Chapter 9 #2
She opens her mouth, but the low rumble of engines turns into a full on roar that echoes through the neighborhood.
Considering it’s a Sunday morning, the rest of the block won’t be happy about being roused from their beds this early in the morning.
Though they probably won’t say anything about it, considering who those bikes belong to.
Leena’s eyes widen and her body stiffens. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing.” I hope that much is true. I’m already moving, though, grabbing my leather jacket off the chair and slamming into my boots.
“No, it’s not nothing,” Leena insists, following me from the bedroom, down the hall, all the way to the front door.
“It’s not. If it’s my father or my brother, I’ll tell them you were just standing up for me.
That they insulted me. That you didn’t like it.
I- I can’t- all of this can’t be for nothing just because you punched my brother in his yap, which he deserved, and my father well knows it. Ivan has always had a big trap…”
I silence her with a sharp look. “You’ve done your part in all of this. No one will ask any more of you.”
“But—”
I watch through the glass in the door as Snake and Edge make their way up to the porch. “Go back to the bedroom. Keep Abby from getting worried. I’ll be back soon.”
I don’t give her a chance to argue before I slam out of the front door, leaving her standing there in my wake, cruelly, in a house that isn’t hers.
I can’t let myself feel bad about it. This is the reason I never let a woman into my life.
Or anyone close to me, period. It changes how your brain processes shit, confuses the hell out of you, and wrecks your loyalties.
I’ve spent less than a day with Leena and already her vulnerability, beauty, and na?ve innocence makes me feel all sorts of shit I can’t decode or untangle.
Shit I have no business feeling.
I don’t like it. I don’t fucking understand it and there isn’t much in life I haven’t been able to sort through.
The key to getting through it, to clawing your way to the top, is always understanding.
If you can understand a thing, it’s not a mystery or a puzzle and you can get to the heart of it and exploit it for your own gain.
Instead of focusing on Leena and the strange feelings that I can’t begin to process, I train my gaze on the two black leather clad figures advancing on my porch like a shadow.
I cross my arms and plant my feet hard on the porch boards.
They creak and groan even though they’re relatively new, protesting my weight.
I raise a brow and wait for them to lay into me for wrecking the shitty truce.
I’ll take whatever punishment they deem is fit, because nailing that bastard in the face, popping his nose, taking my retribution in blood, was worth it a thousand times over.
“We have a problem,” Snake grinds out. He’s a big bastard, but lean, a snake tattoo coiled around his neck. He’s not old, but his face is generally set in hard lines that a violent past etched into his skin. Today they’re even more pronounced and his dark eyes burn through me.
Edge is no less intimidating. He’s nearly as big as Steel.
His leather jacket strains across broad shoulders and a barrel chest. With his hair cut short at the sides and left long on top, his hard features settled into brutal lines, he’d be fearsome to anyone else, but to me, he’s a brother, and as close as anything I’ve ever called a friend.
Odd that he’d be the closest of The Riders, considering he shot me three times.
Semantics and the past and all that.
“Fucking, Gage,” Edge spits. “Wraith, get your woman. She’s coming with us to the clubhouse. We have a problem.”
“What? What fucking problem?” I move to bar the door and Edge raises a dark brow.
I want to look at myself the way he’s looking at me now, that burning copper gaze of his shooting right through me.
He lets my caveman protectiveness go, for the moment, and I realize whatever the hell is going on, it must be bad for him to pass up a chance to mercilessly turn me into the brunt of a joke.
“Not gonna talk about it here. You’ll find out soon enough. Get Leena. Her sister needs her, that’s all I can say.”
My stomach bottoms out. This isn’t about her pig brother and her asshole father. It’s not about what happened last night. Clearly, they kept their mouths shut. No, this is so much worse.
I turn, shuffling back to the front door, that knot swelling inside me threatening to choke off my breath. I don’t know Gage overly well, but I know that he’d never harm a fly and whatever went down last night, it’s some fucked up shit that’s going to threaten everything.
We could be plunged into war, Leena caught in the middle of it.
I don’t even know her, but I already know that I’d do anything to keep her safe. We might have been forced into it, and I might be terrified of the implications of the brutal possessiveness I feel for her, but she’s not just my wife now. She’s mine.