Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA
Max folded his arms across his chest when I told him to take off his shirt, and his face closed up in the way that it had when we were at the romance writers conference and authors were clamoring for him to be the cover model for their books. Between that and what Wendie had said about him bleeding through his shirt, I wanted to see his upper body.
"Why?" he asked me.
"Because I want to see your chest."
"I'd give anything to see yours, too, but I don't feel I have the right to demand that you take your shirt off," he said with absolutely no trace of humor. He was serious.
"Max!" I snapped. He was frustrating me now.
"Briony," he countered much more gently, "what do you think you're going to see?"
"I don't know for sure," I said. "Probably scars? That's why I asked to see. And you did promise you'd tell me if I wanted to know something."
I think, Briony, that I'd tell you whatever you wanted to know.
"OK. I'll tell you: I do have some scars."
"What happened?" I pushed.
"Club business happened."
"That's not an answer."
"It actually is," Max argued. "It's the entire reason in a nutshell."
"It tells me nothing. You can admit that you murdered a man to me, but you can't tell me the reason you have scars now? I want to know."
I'd known that last part would get him, so I wasn't surprised when he shook his head in defeat.
"When I left you to go to Wendie that night, I betrayed you, but I also betrayed the Rampage, and, since we had been asked to guard you as a favor to another club, I betrayed the Lords of Mayhem, too. So there were some repercussions for all of that. I was stripped of my SAA rank and was demoted to prospect for a year without knowing if I'd be voted back in as a brother at the end of that year."
"I knew about all that. What I didn't know about was any repercussions that would have left marks."
"Well, there was a physical form of retribution, too, that left the scars. And now you know the whole story."
"No, Max, I don't know the whole story. I want you to tell me exactly what happened to give you the scars."
"I was chained eight times. Three on the front, five on the back."
"Chained?" I tried to puzzle that out because my mind first went to him being chained to a wall. But when I thought about it, I realized he was using chained like the word whipped. He'd been whipped eight times with a chain. My stomach lurched at the thought of deliberately inflicting that kind of pain on someone as part of club business. I knew the Rampage could be brutal and had their own justice system -- a fight to the death and Max killing Corner with his bare hands came to mind -- but that at least was a fair fight. This chaining was not. This was taking a literal pound of flesh.
Without thinking, I stepped toward Max and grabbed the hem of his shirt. He very gently stopped me by disentangling my hands from his shirt, and then he took my hands between his and brought my hands to his lips for a kiss.
"No, Briony. It's done. It's in the past. And most importantly, I deserved it. It was a club punishment for the wrongs I committed against the club. They could have killed me for what I'd done and it would have been within their rights."
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The Rampage MC #4: Max and Briony
Roman d'amourI was supposed to be protecting her. Instead, I left her to help my former girlfriend. And she was badly hurt on my watch. Now, she won't talk to me and I can't get to her for a year. I'll work the rest of my life to regain her trust, earn her forgi...
