Him? My man?

There was no explanation.

“Web didn’t tell you to choke me. He didn’t tell you to hit me.”

His face started to get hard. “Baby, you ratted out the club.”

“You did your thing. Now keep them away from Mom and from me.”

“You shouldn’t have reported it to the cops, Rosie.”

That was what I was afraid of.

“What’d you think I’d do?” I asked.

“My deal with them was they’d leave you alive. Thought you’d learn to keep your mouth shut,” he told me.

“Well, thanks, Beck. So good to know you were looking out for me.”

He leaned into the glass. “Baby, Rosie, Christ. You ratted out the club.”

“I slept at your side,” I whispered.

His gaze fell then came right back up.

I kept at him.

“You could have been the father of my children.”

He winced and started, “Rosie—”

“When the club started to roll that way, I should have just left you.”

“I wouldn’t have let you go.”

“You wouldn’t have had a choice.”

“No, Rose,” he growled, “you wouldn’t have.”

That gave me a shiver but I powered through it.

“Then it’s all worked out for the best.”

That was when the sneer came. “He’s married, Rosalie. Got a fuckin’ kid. Get over it.”

What was he talking about?

“What?” I asked.

“Cage. He’s never gonna be yours. He’s gone for her and trust me, when that shit happens for a biker, it doesn’t turn around.”

He was talking about Shy. Shy and Tabby and me.

Ancient freaking history.

And trust him about that kind of thing?

He totally had to be kidding me.

“How can I trust you when you have no clue what you’re talking about?” I queried.

“Then you weren’t paying attention,” he snarled, allowing the hurt he felt at my betrayal and my supposed longing for Shy to rise to the surface.

“No, Beck, you weren’t. I’ve been over Shy since that night I rode at your back and you took me to Lookout Mountain and kissed me with the lights of Denver spread out around us.”

“Right, that’s why you handed us over to Chaos, who handed us to the fuckin’ cops.”

“No, I did it because when I made a baby with my man, I wanted that baby to know down to his bones his father was a good man in a way the day that father passed from this earth, he’d struggle to cope, but he wouldn’t struggle to come to terms with the fact this world was better with his daddy in it.”

Beck shut his mouth and did it looking stricken.

That got in there.

Finally.

But still too late.

I did not shut my mouth.

“I wanted you to see how dangerous what you were doing was. How easy it would be for your life to be wasted, the life you shared with me. I wanted you to take a good look at it and find a reason to turn yourself around. I tried to talk to you about it, you wouldn’t hear me. So I felt the need to do something to save you, save us, to save our future. And unfortunately for both of us, it got to the point where that something had to be extreme.”

Beck had nothing to say to that either.

So I kept going.

“Just to say, I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but when you refused to listen to my concerns about where the club was going and what that meant to our lives and our future, it ended with us. Long before you left me bleeding and passed out on a cement floor.”

He shook his head. “You drop the charges, Rosie, and I’ll talk to Web and the guys about letting this shit end here with you.”

I nodded my head. “You’re gonna talk to Web and the guys and you’re all gonna leave me alone.”

“You need to drop the charges, Rose.”

“If I have to sit in a box and look every one of you in the eye before I put you behind bars, I’ll do it.”

“Babe—”

I yanked the paper out of my purse and flattened it on the glass.

“My mother saw me like that, Beck.”

He turned his head away.

He loved my mom. Practically doted on her. An old lady without her biker. All of Bounty treated her like a dowager queen.

“She saw that,” I pushed. “You made her see me like that.”

He turned back to me. “Rosie, we got serious problems because of your bullshit.”

I shoved the picture back in my purse, saying, “I wasn’t caught transporting drugs. I didn’t abduct my girlfriend from her place of business and deliver her to a warehouse where me and the men I call my brothers beat her to shit. You and your brothers did that.”

“You know the code,” he bit.

“I do. My father was a biker and he taught me. Woman. Kids. Bike. Freedom. In that order. Where are you now with all of that, Beck?”

“You did it for Cage,” he clipped, not letting that stupid crap go.

“No. But I will say, in the beginning, I did it for you, but in the end, I didn’t.”

His brows shot together. “What the fuck does that mean?”