Page 5 of Scar

Or the him he’d been. It had been a lot of years since anyone had called him ‘Solo’. The moniker he’d been given in the Army had nothing to do with Han Solo or the franchise. Scar had gotten a reputation for workingsolo. Even when placed on a team, he worked best alone. His superiors in the Army and training officers had tried to drill into Scar’s head multiple times that ‘teamwork’ accomplished the job better, but they had a hard time arguing with his results after a while.

It hadn’t been until he’d met his Delta Force teammates that he’d truly understood what it was his superiors had been trying to teach him all along.

The nickname ‘Solo’ had stuck. But Solo had died in those Afghani caves. Solo had had a flag on his shoulder and God in his heart.Scaronly had darkness.

“Now, before you start trying to fight your way out of this, let me explain to you some things that are going to happen. First, now that you’re awake, all the medical equipment you see around you is going to be taken out of here. That includes the bed. You have been here for seventeen days, as I stated. You have been given glucose and saline to keep you alive, but you’re bound to be hungry. However, I believe another day of solitude will help…boost,” Alpha flashed his teeth in a joyful smile, “your recovery. We’ll feed you the day after tomorrow.

“Second, you’ll be put through training again. I don’t know what sort of bad habits you’ve picked up over the last eight years, but my men will have no trouble beating them out of you. I believe some time in interrogation will also do you some good. I have acquired several new interrogators since you were last here, and let me tell you, they aredyingto break your silence.”

Scar didn’t doubt that—but he also knew that there was nothing they could do to him to make him talk. If he hadn’t been able to do so for Sissy or José all these years, and that was not from lack of trying, he knew there was nothing Alpha’s sadistic interrogators could do to him to change that.

When Scar had first joined theVia DaemoniaMotorcycle Club, José, or Bulldog, had explained to the other officers that Scar could talk butrarelydid. That was a bit of an exaggeration. Scar hadn’t spoken in years. The doctors at the VA after he’d been rescued speculated that his voice box was too damaged to speak, but Scar knew better.

I will not talk…

“And third.” Alpha stood up, his eyes narrowing on Scar. “If you step out of line, if you so much as hesitate to pull the trigger for asinglesecond, your friends all die.”

He threw the file folder into the air, causing piece after piece of paper to rain down on Scar, the hospital bed he was sitting in, and the surrounding floor. Dozens of colored pictures, surveillance photos of Mount Grove and the VDMC.

One of Harper, Lucky’s ol’ lady, landed on Scar’s right leg. He couldn’t reach to pick it up, but he didn’t need to in order to see it clearly. Harper was sitting up in a hospital bed, much like the one Scar was currently in. At her breast was her newborn daughter, Stephanie. She’d gone into labor early and had had to have an emergency C-section to save her baby’s life when she got stuck in the birth canal.

Scar had been at the hospital. He’d stood in her room, watching over both her and her baby as they’d slept that first night. The photo had to have been taken the next day, after Scar had left.

He stared at Harper’s still frame, her joy immortalized in ink. When Harper had first started dating Lucky over two years ago, Scar had followed her. She was the town’s new Sheriff’s daughter, after all, and Hannigan had had a hard-on for the VDMC in a big way. It was entirely believable that she could have been feeding her father information about the club. Mind, at the time, the club had been entirely blameless, besides one scuffle with a drug dealer who was now fertilizer.

Blameless…andboring. But Scar had needed boring. José had been right that theVia Daemoniahad offered Scar some peace to sort through his demons. Not that those demons had been vanquished. They’d only gone dormant.

When Harper’s brother, Richard, had kidnapped Harper, it had been Scar who’d rescued her. Lucky had been in the hospital with severe burns after Richard had set his house on fire with Lucky, Harper, Scotty, Steel, and Jenna inside. Scar had been pissed when he’d learned about the fire. But he’d been tailing the Sheriff, wrongfully believing that Sheriff Hannigan had been behind the trafficked women they’d discovered in Ohiopyle the night before.

But he’d been following the wrong Hannigan. It had beenRichardwho had been the culprit, not his father. Though the Sheriff had known about his son’s crimes. In Scar’s book, that made him just as guilty, but Lucky had spared Hannigan’s life as a favor to Harper.

Harper had not been what Scar had expected of her. The young teacher with raven hair and olive skin wasgood—and that was a rarity in Scar’s world. Moreover, she’d apologized to Scar for being scared of him upon their first introduction. Scar hadn’t minded her initial discomfort. Most women were terrified of him. That fear either made them too scared to come near him or want to fuck him as some sort of twisted conquest. For Harper to apologize for misjudging him… Well, that had been unexpected, to say the least.

Her green eyes had been so honest as they’d stared into his own that he’d been compelled to reassure her. Not knowing what else to do, Scar had touched Harper’s shoulder. The touch had lasted seconds, but it had still been momentous for him. He’d even allowed her to touch his shoulder back.

After that day, Scar had pushed himself outside his comfort zone. What others took for granted was a challenge for him, but he’d managed to work on his tactile wariness with Harper.

Or he had been before he’d turned in his cut.

There were only two women in the world that Scar loved like they were his blood. His eyes traveled from Harper’s picture to one of Sissy.

Charlotte “Sissy” McCoy was Lucky’s adult daughter. When Scar had first arrived at Mount Grove, he’d been a little worse for wear. Actually, that was being generous. He’d been skin and bones, barely a human being. Sissy had been sixteen and Lucky had made it emphatically clear that she was off-limits, even after she turned eighteen.

As the club’s Enforcer, the protection of the club kids and ol’ ladies fell under Scar. Jenna, Steel’s wife, had been the only ol’ lady at the start of the club. There had only been five club kids, though Steel and Jenna’s son, Carter, had been an adult at the time. But Scar had had no intention of interacting with any of them.

José had been trying to get Scar to eat, not yet realizing that Scar wouldn’t eat something that he hadn’t grown himself or watched made. Then Sissy had sat down across a picnic table from him. Her young face hadn’t had a trace of fear on it as she’d stared at him. Scar had stared back, not entirely sure what was going on. She’d looked like she was studying him.

“You look like you’re a cat in the middle of a pack of dogs, like you’re getting ready to run. My dad says a lot of you guys have PTSD and I need to be careful around you. If you have PTSD, I’m sorry. I’ll go if you want, but you looked so lonely. I thought you could use a friend.”

As amazing as it was, Sissy had become just that. Scar had had brothers over the years, was about to gain more, but it had been a long time since he’d had afriend. Despite her young age, Sissy was extremely intuitive and fierce.

She never once cared that he didn’t speak, never asked him a question a simple head nod or shake couldn’t answer. She’d said on many occasions that Scar had very expressive eyebrows. Even as an adult, she’d never judged or questioned Scar randomly showing up in her college dorm room and then her apartment. She always seemed to sense that Scar just…didn’t want to be alone. He’d sit while she did homework or read a book, not caring in the slightest that he was in the room.

But the rage Scar felt at the pictures of Sissy and Harper wasnothingcompared to the pure, unadulterated wrath when he saw the photo of Scotty on the floor.

Lucky’s seventeen-year-old son with Down syndrome was the single spark of brightness in Scar’s dark world. He never in all his years could imagine that such innocence could exist, and then he’d met Scotty.

The first time Scar had met Scotty, he’d been nine years old. A plump little boy with a heart so full of gold that his smile shone. The clubhouse had still been under construction, as had Jenna and Steel’s new home. Lucky was around to help and try to bond with the newly formed club. He often brought his little boy with him when his widowed neighbor, Mrs. Henderson, wasn’t available to babysit. Despite being told not to wander off, Scotty had.

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