of us irreversibly changed by the past week.

“No,” I confessed. “Not this.”

He sat beside me on the bed, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his skin but not touching. Offering proximity without demand. The careful distance felt more intimate than any touch.

“What did you think would happen, Naomi?” His voice was softer than it had any right to be. “When you brought me here, when you started carving your scars into my skin—what was the endgame?”

The question had been circling in my own mind for days, becoming more insistent with each passing hour. What had I truly wanted? Revenge? Justice? Something else entirely?

“I wanted you to break,” I said finally, voice barely above a whisper. The words scraped my throat raw. “To feel what I felt. To understand what they did to me because of you.”

“Because of me,” he repeated, a statement rather than a question. “You still believe that.”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” I admitted, the confession torn from somewhere deep, a place I’d bricked over with rage and revenge. My hands twisted in my lap, restless without a weapon to hold. “I spent fifteen years certain you sold me out. That the robbery was more important than me, than Honey. That drugs and money meant more to you than we did.”

“And now?”

I looked at him—really looked—at the man who had endured a week of my calculated torture without breaking. Who claimed to have hunted my captors across three states for fifteen years. Who said he’d killed twelve men with his bare hands for touching me. The scars I’d given him were already starting to heal, pink and raw against his golden skin. Like my signature written across him.

“Now I don’t know,” I said honestly. The admission left me dizzy, unanchored. “If you didn’t arrange it… if you’ve been looking all this time… then everything I believed was wrong. Everything that kept me going through the worst of it was a lie.”

“Not everything,” he countered gently. “The core truth was real—that someone betrayed you. That the robbery was the catalyst. You just had the wrong name.”

“Then who?” I demanded, suddenly energized by renewed anger. The familiar heat of rage flooded back, steadying me. “Who gave me to them? Who knew where we’d be that night?”

“I don’t know for certain,” he admitted, hands clenching into fists on his thighs. The veins stood out on his forearms, a roadmap of controlled violence. “But I have theories. Suspicions I’ve been chasing for fifteen years.”

“Tell me,” I insisted. My fingers twitched toward the scars on my inner thigh, a nervous habit I’d developed after the worst of it. “Who could have done this to us?”

He was quiet for a long moment, organizing his thoughts. When he spoke, his voice had changed—become the voice of the MC President, the strategist, the hunter he’d become in my absence.

“I’ve been thinking about this for fifteen years and something never added up,” he said, eyes distant with calculation. “It wasn’t just that night in the bayou. It was everything that came after.”

A realization struck me suddenly, ice spreading through my veins. “You said you tracked me to different facilities. That each time you got close…”

“They moved you,” he finished, jaw tightening until I could see the muscle straining beneath his skin. “Always one step ahead of me. Three times I found where they were keeping you—Jackson Asylum, Biloxi, Shreveport. Each time, someone tipped them off before I could get to you.”

The implications hit me like a physical blow. My breath caught, lungs suddenly concrete. “It’s the same person,” I whispered, the pieces clicking together with nauseating clarity. “Whoever sent Spider and his men that night is the same person who kept tipping off the Jackals when you got too close.”

His eyes locked on mine, fierce with sudden understanding, and for a moment we were back in that place we’d been before everything went to hell—two minds working as one, finishing each other’s thoughts. “Yes. It has to be. Someone who’s been actively working to keep us apart for fifteen years.”

“But who would have that kind of access?” I asked, mind racing. My fingers dug into the bedspread, anchoring me as the room seemed to tilt. “Who would know your movements, your investigations? Who would have connections to both the club and the Jackals?”

Jace’s expression darkened, shadows gathering in the hollows of his face. “Someone inside Mayhem. Someone who’s been there the whole time, watching everything I do. Someone with connections I didn’t know about.”

Something clicked in my memory—a flash of rage, of betrayal, from just days ago back at the clubhouse. The sharp crack of a baseball bat against wood. Wild eyes filled with more than simple jealousy.

“I know who you are. If you come back here again, I will kill you. Jace is mine.”

The baseball bat, the outrage, her weak threats to kick my ass if I ever came back to fuck her man.

Her man?

“Misty,” I said, the name falling from my lips like a curse, bitter and toxic.

His entire body tensed, a predator catching a scent. “What about her?”

“When I first came back, when we were…” I hesitated, the memory of our violent reunion in his room still raw, the taste of blood and lust lingering on my tongue. “She broke down the door. Came at me with a baseball bat. But it wasn’t just jealousy, Jace. It was something deeper. Something more like—”

“Fear,” he finished, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Fear that you’d recognize her.”

I nodded slowly, memories reshuffling themselves. “I didn’t place her at first. Fifteen years changes a face. But there was something familiar about her, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”

Fifteen years ago, Misty was only a sweet butt, being passed around, but her eyes had always been on the man I was looking at. It wasn’t odd, he was beautiful and scarily charismatic for an outlaw biker. Every woman wanted him in our little section of the bayou. But I was the one who’d had him. The one he’d chosen.

“She’s only been my old lady for three years,” he said, voice tight with controlled rage. His hands flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed, like he was already imagining them around her throat. “Always there. Always watching. Always knowing exactly what I was doing, who I was hunting. Even before…”

The pieces were falling into place with sickening clarity. Each new revelation like another knife sliding between my ribs.

“She would have known about the bayou spot,” I said, bile rising in my throat. “Honey and I weren’t the only ones who went there.”

“And she would have had connections to Spider and his crew,” Jace continued, the calculation in his eyes turning deadly. “Her brother ran with them briefly before he patched into Mayhem. He gave me dirt on the Jackals and I gave him a patch for it, son of a bitch.”

Silence stretched between us, heavy with implications. I could taste metal in the back of my throat, the familiar precursor to violence.

“Why?” I finally asked, the question tearing itself from my chest. “Why keep us apart for fifteen years? What could she possibly gain?”

“Power,” he replied simply. “Control over the club through me. I was… different after you disappeared. Colder. More focused on building Mayhem into something that could help me find you. Something that gave me the resources to hunt.”

“And she was there through all of it,” I said slowly, the realization settling into my bones like poison. “Watching you climb, helping you build, knowing you’d never look at her the way you looked at me unless I was gone for good.”

The revelation should have shattered me—learning that a woman’s obsession had cost me fifteen years of hell. Had cost Honey her life. Instead, I felt only a cold, clarifying rage. A purpose crystallizing out of the chaos of the past week. Something far more focused than the diffuse anger I’d carried into this cabin.

“She can’t know I’ve figured it out,” I said, voice steady despite the fury building inside. My hands had stopped shaking, suddenly still with deadly purpose. “Not yet.”

His eyes met mine, and I saw my own darkness reflected there—the predator recognizing its mate. “No. Not until we’re ready.”

I absorbed this, turning the pieces over in my mind. “So what now? We just… live with not knowing for sure?”

“No.” His voice hardened, became something dangerous and certain. “Now we find out. Together. We track down the truth, no matter where it leads.”

The promise hung between us—an offering, a future, a purpose beyond revenge. A way forward that acknowledged our shared past without being consumed by it. It felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, the fall both terrifying and tempting.

“And if it was her?” I pressed. “Your own wife?”

Jace’s eyes met mine, and what I saw there was the familiar darkness that had drawn me to him all those years ago—the capacity for violence, for retribution, that matched my own.

“Then she pays,” he said simply. “Family or not.”

The conviction in his voice sent a shiver down my spine—not fear, but recognition of memory. Here was the monster I’d glimpsed beneath his beautiful exterior all those years ago. The predator who had been biding his time during his captivity, patient and calculating.

“You make it sound so simple,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. I traced a finger over one of my visible scars, remembering the nights I’d prayed for death. “As if fifteen years of hell can be balanced by finding who arranged it. As if knowing will somehow fix what’s broken inside me.”

“Nothing will fix you,” he replied with brutal honesty. “Nothing will erase what happened or undo what they made you become. But knowing?” He reached out, fingers brushing mine on the bedspread. The simple touch burned hotter than any of our violence. “Knowing gives purpose to what we’ve become.”

His touch sent electricity dancing across my skin—a visceral reminder of our connection, of the complex web of history and desire and rage that bound us together. How easily we fell back into this, as if the past week of me carving into his flesh had been just another form of foreplay.

“And after?” I asked, the question encompassing everything. “After we know, after we… finish it. What then?”

His smile was slow, predatory, yet held an edge of genuine warmth that I hadn’t seen since before everything went to hell fifteen years ago.

“Then we build something new,” he said simply. “Something terrible and beautiful. Something that belongs only to us.”

“Monsters in story books didn’t get happy endings,” I reminded him, echoing my words from earlier.

“Who said anything about happy?” He took my hand fully in his, fingers interlacing with mine in a gesture more intimate than our violent coupling. “I’m talking about completion. About finding the only other person fucked up enough to understand what we are.”

The truth in his words resonated deep within me—a recognition of something I’d been fighting since finding him again. That beneath all the rage, all the righteous vengeance, all the carefully constructed plans, what I truly wanted wasn’t Jace’s destruction.

It was his understanding. His recognition. His matching darkness.

“I don’t trust you,” I said finally, the admission torn from somewhere honest. “I can’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

“I know,” he acknowledged, squeezing my hand gently. “I don’t expect you to. Trust was another casualty that night in the bayou.”

“Then why try at all?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Why not just walk away? Start over somewhere else, without all this… wreckage between us?”

He looked at me then—really looked—with an intensity that stripped away all pretense. “Because you’re in my blood, Naomi. In my bones. The only thing that kept me human these past fifteen years was the thought of finding you. Of making right what went wrong.”

“I’m not the same girl,” I warned. “She’s gone. Dead. Replaced by… this.” I gestured to myself, to the scars visible beneath the thin t-shirt, to the darkness that lived behind my eyes. To the person who’d spent a week methodically torturing the man beside me.

“Good,” he said with such conviction that I blinked in surprise. “I’m not the same either. The boy you knew died the night Honey did. The night they took you.” His voice hardened. “What emerged was something harder. Darker. More suited to the world as it really is.”

“Monsters,” I whispered.

“Something beautiful,” he corrected, bringing our joined hands to his lips, pressing a kiss to my knuckles with unexpected tenderness. “We’re perfect for each other.”

The simple gesture—the gentleness of it amid all our violence—undid me more completely than any cruelty could have. A sob tore from my throat, raw and unexpected, scraping me hollow.

He didn’t try to hush me. Didn’t offer platitudes or comfort. Just held my hand as the dam finally broke, as fifteen years of carefully controlled emotion erupted in a torrent of ugly, wrenching sobs.

I cried for the girl I’d been. For Honey with her beautiful eyes and fierce loyalty. For the future that had been stolen from us all that night in the bayou. For the vengeful abomination I’d become to survive, and the emotionless mirror I’d found in Jace. For the week I’d spent carving my pain into his flesh, and for how easily he’d slipped back into my orbit after, like it was nothing more than a lovers’ quarrel.

When the storm finally passed, leaving me hollow and strangely cleansed, he still hadn’t moved. Still held my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if we were simply two people sharing a quiet moment rather than two damaged souls trying to find their way back from hell.

“You should rest,” he said finally, voice gentle but firm. “It’s been a long week.”

I laughed, the sound watery but genuine. “Understatement of the century.”

His answering smile transformed his face, making him look younger, closer to the boy I’d loved before everything went to hell. “I’ve always had a gift for those.”

As he moved to stand, I tightened my grip on his hand. “Stay,” I said, the word hung between us—not quite a request, not quite a demand.

“Always planned to, kitten,” he replied, settling back beside me with a knowing smirk that should have infuriated me but instead felt like coming home. “Just didn’t want to presume.”

“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” I warned, even as I shifted to make room for him on the bed. “Or that I trust you.”

“I know.” He stretched out beside me, careful to maintain a small distance between our bodies. Offering proximity without demand. “One day at a time.”

As exhaustion claimed me, the last thing I registered was the warmth of his hand still wrapped around mine. Not a cage, but an anchor. Not restraint, but connection.

For the first time in fifteen years, I slept without nightmares.