Duke didn’t wait for me to respond to anything he had said. He just got out of the car, leaving me in there with the toxic air of his indifference.
I got out, despite the fact I didn’t want to.
We’d come full circle. The hotel room was nicer. The view was better. My face had more bruises. My heart had more scars. But we were here.
We walked into the room in silence, like we were strangers. Strangers would have been better. I would’ve welcomed it. There was nothing worse in this world than someone you loved, someone who knew the deepest parts of you treating you like a stranger.
The room was indeed “nice.” That was somewhat of an understatement. And that was coming from me, who’d traveled all over the world, stayed at the most lavish and expensive hotel rooms.
This wouldn’t be considered the most lavish, nor expensive. Yet it was the most beautiful room I’d ever walked into.
There was a sitting area as you walked in, slip-covered sofa, white with a plethora of ocean-themed cushions, a coffee table with a pile of what looked like local art books, same with the art on the walls. None of that generic hotel room bullshit. No, everything was unique. One landscape in particular was breathtaking, so much so that I forgot about my heartbreak for a second and leaned in to read the artist.
Lauren Mathers.
I made a mental note to find her as soon as I got home and purchase every piece of art she had available. I’d cover the walls of my lavish home with it, to torture me, to remind me.
The rest of the room was decorated in that same style. Whites. Blues. Beach tones. A huge California King faced the balcony doors, which offered a final view of the sunset over the waves.
It was the perfect room for lovers, for romance.
It was a worst nightmare for...whatever Duke and I were.
He put my bag—given and packed by Gwen so I had faith that it was full of everything I might need—on the sofa.
It was then, he looked at me. Not in the eyes, but at my body, the long tee that Cade had put on me to cover my nearly naked body. I’d forgotten I was even wearing that.
“You need to tell me,” Duke’s voice was careful, slow and controlled.
“Tell you what?” My voice was not careful, slow or controlled.
“Saw your clothes…just tatters on the floor,” Duke said. “You’re wearin’ another man’s tee.” He sucked in a harsh breath. “Did they touch you?”
“No,” I said quickly. He wanted to know if I’d been raped. “No. They wanted to scare me. But they didn’t do that. Rosie and the club got there in time.”
Duke’s hands were fisted at his sides. Fury was radiating off him. I waited for more. Surely there was more. Even if there weren’t any hearts and flowers, which I pretended I didn’t want, surely there was anger. Surely he was going to scream at me like he did Rosie.
“I’m gonna grab a shower.”
Still, he didn’t look at me, didn’t offer any remote hint that he might have once held me in his sleep, that he’d kissed me in the rain, or watched me as I’d cried.
I nodded once because I didn’t trust myself to speak, but he already had his back turned and was closing the door to the bathroom.
When I heard the lock click, I sank down to the floor. No, I didn’t sink. That required grace. My legs simply gave out under the weight of my pain.
The floor was soft when I wished it was hard. I didn’t need comfort of soft things right now. I needed hard, more pain.
My sobs were quiet, but my entire body shook with the force of them. The shower turned on in the background and I jerked myself up.
I suddenly couldn’t be in this beautiful room, not with Duke locking a door, separating us, not with that horrible chill to his voice.
I had to escape.
The hot water did nothing to loosen the tightness in his muscles, but he had to try, had to lock himself the fuck down.
Anastasia was holding on because she was strong, because she was a fucking warrior. He had come to understand that woman—the one he’d once thought would crumble after chipping a fucking nail—could get through anything. But it didn’t matter if she could get through anything, and he wasn’t about to test that. She’d been through enough.
So he’d locked himself up. Tight. He’d called up the version of himself that he’d forced himself to be in the desert—in war—the cold killer that didn’t feel a thing.
He had to. The second he’d screamed in his friend’s face and was willing to come to blows with her husband, he knew he had to.
Seeing Anastasia marked had done something to him. Seeing her standing in a pool of blood, her fucking clothes shredded on the ground, had almost killed him. The thought of them violating her, doing that to her ripped through his insides.
The fact that they hadn’t, didn’t make him feel better. Not in the slightest. He was marked down to his bones, his core. Which was saying something, considering not seeing her at all and having only his imagination was what he’d thought was the worst form of hell.
He’d been through plenty in his life. Fuck, he’d almost died. He’d seen friends take their last breath, forced many enemies to take their last also.
But shit, waking up and realizing what Anastasia had done, that had sent him into a spiral, fierce and unyielding.
He knew Rosie had her shit together, knew that she was as deadly and capable as each of them—more so, if anything. But he also knew she was reckless, that she was willing to go further than even a fucker like Lance would go.
And the most precious thing he’d ever touched was in her care. Rosie was not cruel. She had a soft heart, underneath the brutal façade, but she also adopted her own battle persona, where she was willing to let things get ugly in order to win.
Which might’ve been why she’d come up against some of the most dangerous people in the world and managed to come out on top.
Even the most ruthless of men in Greenstone Security and the Sons of Templar respectively had codes, hard limits. And that included any violence against women.
Rosie didn’t have that same code, because she was a woman—and maybe because she didn’t have that toxic masculinity that was impossible to eradicate in men. She wasn’t full of preconceived notions about women being weaker. She didn’t doubt the fairer sex’s ability to weather the storms.
She was willing to let a woman bleed so a monster would die.
He appreciated that within her, respected that—with anyone that wasn’t his woman. And Anastasia was his.
He’d known this, of course, since the beginning. He hadn’t understood it. The visceral part of him had discovered that. Fuck, Duke had winced for each of his friends as they’d experienced their own courtships. It wasn’t just the unexplainable connection that the men felt with the women, it was that each of the women encountered hurt, pain and situations that left scars. He saw them every day. Even though that shit was behind each of them, even though they slept with their women every night, had families, Duke saw that shit. How it had marked them.
And yeah, the payoff was arguably worth it, but Duke hadn’t felt eager to get into that impossible shit. He’d been perfectly content with the lifestyle he’d been living.
Until Anastasia.
Then the switch went off and the choice was taken from him. It sounded fucking pathetic and unrealistic, that instant connection, that knowing. But it didn’t fucking matter what it sounded like. It was just what it was.