Maverick (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #6) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,2

me sexually.

He simply looked at me like he didn’t know me.

Like he didn’t remember me.

And that hurt more than anything else that had ever happened to me, because, God help me, I loved him.

I loved this biker. This scarred, war-hardened man who had eyes like sparkling dimes, the most kissable lips imaginable, and hair that, thanks to the short spikes from the buzz cut he was growing out, gleamed like precious metal in the sun. This biker, whose real name I’d only come to learn when we married. Even knowing it, however, I just called him Maverick.

Either that or husband.

A husband who didn’t remember me.

But this wasn’t some stupid soap opera, wasn’t a sitcom for people’s entertainment.

This was my life.

I’d say my husband glared at me like he hated me, but it wasn’t hatred. What he felt for me wasn’t even that much. I was a nonentity to him. A nobody.

Which was what hurt most of all—to Maverick, I’d never been that.

I’d been somebody.

Always, somebody.

But now, I was back to being a nobody.

My throat felt tight and thick, itchy as the desire to cry hit me hard, but no tears fell. I knew it was some strange thing that had happened to me with my last owner. Crying was difficult. I’d taken to faking tears because they wouldn’t fall for me anymore, not after what I’d been through.

So instead of getting some relief from crying, I just felt clogged up a little like our old toilet in my home in Mezyn, back in Ukraine.

“Where’s Nic?”

He kept on asking that, kept on demanding for this Nic who I didn’t know, had never even heard of, but his desperate tone hit my heart hard. If his desperation for a stranger didn’t take me aback, then my disabled husband, a man who lived in a wheelchair, stunned me further by getting to his feet, standing on them, just as Link and Steel, two of his MC brothers, as well as a nurse, made an appearance in the room.

They tried to restrain him after they got him back into bed, yet the more they tried to keep him there, the more anguished he was. The more desolate.

I had never heard him mention Nic before, but he was desperate to get to him—whoever he was. His brothers didn’t appear to know who this Nic was either.

“We’ll find out who Nic is,” Link vowed, his face sweaty with exertion as both he and Steel worked hard to keep him contained on the bed.

His words were the passcode that triggered a cessation of Maverick’s struggling. As if they’d flicked a light switch, he stopped. Turned still.

“Until then,” Steel told him, “Ghost is here.”

Mav stared up at him. “Who’s Ghost?”

I saw Link pass me a guilty look, but I didn’t stick around to find out how else he could break my heart.

I loved him.

What a time to realize it.

Swallowing down the need to scream, I stared at the walls, at the floor, at the little skid marks on the linoleum. I stared at the set of two uncomfortable chairs where I knew Link and Steel had been sitting, leaving me inside with Mav so he’d wake up with me at his side, and wondered how everything had gone so wrong.

People passed me by, rushing in and out. Link and Steel were tossed into the corridor with me, and as they talked around me, time passed, but it was almost as if I was dead to its endless whirl.

Brain a blur, heart racing, out of nowhere, my lungs just wouldn’t work.

I started to gulp down air, started to swallow it, but it wasn’t the same as breathing. My skin prickled with the makings of a panic attack, and sweat beaded at the base of my back and dotted my temples. None of it compared to the sensation of claustrophobia that had me seeking fresh air.

“Leave her,” I heard Link mutter behind me. “She needs some space. Christ, poor Ghost. Can you believe Mav—”

I didn’t hear any more, was too busy dashing forward, heading down the corridor toward the doorway that would take me to the outer hall.

It was a maze here, and knowing I was trapped inside made me feel worse, but just as I reached the doors, someone cleared their throat, and through the fog of panic, someone called out, “Mrs. Ravenwood?”

They’d started using my full title here, and it was strange to my ears. Strange because I half expected to hear ‘Mrs. Maverick’ instead, but Maverick wasn’t