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 pastetched 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 whateverwent 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’smine.
Chapter 10
Leena
As I ride behind Wraith, dressed in my own clothes—a t-shirt and a pair of jeans—my arms wrapped around his lean waist, my cheek pressed into his leather clad back, all I can envision is the myriad of scars that lie below that leather and cotton.
This man. A stranger with dark secrets, a life lived that I know nothing about, is now myhusband. No matter the circumstances, we’re now bound together by law, but there’s something else. That mystifying string that knots around my insides, pulling me to him, wrapping us up together.
Chemistry. I blame it on that and that alone.
A surge of anger rises in my gut when I think about those scars, raised and white. I want to blame the tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes on the wind, since neither of us bothered with helmets because we were in such a hurry to leave, but I know I can’t. No matter what he said about how he dealt with whoever harmed him, I find the force of violence twisting my stomach astounding. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone in my life, but I want to find whoever put those marks on him and make them suffer.
All I can do is let the impotent rage boil inside of me. I have no more control over it than I do over whatever is happening. I don’t know what’s waiting for us at the clubhouse, or why Wraith’s face was so closed off when he told me to get dressed and come with him.
I can feel the tension in his body radiating into me as he rides. He controls the huge growling beast between his legs with ease, even if he’s completely rigid.
Something terrible has happened and since I don’t know what it is, I can only try and brace myself. My nerves are shredded and raw after the trials of the day before, my march down the aisle to a man who is so far from the vision of Prince Charming that I thought one day I’d marry. The whole day was nothing like the wedding I’d dreamed of, foolishly and girlishly, my entire life.
As we come to a halt in front of a squat building with a chain link fence surrounding a gravel compound, I push down the strangely tangled emotions warring inside my chest. The absurd but fierce protectiveness compressing my chest, the apprehension gnawing at my stomach, the fear I have towards an uncertain future, the lingering rage I still feel towards my father for selling me off and my brothers for letting him.
I force my face into a carefully blank mask, a look I’ve perfected over the years, as Wraith helps me off his bike. He takes my elbow, his fingers biting into my skin, but I don’t let out a sound of complaint as he marches me into the building behind the two other men who rode ahead of us. One of them has a snake tattooed on his neck, it disappears into the collar of his t-shirt and reappears wrapping around his arm, and the other man, who looks like he could be a model, I recognize from the wedding. Their VP, the man who had been seated in the front row of the hall beside their Prez, Steel. His daughter is this man’s old lady, if I’m not mistaken.
We enter through a metal door, then I’m escorted down a narrow hall. The lighting overhead blinks and flickers, the industrial kind of fluorescent tubes that always make thatstrange buzzing sound. The walls are whitewashed concrete blocks, the floor white tile, the kind of thing that’s old, but stands up to the test of time, the stuff found in office buildings and businesses.
“We don’t usually allow outsiders back here,” their VP says as he turns around to study me then turns to Wraith. “Take her down to the hall. Third door on the right, then join us in the meeting room. Steel’s called church.”
Church. The bikers’ official meetings. I wonder what’s happened that Steel has woken everyone up so early on a Sunday morning.
Wraith’s hand on my arm tightens, his fingers digging in deeper, and I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound as he leads me down the hall. My steps get heavier, dread growing inside of me with every passing second.
When he opens the door and it swings in, we both take in the lone figure sitting on the edge of someone’s bed. It’s neatly made up, the room so stark that it has to be some kind of a spare. I only spare a second’s glance for the furnishings, because the figure on the bed unbends from the way she’s folded in on herself, like a broken puzzle piece that is never going to be set fully right again.
“Ami!” I tear away from Wraith and rush to my sister.
