He Kept His Oath, Broke His Vow

For thirteen years, Camila Mireles was proud to be a patched man's wife. She made her peace with being second to the Warhounds — the runs, the silences, the phone that rang at 3 a.m. She respected the code. She believed the brotherhood was family. She thought the one thing a club protected above all else was its own. She was right. She just never understood that the thing they were protecting her husband from was her. Because Fox — Damon Wray, the Warhounds' Sergeant-at-Arms, the keeper of the club's silence — didn't just cheat. For five months he ran a real affair and hid it behind the one wall Camila had spent her whole marriage respecting: club business stays in the club, and old ladies don't get told. He kept his oath to the brotherhood by breaking his vow to her. And the brothers she'd fed and bled and buried alongside for thirteen years all knew, and looked her in the eye, and said nothing — because the code said so. The affair broke her heart. The coin she found — a second silence-token, the kind a Warhound carries, the kind that bought a brother's quiet about the other woman — broke something bigger. In her own marriage, in her own family, she was the only one who didn't know. Now Fox wants her back, and every instinct he has is the wrong one: apologize the club way, have the brothers vouch, handle it in-house, keep it quiet. But there is no fixing inside the code what the code was used to break. If Fox wants Camila — really wants her — he has to become one whole, transparent man instead of two sealed ones. He has to break the silence he swore to keep, in the open, at the cost of the patch that made him. And even then, whether the vow means anything again is hers to decide, on her terms, in her own time.