Chapter 19
Wraith
Night four, or maybe it’s five, with no sleep. It shouldn’t surprise me. The rest of the world spends years of their life in sleep. Years.
I never managed to train myself to sleep with one eye open.
I just don’t sleep. Period. It goes on for days.
Sometimes a week, before I crash hard, going deep into that healing oblivion, an entire day, sometimes more, to repair the damage.
I used to think it was the drugs. The blow that did it. Kept me awake, on the verge of mania.
Now I know it’s all me.
After I lost myself in her—for hours—she showered and I drove her over to Steel. He wasn’t there, but then again, I knew he wouldn’t be. Harley was over there too, big surprise, since she and Leah are like sisters.
I wasn’t asked to be at the clubhouse, but I went anyway.
Found Steel and Edge stressing over finding Ami a place.
Where to put her. Here or in Jacksonville.
In the end, they decided maybe a new start was best. Decided to send her to Tampa, where she could start fresh, leave her family for a bit and just get away from everything that happened here.
Steel called her and she was receptive to the idea.
None of us have any fucking idea who the hell roughed her up and why she’d blame Gage. It seems like she truly wanted to get herself out of this and if she had to do it steeped in blood, then obviously she thought it was worth it.
I offered to go see Gage, but Edge insisted that after being beaten senseless, the guy wouldn’t be in the mood to see my ugly, asshole mug.
Clearly, he wanted me to fire something back at him, something to help us both forget what we’d witnessed that morning, but I came up empty.
The one and only time the bastard will ever get a free pass on insults from me.
I nearly begged Steel to let me go to Jacksonville and resume my normal routine of meeting with our grow-ops, and the guys at the warehouses, but he refused. He wanted to give us each a week to settle into our new situations before we went back to doing our club business.
I don’t know why I felt the need to reassure the guy, since he’s a giant of a man in all ways, not just physical stature and I know he thinks of me as some half wild alley cat he pulled, broken, out of a trash pile, fixed up and set on the right path, but when I told him that Leena was over at his place with Leah and Harley, he nearly grinned.
Never thought it would be possible for a grown-ass man to be brought to his knees by a tiny slip of a woman, but with Steel, it’s definitely possible.
Edge too. He walked through hellfire and brimstone, to have the right to be with Steel’s daughter.
He was willing to give up The Riders, a club he himself co-founded, a club that means everything to him, for Harley.
I thought they were both pussy-whipped in the worst of ways.
Then I met Leena.
Kind, sweet, gentle Leena. A woman with more compassion in her heart than the entire world put together.
A woman whose whole world was upended, married to a stranger with unseen scars branded on every inch of who he is, a man nearly settled in his solitary world, a man with no room in a heart that he’s forced to be unfeeling and hard for years.
She came crashing in, shattering those boundaries and that piss ass attempt at a mask, in less than a few days.
Leena. The soul of a warrior, a wealth of undiscovered passions as fiery as the flaming sword she brandishes in her hand, her touch as gentle as silk, as though she knows she holds a life of glass between her palms.
She looks at me like I’m something. She looks right through me, to the very heart and soul of me, but she hasn’t shied away from the blackness.
The dark and the festering wounds. Unbidden, she worked her way in, disarming me completely, blanketing all that ugliness with her sweet beauty and her gentle kindness.
“Wraith?”
I stiffen instinctively. On my side, facing away from her, I couldn’t see that she was awake, just as she couldn’t see that I’m not sleeping. Abby, for once, isn’t wedged up between us. She’s nestled at the foot of the bed, wrapped around Leena’s feet, guarding her with soft doggy snores.
“Hmm?” I mumble into the darkness.
I don’t expect her to touch me, but then again, Leena isn’t anything I expected.
She’s a walking bundle of contradictions and there hasn’t ever been a sweeter, more beautiful set.
Her tiny hand splays out on my shoulder blades, laying me to waste with that simple touch.
I’m just damn thankful that I have that barrier of cotton between her skin and mine.
It salvages my raw nerves and lets me think with more than just my cock, which is hard and throbbing in an instant.
“Are you okay? I mean…” There’s a hint of a self-deprecating smile in her voice.
“I know you’re not. I know you’re not okay after what you had to see today.
I- I hate that I’m a part of that, in some way, through blood, I guess.
I hate that any of it happened at all. I know that it’s not just that.
I know you haven’t been sleeping. That first night.
Or last night. Tonight. Aren’t you exhausted? ”
I want to lie to her, but maybe I am fucking exhausted, because the truth springs to my lips and rushes free like an untamed stream. “Yes. No. I don’t fucking know. I’m used to not sleeping.”
Her hand splays out and begins to rub slow circles that feel like fucking heaven back there. Heaven, at the fingertips of an angel I definitely don’t deserve.
“I- sometimes… I couldn’t sleep either. For nights at a time.
When I lived with my mother, I just felt something was off.
She was acting weird. She’d always been so distant but then…
I don’t know. Deep down I knew that something was wrong.
I wasn’t exactly surprised when she took me for what she called a meeting with my father, and then she never came back.
My father told me at the end of the day that I’d be living with him.
Switching schools. He was so calm, detached, unfeeling, when he told me my mother wasn’t coming back for me.
Ever. I didn’t sleep for days at his house.
It was so strange. The bed was wrong. The room, wrong.
Everything in my life was wrong. In the end, he had one of my brothers take me to the doctor, because he couldn’t be bothered, and get some sleeping pills.
He literally said I was just being dramatic.
Probably thought that’s what females do. ”
My whole body tenses, my muscles turning to stone. “I’d like to beat your father the same fucking way that he had your brother beat Gage.”
She makes a noise low in her throat. “I don’t.
I don’t want to bring violence against anyone.
That’s what this whole thing was about. Avoiding it.
A war. Stopping him, keeping his ambitions in check while giving him the very thing he’s always wanted.
Power. He’s not a dictator and he doesn’t care if he does it alone or not.
He just wants to prove to the world that he’s finally, after clawing his way there his whole life, come out on top. ”
“That’s strangely poetic.”
I’m not entirely surprised when she changes the subject.
“Leah was happy this afternoon. I can see why Steel is worried though. The pregnancy isn’t easy for her.
She said she’s constantly sick, all throughout the day.
I think he feels bad, Steel I mean, since he can’t be there with her.
She said he’s losing his mind between all the stuff going on with the club, Harley moving in with Edge, even though he’s mostly accepted that, and her being so ill. ”
“Being Prez ain’t ever easy.”
Her hand pauses between my shoulder blades, and I try not to think of how nice it is to have it there, or how there’s an uglier, darker part of me that wants to pull away, to sabotage her touch just to protect myself against the way it guts me like a knife straight to my intestines.
“You were. President of your club. You must have been really young.”
I curse myself for not keeping my mouth shut. I might be a loudmouth around the club, bugging my brothers incessantly until they want to throttle me, but I keep the shit that really matters, the personal shit, on lock fucking down.
“I was young. Young and fucking stupid. We were a bunch of kids running around thinking we were big time. Doing shit that other clubs did because we thought it made us one. We weren’t really a family, but it was the closest thing to one that I’d ever fucking come.
I thought that meant something until Steel Riders took us down and cleaned me up and I joined them.
They’re a real family. Guys who would die for one another.
Who swear vows of loyalty to each other.
I’d lay down my life for any one of those bastards and I know they’d do the same for me in an instant. ”
Leena’s hand flexes on my shoulder blades, right above those scars that mar the landscape of my flesh.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it, but did someone hurt you?
I mean… really hurt you? The kind of thing that makes this—” her fingers trace the scars by memory, though she’s only seen them a few times, above my shirt.
“That makes this seem like nothing at all?”
“No.” It’s the instinctual answer, ground out from the safest part of me.
Silence fills up the room, stretching and unfurling uncomfortably between us at my lie. Her hand retracts and damn it, I fucking miss that heat so much that it’s like a punch to the gut and I can’t breathe properly. What the hell is she doing to me, this quiet, gentle, unassuming creature?
Even though I have no idea what I’m doing, because I have never been this close to a person before, anyone—my own mother, any of my brothers before or now—I turn sharply, the sheet rustling and the bed dipping underneath my weight.