The Road Back (The Unknowns Motorcycle Club Book 3) by Ruby Reid Read Free Book Online Page A

to him again.
     
    She’d lost a part of herself when the police had called her and told her what had happened. She instantly felt that the world was a cruel creature and that she was not meant to be happy. Several bad relationships in high school, sexual abuse at the hands of a long-time boyfriend in college, and then Stephen had been killed.
     
    Now, of course, there was the current situation she found herself in. It was nothing more than an extension of the bad fortune she’d always had when it came to relationships. Sure, she knew it was self-pity on one hand, but damn… how much was one woman supposed to take?
     
    She felt tears coming on, spurred by the helplessness that flooded through her. Here she was with Stephen’s killer, desperately hoping to be rescued by a man she barely knew but had been connected to her life in a vague way for years without either of them knowing it. It was all just too surreal.
     
    She took the exit that Marco had pointed out and drove on, headed towards her uncertain future.
     
     
     

 
    CHAPTER 7
     
    Alex arrived at the field Marco had indicated shortly after eight thirty. The road that ran across it was slow, but not dead. When he pulled off onto the secondary road that wound into the field, traffic became non-existent. Not only that, but the field was totally empty with the exception of a large cell phone tower and the occasional tree. Something about the solitude of it all only increased the feeling that he was driving directly towards his execution.
     
    When he reached the state maintenance road half a mile down the secondary road, he killed the engine and headlamp on Jameson’s bike and pushed it slightly off of the road. With the road right there in front of him, it was difficult to go down there and make sure Marco wasn’t just bullshitting him. But he couldn’t very well go down there with guns blazing when he had no guns to blaze.
     
    He sat in the silence of the night and looked at his phone. Slim should be arriving within fifteen minutes or so. Until then, it was just him and the night.
     
    He was surprised to find that his mind kept wandering back to his father. Maybe it had something to do with the knowledge that his own death could be waiting for him down this road. Perhaps, he thought, we think of the huge and horrible things we have done just before we die as a way to repent.
     
    He didn’t know and, honestly, had never given much thought to such things. All he cared about as he sat there in the silence of the night was getting to Amanda and making sure she was okay. In some deep and dark pit within him, he knew that if he got down there and found her dead at Marco’s hands, he was going to unleash some other part of him. He had always sensed it lurking inside, some part of him that had come out only to play a bit on the night he had killed his father. He’d spent a long time being aware of that hidden part of himself and had tried to ignore it. But now, he found himself allowing it room along the front row of his thoughts.
     
    Knowing that he had that dark part to him—a part that was capable of such remorseless violence—was like living with a bomb in his head. He could sense that side of him lurking at the controls of his actions and thoughts whenever he got into a fight. The hell of it was, though, that he had come to hate that part of him. It made him feel like a monster. Worst of all, knowing that part existed when a large part of him badly wanted to be with Amanda seemed like a huge contradiction. How could two such polar extremes exist within one person?
     
    He assumed that a shrink would tell him that it was because he had felt the need to be loved for his whole life. His father had been a semi-violent drunk, and his mother had been the cardboard wife, only spending time with him when it was absolutely necessary. She had been more worried about saving her own ass from her husband’s violent tendencies. Love had never come easy to him.