Raiden (Satan’s Angels MC #2)

Chapter 19

Ella

I ’m brushing out my long hair after a shower a few days later, staring down the big black duffel that I’ve moved into the corner of Raiden’s room, but refused to unpack. We’re having dinner at his dad’s house in a few hours, so of course that’s when my dad chooses to call.

He’s a rival prez and still sort of my prez at the same time, but before any of that, he’s my father. I don’t have the option of not answering while I sort out my complicated feelings about the sort of double life I’m living and my torn loyalties.

This is the first time since he’s attempted to call since we all got here, and as I answer, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. “Hey, Dad.”

“Widow. I’m in town.”

Zero fucking preamble, all commanding, iron tones, but that’s my dad for you.

I’m not surprised, but I am suspicious about his timing. The thought of him having me watched like I’m the enemy or untrustworthy, chills me.

I study the brush on the bed, using it as an object of focus to calm down. “That’s good news. I’ve missed you.”

“I want you to have dinner with me tonight. I have something I need to talk to you about.”

I suck my bottom lip into my mouth and bite down. How am I supposed to respond to that? For someone who is supposedly smart, I’m at a loss.

I decide on the truth, because it’s the safest bet. “I’ve made good progress here. If I’m not honest about meeting you tonight, it won’t go well for me.” I don’t know what my dad’s plans are for me, but he doesn’t do anything without a purpose.

“Tell them, then. It’s not meant to be a secret.”

“What if I had something I was meant to be doing tonight?” I hate that it slips out. I shut my eyes at the dead, uncomfortable silence.

“Plans that are more important than your own father?”

Zale can be like that. Manipulative and childish. As an adult, I get a lot of the reasons my mom didn’t want him involved in raising me had nothing to do with distance.

“No, Dad.” My heart plummets into my stomach at the thought of disappointing Raiden. This is one time, but it meant something getting invited. I was half terrified of meeting his dad for the first time and half elated.

Despite trying to blend in before, I was never the kind of woman men brought home to meet their parents.

My fragile hope shatters like glass on concrete.

“When I tell Gray that I’m meeting with you, he’ll insist that he send a few of his men.” I don’t know for certain that he would, but making it seem like he’d press it gives me an easy excuse to bring at least one person with me.

Zale would never hurt me. I don’t believe I’m just a cog in a wheel to him, a pawn, a player in whatever game he’s playing, but having backup in the form of another set of listening ears at my back makes me feel far less torn about this.

“Fair enough. It’s just dinner.”

It’s not just dinner. Nothing gives that away, but I just know .

“Okay. Can you text me the time and place?”

He laughs. Let him think I don’t know him through and through. He’s not the only one who has been watching and observing. I didn’t need a lifetime or to have grown up with Zale to know him well. He might still be volatile and unpredictable by nature, and I’ve had a blind spot because I also have a soft spot for him, but I do know the basic nature of the beast.

“I’ll tell you right now.” He names a place that sounds like a steakhouse and tells me to meet him there for seven, then hangs up before I can respond.

I don’t get to change my mind or ask him if we can go somewhere else. I don’t get to question him.

The past me did whatever he wanted blindly before coming here. I put far too much trust in him. Maybe a tiny bit of me questioned if he was playing me and there was a fuck of a lot that I excused. Insensitive, stupid shit, but it was mostly the small stuff. I never thought that Zale could be acting at caring about me.

The fact that he picked seven and tonight—the exact time of my dinner with Raiden and his family—makes me nauseous again.

I don’t know if Raiden’s going to be pissed at me for bailing on him or for meeting with Zale, but I do know he’s not going to be pleased.

I’m still in a towel, so I throw on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and go to find him.

He’s in one of the club’s back offices. I only have to walk down the hall with all of our rooms and take a right.

Over the past few days, Gray’s tried to get things back to some semblance of normal at the club. He’s been allowing meetings with some of the club’s dealers, called their farms and suppliers up north, though there’s still extra security around the club.

They’re still pretty wary of me, but I’m not getting the black looks of hate that I used to.

I move through the club with ease, without any of the men here breathing down my neck, fucking literally, getting up in my business because of course I’m up to nefarious spy shit twenty-four fucking seven. I talked with Smoke yesterday. He’s been going to the range to work with Bullet all week as they’ve started up operations there, full time again. He feels like I do, a sort of reluctant and grudging acceptance, but I haven’t asked the other guys. They’re not exactly the approachable type, and they’ve been out with some of the other patched in members and even doing guard duty with the prospects.

I would seriously hate for Zale’s showing up in town to throw the club back into chaos and lock everything down again just when everyone is starting to learn how to breathe.

Raiden’s office is in the back of the clubhouse, but on the opposite end of the private rooms. I walk through the lounge, which has a few men in it, playing pool and darts, watching sports on the huge TV.

The room where all the security and tech magic happens is closed up and probably locked, but I smile at the magical pointy hat screwed to the door. Wizard doesn’t need a nameplate. He did one better.

I suppose the accounting room doesn’t belong to Raiden, but I still think of it as his. It’s not an office. It more closely resembles a library.

The door is open, but I still brush my knuckles against it. There’s no desk. They’ve gone with a huge wooden table. Just about every inch of it is littered with papers and folders. There are bookshelves lining the room entirely, though some of them are empty, or filled up with binders. On one side of the wall, they’ve broken away from shelves to do filing cabinets. They look heavy duty and probably have great locks. There’s a huge woven rug underneath the table. Raiden takes up a desk chair, making the fancy thing look small.

His head snaps up at the sound of my soft knock. He has that tired, bleary expression of a man who has been staring at a backlog of paperwork for far too long. He digs his fingers into his eyes, then blinks away the strain. “It is you. I thought I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming about angels.”

“Holy fuck, Raiden.” I roll my eyes, but warmth unfurls inside of me like a rare flower showing its face to the sun. “Angel? No. Especially not with what I have to tell you.”

I shut the door and twist the lock. That underscores my words and gets his immediate attention. He sobers, stands up, and can’t help stretching. He’s been in here since first thing this morning.

Maybe my purpose in coming here is to be more than just a part tying together a gesture of peace. I could probably help him here. I know that the club would have to trust me far more before they ever let me see anything to do with their finances and all their businesses. The paperwork in this room would be enough to send someone to jail if it fell into the wrong hands.

A cold sweat breaks out on my skin.

Raiden’s in my face fast, grasping my shoulders. “Ella. You’re scaring the shit out of me going pale like that. What’s happening?”

“I’m fine.” I swallow back the bitter taste at the back of my tongue. “My dad called me. He wants me to have dinner with him tonight.”

Raiden’s face breaks into open hatred. “What the fuck?” He doesn’t let me go. He pulls me closer, hugging me tight to him, letting me tuck my face into the crook of his neck. It feels possessive but rather than shy away I lean into it.

I’ve made a point of it in my life and especially since I got here, to prove that I can look after myself. I’ve told Raiden countless times I don’t want to be possessed, owned, or dominated. But his tight hold, protective and soothing in its own right, is a brand of possessive I could get behind, so I hang on tight for a moment to get my shit together before I pull back.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to have dinner with you and your family. I truly did. This isn’t something I can say no to. I don’t want to make him angry. He’s not unstable, but he is unpredictable. I don’t want to give him a single reason to do anything to this club.”

“Tonight.”

“Yeah. Same time too.”

“The fucker’s watching us again,” he curses under his breath.

“Maybe,” I cede, totally transparent. “Maybe he never stepped. I thought he’d tell me something like that, but there’s no guarantee. I don’t know what he wants. He didn’t send me here with those instructions, and he’s not going to try getting information from me now. I told him that Gray would send me with a few of the men from here and he seemed to expect that. He told me it was fine.”

“This is a trap.”

I taste the hot, bitter scorch of acid at the back of my throat again. “It could be. If he wants one or two of the men from here and me, but that seems like a waste of time. A lot of this shit he could have just done already if he wanted to.”

“He’s playing games. Terror is always more fun to a man like him than just razing something to the ground.”

“I don’t honestly know. I thought I did, but... fuck.” It makes me exhausted to the core of me to think about this, to be caught between two worlds again, not really fitting in either, no matter how much I want to.

I’m caught between two men.

One I owe loyalty, and the one I’m losing my heart to—despite all my best intentions to remain aloof.

“If he’s just practicing straight up fuckery, then he might ask you to go back to New Mexico.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Raiden never used to be so unguarded, but I see stark relief burning in his coffee eyes that soften to a lighter brown the longer he studies my face.

“If I get the vibe that he’s going to do something to break the peace or hurt someone here, I will do everything I can to stop it. Maybe… maybe there’s some small chance that he just wants to see his daughter.” Even I don’t believe that, and it makes me sadder than it ever did when I was a kid.

“We could come with you. Gray and a few of the other guys and me. We could talk business. Ask him nicely what he wants and if it’s anything other than dinner with his daughter, then it’s club business.”

“What if he’s counting on that? He could call that an act of aggression if it’s more than just a few men. I don’t want you and Gray together anywhere near him. If he thought you’d come with me and he’s planning something, I want you here, safe, or with your family, keeping them safe somewhere else.”

He tips my face, running his thumb over my pulse point. “You’d have to be crazy to think that I’m going to let you go there alone.”

“You’re never going to be the type to burn down the world for me,” I protest, but it’s breathy and lost as I drown in his fierce, protective expression.

He cocks his head, clearly not liking that. “Don’t confuse the way I treat you with how I feel about you. I don’t act possessive because I’m not here to control you or your life. That kind of shit isn’t right. I’m not a jealous asshole who thinks that handling a woman makes him a man. I do feel possessive of you in the way that I want you safe and healthy, no holds barred happy. You deserve a lifetime of happiness. Good things, El. He’s messing with your head and that’s just as bad as physically hurting you. I will never sit by and allow someone to harm you. If they even so much as think about trying, they’re going to answer to me, you feel me?”

Our faces are so close, just a breath apart. The goodness of this man is there right in front of me, shining and shimmering like a lone star in the night sky.

“You guys are outlaws with good hearts,” I whisper, bringing our mouths closer. “That’s what makes you different than any club out there. But Zale was once part of that, and not only that, his father founded this place. What if there’s something good left, something worth discovering and fighting to keep?”

He shrugs, pulling back, but he keeps his hand on my hammering pulse. If any other man tried to touch me like that, or grab my neck, I’d knee him in the balls, but with Raiden, it feels sacred and right. With just that simple touch, my body wants to give up all my secrets to him.

“Not saying he does or doesn’t have something good left, but I’m not believing in it and I’m not taking you for granted for a second. I’d have to be crazy to have a woman like you and just give her up and leave her unprotected. Keep what’s close to your heart close. That’s just common sense.”

I can’t look away. This isn’t the first time he’s said things like this. Words that hint at the depth of what he feels. We might be new to it, but that doesn’t negate the legitimacy of it. We’ve both been through our own personal hells. That should keep us apart as enemies, but maybe the past we’ve both lived only brings us closer together. The separate, painful bad before a combined good.

“I’m not afraid to do what needs to be done and I’ll do anything to keep you safe and help you have a future of your own choosing. You just say the word and whatever you want, I’d do just about anything to make it yours.”

I’m so struck by the innocent ferocity he’s displaying. It might even be a little na?ve, but he one hundred percent means it. Those aren’t just empty, flowery words.

I’m rocked because there hasn’t been a single person in my life other than my mom who has truly cared about me before. I miss her a thousand times more in this moment, my wounds still open and unhealed. But she was my mom. There has never been anyone who didn’t have to look out for me by merit of being family.

I cover Raiden’s hand with my own and guide it away from my neck. Holding it out in front of me, I study his strong hands with those hilarious sparkly pink nails. I take in the muscles flexing in his forearms before I let my eyes trace the rest of him. He was painted brutal by his intensity, but he softens right before my eyes.

“You don’t look like a biker. You don’t have the personality to be in mainstream society either. Your face says you would enjoy it, but your soul is out there on the road and in here with a collection of outlaws. You’re all the contradictions, but you’re a good man above all. So many here are too. I think you guys collect them. I said mean things about this place when I first got here. I was the one who was wrong.” I can’t say it out loud that these men are starting to feel like family. I can’t talk about my half-formed hopes for fear that they’ll blow up and vanish like breath on a frigid day.

“You’re good shit yourself, Ella. You belong here. I’ll work to prove to you that I’m good enough.”

That startles me. “Good enough? Oh my god, Raiden. No! If we’re working at building anything, we’re working on it together. It’s not about deserving or being good.”

He cups my face, so close to kissing me that I can taste him before it even happens. My skin breaks out in goosebumps. “I’m still going to fight to keep you by my side and in this club. Fight for your happiness and a good life for you and me, my brothers, and my family. Everything will be fine, I promise.”

I want to believe it. Goodness aside, I know how Raiden and the other men here have changed even since I got here. They’ve proved that they’re willing to do anything for each other and their own. “You can’t know that.”

“I do know it, because I’m saying it’s true. That’s what this club is and what we stand for. You can only put men like us in a cage for so long. Zale is done hemming us in. He threatens you, he threatens all of us.”

“Maybe I should pretend that I hate you and that nothing is going right here, but if the other men who came with me are spying on me and reporting back to him, he’ll already know. I trust Smoke, but not the others. He picked those men for a reason. I’d suspect him if he’d picked those most loyal to him, but that’s probably what he wants. He might expect blind loyalty from me, but that doesn’t mean that he’s ever going to trust me. I do realize how sad it is to say that.”

Raiden backs off and paces a few feet away. He turns back in a minute, thought sorted, face thunderous. “You don’t have to go.”

“I do and I will. I’ll give him the truth and hear him out.”

He can see my determination and his face bows into a frown, but he doesn’t fight me on it. “We’ll go to Gray with this together. He might suggest someone else, but I say take Gunner. He might be thankful to Zale for letting him in here, but he’s loyal to his club and his brothers without question. I’ve seen him kill and so have you. He won’t hesitate or let his emotions get in the way.”

I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me before that some of the men here might still feel like they owe Zale loyalty and might take that one step further, into betrayal of their club brothers.

“What if all this time, Zale’s had a rat in the club. Someone he approached who knew he was alive and has been spying for him?”

It obviously isn’t the first time Raiden’s thought of it. “That could be. I know it’s in Gray’s mind too, even if he’s never put it to us. If there’s someone here we should be wary of, we should do it without them knowing that we’re thinking about it. That’ll just drive them underground.”

“And if he backs me into a corner and it comes down to his suggesting something he knows you won’t do?”

“Then we decide as a club what our options are. If it’s war, then we get the women and children out of here, look after our businesses, and stand together.”

Dying or creating a bloodbath is not an option. I refuse to let it be. “There are other ways. It’s sneaky and unthinkable, but it wouldn’t have to be you. It could be me. My dad’s club is huge. They have cops on their payroll, but not all of them and not at the kind of levels they can control. They’re doing much worse than you guys can even think. Bodies. Cocaine, heroin, and meth. Running women. If I can prove their crimes, with evidence and get someone to listen to me, I could take them down.”

“That’s a level of dangerous that I’d never let you get involved in.”

It slams into me what I’ve been seeking my whole life. It wasn’t the thrill of living, it wasn’t even knowledge. It was peace. Peace and happiness. Living in the thick of this chaos, the hurricane of life ever since I had to leave my PhD unfinished, makes me long for quiet and solitude. A simple life can still look like this. It can still be a club, loyalty, the road, because that’s based on family above all.

That kind of life doesn’t come without work or risk and the framework of a plan knits itself together in my head. “If he’s not here to force me back home, I could act like the good and loyal daughter and say I was seducing you for information. You’d have to give me just enough, that I could tell him to make it seem legit. I could beg to go back home. Tell him how unhappy I am here. If I was in their den, I know I could gather up enough information to—”

“No.”

“It could be the only way out of this,” I plead.

“And if Zale and a few of his men go to prison? Trust me, they won’t all go, and they’ll be gunning for revenge twice as hard.”

“If his only aim is to annihilate this club, then show him that he’s wrong. He has so much more power down there, more men catering to his every whim, more money, women, everything and anything. But what he really wants is this club. We could show him that he doesn’t have to destroy it.”

Raiden chews on that, churning it over in his mind. “Appear to surrender.”

“Yes. Become a chapter of the Berserkers. Get Gray to step aside. Give Zale back his spot here as president. Make him think that he’s humiliated his son and everyone else here into submission. Make him believe he’s won.”

“Ain’t happening. I wear the angel on my back not a fucking rabid monkey. We’re Satan’s Angels through and through. It’s a crazy idea, but if we’re gonna do some Machiavellian shit and play the long game, then Gray might agree to step down as president and let Zale back in. But how would that work? And then what? Do as the Romans did, and execute him by stabbing him repeatedly in the back?”

“I don’t know.” Horror infiltrates the hazy framework of plans. “I didn’t mean kill him. I meant… Fuck. He’s my dad. I don’t want him to come to harm. I don’t want to sit around plotting anyone’s demise. I want what you said. Happiness. Freedom. A good life. But I know he can’t be convinced to leave you alone.”

“How loyal are his men? Anything happens to Zale and we’re likely to have a whole club gunning for us.”

“Wait.” A whole club gunning for us. Unless… “Isn’t there some old rule that anyone could challenge someone for president and if they beat them, then they took over? They didn’t have to kill them. Just displace them by proving they’re stronger. The men in Zale’s club will follow strength. I’m sure a few have tried in the past, but Zale wouldn’t tell me that. He likes to be flattered and worshipped like a god.”

“I don’t know that clubs still do that, but for any sort of challenge to stick, it couldn’t come from an outsider,” Raiden admits.

“It would have to come from a chapter.”

“Yes. If we give Zale time to set someone else up in the Berserkers, probably his VP, and come up here to run things, someone could challenge him. We’d just have to figure out who. Someone who would have to be willing to be at the top of everything and that means probably leaving here, putting Gray back as prez or acting prez in his stead or making him his VP. Even if it’s all just appearances, there would have to be a certain legitimacy to it. And there’s always the chance that something could happen and whoever was challenging could die and then we’d have a real mess here. You’d be living, but as you said, in Zale’s cage.”

“We should go to Gray with this right now.”

I expect him to shake his head and talk me down, but his expression solidifies into determination that matches mine. “Even though we don’t know what Zale wants, I agree.”

“You’ll stand by us, over your own father?”

“My father made me a pawn. By showing up here like this, it’s pretty clear that he’s using me. What choice has he given me except to fight back? I don’t want him dead. I want to love him. I want him to be my dad before he’s just another man who thinks he can get something from me. He’s the one who put me here. If he judged me wrongly and underestimated me for his own gains, then I’m not to blame for that miscalculation. I’ll do anything I can to keep him alive as my dad, but honestly, I don’t give a shit if he’s running some club or not. If he’s here, there’s always the option that we could take him down some other way too, but Gray would have to be on board. This whole club would. It couldn’t work otherwise. And we’d have to do it without his men here knowing. Maybe it’s best that no one knows I’m involved with it either. You could want me and lust after me without trusting me with club business. That would be the commonsense thing to do anyway.”

“I’m not a ruthless bastard,” he snaps.

“I know. This place, you and Gray and probably a lot of the men I still don’t know well yet, you’re all the exception.” I watch his face soften, aching to hold him, aching for all of this to be over so we can do what we both thought was unthinkable and maybe work on living a life together. “You can still be and play Zale’s game. If he’s got you involved, then you have to rise to the challenge and conquer your opponent. Go to Gray by yourself and talk to him so it doesn’t appear like I’m involved. I’ll say whatever you want me to say and act however you want me to act tonight. Just let me know.”

“If you take Gunner and he sees the truth of Zale, he might be more willing to act against him.”

“You mean challenge him? Gunner?”

Raiden shakes his head and shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m one for books, not for plots. The kind of books that don’t involve plotting past figuring out where dollars can best be served, hid, or laundered.”

He allows a small smile, but even that warms me. It’s just for me and it’s as dazzling as any grin. I deflate, forgetting the shit that I’m imbedded in. Right now, it’s just me and Raiden in here. My dad, his club, even the rest of this one, is out there, behind that locked door.

I never thought about finding a soulmate for myself. I was starting to figure that such a person didn’t exist. I find myself stepping closer to Raiden. I can’t help myself. I belong in his sphere, pulled to him by the elemental and magnetic impulse of the universe’s weaving.

The reluctant, frightened parts of me that still believe strongly in reason over emotion and in basic self-preservation resist as my feet take me closer. I’m the one who puts a hand on his hip, lifting up his t-shirt and planting my palm on his hard abs because I just need to feel the heat of him.

“Widow…”

My nails curl in, anchoring him like I might be able to keep him when all of this is over because in the meantime, I’ll fight as hard as he’s willing to fight.

I never realized how much of my life has been about survival until I wished I could thrive.

I want to give him this moment before I go to the den of the wolf and everything might go to shit. I don’t know if we can get through this without someone we love dying. I might have to leave, and I will if it means keeping Raiden and his family of club brothers safe. Our marriage wasn’t written as a love story, but just for a moment I’d like to pretend like the forces outside of us aren’t unravelling our seams and that the storm isn’t gathering to break over us.

“We should go and talk to—” Raiden’s sentence finishes as a groan when I work his belt open.

“We will. Just give me a minute. Or ten.”

I drop to my knees, pushing Raiden against the edge of the desk. He doesn’t need balance, but it’s hot to think about his legs wanting to give out like mine do when he touches me. He looks down at me, the world dropping away for him too, pupils blown wide and black and entirely focused just on me.

The way he looks at me is a key slipping into the locked door that I’ve kept inside of me for so long. The mistrust, the walls, the shackles I’ve chained myself in, all drop away just from that single look of reverence. It’s like having the sun beat down on me, warming the ice in my marrow.

I undo his zipper and brush my finger over the wet spot on the front of his boxers before I take him out. “Fuck…” His low grunt comes straight from the bottom of his gut. He fills up my hand, thick and long, the veins standing out, his head a dark red.

“Widow…”

“Ten minutes, Raiden. Please.”

He fights with himself, railing against more than just the option of pleasure, then bows his head in agreement. I bow mine in worship, taking him into my mouth, determined to shut everything else out for these moments that are ours alone.