Once Archer was finished changing, he threw his old clothes back into my bag. What he planned to do with it, I didn’t know. When he was done, he looked at me, and regret instantly filled his eyes. “You have to,” I protested, knowing he was having second thoughts about the second part of our plan. The part where he had to make it appear like I had been attacked.

“Deacon will kill me when he finds out.”

I shook my head. “You have to do it.” My fingers gripped the sides of the sink. “Now, Archer!” I commanded. The words had barely left my lips when his fist connected with my cheek. Pain ricocheted through my face and head. Before I had a chance to prepare for the next blow, it felt like my lip was splitting apart.

Staggering back from the sink, I tried to get my bearings. Then I felt Archer’s hands on my waist and neck. I couldn’t help noticing that his fingers were trembling. “Jesus Christ, forgive me, Alex,” he said.

Then he went for the grand finale. A disabling move I had never heard of, but Archer’s martial-arts background had served him well. I needed to be unconscious to truly sell our story of Sigel’s attack, but Archer refused to knock me out. He had demanded to find an alternative. As the pressure he was applying above my clavicle increased, I began to feel light-headed. The harder he pressed, the more it caused the world to spin around me.

And then everything went black.

You know the old cliché that says that your life flashes before your eyes before you die? Well, in the last three days, I’d stared down the sins of my past twice. Once when I was knocked onto the forest floor from the impact of the blast that took out Case. Then the other when I was chained to a bed and forced to watch the woman I’d come to love more than life itself walk out of the room to an uncertain fate.

I don’t know how long I screamed behind that gag. I never fully grasped what a helpless feeling it is not to be heard. As I tried pushing myself up on the bed, the metal of the cuffs sliced into my wrists, sending blood trickling down my arms. Over and over again, I jerked my arms, hoping the rails would break, but the damn things might as well have been reinforced steel.

Finally, I resorted to throwing myself back against the bed, which banged the headboard against the wall. A sheen of sweat covered my body as I banged and banged. When the door flew open, a red-faced Bishop stomped in, his face buried in some mechanical manual. “Dude, would you pipe down? I’m trying to study for my exam.”

When he finally looked up, the manual clattered to the floor. His mouth dropped open almost as far as his eyes widened, and if the situation hadn’t been so serious, I might’ve laughed at his expression. He jerked the gag away from my mouth. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“Alexandra,” I growled.

“What did you do? Get ready for some kinky sex and piss her off? Man, she’s a feisty one.”

“Just get the fucking keys out of the nightstand and get me out of these.”

Bishop started rifling through the top drawer. Finally, he produced the key. Once I was out of my metal prison, I grabbed a towel off the floor. Pressing down on my wrists, I tried to stop the bleeding.

“You gonna tell me what the hell happened?” Bishop pressed.

“I need to find Alex. ASAP. You think Archer can put a tracer on her phone?”

“Archer went with Alex when she left half an hour ago.”

“Fuck!” I growled as I threw open the bedroom door. I stalked down the hall to the bathroom. While I wrapped my wrists in Ace bandages, Bishop eyed me suspiciously.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t have time to explain. I need to find Alex. Now.”

“Tell me why she handcuffed and left you?”

“Alex lied to me about her meeting with Sigel. She didn’t tell me that he had asked for the cut.”

Bishop’s brows furrowed. “Why would she do that?”

“Sigel ordered Alex to bring him the cut. When I found out what she was going to do, she handcuffed me to the bed, so I couldn’t go with her.”

“You’re fucking kidding me!”

“I wish.”

“Where is she now?”

“She had this Parents Night thing at the school. I don’t know if she was meeting him afterward. …” Then it hit me. Sigel would want a safe place to get the cut—a place with a lot of people and witnesses to foil any retaliation the Raiders could plan. “Fuck. He’s meeting her at the school.”

I raced out the door with Bishop close on my heels. All I could think of was getting to Alex, damn stubborn fool that she was. I hoped to hell I wasn’t too late.

Without a word to any of the other guys, I hopped on my bike and tore out of the driveway. Bishop and Rev caught up with me halfway down the road. When I got to the school, my heart shuddered to a stop. My eyes were blinded by the glaring blue and red lights of the police car and ambulance. Once I parked my bike, I started scanning the crowd for any Knights. The only cut I saw belonged to Archer, who was talking to a police officer.

At the sight of me, his face drained of color. For a moment I felt that my knees would give way and I would collapse onto the pavement. Alex couldn’t be gone. I couldn’t even begin to imagine a world without her smile, her caring heart, her laughter. It was unbearable, and I fought for breath. It felt like someone had roundhouse kicked me in the chest. I wasn’t a praying man, but in that moment I started begging and pleading.

And then Archer held his hands up to me as if cautioning me not to freak out. He said something else to the officer, and then he strode toward me. “Deacon, she’s fine. A few cuts and bruises, but she’s going to be fine.”

Doubling over at the waist, I braced my hands on my knees and gulped in air. “Thank God you were here to protect her.”

“No, man. She took Sigel out on her own.”

Jerking my head up, I stared at Archer in both disbelief and horror. “What?”

And then Archer began to tell a story that was almost too hard to believe. Before I showed myself to her after the explosion, a plan had been masterminded by Alex to ensure that Sigel would never hurt Willow again. A plan for which she had enlisted the help of both Rev and Bishop, although they’d had no idea what her true intent was. No, only Archer knew the truth. He had risked both his life and his place in the club by helping Alex.

As he talked, I tried wrapping my mind around Alex and Sigel in that stall. How someone like her had managed to take down a notorious MCer simply with a knife and some courage blew my mind. When Archer finished, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, man. I thought it was the best thing for the club and for your family. Even when you came back from the dead, so to speak, it still made sense.”