Nova Castellano.
He was my whole world, had been since we were kids running wild together with skinned knees and no idea what love even meant yet. His name is Cole “Reckless” Hendricks. Everything I was, I was because of him.
Until the night he tore my heart out and didn’t even bother to be quiet about it.
He claimed another woman in the same clubhouse bed we’d shared a hundred times, humiliated me in front of everyone who mattered, and didn’t give me one second to explain what I’d actually come there to tell him. He’d already decided I was a cheat before I said a word. Me. Like I would ever have done that to him.
So I left. Left the club, left my family, left the only home I’d ever known, mostly to keep them from tearing Cole’s MC apart over what he’d done to a Castellano. I ran with the one thing he never knew existed: our baby, growing inside me while I drove away from everything.
Three years is a long time to build a life out of the wreckage. Long enough that I almost believed I’d done it.
Then he walked into my bar like no time had passed at all.
Cole “Reckless” Hendricks.
She was mine. My angel, the one good thing in a life that never gave me many, and I destroyed it with my own hands. I claimed a woman I never should have touched and believed lies I had no business believing, and it cost me the only thing I ever actually wanted. I didn’t even know what I was missing until it was three years gone.
I’m done paying for that mistake by losing more of what’s mine.
Nova thinks she can hide behind a bar in some town I’ve never heard of with my kid and just disappear. She’s wrong. She’s a Castellano, mafia royalty in her own right, but that doesn’t matter to me anymore. She’s mine, the baby is mine, and I am done being reasonable about either of them.
She ran once. She won’t get the chance again.