“We need to know what the hell happened last night,” Bandit grunts. “You need to tell us so we can deal with the situation.”
Raine’s body stiffens, and I can smell the hurt mixing with the anger coiling inside her.
“No offense, Bandit,” I snarl. I look from him to my Prez while putting myself in front of Raine and moving my gaze back to Raine’s brother. “You need to leave. I’m not going to let you come in here and force Raine to talk when she’s not ready. You want to know something we all want to fuckin’ know, but I ain’t forcing her to talk. Nor am I gonna let anyone else.”
He doesn’t need to know what I know so far. Maybe if he didn’t go about this shit the way he did, I might have spoken with him to get his input, but now . . . no fucking way. My wolf is clawing at my insides, beating against my brain, wanting out.
She’s fine. We’ve got her. She’s protected.I tell him but it still doesn’t work.
“Cyrus, brother, you might want to get your people out of here,” Corbin warns. I could feel his eyeson me. He knows I’m close to shifting and letting my wolf out.
“I’m not leaving my sister,” Bandit announces.
“Bandit,” Cyrus growls. “She’s with her mate. He’s not going to hurt her. Let’s give him space right now. We’ll find out what happened, brother, I promise.”
Bandit visibly clenches his teeth and gives a jerky nod as he grinds out, “Fine.”
“Bandit,” Raine calls but doesn’t move from behind me, “love you.”
“Love you too, Rainy,” Bandit mutters, his face visibly softening. “Call me later and let me know you’re good.”
“Okay.”
My wolf eases slightly as we notice the tension leaving her body.
Fuck.
I wait until those of the Iron Howlers MC leave the clubhouse before I finally breathe easy, my body relaxes, and my wolf calms down. We’re two being coming one, and it’s sure as fuck not easy. My wolf has his own emotions, and I’ve got mine. It’s like we’re interlocking everything we feel, weaving them together, and it’s fucking us up more than I thought it was.
“I don’t want to rile you up again, brother,”Corbin remarks, coming forward. “But we need to talk.”
“I know,” I grunt.
“Can it be after pizza?” Raine asks quietly, though we all heard her.
Corbin cocks a brow and grins while a few others chuckle.
But I look over my shoulder, down to her, and answer. “Yeah,dolcezza, after pizza.”
Chapter Thirteen
Raine
“Look, I get you don’t want to talk about what happened last night,” Justice, Dane’s VP, says from across the table where we were all sitting. The way he said it, his voice gruff, a bit gravelly, maybe a small amount annoyed, but still there was a gentleness to the way he said it.
“VP,” Dane growls.
“You know he’s right, brother,” Corbin grunts, looking between Dane and me. “We wouldn’t push if we didn’t need to know what the hell was going on. You know it as well as we do. Gotta know what we’re dealing with. All the bullshit circling around theclubhouse, we can’t have any loose ends. Her being yours, if it wasn’t random, then it could come back on us.”
“How could what happened to me come back on any of you?” I ask, not understanding any of this.
They hadn’t pressured me into talking. In fact, while I’d been eating pizza with Karsyn, her daughter Sage, and a woman named Lake, the guys had gone behind closed doors to talk. What that was, I don’t know. But whatever it was, none of them looked happy when they came out. I didn’t have to be a shifter to sense the difference in them all.
Corbin, Justice, Abel, Tucker, and another man named Zander join Dane as they took over our table. I watched Corbin walk right over to where Karsyn was sitting, scoop her up out of her chair, sit, and pull her into his lap. Sage giggled at this, and he’d ruffled the girl’s hair, asking where their son was. Karsyn d lifted and waved a monitor telling him he was in their room. I also saw how Tucker sat right next to Lake, tucking her into his side.
The way both men were, I found sweet, but I didn’t know why they all had to come over here. Well, except our table was where all the pizza was. Pizza and flavor packets. Several different brands, different flavors, different types. Including myfavorite.
I loved drinking the dragon fruit ones. It tastes amazing.