that he can’t be in love with me. And even if he was, I could never love him. I could never love a man who enjoys humiliating me, who delights in my pain, and who kills people as part of his daily life. I could never love him, but when he’s gone from me, I feel utterly hollow.
“Tequila, what am I supposed to do?” I groan, torn. “I feel like…”
“Like…?”
“Like I’m becoming someone else. Like the longer I’m with him…” I trail off. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
And I don’t know if I like the person I’ve become.
I shake my head. “What do I do with that?”
Again, she lifts her shoulders. “See, but that’s what the club does. It gets inside you. It changes you. You can be happy here, but only if you let go of the bullshit that place filled your head with. This life can give you freedom and show you who you really are, but only if you let it.”
I glance over at Spider, sitting at a table still talking with Dragon.
How can I accept what is happening to me, or what he does to me? Embracing a life with him means opening myself up to the monster that lives inside him. It means condoning the twisted things he does to me, and that I crave them, but it also means accepting the lawlessness, the violence and the danger of the club.
Even if I am the kind of girl who needs the monster in him and who gets off on the chaos he brings, how do I accept his life? And why does doing so feel so much like I’m turning my back on something?
“Tequila?” I nod to the Jack Daniels on the bar. “Can I have another shot of that?”
She pours me another glass, and I down it with a shudder, but it doesn’t shut off the anxiety that eats at me.
I sit and stare at the Devil’s Outlaws patch on the back of Spider’s cut for a long time.
23
Shattered
I’ve started talking to Tequila again by the time Spider returns to the bar. He slips his hands around my waist and slides one hand over to my belly. The heat of his palm makes my stomach flutter. He drops a kiss on my bare shoulder.
“Ready for me, Wildcat?” he murmurs.
A weird mix of dread and anticipation coils in my gut at the hunger in his voice. The need there makes it clear exactly what I’m supposed to be ready for him to do to me. My sex clenches in response, the pinch of the clamp he put there only making the arousal he ignites more intense.
Images of Dragon and the others taking Sam viciously on that pool table fill my mind, topped off with the way in which Dragon had taken her. From behind, anally. Spider had promised to do that to me.
The ache in my core mounts while I shiver with trepidation.
Without waiting for me to respond, Spider grabs the leash from the top of the bar, turns the stool around to face him, and yanks me from the seat by the wrist. I stumble, and he catches me, crushing me against him. The pressure of his chest against mine tweaks the clamps on my nipples, and a mix of pain and pleasure spears through me.
“I see you’ve been making friends with Jack,” he says blandly, his face a scowl above mine.
I blink at him. “Huh?” Who’s Jack? Whoever that is, I certainly hadn’t been flirting with him the way Spider’s implying. Irritation at his possession rears up. “I wasn’t—”
Spider nods to the bar and I turn. The bottle is still sitting there along with the shot glass.
“Oh. The booze. Jack. That’s clever. I get it.”
“Have you been getting her drunk, Tequila?” Spider says, and I can’t tell if he’s annoyed or if he’s just being his usual cantankerous self.
He thinks I stumbled into him because I’m inebriated. Unfortunately, the buzz from the two shots has worn off.
“She only had two.” Tequila takes the bottle and pours a glass for Mort, who gives Spider a nod and sits. “I thought she could do with a little loosening up before you savage her.”
“That’s my call, Tequila.” There’s a definite note of irritation now. “Come on,” he adds to me, tugging lightly on the chain connecting the clamps on my nipples and clit and sending a bolt of pleasure through me. “Let’s get these things off you.”