The Chapel He Burned Down Twice

Halo Bardot lit the candles and scrubbed the altar of the Hounds of Saint Vitus' chapel for six years. She kept the club's dead in matching vests. She thought she was married to a man named Beck. He came back from a road trip with a marriage certificate in his saddlebag. Complicated. Ugly. Public. Halo didn't scream. She put out every candle in the chapel with her bare hands and let the priest hear about it. Now the chapel is a pile of ash and one woman's scar tissue, and Beck is standing in the back row every Sunday with a single candle in his fist — one from the flower shop down the street, unpaid for, left on the counter once a week for two years. A dark MC biker romance about cheating, betrayal, and the slow, hard, unpretty work of grovelling. Not a promise. A practice.