Wrath was kissing me.
And it was a good kiss.
No, amazing.
He didn’t kiss like a giant of a man with hands so calloused they abraded my neck where he held it just like his beard did my chin.
He kissed like a man with all the time in the world to worship a woman and make her body sing.
I almost could have enjoyed it if I’d actually wanted him to kiss me, or if I didn’t still feel the ache of Cricket in my bones.
If I didn’t want and hadn’t always wanted the undercover cop whose burning gaze was on us now.
Wrath pulled away after a long moment, his unreadable eyes as blank as ever as he stared down at me for a beat before looking at the crowd.
“Fine, you want ’er, brother, can’t think of a better man to have at ’er,” Reaper sanctioned with a jerk of his head.
“Keepin’ it in the family, eh, Harleigh?” Grease said with a lecherous waggle of his eyebrows before dissolving into laughter. “Hey, Wrath man, you get tired’a her, you send her my way for a night, yeah?”
“Yeah, brother,” Wrath said quickly before I could bare my teeth at the scumbag Sergeant at Arms. “Though got a feelin’ in my dick, I won’t get tired of her real quick.”
“Good,” Reaper said loudly, his voice ringing with authority. “Glad to have that shit done with. Now let’s fuckin’ party, got somethin’ to celebrate now.”
There was an answering roar as everyone filed out of the room, conflict forgotten even between the feuding brothers Mutt and Twiz who laughed at something as shoved each other out the door. Only Danner remained in the frame, Laken gone, his arms free to cross over his chest.
“You got a problem, brother?” Wrath asked pointedly as he tugged me closer into his side.
Danner waited a beat too long to be respectful then smiled, “Nah, man, we’re good. Just takin’ a look at the prize you won.”
“Yeah?” Wrath asked, anger creeping in at the edges of his voice.
I tried to catch Danner’s eye to tell him to back off, but he was preoccupied with a cheeky shrug of his shoulder. “Looks like her name, beautiful as a rose. Mind those thorns though, yeah? I have a feelin’ they might getcha in the end.”
It was the earliest hours of the morning when I finally made my way home from the wake, and the emptiness of the streets in downtown Vancouver didn’t help to settle my unease. It was a safe city, and even though my apartment could have been nicer, I lived in a good part of town far away from the drug-riddled, crime invested horrors of East Hastings Street. Besides, I carried the Sig Sauer handgun my dad got me one Christmas in my purse as well as a flat, slim blade Bat had given me tucked into my boot. I was a biker babe, I could handle myself.
But fear still ate at me like the encroaching night. It was the first time I’d be back in the apartment Cricket had tried to rape me in. I’d spent the last week holed up with my family back in Entrance, sleeping in my childhood room, curling up with my dad and brother on the couch, going shopping with Cress and Lou, out for drinks with my girl Lila and the other biker babes. But it was time to face reality, and even though my dad wanted to sell the apartment immediately and put me up in a hotel in the meantime, I knew the Berserkers would notice that shifty behaviour. I was a spider caught in a web of her own making. I’d made it, and now I had to lie in it.
My hand was on the door handle when I heard the whisper soft rasp of footfalls on carpet. In the next two seconds, I had my gun in my hand trained dead center at the chest of the man who’d dared to creep up on me.
“Good reflexes,” Danner noted tersely even as he continued to come at.
I knew I should lower the gun, that Danner didn’t pose that kind of threat, but I held statue still as he walked into the barrel, its small, lethal opening pressed up against his chest over his heart.
We locked eyes over the gun. I could feel his strong heart beat against the weapon and for one crazy moment, I knew he’d let me shoot him.
“You shouldn’t surprise a woman alone in a dark hallway,” I told him finally.
“And a woman shouldn’t arrive alone and unprepared at the funeral of her abusive dead boyfriend,” he ground out, leaning closer to me in a way that ground the gun even deeper into his hard pectoral.
I bared my teeth at him. “You think they wouldn’t’a found that suspicious, me staying away when my man’s been murdered.”