Raiden (Satan’s Angels MC #2)

Chapter 12

Raiden

S ometimes, I think it would be easier to be like Gunner. Wired in a way the world calls wrong, so you don’t feel the confusing, piercing shit that takes up room in your brain. Stuff you can’t get out of your head for all the world of trying.

Like Widow.

Love at first sight is ridiculous. I have to admit that I wanted something from her from the moment I saw her, but it was more than lust. Whatever lay behind those green eyes, soft and welcoming as a wide-open field full of freedom, it was more than sexual.

The men Gray hired are seedy. I’ve never met such creepy fuckers in my life, and being as I was in prison for five years, that’s saying something.

I have to admit, they produced results. Three days after we met with them, they gave Gray a file on his half-sister. They’re still working on who set those fires. Gray doesn’t just want names. He wants reasons. History. Undefinable, ironclad proof. He’s not the kind of man who makes innocents pay. If we’re going to war, we’d better get it right.

Widow’s in the shower. I waited until she left, skulking just around the corner like a stalker, then I moved into her room. She does have a lock on the door, but no code, like our rooms. She didn’t bother to lock it behind her. I could take that to mean that she has nothing to hide—or that she’s hidden it so well she thinks she’s safe.

I’ve thrown myself down on her bed, a narrow twin that my feet would stick over a ridiculous measure. I have my knees propped up, one foot balanced over the other, swinging casually in the air. The file that contains everything on her life from the time she was born until now, is spread out beside me.

She walks in twenty minutes after I snuck in here.

In a flash, she has a gun in her hand, levelled at me.

I’m a hard man, full of tattoos, big enough to tear a man apart with my bare hands if I wanted, but the gun relaxes in her grip. She sighs, lifting a shoulder in a slight apology, before she puts the safety back on and slips it into the back of her jeans. She pulls her black silk blouse down to cover it. It’s the classiest thing I’ve seen her wear, with little gold and pearl buttons down the front and a tank underneath for modesty. Her jeans might be ripped to shit and painted on, her boots heavy steel toed ones made for riding, but she looks classy. Her long hair is in a wet ropey braid that makes it look darker than it is. She’s lined her eyes and put on mascara, but other than that, her makeup is understated.

Without meaning to, my eyes fall to her plump lower lip.

She’s the one who kissed me at my place. She invited me into it. I haven’t kissed a woman since well before prison, when I was in high school, before I got involved with the club.

“You always carry a gun with you when you shower?”

“I do now.”

She has a point. It’s a messed-up situation that I feel better knowing that she has the power to keep herself safe. Would she choose to defend this place? The people here? The ones who have been so unkind to her?

I think she would. Widow doesn’t like to be vulnerable, but I know everything that she hasn’t told me. She’s so much more than an MC princess or a sassy, spoiled, entitled brat sent here to throw our lives into chaos. She has her masks, and she’s worn them all well. The fact that she was allowed to keep her weapons was a public declaration that we trusted her. That was bullshit, I wasn’t sure if I did trust her, but whatever she’s hiding, or whatever she’s up to—that’s if she’s up to anything—it doesn’t involve her putting a bullet through our brains.

Her eyes flick to the bed, to the pages I have spread out like a fresh snowfall around me. She knows that I know, and her lips curl back with displeasure.

It makes me realize how little I’ve seen her truly smile.

I don’t do much of that either.

I’ve always wished I had a better sense of humor. She’s brought something out in me that I didn’t even know existed. She’d made it possible to expose the softest parts of myself without fear or ridicule. All I’ve given her in response is another reason to hurt.

“Congrats.” She waves her hand at the bed before she crosses her arms and plants her feet in a wide stance. The flush of anger or maybe embarrassment creeps up her neck above the open top button of her blouse. “Hope your PI achieved whatever you wanted. You could have just asked me. You won’t figure out whether I’m playing your or not by gathering facts about my past.”

Shame curdles in my belly. She deserves more than this. More than me. I could have asked her, but we’re not in a position where we trust each other enough to believe the answers.

She would have told me the truth anyway.

There’s something inherently honest about this woman that everyone else seems to lack. She’s like her brother that way. Fundamentally good. Salt of the earth. Honest to a fault. Tough as all fuck in her own right. I just couldn’t see it.

I sit up and gather up the pages, tucking them back into the folder. My legs swing over the bed, and I lean my elbows on them.

She waits, looking like she’d spit on me if given the chance, but behind her justified anger and hurt at my betrayal, there’s something sweet. It’s more than just her perfume and the natural scent of her. It catches me off guard, as does the way my body reacts. The visceral tightening, the flood of heat, the surge of protectiveness and possessiveness when I think about what I read in that file, isn’t something I can fight.

I brush my hand over my shaved head. “Fuck…” I exhale, drawing out the word. “After what I read, I understand how deeply I hurt you. I can see how it would be triggering for you.”

Her mouth works as she struggles to keep her words in, to choose them wisely instead of just firing them at me. “That’s a stupid term. What you did was predictable and exhausting. It was disappointing. I thought you were more than that.”

Her words strike like a flint, igniting the primal, deep-seated fury at the heart of me, but I’m not mad at her. I’m mad at myself. At the world. “I’m not.” There’s nothing subtle about the fisting of my insides as I watch her arm herself in front of my eyes. I point at the folder. “This isn’t about me. I should have asked you, but now I know anyway.” It’s also taken everything inside of me not to ride off half-cocked and commit first degree fucking murder, gouging out eyes, cutting off hands, and staving in skulls of the pricks who made this woman’s life hell.

That’s not something I want to dwell on. The fact I can’t stop thinking about it doesn’t bode well for me.

That shit isn’t romance. It’s straight up craziness. I can’t afford attachment. The only allegiance I owe is to this club.

“You were doing your degree at an Ivy League school. Not easy to get into, but you were smart. Everything was fine until your last year. You tried to file harassment charges against not one, but two of your professors. It was swept away, and you were the one who left. It was you who the dean and probably a whole lot of other people called a liar.”

She studies her nails, which are freshly painted black. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“You finished your undergrad back in Nevada and did your Master’s there, and then you were working on your PhD, but you left in your second year, just shy of finishing.” Her eyes darken despite her efforts to look bored. “Why was that?”

“You know why,” she spits, a new kind of violence I haven’t seen in her before rising up. “It was the same age-old story. It must have been my fault. I must have been asking for it. Led them on. Seduced them. Even though I was trying to live in their world, I was never going to fit. I wanted my Master’s. Wanted my PhD. It was my dream to be a professor one day, to open doors for people and open worlds that I never had opened for myself. I was never going to be them. I thought if I couldn’t join them, I’d beat them, but it didn’t happen that way. All they saw in me was trash, someone they could ruin and discard, laying the blame entirely at my feet.”

I open the folder and scan the list I’ve placed at the front. “Their names are all here.” I manage to sound casual, not like a beast longing to tear these men apart and feast on their hearts. Which is, I have to admit, incredibly fucking unlike me. “You tell me which ones I have to kill.”

“Jesus Christ!” Her eyes widen and after a pause, she laughs. I wish it was real. “If I wanted them dead, they’d be dead already. You think I didn’t get offers from my dad to take care of me?”

“You allowed them to chase you away.”

“It didn’t happen like that. What you’re not going to read in that file was that I stabbed him in the thigh with a pocketknife. He agreed not to press assault charges against me if I was the one to leave and keep quiet about it. He was twice my size. He was the one who asked me to come to his office and tried to assault me, but I was the one looking at potential jailtime. It was my word against his. He was well respected. He came from money and could afford a lawyer who would twist things in his favor no matter what really happened. He made me sign that NDA and agree to leave. I had to withdraw from all my classes a few months before the semester was over.”

I’m on my feet before I even realize that I’ve surged up and off the bed. “I will fucking end him.”

Her smile is full of sadness. “I’ve fantasized about it repeatedly, but you won’t get the chance. He hurt someone else. The wrong girl. She had connections I didn’t have. More money than him too, I’d bet. He’s the one doing jailtime for raping her.”

“An easy target then.”

“I think he’ll get taken care of there. No one likes a sexual predator.”

“Your dad knew about this, and I didn’t?” Fuck. it would be nice to have a conversation without coming across as a whining, butthurt child.

“He might be a mad bastard to you, but to me, he’s my father.”

I struggle for control, which means looking away. “I don’t want you to take this wrong. It’s going to come out badly because of what’s already been said and when it’s been said but… why now? Why did Zale only come for you after he was finished with this club and ready for his revenge?”

She rolls her eyes at me. “I always thought it had more to do with my mom. She didn’t want me coming up here. She never said so, but she was scared that if I liked it, I’d want to stay. She also didn’t want a man like Zale, who wasn’t father material, in and out of my life. That’s confusing and painful for a kid. When I was an adult, she didn’t step in and stop it because I was old enough to make up my own mind.”

She’s right about Zale not being father material. Even for Gray growing up, it was the men from this club who raised him, who did all the shit a father was supposed to do. It was my family who fed him most days because he was always with me, even going so far to include him in holidays and look after him when he was sick.

“My mom never kept him from me. It’s not like I didn’t know about him, and she didn’t varnish the truth. I knew he was busy, that I was a surprise for both of them, and that my father had a life across the country that made him far too busy to come and visit. It was the kind of life not fit for a child to rub up against. My mom told me the truth of it all, but she always made sure I knew that she loved me enough for two parents. When he came for me, he never apologized for not being there. He didn’t have to. I got it. I wasn’t resentful. I was working at an office job, hating every minute of it when he showed up. I was ready to do something else with my life. That’s why I went. Not because I thought I owed him anything. He paid off my student loans. It was not a small debt. He found me a place to stay and took care of everything so that I had nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not trying to make- I…” I start again, gripping that folder hard in my hands. “You never thought that he was buying you off?”

She stares at me incredulously. “Buying me for what?”

“I don’t know. You don’t even have to know. He already had plans, I can promise you that. Zale does nothing without thinking about it. For years, he made this place a great club. He took it over from his father and built something good. Transformed this warehouse into our clubhouse and did a lot of good for this community. But he’s always, always been a planner and he’s always known what he wanted.”

“Yeah? What was that?”

“ More . He never knew when to stop.”

For once, I take a hint. I’m sensitive to the tightening of Widow’s lips and the stubborn hardness in the tilt of her chin that tells me she doesn’t want to keep talking about this. I change the subject, bringing us back around to the bastard who wronged her. It might not be in my power to make this right, but I’d throw some serious weight behind it to fix this for her.

“I’ll get you reinstated. Make sure you’re allowed to finish.”

Her eyes flutter closed and open slowly. The weight of her desire is obvious, but she shakes her head. “I can finish anywhere I want to. I don’t… even know if I do want that anymore. Maybe I don’t want to be something I’m not. The academic world is so snobby, I just got tired of all of it. The politics, the games, the pretense, the falsity. I just want to learn because I love it. I loved knowledge . I’ve read all the classics . Most of them I devoured before I even got to college. I’m book smart. It was always easy for me, that and languages. You can’t read the classics and fully appreciate them unless you’re reading them in their original language. I know Spanish, Italian, and French, but I also read Greek and Latin and some Old English.”

A new curiosity burns in my belly, mixing with the feral desire for vengeance, and the other, darker desires that consume me when it comes to this woman. “What. The. Fuck. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugs again, so pretty, but also so intriguing and alluring because she’s different than any other woman I’ve ever met. The animal lust that she’d inspire in a man is obvious. She’s beyond gorgeous, the full physical package, curves for days, big breasts, a sexy ass, long legs. She’s walking sex.

She’s so much more. I can understand now why she’s so angry with me. When I accused her of using herself as a weapon against me, which I’ve done more than once, which my sister has flung right into her face, we’ve shoved her into that same box that all the ignorant assholes who used her did. She’s probably been fending predators off since she was thirteen or fourteen and old enough to look like a woman. She’s exhausted that she can’t be seen for more than what she looks like.

I also alienated her. Shoved her to the periphery. Made her feel like she had no safe place here. For years, that’s what those fuckers did to her. They wouldn’t allow someone like her into their snobby little gentleman’s club.

She reads all of that off my face and more, but she still snarls at me. “I would have, if we could have built five seconds of rapport without tearing it all to shit.”

“Five seconds of rapport.” I muse on that, turning it over in my mouth. She steps forward but stops and clasps her hands in front of her, waiting. “Come over to my dad’s. Come see where I grew up. See the yard, all the flowers the club planted for my mom. Come visit her grave with me.”

She brushes past me and sits down on the bed so hard the shitty frame underneath the even shittier mattress jumps and groans. “That’s not the kind of rapport I meant, but maybe it’s a start.”

“I’ll ask Lark to come too.”

Her head snaps up, her breaths quickening. “You can’t make her accept me.”

“You’re right. But I’d like my father to meet my wife.” I’ve never said the words. Not in the woods and not now, but I need to. She needs to hear them. I can’t say them standing over her. I walk to the bed and kneel down. She inhales sharply and doesn’t let it out. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh my god. Get up. Please. Don’t be sorry for what happened. I was mad at the time, but you don’t even know me. You had a right to—”

“I don’t have a right to make you pay for what someone else has done.”

“I’m a grown woman. I can handle myself.” She brushes her fingertips over my shoulder. “Please. Get up.”

She doesn’t invite me to sit down beside her. That’s an intimacy that I haven’t yet earned back. “Before I do anything like that with you, I need to talk to your sister. I’ll ask her if she wants to go somewhere for an hour. I’m not a spa girl, but maybe to the range.”

“Yes. She needs to learn how to shoot. I’d love it if you could give her some help. We were teaching her before. I’ll talk to her.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

“You have enough going on. I’ll do it. I just don’t know that I can tell her about what happened to me. It’s not going to make her trust me. She might even say I had it coming.”

I can’t imagine my sister being so cruel. “Why would she ever say that?”

“What? Because she’s a woman? They can be mean too. Sometimes, they’re the worst of all. You have no idea, Raiden.”

I want to take her face in my hands, to hold her, to let her search me out, discover me, to be the balm that stands between me and the shit in my head. I want her to come to me, to kiss me again. A woman hasn’t initiated that with me until her. I’ve always been the one to take the lead. It was nice, handing it over to her, even briefly.

“I don’t. I hope that we can…” I’ve never been so awkward. So at a loss before. I think I’m the one flushed now. I know how stupid this is going to sound. “Maybe we can help each other.”

“Swap ghosts? Exchange closets and dig out each other’s skeletons?” She stops her sarcastic tirade, cutting herself off when she sees how red I’m getting. Her hands flutter at her sides. I don’t know if she wants to get up and touch me. I want her to. She doesn’t. “I don’t know if it will help, but maybe we’ll get to the point where it wouldn’t hurt.”

I tap the folder against my leg. “This is going to be shredded immediately. No one else will see it, not even your brother. He gave it to me without looking at it. I’m going to talk to Lark. Warn her to be nice.”

“Please don’t.”

“I will. I’m going to. Right now.”

It takes a minute, but an unexpected smile, shy and slight, plays over her lips. “Thank you.”

Her smile hits me like a bolt of lightning, energy shooting straight to my cock. I shove the file in front of me and leave before she can notice.

I want to tell her that it’s her smile, her grace, her intelligence, and kindness that make her beautiful. I want to say that I’ve never met anyone like her before. I want to say that even though shit is burning all around us, I want to put real effort into making this alright. Her. Me. Us. It shouldn’t exist, but against everything, I want it to. I want to make it clear that I understand how much I hurt her by not trusting her and assuming her capable of the worst. I’ve run it over and over in my head since it happened, and I’ve been shocked at the level of hurt that’s shimmered under my own skin.

I leave the words unsaid.

Maybe they’re better that way.

Certainly, they’re less dangerous.