Page 15 of Perdition
Patriot growled, his eyes dark with barely contained rage.
“You motherfucker!” he snarled. “You actually fucking considered cheating on your old lady? With a piece of club pussy? Cheating onEmily?”
With each word, Frost felt the falling hammer, slamming into him, over and over and over and over, obliterating his soul.
His very being.
What the fuck had he done?
But what real harm is there in just thinking about it?
That’s where it starts, asshole!
And suddenly, there were two voices in his head, and he was so fucking over it.
Snapping his teeth, he barked, “It’s done. It’s over. It didn’t happen; I didn’t cheat, and I never would.”
Locust snorted, shaking his head, disappointment and disgust in his expression.
“I’m sure the day before you nearly stuck your dick in Sarah that you truly thought you’d neverconsidercheating, either. I bet the day before you honestly thought you’dnevereventhinkof another woman as apossibility. And since then, you’ve done nothing to prevent those ideas from that night from sprouting into something you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting,”Locust said, his voice edged with a sharpness Frost had only ever heard when the Enforcer was speaking about a club enemy.
“Instead of putting space between you and Sarah, you’ve been getting closer, spending time together all snuggled up on your couch. It’s like you’re tempting fate, just seeing how close you can get to the line before your finally break. Fuck, you’re being disloyal justtalkingto Sarah at this point. She texts you, you text her—and I bet you tell her shit you don’t tell Em, am I right? Does Em even know what’s going on with the patch over? Does she even know why her husband has been spending every night in a bed where she isn’t? I bet Sarah does—and not only as it troubling from a ‘you’re fucking married’ standpoint, but it’s also concerning because…what have you been sharing with her that a club whore shouldn’t know?”
Motherfuck?!
Slamming his fist into the table, body vibrating with rage, Frost spat, “You honestly think I’d share club business with Sarah? You think I’m the kind of man who’d betray my own fucking club, my brothers, the men I’d kill and die for?”
What the goddamn actual fuck is happening right now?
Patriot leaned in until his nose nearly touched Frost’s, his breath coming in hot bursts.
“Why not, when you’re so willing to betray your own wife?”
Rage, boiling, roiling, searing, exploded inside him.
He hadn’t betrayed his wife!
Right?
SIX
Frost cursedand slammed the laptop closed. Turning, he practically threw the device into the safe behind him, locking it. He trusted his club brothers implicitly—even despite all the bullshit they’d pulled lately—but that didn’t mean that something as important as a laptop containing all the financial and security information about the club and every brother in it was safe from prying eyes or sticky hands. They weren’t a one percent club, but that didn’t mean the local LEOs didn’t get a taste for climbing the ladder by stepping on “biker riff-raff.” There was no telling when there’d be a raid, and once the safe was closed and locked, it looked just like a bookshelf, complete with books about Harley repair, finances for dummies, and a complete history of Northeast Pennsylvania, written by some local self-proclaimed historian.
Twisting on his heel, his movements jerky from pent up frustration and unspent anger, he slammed back into his chair, the weight of him making the thing screech horribly.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t scrape what Patriot had said from his mind.
“Instead of putting space between you and Sarah, you’ve been getting closer, spending time together all snuggled up onyour couch. It’s like you’re tempting fate, just seeing how close you can get to the line before your finally break….”
He could admit, it wasn’t the most intelligent thing to keep the woman he’d once consider breaking his vows for so close to him. But he’d felt guilty, like he’d lead her on, making her think they could be something they weren’t. That next morning, he’d talked to her, told her that her approaching him, once again—after that first time she’d come on to him after she’d first arrived at the clubhouse—was inappropriate. He told her that they could be friends, only, and nothing more. That he was married, and his old lady was a pillar of the club.
Sarah had commented that she rarely saw Emily, so how could she be the pillar of anything—and that had stung like a motherfucker, but he’d been wondering the same thing. When had his old lady started distancing herself from the club she’d helped build?
Probably right around the time you started spending the night at the clubhouse without her, which is right around the time the twins graduated high school and left for college. Right around the same time Em started focusing on Flower’s Blooms instead of Madsen Flowers, you, her husband.
So, in a way, Sarah was right, but she was also wrong, because even though Em wasn’t around as much, she wasstillheart and soul of the Unchained MC. She was still the one who’d sat with him nights on end, helping him go through real estate listings for possible clubhouse properties. She was still the one who’d cooked up a storm to feed him and his rag-tag group of founding brothers as they discussed the terms of the club charter. She was still the one who’d helped him brainstorm the name of the MC, and when he’d settled on Unchained, she’d smiled, told him it was perfect, and then given him a blowjob that made all the long, agonizing nights worth it.
Emily was still the one who’d been there with him, for him, when he’d needed her the most—during the fear of the unknown as he mustered up for a deployment, during the long, lonely months when a simple letter from her made all the difference between giving in and going hard. And during the everyday moments when he was home, in need of rest and peace, and she’d just…been his calm in the storm.
