Page 19 of Raiden

Everything routine.

Being out here with nothing around me in the wide-open pricks at my panic and that makes me want to panic more, the fact that I’m nothing more than a pathetic statistic. I get up, stretch out the aching stiffness that the cold and the damp spread into my joints, and brush all the earth off my arm. I thump my chest hard with my fist, right over my heart. It does fuck all to stop the bastard from pumping out more adrenaline. All this shit is in my head, but I can’t exactly bash open my skull.

This? This is reason number one hundred and eighty-five thousand that I want to put Zale Grand in the ground.

I try to take a breath and get myself under control, but there’s no breath there to take. My lungs are constricted. They’re filled with lead instead of air, molten shit that’s leaking through. I know what this is and it’s happening. I can’t do anything except stand here and heave and gulp like in the black depths of the deepest water.

I guess I’m making enough noise to raise the dead because Widow wakes up violently.

She’s immediately tuned in to threats. There are none. It’s just me out here, my own body betraying me.

She scans the trees behind me and then pushes up from the ground and walks over.Calmly, as if I’m not heaving and drowning in my own body. I hate that she’s here seeing this, but what I am going to do about it when my lungs are stones?

She has moss and leaves in her hair. Dark smudges under her eyes from the shit sleep. She’s rumpled, her clothes damp from the damp night air. She’s still an angel, misty and ethereal.

I expect that she’s going to offer some stimulating intellectual thoughts, maybe point out that I’m having a panic attack and try and talk me through breathing.

Shows how much I know of my wife. When did Widow ever do anything that was expected of her?

She says nothing, but steps into my space, pushes my leather aside, and shoves her palms up under my t-shirt, reaching all the way up my chest to my burning lungs.

It’s the fastest way I’ve ever had a panic attack stop. I guess my brain is diverted from theholy fuck we’re dyingstraight towhat the fuck is happening?

Her palms are freezing against my skin. The breath barrels up from my belly and explodes out. The air I suck back down is clean and fresh. All that shit in my head that wouldn’t fuck off all night clears like the sun in the distance banishing the rest of that gray dawn, lighting the sky up in fiery, fierce oranges and reds.

It’s just Widow and me out here. No one else. No one else is coming for me. Out here, I’m free. There’s not too much space. I’m fine. I’m going to survive this. I can breathe.

Her touch is a thousand times more intimate than it is sexual, at least for a minute.

The longer we stand like this, the hotter her hands get, soaking up my heat, acclimating to me, becoming one.

I’m not sure how it happens, but suddenly, my hand is on her hip. She starts, a shiver vibrating down her body. The slow pink flush that ignites over the bridge of her nose like a reflection of the sky above us, has my heart beating hard. Desire flares up over my skin. Her hands are hot as brands now, burning through me. I sweep my eyes over her heaving breasts under her leather jacket. Her soft, ripped up jeans are molded to her long, shapely legs.

I grasp her by the wrists, closing my strong hands around them like shackles. I tug her off balance, pulling her into me. She should shove back, fight, struggle, but she goes completely still, but not like an animal paralyzed by fear.

Pressed up against me, her breasts crush against my chest. A spark shower explodes inside of me. The night scraped me raw. The panic lowered my defenses. My hands release her wrists and sweep around to her ass. Legally, she’s mine, but right now, I hate that she’s notminein the ways that count.

Lust explodes in my bloodstream as my hands cup her round ass through her jeans. I haul her up and she wraps her legs around my waist. A few steps and I crush her roughly against the first tree I see. I make sure my hand flies up, protecting the soft, delicate skin of her neck and scalp from the rough bark.

Widow squirms against the hard length of me trapping her. She’s not fighting to be free, but still, I groan her name. “Widow…”

It’s permission I’m asking. Permission to start what should never be started. I need to know if I’m taking something, it’s being freely given in equal fucking measure.

She slams our foreheads together so hard it stings. “Everything you think I am? I’m so much more than that.” It sounds more like she’s saying the same thing about me.

Her back presses into the tree, giving her leverage against me. She rocks her pelvis into my cock, which is like a weapon in my jeans. I’m so hard that I snarl back at her in a hiss of air. I fist my hand in her hair and tug her face back. She tilts it, parting her lips and licking along the lower one in a slow, sensual challenge.

I intend to plunder her mouth, to bite and suck and brutalize her lips, but when our mouths meet, the fire is gentle instead of brutal. She’s the one who leads. I’m not tentative, but she’s the one who uses her teeth first, gently, a soft whimper and a slow, sensual sweep of her tongue that nearly makes me explode in my jeans.

She shows me how she wants to be kissed, and I’m no gentleman. I’m fucked up in ways I probably haven’t even analyzed, but I don’t kiss her like a beast. I don’t take it out on her. I let her fill me with her heat as I kiss her back. It feels likeI’m being remade, reshaped by her. The most fucked up part is how much I don’t hate it.

I love the way she tastes. Honey sweet, a little like cherries and strawberries, all the fresh summer fruits I’d never admit to loving as much as I do.

The club came and planted flowers for my mom because it was her dying wish that her flower gardens, which had gone to shit because she was too ill to make them thrive, be revitalized. My club brothers had our yard looking like a floral conservatory in one hard day of work. I let them know how much it meant to me that they’d do that for my family, especially after my parents called me as good as dead to them, but I’d never let on just how much I liked all that beauty and color after the bleak years of prison. Things you never noticed before are so vibrant after.

Widow smells earthy like those gardens. I know I’m imagining it, but tasting her, drinking her in, is like basking in the combined glory of all those flowers, so heady that they overwhelm a man.

There’s a noise, sudden and sharp in the distance. Not a twig snap and not made by a human, but it breaks us apart all the same. I instantly shield her body with mine, curling around her until I throw my head over my shoulder and ensure there truly isn’t any danger coming for us. The morning is silent and still. There’s nothing. No one.

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