16. Confessions
CHAPTER 16
CONFESSIONS
Nisa
I wake up with something in my nose, and it feels wrong. I try to pull it out, but instead, a strong hand grabs my wrist and pulls my hand back down.
I'm not sure where I am, but I must be in the hospital again. Even though all the normal machinery is here, the rest of the room doesn't seem right. It's dark and a tad cold, but not to mention I don't see any nurses running around. I blink a few times and turn my head to see Leo sitting in a chair, his beard longer and his eyes redder than I've seen in a while.
"What happened? Where am I?" I croak out. My throat is so dry that even trying to swallow my own spit feels like acid going down. I bring my hand up to my neck and rub. It does nothing for the burn inside, but it makes me feel better.
"You're in the clubhouse. You wouldn't let us take you to the hospital. You've been unconscious for the past four days." Leo says everything matter-of-factly, like he's reading this off a menu or something.
"What about my mother?" Is she okay? I need to go. I sit up and instantly regret the decision. I forgot just how much pain I was in before the Doc put me under. It's less now, but still more than enough to knock me on my ass.
He falls back against his chair, spreads his legs slightly, and glares at me. "Stop it. You know, we went to check on your mother, Nisa. For fucks sake, what the hell kind of people do you think we are?"
"You're right. I'm sorry. I'm just out of sorts." After all that we've been through in the past few weeks, if there's one thing I know Chrome Creed will do, it's watch out for my mother.
"You should be. After the beating you took." His voice is dripping with disdain. Out of all the times for him to be mad at me, this is probably the worst.
"Leo, if you're going to sit there and just shoot dirty looks my way, you can go. I don't need this shit right now." My voice cracks as I try to speak louder. My hand goes back up to my nose and I feel something taped there.
"If you try and pull that out again, we're going to have a fucking problem." Leo grated, his hands clenched hard on the arm of the chair he'd been sitting in.
Then have someone else come in here and take it out. I don't want it. It's uncomfortable. I drop my hands back down on the bed I'm in and let my gaze roam along the ceiling and walls around me. I've been through most of the rooms in the Chrome Creed clubhouse, and I don't remember ever being in this room. "We're in the clubhouse?" I ask Leo, and he nods his head.
"Where at? I don't ever remember seeing this room." I look next to where he's sitting, trying to find something that I can remember.
"I had it made a few days ago. When Doc said that you wouldn't be as comfortable here as you would be in a hospital, I went out and got everything we needed to make sure you were." He barely blinks as he explains that he basically made a complete hospital room for me, simply because he didn't want me to be uncomfortable. It's the sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me.
"Wow, that's unexpected. Thank you, Leo. I mean that." I try to give him a smile, hoping to lighten the mood, but he doesn't return it.
"Do you remember what you said when you were in the motel room?" He crosses one leg over the other, laying his ankle on his knee.
"No, I mean, I said a lot. I was in pain." The small machine next to me with my heart rate starts to beep faster and I inwardly groan. It looks like lying is out of the picture. I guess I'm left with not giving him any answers at all.
"That's okay, I can jog your memory if you need. I have no fucking problem doing that." He gets up from his seat and walks over to the foot of my bed. They must have bought the equipment they brought here directly from a hospital because even the bed is what someone would see there. Leo grabs the hard plastic footboard and continues to peer at me.
I gulp again, and the fire in my throat is less. We stare each other down for a few more seconds before he starts to talk again.
"When you were in that hotel room, I asked you who had done this to you." He gestures with his hand towards my body, "You refused to tell me. You told me to go away. Then you told me that he was trying to get you to hurt me. You're going to tell me who you are talking about."
"The Easter Bunny," I smirk at him.
"Try again." He says, and it's clear by the menacing tone that he's not fucking around right now.
"I don't know what you're talking about." My voice is lower.
"Nisa, try a fucking gain!"You're not going to lie here and protect some asshole who thought it was okay to put their fucking hands on you. You will tell me who the fuck did this to you, and you're going to tell me now." He snaps, and I raise my chin in defiance. He's not going to hurt me; I already know that.
"Fine, it's not going to take long. I know whoever did this has a stake in that laundromat. They're going to have to come around at one point or another. I have enough people and enough patience to wait for months if I have to. Twenty-four hour shifts And if that doesn't work, then I'll burn that fucking place down. They're going to know that it was me who did it, and I'll sit there and wait for them to come for me. " He glares at me for a second more before he looks me up and down and walks toward the door.
I can't let him do that. He'd be playing right into Marc's hands. All Marc wants is to get Leo alone. If he decides to go through with this stakeout, so to speak, there's nothing stopping Marc from getting what he wants. I'd have failed anyway.
"Leo." His name rolls off my tongue. I can't bear to look up at him, but I feel his gaze on me, "Don't do that. I'm here to keep you from doing that. Just let me finish this. I know you want to help me and my mother, but I dug this hole for myself. " I finally summon the courage to look up at him."I betrayed you. You owe me nothing." My heart clenches at my admission.
Leo's top lip pushes up into a snarl before he turns on his heel and walks over to the corner of the room. He picks up a simple wooden chair and places it at the side of my bed. He sits down and folds his hands in his lap. "I'm ready for this story whenever you are." The muscle in his jaw clenches. Even with all this rage, he's so gorgeous.
My cheeks get hot picturing him in one of the many sexual positions that I've dreamt about before. I clear my throat and try to raise myself up in bed, but a pain shoots through my body when I do. Leo reaches down and picks up a remote that controls the bed, and he raises the head so I'm in an upright position.
"Get on with it." He drops the control back down and continues staring at me.
"When Hugh died, it nearly killed my mother. She was so protective of me after that point, not that she wasn't protective of me before, but moreso. I didn't want her to protect me when I knew she couldn't make ends meet now that the money Hugh used to bring in was gone. I came to the club thinking that you guys were my family and I would get a break from the shit that was my life, but you wanted nothing to do with me. You threw my family out to the curb when we were of no use to you."
His mouth snaps open, getting ready to defend himself, but I need to get through this, so I put my hand up to stop him. I ignore the pain that I feel by grinding my teeth. "At least that's what it felt like to me."
I sigh and look up, thinking about the beginning days of Marc's courting me. How I thought he was such a gentleman, and how he saw me as a grown woman and not the little girl the Chrome Creed men saw me as. How him not wanting to have sex with me was just another reason that he was someone I could trust.
"I met a man, Marc. He was charming, a gentleman, and a fucking badass when he needed to be. He was... well, he was you, Leo. He didn't look like you, nor did he sound like you, but that dominance, that power, just the whole king of the jungle aura was exactly what he had. I figured if you guys didn't want me and he did, it was a win. He spent months courting me, taking me out on dates. Then he started bringing me around to his jobs and some underground dealing, illegal shit that I knew he was into but didn't bother me. I knew you guys were into illegal shit, too. It's the norm in the game, and I understood that. Then when he found out that I couldn't pay my bills, he helped me and my mother when you guys didn't. I was completely loyal to him. I'd do whatever he asked me to do, and he knew it. When he started talking about your club, there was so much fucking hatred in my blood that it felt good to say how much of an asshole you guys were. How all you did was party and fuck club whores. When the questions started to get more specific, I didn't realize. Not until he told me to follow one of the strippers to a safe house and report back where it was. When he started asking what drops you all typically made, When the questions went from normal bashing to shit that could get you killed, I tried to get out. I tried to tell him that I wasn't going to do anything else for him. It was too late. He had his hooks into every level of my life, and if I went against him, he would make sure that it was a living hell. I've been trying this entire time, and as you can see, he's made good on his word. "
Leo leans forward in his seat and drops his head down so I can no longer see his eyes. He must be disappointed. There's no way that he's not. My brother gave up his life for this club, and the way I honor that memory is by going to one of the club's enemies and opening my fucking mouth. If Leo got up and walked out of this room right now, taking all his patch brothers with him, I'd understand. I'd prefer that to him going after Marc himself.
"You keep saying that we didn't want you. That we abandoned you. I guess from the outside, that must be what it felt like. We never abandoned you, Nisa. We could have done a better job of looking in on you and not just taking your mother on her word when she said everything was okay. We should have dug deeper. Still, you were never abandoned." His eyes peer into mine, and he holds my gaze. A cloud of emotion I've only seen a few times before crosses his eyes, "You say that I didn't allow you to be with the family or that you weren't allowed to be in the clubhouse, but it was never because we didn't want you. I'm the one that kept you from being in the club; me, not anyone else."
My eyelids flutter as I try to find a reason why, if not because he didn't want me there, would he keep me from being in the club? "That doesn't make sense. You're contradicting yourself. You can't say it's not because you didn't want me to be there and then say you purposefully kept me from being there. I don't understand."
He sits back in his seat as if he's trying to put as much space between him and I as possible. "I kept you from being in there because I knew that if you were in the clubhouse, or around me, or even just popped up every once in a while, I wouldn't be able to keep the promise I made to your brother. I swore to him that I would look out for you and your mother. I also swore that I wouldn't fuck you."
The vulgar word shoots off his tongue and lands right at my core. I clench my thighs tight, waiting for him to finish his statement.
"I knew that if you were around all the time or in my space, that I'd have claimed you, I'd have made you mine, and it's the one fucking thing he asked me not to do. I don't want to do that to him. I didn't want to do that shit to you." He runs his hand through his hair and lets out a deep breath.
"What do you mean do that to me? What would you be doing? " I ask quickly.
"Nisa, you know me. You know how I am. How I am with my women. That's with women I don't even really care about. Assholes and other scumbag clubs come and fuck with our sweet butts and I go absolutely mental. Can you fucking imagine what I would do if you belonged to me? " His eyes squint and even though I know I shouldn't, I find myself getting emotional.
"Now I hear that you went against my club. You gave away confidential information to someone else that they plan on using to come after my club. Everything I am is telling me that we should fucking put you out on the curb. Through all the shit we've been through, you doing some shit like that never should have happened. But you should've never been in a position for it to happen in the first place." He shakes his head and wipes his hand down his face.
"It was never Hugh's decision to make. You realize that, right?" I ask him, and he looks at me again. "He had no right to ban you from being with me. You said it yourself, you're a crazy man with women that you barely care about. No one's ever seen you with someone you do care about. How could my brother know what you and I would be like? It wasn't his decision. It's mine." The thin tube going down my throat makes all the talking hard, but I need to get this out.
"What is your decision then?" His gruff voice makes me shiver.
I grab hold of the sheets on the bed and take in a deep breath. Time to be brave. "I'm yours, Leo. I've always been yours."
He closes his eyes and leans his head back for a second. I bite down on the inside of my mouth to stop a moan from leaking out when I watch his Adam's apple bob up and down while he pressed a hand against his growing erection. When he looks at me again, his gaze is steady and sure. "You may come to regret that decision, Nisa. But at this point, there's not much I'm going to let you do about it. "
My jaw drops and a million different questions go racing through my mind. When he gets up and walks to the door without saying anything else to me, I call out for him. He can't leave me on the edge like this. What does that mean?
"Leo!"
He turns and leans against the door, "Get some rest, Nisa, because when you wake up we're going to talk about who the fuck put their hands on my woman. You're mine now, and that means someone has to die."