Page 33 of Damron (Bloody Scythes MC #1)

Chapter eighteen

Carly

D amron walked in like he owned the air.

His shirt was ripped down the side, fresh stitches zippering his ribs, and his leather cut—painted with his blood, someone else’s, and something like axle grease—hung open like a flayed animal.

There was a trick to moving through the MC world when you were a politician or a woman, and I’d long since mastered both, but right then I felt like a little girl at a monster truck rally, trying not to flinch at the noise.

The rest of the Scythes raised their bottles as he passed—Augustine, half his face still green from bruising; Seneca, shirtless and sporting a cartoonish roll of gauze around his bicep; and then Nitro, who looked less like a man and more like a problem set to explode in ten seconds.

Nitro saw me first. He stepped forward, hand raised for a backslap, but stopped cold when he spotted me by the pool table.

His grin flickered out like a blown fuse.

I wasn’t supposed to be here. Not tonight, not after what happened.

My throat went sandpaper-dry, but I kept my eyes locked on Damron, the only man in the room who could make a tailored blazer feel like a bulletproof vest.

He clocked me without breaking stride. For a heartbeat, the whole place went silent, the way churches go silent when a woman in a red dress stumbles through the doors on Sunday.

He didn’t slow, didn’t even blink. Damron walked right past Nitro and the rest, picked up a bottle from behind the bar, and popped the cap with his thumb.

No glass. He just swigged and set it down, eyes never leaving mine.

The others took the cue and vanished. Not literally—Scythes didn’t run from drama, they just pretended not to give a shit unless there was money or violence involved—but they faded into the shadowy alcoves, leaving me and Damron in a hemisphere of silence lit only by the pink glow of the neon and the cheap Christmas lights someone had run across the ceiling six years ago and never bothered to take down.

His jaw was clenched so tight it looked like he was grinding concrete between his molars.

The way he flexed his left fist—absent the ring finger, still healing—made the missing digit more noticeable, not less.

I started, “I heard what happened at the Dire Straits clubhouse.”

He grunted, reached back for the bottle, and poured a shot into a sticky glass. Didn’t offer me one. “Yeah? You come to lecture me about excessive force, Senator?” His voice had gone husky with smoke and pain meds, or maybe just plain old contempt.

“I came,” I said, “to say I’m sorry.”

That stopped him for half a second. He kept his back to me, shoulders hunched, shirt ruined, skin like road rash over granite.

“For what, exactly?” He turned, the half-empty glass trembling in his fist. “For leaving? Or for pretending I was just another bad decision you could un-sign like a fucking amendment?”

My hands shook, so I jammed them in my pockets. “For trying to carve you out of my life like you were just another part I could amputate,” I said. My voice sounded small, even to me. “You always said I was a coward. You were right.”

He downed the shot in one go, and even from across the room I saw the way his eyes pinched at the pain. The stitches in his ribs had been done with speed, not skill. “Little late for that, don’t you think?”

Maybe. But I’d run out of choices, or maybe I’d just run out of places to hide.

The jukebox in the corner cranked to life—a Patsy Cline cover, something slow and ruined—and neither of us even looked at it.

I walked toward him, letting my heels click against the warped linoleum.

Each step felt like I was crossing a minefield, and in a way I was.

I stopped three feet from him, close enough to see where a new scar bisected the one I gave him years ago in a parking lot brawl that ended with us fucking on the backseat of his Harley.

I almost reached for his arm, but caught myself and fisted my hand in the hem of my skirt instead.

“I fucked up, Damron. I thought I could be two people—the senator and the biker’s wife. I was wrong.”

He just stared at me, like maybe I was the one with a hole in my side. “What changed?” The words came out as a challenge, not a question.

“Everything,” I whispered. I moved in, so close I could smell the cheap whiskey on his breath, the iron tang of blood seeping through his bandages, and beneath it all, the aftershave he’d never admit to wearing but always did. “Giammati. The Dire Straits. You. Me.”

He smiled, and it was a mean thing—no light in it. “So what? You want me to say I forgive you? That we’ll play house, and you can give a fuck about me between press conferences?”

“That’s not what I—” I started, but the rest died in my throat. I didn’t know what I wanted. Just that for the first time since the hospital, I wasn’t numb anymore.

His hand flexed at his side, the phantom ache of his missing finger obvious in the twitch of his knuckles. “And what exactly do you want from me now?”

“Give us one more shot,” I said, hating how pathetic it sounded. I’d spent the last four years running from the possibility that I could ever need someone this badly. “Please.”

He let the silence ride for a whole five seconds, maybe longer. The tension vibrated between us, thick as the smoke and just as hard to breathe through.

Then Damron moved. One step, then another.

His hand came up—not a slap, not a shove, just a slow slide to the back of my neck, so gentle it made my knees weak.

He yanked me into him, and the first kiss was slow, testing.

Like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss me or bite a piece out of my cheek.

Then his mouth opened and mine did too, and the years, the wars, the fucking heartbreak, all of it collapsed into a kiss that tasted like whiskey, salt, and a promise I didn’t deserve.

His other hand splayed across my back, big and hot and shaking just enough for me to feel it.

I pressed up on my toes, one hand sliding under his ruined jacket, careful not to touch the worst of the bandages, the other fisting in his hair.

His tongue grazed my teeth, then dove in deeper, desperate and angry and pure.

My body went molten—heat pooling between my thighs, heart stuttering so hard I thought I’d black out.

I didn’t care. I let him devour me, lost myself in it.

I broke first, lips raw and swollen. We stared at each other, breathing like we’d run a marathon in full gear. I was shaking so hard I thought my knees might give. He gripped my waist with both hands, gentler now, like he was worried I’d break.

“You want a do-over, Senator?” he whispered, and the old spark was back in his eyes. “You get one. That’s all.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

He nipped my lower lip, then smiled, slow and dangerous. “You walk out on me again, I’ll kill you,” he said, and I believed him, even if the death would be his own. The jukebox switched to a slow waltz. Neither of us moved.

Outside, I heard the rumble of bikes, the laughter of club brothers who’d survived another war, but in that room there was only me and him.

Two creatures made for violence, tethered by a need neither could kill.

My hands slid around his waist, careful of the bruises, and I rested my head on his chest, feeling his heartbeat under the blood and the leather.

The future was fucked. The present was worse.

But for the first time since I walked out, I thought maybe, just maybe, the two of us could survive it.

I pulled back and met his eyes. “I won’t leave again.”

He just grunted, but his hands never let go.

We stood there, letting the silence stretch, neither one of us needing to fill it. For once, that was enough.