Chapter 171 Talking it out
Ryder's POV
Tommy hugged Sage and then turned to me with a look that clearly said stop standing there like an idiot.
I was doing exactly that. Standing there with my hands at my sides and my brain completely offline, staring at her like I needed another few seconds to confirm she was actually real and not something my mind had conjured up because I had spent two weeks thinking about nothing else.
"I would like to tell you something, Sage," Tommy said.
I looked at him, confused and thrown, because he had not run a single thing by me since the day I told him Diego had called. Whatever he was about to say, he had decided it on his own and I had no idea what it was going to be.
Tommy leaned into Sage's side, dropping his voice low enough that the room around them could not pick it up. "No matter what he says or doesn't say to you, just know that he missed you so much."
He then looked at me over her shoulder. The look on his face was the same one he had been giving me since we were kids whenever I was about to do something he thought was stupid or let something important slip through my fingers.
"Go," he said, stepping back. "Take her somewhere you can actually talk. And don't screw this up."
I nodded, unable to form words, and gestured for Sage to follow me into the office.
I led her through the club and closed the office door behind us, shutting out the stares and the questions and the low murmur of everyone pretending not to watch. The noise of the clubhouse disappeared. It was just the two of us and the quiet and the four walls of the space.
My heart was pounding so hard I could barely hear anything else. The sound of it filled my ears like thunder and I was aware, distantly, that my hands were not entirely steady.
Sage put her bag down by the door and turned to face me. We stood there just a few feet apart and I realized I had no idea what to say. Every word I had rehearsed in the two weeks since she left, every version of the conversation I had run through in the dark at three in the morning, had completely vanished from my brain.
"You came back," I finally managed.
"I came back," she confirmed.
"Why?" The question came out more desperate than I intended. "Sage, what happened? You left two weeks ago to marry Diego and now you're here and I don't understand—"
"Can we sit?" She gestured to the chairs in front of my desk.
"Yeah, of course." I moved around the desk but did not sit. I was too wound up, too full of something I could not keep still enough to chair. "How was the trip? Do you want water? Coffee? I can—"
"Ryder." She said my name softly and I stopped rambling. "Just sit down. Please."
I sat. She sat across from me, her hands folded in her lap like she was working to keep them still, and I looked at her face properly for the first time since she walked in. She looked tired. Not the broken, hollow kind of tired from the hospital. Something different. Like a person who had been carrying a decision around for a while and had only just been able to put it down.
"Diego is a good man," she started, and my heart sank clean through the floor. "Maybe one of the best men I've ever met."
I did not want to hear about how good of a man Diego was. I did not want a list of the ways he had been better than me, more present than me, steadier than me. But I had no right to stop her so I kept my mouth shut and let her talk.
"He wanted to make the marriage work," Sage continued. "He really tried. He was kind and patient and he did everything he could to make me comfortable. To make me feel safe."
"But?" I asked, hearing the unspoken word hanging in the space between us.
"But after two weeks, he realized I was miserable every single day." Her voice was quiet. "I tried to hide it. I put on a brave face and went through every motion, told myself I was just adjusting, that it would get easier with time. But Diego saw through it."
"What did he see?"
"That I didn't want to be there." She looked at me directly for the first time since we sat down. "That I was forcing myself to build a life with him when my heart had no interest in cooperating."
Hope started to build in my chest, fragile and terrifying in equal measure.
"He told me something," Sage said. "He said he wasn't just looking for a biker princess to marry for political alliance. He had gone into it expecting the arrangement to develop into something more. He wanted love eventually, or at least the genuine possibility of it. Not just obligation. Not someone who could eventually leave him for someone else."
"And you couldn't give him that," I said.
"No." She shook her head slowly. "I tried. I really did try to develop feelings for him because he deserved that. He is a good man and he deserved someone who meant it. But I couldn't make myself feel something that wasn't there. Especially not with everything that had happened with Dante, and with Jaxon still recovering."
"So you don't love him," I said, needing to hear her say it plainly.
"No." She shook her head again. "I don't love him."
I kept my voice even with great effort. "So he sent you back."
"He told me he couldn't keep me when my heart so obviously belonged somewhere else." Her eyes were shining now, holding the tears back with the same stubborn control she applied to everything. "He said it would be cruel to both of us to force a marriage built solely on obligations. And practically speaking, the succession of the blood sisters would eventually pass to Elena's daughter or to his wife, which was me. He could not afford someone who was nonchalant about everything they had built to step into that role."
My breath caught. "Your heart belongs to someone else?"
Out of everything she had said, that was the line my brain locked onto and refused to release.
"Yes." She replied. The word was barely a whisper.