The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 295

Chapter 145-2

He shifts slightly, lifting me off his lap, setting me down right next to him. He rests his arm along the back of the sofa behind my shoulders. His fingers idly toy with the ends of my hair, tracing the strands down to my collarbone, but as the moment passes, his eyes drift toward the fire.

The conversation fades into the background, leaving a thick, heavy silence in the room.

I’ve been watching him since he walked through the front door an hour ago. He carried the food in with a casual smile, kissed the top of my head, and kicked off his boots just like any other night, but the tension in his frame is different tonight.

It’s not the physical exhaustion from a long day at the shop or the sharp, high-strung irritation that follows a chaotic church meeting.

This is a quiet, guarded stillness.

I don’t press him immediately. I take a sip of my ice water and wait.

In the MC world, you learn very quickly that pushing a man when his walls are up only makes him pull further back into the shadows. You give him space, you hold the room, and you let him find his own path to the words.

Locke lets out a breath – a heavy, low exhale through his nose – and turns his head to look at me.

“Zara,” he says softly.

The tone of his voice instantly shifts the air in the room. The warmth remains, but a quiet, solemn weight drops between us.

My heart gives a small, sharp thud against my ribs, but I force my posture to stay relaxed. “Locke?”

“I need to tell you something,” Locke says, his eyes searching my face with an intensity that makes my breath catch in my throat. “And I need you to listen to me, okay?”

“Okay,” I say quietly, setting my napkin down on the table. Every instinct in my body pulls tight, waiting for the blow.

Here we go. Hang on, girl.

Locke shifts his weight, turning slightly toward me on the sofa so he’s facing me fully.

His expression is completely bare, free of the cold, hard mask he wears for the rest of the world, but behind his eyes, I can see a war raging between his duty to the club and his devotion to the woman sitting in front of him.

“I have to leave for a little while,” he says. “I’m going on a recon run. A dark run.”

I freeze, my hands resting flat against my thighs. “Dark?”

Of course I know what a dark run is, even if hearing him say it aloud makes the air thin out in my chest.

A dark run isn’t standard road work or routine club business.

1/2 12d

Chapter 145

Charm

It’s a complete ghost operation: no GRS, no radio, no phone, and no backup squad riding at your flank. Batteries pulled from devices, cash only, riding off-grid into unmapped or hostile territory where even a single pinged tower could mean an ambush.

If you run into trouble out thefe, you don’t call the clubhouse, you don’t call anyone. Nobody comes to pull you out of the fire, and anyway, nobody answers the phone. You survive on your own instincts, your own toughness and smarts… or you don’t come back at all.

“Yeah,” Locke says. He reaches out, taking both of my hands in his, “So you know, Zara, I can’t tell you where I’m going. I can’t tell you who I’m meeting, can’t tell you what I’m looking for, and I can’t tell you when I’m coming back.”

The words hang in the warm air of the living room, heavy and terrifying.

I can’t tell you where. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know how long.

A cold, hollow ache opens up in the center of my chest. For a second, the room seems to spin, the soft crackle of the fire turning into a muffled hum.

Every worst-case scenario I’ve ever buried since growing up around this club comes rushing to the surface: dark back roads, unmarked vehicles, hidden guns, men who disappear into the night and never

come home.

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