Page 63 of Raiden

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.”

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