See Me or Judge Me Book 6 Brotherhood of Steel MC Romance

⚠️ Prologue Content Warning

This prologue contains references to miscarriage and incestuous sexual assault/rape by a parent. The assault itself happens off-page, but its aftermath and emotional impact are discussed.

Please take care while reading and skip this prologue if these subjects may be difficult or upsetting for you. 🖤

Roxy

People liked to ask where you were from. It was one of those normal questions.

Where did you grow up?

Who are your parents?

Did you have brothers or sisters?

Normal questions for normal people. For me, they were questions I learned how to avoid, because the truth wasn't something I liked giving away.

I grew up in a house I spent most of my life trying to survive. My father was supposed to be the man who protected me.

Instead, he became the person I needed protecting from.

The beatings started young, the rest came later.

I learned when to stay quiet. When to disappear into my room. How to tell what kind of night it would be by the way he walked through the front door.

I learned that fighting back sometimes made things worse. So did crying. Eventually, I learned not to do either.

Then I turned eighteen.

I used to think eighteen would change something. That being an adult would magically make me stronger.

Make him stop. It didn't.

The night he raped me should've been the worst.

It wasn't.

The worst was realizing afterward that nothing had changed. He still expected me to get up the next morning.

Still expected me to exist inside that house as though he hadn't taken something from me that never belonged to him.

Then one night, he brought his buddies home. They were drinking, laughing, and when I realized exactly what he'd brought them there for, something inside me finally snapped.

I ran. No plan, no money worth mentioning, and no destination. I just knew that if I stayed, I wasn't sure I'd survive another night.

By the time I reached Blackridge Hollow, I was hurt, exhausted and terrified of every man who came too close to me.

Somehow, I found the hospital, and that's where I met Harley.

I didn't know she was connected to a motorcycle club, didn't know her husband was the Vice President, didn't know that meeting her would change the entire direction of my life.

All I knew was that she was a nurse with kind eyes who didn't touch me without telling me first.

Then the doctors told me I was miscarrying. A baby I hadn't even known existed, a baby I didn't know how to feel about because I knew exactly how it had been conceived.

I expected questions. Harley didn't push, neither did Anna when she appeared later.

They just stayed.

Eventually, I gave them enough information to help me properly. Not everything, I couldn't, but enough.

Harley told me there was somewhere I could go, a safe house, a job could be sorted. Nobody would force me back home.

There was just one catch, I'd have to meet Steel. The President of the Brotherhood of Steel MC.

I nearly laughed in her face.

I'd spent my life terrified of one man, and this woman wanted to introduce me to a clubhouse full of them.

No fucking chance.

Except Harley didn't push, she explained, Anna reassured, and when I finally agreed, Steel didn't push either. He didn't demand my whole story, didn't ask me to prove I deserved help. He told me I was safe, then he made sure I was.

That was how I found Lacey, Frankie, and Grace.

Harley and Anna became more than the women who'd helped me in a hospital, and somehow, without me realizing it was happening, the Brotherhood became part of my life too.

There were a lot of them. Loud, tattooed, annoying as fuck, but I learned something pretty quickly.

They weren't my father, and then there was Blade.

Jesus Christ.

Blade.

The pretty boy of the Brotherhood.

Dark hair, blue eyes, tattoos and a smile he knew exactly how to use.

He was the clown, the idiot. The one who could make an entire room laugh when everything had gone to shit.

I'd thought that was all he was at first. I was wrong. Most people were about Blade.

Behind the jokes was a man who noticed everything.

A man who could go from laughing to deadly serious in a heartbeat if someone he cared about needed him.

Loyal, protective, and far more complicated than he let people see.

His brothers knew parts of him, Steel probably knew more than most. They'd been friends since high school—Steel, Blade, Brick, Snake, Eightball, Tank and Acid.

Six boys who grew into men together. Brothers long before patches made it official, but there was another part of Blade's life he kept separate.

His family.

Steel respected that, so did the others. Club was club, family was family, and somehow, I'd been allowed to see both.

Because Blade wasn't always Blade to me.

He was Jaxon too.

I didn't know exactly when he became my person. There wasn't some huge declaration. No moment where he asked me to be his girlfriend.

Thank fuck.

I probably would've run.

He didn't ask me to be anything, he was just there. We became friends, then best friends.

Then... us. Whatever the fuck us was.

We slept together, we didn't sleep with anyone else. If I needed him, he came. If he needed me, I was there. He made me laugh and I kept his ego under control.

Mostly.

I trusted him. That mattered more than any label ever could.

The others didn't understand us.

Joker asked questions because Joker couldn't keep his fucking mouth shut, the women tried occasionally. Even Steel had looked at us more than once like he was trying to work out what the hell we were doing.

We didn't care.

I wasn't Blade's girlfriend, he wasn't my boyfriend. I wasn't his old lady, we didn't want marriage or children. We weren't waiting for our relationship to turn into something everyone else understood.

This was it and we were happy.

My father had spent years teaching me that love meant fear. That being wanted meant somebody owned you or my choices didn't matter.

Jaxon never tried to own me. He never asked me to become something for him.

He just saw me.

Not the girl who'd been beaten, not the girl who'd been raped, not the broken eighteen-year-old who'd arrived in Blackridge Hollow with nowhere left to go.

Me. And somewhere along the way, I started seeing him too. Not just Blade, not the Road Captain, not the pretty boy who made everyone laugh.

Jaxon.

The man underneath it all. Maybe that was why we worked when nobody else understood us. They saw something that needed a label.

We saw each other and that was enough.