Chapter Eight – Angela
Chapter Eight
Angela
I sat down in a plastic chair on the other side of a bulletproof window and held a phone to my ear. “You wanted my attention. Well now you have it.”
Gray, my ex-boyfriend and my son Rabbit’s father, sat on the other side, holding his own phone to talk to me. “Hey, baby,” he said, grinning broadly.
I waited there to see what he’d say next.
I didn’t want to give him anything. They’d taken my coat, but I made sure what I was wearing showed neither curves nor skin.
And my expression was flat. He was nothing to me.
And there was nothing he could do to me, behind bars—which was where he was going to rot. Forever.
Except a month ago he’d started sending letters—and last night, he’d sent someone to bust the windows of the tattoo studio I owned, I was sure.
“You look tired,” he said. “Long night?”
There was a point in time when I would’ve thrilled at his concern.
When I’d been eighteen, when I’d started running with the Pack, when I’d seen him—I knew I’d had to have him in that obsessed-teenager way.
That my life wouldn’t be complete without him.
He was six-four, broad-shoulders, Viking-arms, and—yeah, given my now-boyfriend Mark I clearly had a type.
But Mark was a lawyer, not a drug-dealing-murdering-son-of-a-bitch-behind-bars who I hated every day.
I crossed my legs and stared off into middle distance, ignoring him. I knew he hated that. As leader of the Pack, he expected utter loyalty—and with the exception of me, he’d mostly gotten it. Werewolves and bikers had an inherent sense of hierarchy.
“Angie,” he said, his voice just a croon, the husk of his wolf coming through. He knew what I had inside me, how much the wolf-part of me still wanted to please him.
“Don’t try,” I told him. “It won’t work.”
My wolf was a fickle bitch. Luckily, I took silver every day, so that I was always the one in control. I’d learned it from the Pack—smuggled colloidal silver into prison was the only way Gray could stop from wolfing-out on moon-nights too.
He leaned back, surveying me. “I just wanted to see you again, Angie. That’s not a crime.”
“Breaking Dark Ink’s window is.”
“If I did that, it’s just petty vandalism. Plus I’d have had my guys make sure no one was inside. All completely theoretically, of course.”
I gestured to myself. “Well, you’ve seen me now. I’m going to go,” I hung up the receiver and brought my eyes up to stare at him blankly like he didn’t count.
He waited until I’d almost stood to ask, “How’s my son?” I didn’t hear it, so much as I read his lips through the glass.
Blood rushed in my ears. If I could keep going, walk on out like I hadn’t heard him—but I’d waited half a second too long, and we both knew the truth. I sank back into the chair, trying to appear indifferent, and when I picked the phone back up I made sure to say, “What?” in an incredulous tone.
Rabbit was the only good thing to come out of my time with the Pack. And when I’d gotten out, I wasn’t even late yet—and then he’d been born late, besides. There was no way they could know anything for sure, unless—
“I’m not stupid, Angie. He looks just like me. I have photos.”
Bile rose at the thought of some drug-running biker following my son around with a camera. “Rabbit isn’t yours. He’s mine and some other guy I fucked. I fucked a lot of guys after you. Still do.”
“Looking for a cock big enough to replace mine?”
“Hardly,” I laughed sharply. “Let’s just say that when you’re not a virgin, you have a lot of catching up to do—and that those experiences put earlier ones in… perspective.”
He was still looking at me with that trademark killer-grin. “I’d forgotten how feisty you were.”
“Did your masturbatory fantasies leave that out?”
Gray leaned forward. “I know you’re afraid of me, Angie. I can see it in your eyes. You don’t have to be.”
He’d left me alone for seven long years, until last month. Maybe he’d changed behind bars. Found Jesus, or Buddha, or whatever.
He put his hand up to the glass and tilted his head. “I just want to be a family again.”
And at that, I laughed loud and true. “Are you fucking kidding me?” His eyes went cold, like a predator’s, and I remembered just how hard he could hit. “He’s not yours,” I repeated.
“Cut the crap, Angie—unless you want someone to help me get a DNA sample.”
I froze. I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of for Rabbit’s sake—him finding out that he was a werewolf—or that he was related to Gray.
“Being in here,” he said, knocking on the glass between us, “has given me some perspective. I know now I never should’ve let you go.”
At that—all the anger and all the memories came rushing back. “Like you let Willa go? And all the girls before her? Fuck you, Gray,” I said low, this time with my own wolf’s voice, and watched him startle. “Fuck you. You knew she might die—that I might die—and you never said a word.”
He leaned forward on his side of the glass. “I didn’t need to say it. I wanted you to be my mate for life. I wouldn’t have knotted you otherwise.”
“That was supposed to make me feel special?” I forced myself to laugh hollowly, to hurt him, even though there was no way I could ever hurt him the way he’d hurt me.
“After you left—do you know what Wade did?” I swallowed down the stomach acid that rose as I remembered the night.
I’d only come back to the bar for my tattoo guns—they were Dringenbergs, practically irreplaceable, as I didn’t have a penny to my name, and doing tats was the only way I could make any.
And that was when Wade had stopped me. He just picked me up and carried me off to the back room, me screaming the whole time.
“He took me. Carried me off to your room—our room—and threw me on the bed. Said he’d waited long enough, and it was finally his turn. ”
Gray’s jaw tensed and his eyes narrowed, and I knew no matter how in control he was of the Pack that no one outside had ever had the balls to tell him this story. Or, none of them had ever thought he would care—one of those two. I leaned in.
“I could hear the rest of them through the walls—so I knew they could hear me screaming. Trying to fight him off, kick him away. And when at the end—when I was covered in claw marks and bitten—when his knot finally flared and trapped me there, on him, him touching me, holding me for half-an-hour while he whispered apologies to me for what he claimed his wolf made him do, begging me to stay? I will die before that ever happens again.” I stood.
“Maybe Rabbit is his—but I know he’s not yours, and I’m definitely not your mate. Don’t ever contact me again.”
I dropped the phone and walked away.
“What’re you going to do when the moon calls him?” Gray shouted after me. I ignored him and kept walking.