The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 87

Chapter 57-1

I tuck the phone into my bag and step into the parking garage. The tension is immediate.

It’s too quiet. This place is bright and clean, the kind of expensive garage that should feel safe, but the concrete just swallows up the sound of my boots. Every footstep echoes too loud. Every dark windshield feels like a pair of eyes.

Or a hiding spot.

I stop walking. The elevator doors slide shut behind me. For about ten seconds, nothing moves. Then a dark figure steps out from between two SUVS.

My body recognizes Knox before my mind does, and every muscle locks. The warmth I carried from the boutique disappears so quickly it feels stolen.

Knox.

He looks terrible.

Not drunk. For an MC criminal, it’s surprising to say that Knox rarely drinks enough to surrender control that way. This is something else. Deep, bruised shadows hang under his eyes, his mouth is set in a hard, bitter line, and a restless energy in the way he moves that makes him seem like something pacing behind glass.

“What are you doing here?” I ask sharply.

His gaze drops immediately to the shopping bags, then rises to my face. The expression that moves through him is so nakedly furious that fear slides cold through my stomach.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he snaps.

“This is a shopping centre.”

“I know what it is.”

“Then why the hell ask what I’m doing here? I’m shopping.”

His jaw tightens, a muscle jumping in his cheek.

Once upon a time, that would have been enough to silence me. I would have softened my tone, apologized for an offence I didn’t understand, rearranged myself around the possibility of his anger.

Not anymore.

I take one step backward. “You need to leave me alone.”

Knox laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You’ve become very brave.”

“No. I’ve become tired.”

His eyes sharpen. “Of talking to me?”

“Of being anywhere near of you.”

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Maple 52+

For one brief, impossible second, surprise crosses his face, then he looks again at the bags, lingering this Time on the gold logo printed across the black paper. Recognition arrives slowly, followed by disbelief and then rage so intense it seems to change the air between us.

“Lingerie,” he says quietly, in an accusing tone.

I close my fingers more tightly around the handles. “That’s none of your business.”

His head tilts. “Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Is it for that motherfucker Locke Tanner?”

The sound of Locke’s name in his mouth makes my skin crawl, but I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

Knox looks at my face, and whatever he sees there makes something inside him snap. Maybe it’s the confidence I haven’t managed to hide. Maybe it’s the smile still lingering from the fitting room, the knowledge that I chose beautiful things for a man who looks at me as though beauty is only the beginning of what he sees.

Or maybe it’s simply happiness.

Mine.

Something that Knox never gave me and can’t ruin.

He lunges before I can react.

One second there are several feet between us; the next his hand closes hard around my upper arm, fingers digging painfully into skin that has barely finished healing from the last time he decided that my body was his to punish.

“You think you get to be happy?” he snarls.

His grip tightens. And standing there in the cold brightness of the parking garage, with my beautiful new life held in one hand and my old nightmare holding the other,realize that Knox isn’t furious because I left him.

He’s furious because I survived him.

He studies me with the detached concentration of a man reassessing an Investment that’s suddenly become valuable again. “I’ve been watching you, you know.”

The words are conversational. Almost lazy.

“You’ve gone back to the clubhouse, Zara. You work in Tucker’s garage now. You’re living with Tanner. You’ve started chemotherapy.”

My blood turns to ice that he knows about the hospital treatments; that’s such an intensely private part of my life, it takes my breath away that he knows it.

He smiles, very faintly. “There it is. The sore point.”

My voice is almost soundless. “How do you know that?”

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know everything.

“You’re sick.” I force myself to breathe. “You’ve been following me?”

He doesn’t bother denying it. Instead, he tilts his head, nails that black gaze on me.

The panic building inside me suddenly shifts, but not into anything even resembling fear. Instead, it morphs into anger.

“You think any of your bullshit behavior is about me?” I spit out.

“It is.”

“No.” I step closer. Not away. Closer. “This is about control, and you’ve lost it. You’ve lost me and all the benefits I gave you. You’ve lost my father, and his club, and all the business that relationship brought you. Don’t you get it, Knox? You’ve lost.”

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LUCK DRA