Page 32 of Diesel
“I’m his wife, and if you shoot him, I swear you won’t live long enough to walk out of here.”
My heart sinks into the floor. Because whether she understands it or not Makenna just handed him the only weapon that can be used against me.
Her.
ELEVEN
MAKENNA
Zane’s fingerstwitch against my back, like he’s trying to hold together the pieces of us I just detonated. I didn’t mean to drop that bomb, but I panicked. Walking outside to a gun aimed at my husband’s head is an image I’ll never scrub out of my brain.
So I didn’t think. All I cared about was stopping him from dying, even if I had to take that bullet myself.
But now he’s looking at me like I dropped a match in a room doused in petrol.
My stomach knots as he trembles in my arms. He’s scared, and that terrifies me. I can only count a handful of times where he’s truly been afraid and shown it. Usually, he keeps his emotions locked down tight.
“Zane?”
He brushes my hair back from my face, so gentle, so different from the sharp edges he’s carrying in his body. “Wish you hadn’t done that, firefly.”
“He was going to kill you,” I whisper.
His lips brush against my forehead, and I cling to his biceps like he’s a life raft in stormy waters. I hate how cold his skin feels under my fingers.
I don’t know why it matters that this guy knows I’m Zane’s wife, but clearly, it’s a big deal. “Stay behind me.”
Zane turns and shields me like a wall. I curl my fingers into the back of his shirt, like it’ll keep him tethered to me, but he’s not invincible.
He can’t stop bullets.
Then, in a voice I’ve never heard from him, he snarls, “You point that gun at her again and I’ll kill you. I don’t give a shit if you’re wearing the patch, I’ll put you in the fucking ground.”
There’s a beat of silence and I can barely breathe through the tension. I should have stayed in the house, out of sight.
“She’s your…wife?” I can’t see the other man’s face, but I can hear the shock threading through his voice. “Since when?”
Come on, Zane… just leave.
“You really give a shit about my private life, Riot?”
Riot… Of course that’s his name. It fits. He looks like the kind of guy who lives for chaos.
“You bein’ married ain’t private. It’s club business.”
I peek around Zane, my gaze gravitating to the gun still aimed at us. My fingers tighten in Zane’s shirt. I hate this guy. Who does he think he is? Our marriage has nothing to do with him, or the Sons.
Zane agrees. “She’s not club business. She’smybusiness.”
Riot laughs, an ugly, dark sound that makes mystomach flip. “That ain’t how it works, and you know it. So I’ll ask again, Diesel. How long have you been married?”
Silence stretches like a band pulled too far. We’re all waiting for it to snap back.
“Long enough.”
That’s an understatement. We were in single digits when we first met. Fifteen when we realised we loved each other. Twenty-two when he was put in jail for defeating my monsters. And twenty-six when he married me.
Thirty when I left him divorce papers on our kitchen table and tried to disappear as if we never existed.
