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Chapter One

RUN

Vicious scrapes covered s Pain throbbed steadily in ainst the inside of

The tears threatened to fall, and I couldn't stop them It was all so out of my control All of it The whole situation

Everything was broken

As ainst ular breaths blowing against ht If only we could rewind everything, to go back to that beautiful night in Las Vegas when it seemed like our world was unshakable

I reluctantly brushedaway the tears along with my hopes

We can't go back Not now Not after what had happened

My , the Reapers, spit on Jax while he laid on the ground, broken and bloodied They were led by Darrel, Jax's father—the o, leaving hiin to iroith an abusive parent To be sainst the one adult as supposed to love and protect you He was the reason Jax walled himself off from everyone He was the reason Jax holed hi fro music

And after all these years apart, he had beaten Jax again

My hand tightened around the throttle as er White-knuckled withinside h my veins They hurt him They hurt Jax

No one was going to hurt the et aith it

No, this wasn't fucking over yet

In the driver seat, ready to go, I secured Jax's ar bottle above my head

"What are you doing?" Jax rown accustomed to over the course of the tour, and I could barely hear hi of the motorcycle

My heart breaking for him, I lifted his bruised hand toaway the past"

My fingers gripped the bottle hard With the burning blouse sleeve hanging out the top beginning to singe th toward the house

The bottle spun wildly, the fla up the darkness as it ascended into the night sky For a brief er All the frustration All the pain disappeared—eclipsed by one beautiful ie streak suspended above a row of rusty trailers stitched together like segments of a decomposed centipede

That squalid hovel had been Jax's hoht ly scars he'd hidden from everyone else around hiined anything could

Silhouetted against the blackness, the bottle flipped end over end as it began to descend, ushering a surreal silence in its wake

The sound of my own heart pounded in my ears as an electric numbness washed over my body My eyes widened in anticipation as the bottle fell toward its target

This was it The ht back

With a crash, the bottle struck a tree branch belonging to a gnarled cypress overhanging the driveway Glass and alcohol exploded in a shower of fire, raining tiny orange-red co the stillness

The street erupted into fast-niting the dry California grass Fire crackled around Darrel's Cadillac and the bikes nearby, sending tendrils of hazy smoke into the air