Page 30 of Savage Heart

Stanford University.

Liz had been talking about going there, about their amazing medical school program. He could hear the yearning in her voice when she spoke about it, so he knew it was important to her.

But…just last night she was making calls about her classes for UNLV, like she was attending there in the fall. That didn’t make any sense.

Pulling the letter from the pile, he quickly scanned it.

….congratulations…scholarship…our medical school….

Fuck! She’d been accepted to Stanford—and she had a motherfucking scholarship! Why wasn’t she talking about classesthere? Why the fuck would she choose to go to UNLV instead of her dream school?

Then he remembered….

“I love you…” she’d said, “I can’t imagine my life without you….”

His insides wanted to crawl up his throat and become his outsides.

Shit. She was choosing to stay in Las Vegas…for him.

Fuck.

No.

He couldn’t let her do that. Going to Stanford was important to her, it was the better school, and after all the shit Liz endured in her life, she deserved a school that would help her have the career of her dreams. He refused to be the reason she stayed in Vegas, but…what the fuck could he do about it?

And then…he thought of something.

After that, his plan was set in motion, a plan that was slap-dash but necessary for getting Liz the fuck out of Vegas—because he loved her, so fucking much, and knowing she was giving up her future to stick with a hardened, blood-soaked asshole like him? He couldn’t live with himself.

So he did what he had to do, and in doing so, he carved his own heart out of his chest, and left it bloody and barely beating on the floor of the bar’s office.

“Bonnie…let’s go back to the office….”

“Be nice and loud. Tell me how much you like it….”

Bonnie hadn’t hesitated a moment—helping him fuck over Liz by being the willing slut he knew her to be.

And when it was all over, when Tosser had texted him to tell him Liz had left, he’d pushed Bonnie away, vomited into the trash can, then spent the night getting shit faced.

After that night, he deleted Liz from his contacts, deleted every picture of her in his phone, and abandoned his shit in her apartment—all to cut off that part of him that was bleeding, an open wound that still hadn’t healed nearly ten years later.

God, how was he any better than his fucking father, a man who hurt his wife, the woman he was supposed to love? He was no different—no, he didn’t use his fists as his father had, but breaking Liz the way he did had to have hurt just as much. And he knew from her expressions every time she saw him, especially with Amelia, that the wounds he’d inflicted still hadn’t closed. They were fresh, just as his were.

He’d hurt the woman he loved.Must be a Skaarsen trait—asshole men who damage their women.

He’d regretted what he’d done every fucking day of his life. He’d foolishly thought that cutting her out of his life would be easy; if she wasn’t there, he’d eventually forget about her. The wretched truth was there wasn’t a single day that passed in ten years when he didn’t think about her. She was there, rooted in atthe deepest part of him. To completely cut her out, he’d have to rip the heart out of his chest and set it on fire.

Still watching his woman sleep, Trouble couldn’t stop the trainwreck of his thoughts, especially the memory of when he’d seen Liz for the first time since he’d broken both their hearts in that fucking bar ten years ago.

“Shit, brother, Skathi’s hurt bad,” Odin croaked over the phone line, the fear and pain evident in his deep, raspy voice. The man had fallen fast and hard for the large, badass woman.

“You headed to the hospital?” Trouble asked, already mounting his mint, matte black 1986 Harley FXR Super Glide to head to wherever his brother needed him.

There was a moment of strained silence before Odin replied, “We’re at the clubhouse, I got someone coming to take care of her.”

That made Trouble’s brows furrow. “Like a paramedic?” That was unusual because whenever a club brother got himself shot, stabbed, or sliced, they’d either patch him up using the scraps of their field training, or they took him to urgent care, where the overworked docs didn’t mind a few extra hundreds intheir pocket to keep their mouths shut. If Odin was bringing in a professional, things were bad.

“No,” Odin replied, “I’ve got a doctor coming in. I arranged for the doc to be on retainer for when we need a more delicate hand with the needle.”

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