Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Joey
Ipushed open the door to the kitchen, barely biting back a sigh when I saw it wasn’t uninhabited. Alejandro was standing at the coffee pot, making himself a cup. Upon my entrance, he looked over at me with those dark eyes, arching a brow. “Want a cup?”
“Sure,” I grumbled. That’d been my goal anyway, but he was blocking the fucking coffee machine. “Just pour a bunch of sugar in and that’s it,” I told him. “I don’t use creamer.”
“That’s practically syrup,” he muttered, but he did as I asked anyway.
“That syrup is the only way I don’t wake up and immediately have blood coating my hands,” I warned him. “I need the sugar. Caffeine is just an added benefit.”
He snorted but slid me my coffee before finishing up his own.
Leaning back against the counter, he lifted his mug to his lips.
I didn’t leave since it seemed like he had something he wanted to say, and honestly, I didn’t want him hunting me down later to spill his guts.
I wanted to go sit in the chapel and drink my syrup, as he called it, without being bothered for several hours.
Having Elaina around, as pretty as she was and all the help she clearly needed emanating off her in waves, was doing my fucking nerves in.
I hadn’t slept for shit last night. Fuck, I’d almost caved and called Adelaide to beg her to help me.
I couldn’t do this a second time, and I certainly couldn’t hurt another woman like I had her.
That was exactly what I would do if I got too close to Elaina, even with Alejandro protecting her.
“Spit it out,” I finally ordered when he still didn’t open his damn mouth.
“Elaina is not very comfortable here,” he told me. I barely resisted rolling my eyes. She wasn’t fucking comfortable? Boy did I have fucking news for her. “She feels you don’t like her.”
I scoffed. “I don’t have a fucking thing against her, Garcia,” I assured him, calling him by his last name.
“Just got no interest in getting close to her is all. She’s welcome to wander around as she pleases, so long as she stays out of everyone’s rooms unless she has permission and she doesn’t step foot in my chapel. ”
Turning, I made to leave, but his voice stopped me.
“She’s not your ex.”
My fingers tightened around the handle of my mug. I clenched my jaw, my muscles bunching up tight in my shoulders.
“You don’t know a fucking thing about Adelaide.
I suggest you keep any mention of her out of your fucking mouth,” I growled.
Not giving him a chance to speak further, I shoved out of the kitchen and stormed to the chapel.
I guessed my expression was murderous enough because even Ink didn’t bother me like he usually would as I passed by him.
I dropped into the chair at the head of the table after shutting the chapel doors behind me. Alejandro didn’t know shit about Adelaide. No amount of research he could ever do on her would reveal the woman she truly was. It sure as fuck wouldn’t reveal the woman she’d been when she was with me.
Adelaide had been a shell of a young woman with no purpose, intent on no doubt ending her life after her ex, Tristan, ripped her fucking heart out of her chest on her eighteenth birthday at the party he and his twin, also her best friend, threw for her.
I’d been there to cause chaos but had taken one look at her drinking herself stupid in a corner, her makeup ruined and tears staining her cheeks, and my plan had changed.
I’d taken her on a ride. Had given her freedom.
Shown her what it was like to live. And when I’d gone to drop her off and saw she was living at a trap house full of drugged up men and alcoholics who would no doubt be eager to get their meaty, disgusting hands on her now that she was of age, I’d put my fucking boot down and made her come home with me.
And I’d molded her into a monster. I’d given her a purpose, a reason to keep breathing. I put a fight in her soul that burned so goddamn brightly, she just about lit anything on fire she touched, and not in a good way.
She and I would never deny that I was the reason she was still alive today.
Even her husband, River, who was the president of the Fathers of Mayhem MC, knew I was the only reason she still pulled breath into her lungs.
She and I had a bond that could never be broken, no matter how hard people fucking tried.
And River, who was endlessly patient with her and gave that woman the fucking world on a silver platter and then fed it to her every fucking day, tolerated my existence in her life.
Hell, sometimes, he even forced us together.
Because without each other, we’d probably cease to exist.
No other woman needed the baggage of knowing their man was tied soul-deep to another woman. And no other woman needed to be turned into the catastrophic kind of monster I’d turned Adelaide into.
History might not repeat itself. But I would never take the chance that it did.
Elaina was safer keeping her distance from me. Because once I latched on, I did so quick and deep. And when I was done with her, there’d be nothing left of the woman who’d walked into my clubhouse last night.
I was a destructive kind of man, and no one deserved that.