Page 92 of Queen of Anarchy (Dirty Broken Savages 2)

My throat tightens. There’s a surge of emotions rising in my chest, threatening to choke me if I let it.

It used to be so easy to say no. To tell people they were nothing to me. Hannah was the only one who meant something, and she was dead, so who was left to matter?

But now…

Now, I can’t lie to myself. Gage does mean something to me. I’m terrified to give it a name, to identify it with words, but he’s become a part of my life. A part ofme. I spent so long pissed at him and fighting against him, just like I’m doing now. But I need that. I need him to be there for me to fight against. Someone who’ll push back against me when I’m being unreasonable and push me to fight back harder against my demons.

Someone as stubborn and hardheaded as I am.

He’s been that. He’s been that since the moment he walked into my life when the two of us faced off in that alley—him demanding to know why I murdered a guy, and me telling him to go fuck himself.

It set the tone for things between us. But somehow it shifted, so that even when we’re struggling against each other, it’s usually for a reason. So that we can come to a better outcome together.

I look up at him, taking in his face. The hard lines of his expression, the scar on his lip that I still don’t know how he got. The bright green of his eyes that not even the darkness of the night can dull.

Finally, I shake my head the tiny bit I can with his grip so tight.

“No,” I whisper, barely audible, but there. “You’re not nothing.”

His face stays hard when I say it, but something flashes in his eyes. Keeping his grip on my chin, keeping me grounded with the force of it, he turns my head to face Knox.

“Is Knox nothing to you?” he asks.

I swallow hard and stare at Knox next. This massive, tattooed man. I think about how I watched him torture that guy from the Diamond Devils. I think about that slightly feral grin that I’ve come to know and love, and the way he licked blood off my face when I first met him.

I think about how he’s willing to marry his enemy’s sister for me.

I’ve never had to hold back with him. He’s the one whose crazy can match mine. The one who understands why sometimes I crave pain just as much as pleasure and gives me plenty of both, no questions asked.

I think about the word ‘mine’ in our blood on my chest.

I whisper my answer again. “No. He’s not nothing.”

Gage drags my gaze to Priest next. “What about him? Does he mean nothing to you?”

Priest’s eyes burn as he watches me, and I swear I feel it all the way down to my soul.

I think of everything we’ve shared. How he’s let me see his jagged, broken edges, and he’s seen mine too. I know the pain he’s experienced, and it feels like I carry a piece of it in my own heart now. I would kill anyone who tried to hurt him, who tried to use his pain against him. And I know he’d do the same for me.

The encounter we had after they got me back from Julian is still fresh in my mind. The way he was wild with anger and panic and fear, so determined to make sure I was okay and make sure I knew he wasn’t going to let anyone take me.

I remember the look on his face when he finally came, the release of it and how he held me afterward.

There’s so much control in him, but somehow, I make him lose it. I make himlet goof it.

I swallow hard, and the words come a little easier this time. “He means… something to me,” I say softly.

My gaze is locked with Priest’s, and so much passes between us as I speak. I can tell he feels some kind of way about what’s happening, that I mean something to him, too. There aren’t words for what it is, not right now, but it’s there and we both know it.

But of course, Gage isn’t done.

He makes me face Ash next.

Heat and desire burn in Ash’s eyes behind his glasses, but I can see past that to a hint of pain and lingering closed-off-ness in his face as the men all wait for my answer. It brings back memories to that time after the gala, after I tried to hurt him and push him away.

I think past that, though. To that first night when I fought him on the stairs of their basement, trying to get away, to get back to my life and my mission, while he teased and flirted with me.

I think about how Ash was the one who kept Gage from killing me, how he talked everyone down and got them all to agree to the deal that started everything.

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