Page 117 of They Break Beauty

“It’s not like you think. She saved me back then. She saved my life, Mason.” He tightened his hold on her and looked at her with utter reverence. “Fuck, she saved me from more than even that. She spared me.”

Brianna grimaced as that time was referenced.

And Levi could barely hold it together, his body now full of tension, emotion swimming in his eyes that had Colt going to him and wrapping himself around him uttering words of comfort.

Lev never talked about that time in his life.

This was beyond unprecedented.

“You see now, Mason? You see why I can’t let you pull her from me?”

“This is dangerous, that being the root of the connection and obsession, Lev.”

“We’ll make sure that isn’t the case,” Brianna said, eyeing me in reference to our conversation about my handling of Lev being detrimental.

“You don’t understand,” Lev insisted, pulling from Brianna and Colt and rising to his feet. He strode over to me and slapped his hands down on the coffee table in front of me. “But you will.”

I tensed, preparing for another fight.

But then he pushed off the table and went another way that I wasn’t expecting—there seemed to be a lot of that lately.

Too much.

“I’m gonna tell you how it was.”

And then the most shocking thing of all happened.

He went back to that time and place that had marked the worst experience of his life and forever changed him.

24

~Levi~

Six Years Ago

She was so beautiful.

Like a princess.

She even had a jeweled tiara on to go along with it.

But the white summer dress beneath a black leather jacket… no, it was like she was an angel who’d been dragged through the gates of hell because of some awful mix-up.

I knew who she was really.

The club princess of the Steel Dawn Motorcycle Club.

I’d met her before when my dad had taken me to the clubhouse her father ran. A couple of months back. It had been part of his training, to show me how to do business, how to strike deals with dangerous men. And Curt Walker had definitely fit the bill. But so did my dad.

That made it all the harder to swallow that this had happened.

That I’d been taken.

I didn’t want to think about it.

When reality was too brutal, fantasy helped you through.

So she was an angel to me. One who’d lost her way, one who the bad men would come to realize didn’t belong here soon. And then they’d take me with her as they sent her back to the good place where she was really supposed to be.

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