An Outlaw Monster (Back Down Devil MC #10)(40)

I felt the anger rolling in my stomach. But there was something about Harlee’s eyes that just threatened to tear me up. Goddammit, that was my fatal flaw. I rarely fell for a woman but when I did I fell hard.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. That ring was meant for someone else.”

Harlee grabbed the ring and slid it off her hand. She put it on the nightstand. Next thing I knew she grabbed her notebook and her bag and started to walk toward the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I have no reason to be here. I’m not going to be some whore to you, Trent. If your club wants to chase me down and kill me, fine. Let them do it. I don’t care. I’m not going to rat on anyone else. Bad enough I did to Daxton and his club. I’m done with this life.”

Harlee walked by me, putting her hand to my chest, pushing at me. I moved out of the way and watched as she walked down the hallway. The scene was all too familiar for me. The last time I saw it happen, I did nothing. I did nothing for the safety of the woman I loved and maybe even for the safety for myself.

This time?

Fuck that.

“That’s what she did,” I called out. “Right what you’re doing.”

Harlee stopped walking. She turned and looked at me. “What?”

“Right there. Just like that. She grabbed her bag and walked out. Didn’t want to deal with the life anymore. And you know what I did?”

“What did you do?”

“I let her go,” I said. “I figured it was for the better. She couldn’t survive in this world. It would be a constant fight and struggle. I’d live with my eyes on the road and my eyes on her.”

Harlee dropped her bag to the floor. She took a few steps toward me and crossed her arms. “Keep going.”

“There’s nothing to tell, darling. It’s my life. I grew up with my old man running his life into the grave. He loved to gamble, drink, snort shit, and more than that, he loved *. All of it he paid for with a debt he could never satisfy. I got into the life to escape another. When I met Allie, it was instant sparks. She was a pretty little woman working at a restaurant to pay off student loan debt waiting to become a lawyer. We hit it off and it was just… damn. I got deeper into the MC and she got a job offer. Now it was an outlaw with a lawyer. That didn’t mix so well with what I did for a living. In the beginning it was wild. You know, the bad guy and the good girl. Probably like those dumb chick flicks you were watching, right?”

Harlee smirked. “I don’t think many of those have a murderer as the love interest.”

“Too bad. Guys like me, darling, understand life. When you take life, you understand life. Am I a bad guy? Fuck yeah, I am. But there’s plenty of bad guys standing on the other side of the law. Trust me. I’ve seen it.”

I watched then as Harlee started to get closer to me. “Tell me more.”

“She took a case that was close to the MC. If it went one way it would help us. If it went another way, it would hurt us. By then, I was patched in, at the table, and I was known as the monster. I got that name because I beat a guy in The Hell Five so bad, he could only see out of one eye and couldn’t talk. When the police questioned him as to what happened, he used a whiteboard and a marker to write down who attacked him. Guess what he wrote down?”

“The monster?” Harlee asked.

“Exactly. I was the muscle. I still am the muscle. The case that Allie took was important for her career. Her bosses knew who I was and knew we were together. There were a hundred reasons why we shouldn’t have been together. Everyone tried to talk me down. Jasper, Max, Austin. Even Cash. It was the temptation. Maybe in my heart somewhere it was the small chance to escape and feel something normal. But this is normal for me. Right now. Right here. This is my life.”

“What happened with the case?”

“She dumped it off to someone else,” I said. “I didn’t want to put her in the middle. Ripper - the President before Trev - insisted I do it. That created some heat in the MC. I thought I was going to lose my cut over it. I might have done that for her. That’s how much I cared. She came up with the idea to dump the case onto someone else. The guy who took it was a friend of the club and he worked it in our favor. Allie got fired from her job. There were probably ten things I could have done to fix it, but the one that stuck was to ask her to marry me. So I grabbed a ring. The ring you left in the bedroom. I thought if I could pull her in and keep her safe, she could understand that the club was family. We’re not just barbarians on motorcycles looking for trouble. We’re brothers.”

I let out a little laugh and leaned against the doorway. I watched as Harlee got even closer to me. She was within reach of me touching her. But she touched me. She ran her finger along the patch on my leather cut.

Enforcer

That’s what the patch said.

In others words - don’t f*ck with me or you’ll end up dead or with your jaw wired shut.

“So she left?” Harlee asked.

“She’d been planning for a while. She leveraged herself into a new job in New York. Right outside the city, a decent sized firm, run by another headstrong woman. This I didn’t find out until later though. She came to the apartment - not this one - and I had the ring in my hand. She breezed right by me and packed a bag. I watched her do it. I thought maybe if I let her get close to going and showed her the ring it would all click. That didn’t happen. I showed the ring and she slapped it out of my hand. She slapped me across the face, kissed my other cheek, and walked out. Truthfully, I could have chased her ass down. I could have dragged her to the clubhouse and had the table vote on what to do with her. But I didn’t. And I made sure nobody in the club bothered her either. She always deserved better.”