Lorenahadgonebackto her apartment and she’d taken Zeke with her. It had been at my request, and there was a prospect watching over them, yet it didn’t sit right with me to have them so far away. Regardless, I would have done whatever, sent them wherever, if it meant they were both safe.
Even having to deal with her pulling away from me, cringing away from my touch at night as if I’d burned her. I hated that. Hated the distance. I wanted to swallow the space between us with my rage. Wanted to demand she look at me, not with disdain but with the love she had before everything went to shit.
I understood her, though.
She was afraid. They all were. It was understandable. She was a schoolteacher. This shouldn’t have happened to her. It shouldn’t have happened to them. Mayan and I had brought this onto their lives.
Maybe a part of me wondered if they were better off without us to fuck up their lives. But as soon as that thought formed, I banished it. Even thinking it felt like a betrayal. She was my Vieja. My fucking woman.
And I’d demand her attention, no matter what I had to do.
I pushed my way into her apartment. The place was quiet. I looked around for Desi, though I knew she wasn’t there. The two prospects I had manning the place had told me Desi was leaving, and Mayan and I had him follow her.
It wasn’t safe for them, but Desiree was determined to be stubborn, probably under the misguided thought that she wasn’t officially with Mayan in any capacity.
We couldn’t be too careful.
“Lorena?” I called out, already walking towards her bedroom. She was laying down on the bed, her arms wrapped tightly around Zeke.
My son clutched at her like a lifeline, laying his head against her chest, his sleep easy and calm.
Lorena’s head turned in my direction. “He was having nightmares,” she whispered.
My heart ached for my son, yet I knew he clung to her as desperately as I wanted to do so myself. In those moments when the bomb had gone off, she’d protected him like a mother would her own child.
She’d protected him like I would have.
I toed off my boots and slid onto the bed behind her, wrapping my arms around her thick waist. She didn’t cringe or try to pull away. In fact, she seemed to snuggle back into my chest.
It felt like sliding home.
I breathed a sigh of relief and kissed the back of her head. “I’m sorry,” I told her again.
“It’s not your fault,” she whispered.
“You blame me for it.”
“I don’t.” The denial came immediately. “Then why have you been pulling away from me?”
There was a moment of prolonged silence. A silence that only made me grip her tighter, pull her closer as if I could somehow keep her tethered to me for something that I figured was inevitable.
“Because I’m afraid of losing you,” she finally whispered, and I could hear the tears in her voice. “Because I was afraid of losing Zeke. Because I’m scared and I don’t know how to deal with it.” Her voice cracked, broke.
I wanted nothing more than to flip her around, but I didn’t want to disturb my son’s rest. So I just held her as she cried and felt my throat tighten.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I never thought you’d be dragged into my club’s mess. But give me a chance to prove to you that I will do everything it takes to fix this. So that this shit never touches you ever again.”
She took in a shuddering breath. “I’m not going to leave you, Miguel.”
The words had my heart pounding against her back. “But you–”
“I promised you I’d be with you when I agreed to be your Vieja. I just…” She paused, searching for the right words. “Can you respect that sometimes I’ll need space to wrap my head around certain situations? That I’ll need to think and breathe. That doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you or that I feel I’ve made a mistake.” When I didn’t respond she asked, “Does that make me crazy?”
My arms tightened around her. “Maybe. But then maybe I’m crazy too, because I have no plans on ever letting you go.”
We struck in the dead of the night from several places at once.
They were expecting a counterattack against their factory full of product, a factory Chema had uncovered after hours of pouring over his laptop. They’d manned up, setting up guards over every fucking inch.