Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3)

by Jessica Gadziala

  I closed my eyes tight and let myself believe. If only for the moment, I let myself have it without thinking about it, without analyzing it.

  "What about yo..."

  "Shut it," he said, but his voice sounded calm, almost sated. Which wasn't possible seeing as I was the only one who got to have an orgasm.

  "But you've got to be uncom..."

  "Woman," he growled and I felt a laugh burst from my chest. He pulled me backward suddenly and watched me laugh. "I was wrong," he told me when I trailed off.

  "Wrong about what?" I asked, my head cocking to the side.

  "Not cute," he said, shaking his head.

  "I'm not cute?" I asked, feeling a sinking sensation inside despite the fact that I had argued with him about calling me cute in the first place. I realized suddenly that I did want him to think that. I wanted him to think I was cute. It mattered. It shouldn't have, but it did.

  "No," he said, looking almost grave. I know my face must have fallen because his lips quirked up. "Not cute," he said, hand going to my cheek. "Beautiful."

  The word turned my bones to liquid, turned everything inside me solid into something fluid. I sat there stunned at the feeling for a long minute before something inside me violently fought it. My body went solid again, reinforced with steel.

  "Mean it," he said, misinterpreting my reaction for disbelief.

  I felt myself nod tightly at him as I slowly inched away. "I believe that," I said, swallowing against the dry feeling in my mouth.

  "You're pulling away," he observed as I, quite literally, did so. "Didn't push," he informed me, bringing up our earlier conversation.

  "I know."

  "Still pulling away."

  "What do you want from me, Wolf?" I yelped, feeling torn in two with the desire to crawl back into his lap and the growing part of me that was screaming at me to run far, run fast.

  "Nothing you don't wanna give."

  Augh. Of course he would say the right thing. I guess the silent-type didn't often blurt out a bunch of stupid, meaningless shit like the rest of us.

  "I don't know what I have to give," I admitted, falling onto my ass by his feet.

  "Your pace, Janie," he said, reaching out to place his hand on my knee and squeezing.

  I looked down at the ground between us. There were a dozen things that could have been said, honest things, true things, things that exposed a little bit of what I was truly feeling in that moment. But that wasn't the kind of woman I was. I looked up with a smirk. "I thought you were supposed to be some badass biker guy. All booze and brotherhood and bitches."

  He didn't bristle and prime for a fight like I would have preferred. That wasn't his style. He just shook his head at me and got to his feet. I watched him curiously for a minute until I realized what he was doing; he was walking away from me. I sprang to my feet and moved to chase after where he had disappeared into the trees. But he was nowhere to be found.

  "Not funny, Wolf!" I called into the empty space, spinning around. "Is this supposed to be some more like training shit? Or are you just being a dick?" I walked a few more steps forward, sure he was close enough to hear me. "What could possibly be your end game here?"

  "Proof," his voice said right behind my ear, causing two things at once- a knee-jerk surge of fear and adrenaline that had me spinning around and striking out like I had been trained to do, but also a complete, almost overwhelming sense of relief.

  "Proof of what?" I asked, my fingers on my left hand aching from where I hit his jaw. He hadn't so much as flinched meanwhile my hand felt like it collided with a brick wall.

  He shrugged. "You stayed."

  "I stayed?"

  "Coulda run. Stayed."

  So it was a test. He wanted to see if I was, what, just biding my time? Letting him kiss me and touch me? Sharing things with him that I never shared with anyone? So that I could eventually disarm him and get away? He gave me the chance to run. I found that both insulting and liberating.

  "And if I ran? What then?"

  "Let you go."

  "You'd have let me go?" I asked, going back a step. "You keep me in your house under guard by your dogs for days but today you would just... let me go?"

  "Things changed," he said, brushing past me and walking back in the direction of the cabin.

  "What changed?" I asked, having to just about jog to keep up with his long-legged pace.

  "Things," he said again.

  "Fine but what things?"

  "Doesn't matter."

  God, he was impossible. "Maybe it matters to me," I tried, keeping my tone even.

  He shook his head and pushed his pace faster as if silently informing me the discussion was over.

  "Seriously? This is juvenile," I hissed, picking up into a full jog and still falling behind him as he did the manly version of a power-walk. You wouldn't think there was such a thing, but apparently there was and Wolf was doing it. "You're really not going to talk to me about this?" To that, I got his head turned over his shoulder at me, a brow lifted in a way that said 'what do you think?'. "Well fine. Two can play that game," I said, slowing to a walk and letting him charge ahead.

  He didn't want to talk to me? Fine. I didn't have to talk to him either. At least not until he was willing to give me some answers.

  Oh yeah, we were going full-on school ground at this point.

  TEN

  Janie

  I got back to the house all of five minutes after Wolf did, intending to follow through with my adolescent 'let's see who can win at the silent game' thing when I heard Wolf's voice from through the open front door.

  "She okay?"

  I had a sinking feeling inside.

  Lo.

  Jesus Christ.

  Lo.

  What the fuck was wrong with me?

  I just... took off into the woods to play with guns and have an unexpected orgasm and shit while Lo was still out there.

  I shouldn't have cared. I told myself that that part of my life was over. I was planning on leaving. I should have already been gone. If things went to plan, I wouldn't have even known she was in that kind of situation. Fact of the matter was, there was a good chance she would have been dead, or wishing she was dead, if I hadn't still been around. I was supposed to compartmentalize that shit from my future- locked up tight, pretending not to care, becoming stone cold.

  But as I stood there listening to Wolf's minimalist side of a conversation, I knew that would never be possible.

  "Wolf," I heard myself whisper and he turned toward me, giving me a nod that I took to mean they had her and she was okay. Or, if not okay, would be that way.

  "Yeah. Right. Okay."

  He hung up and tossed his phone on the counter, holding his arms out and I didn't even pause, I flew at him.

  "Cash got her," he said on impact, arms going around me.

  "How bad is it?" I asked, needing to know because otherwise my imagination would run away with me. And let's just say that my imagination had a lot of awful, sick things to pull out of the cobwebbed corners of my memory.

  "Back ripped open," he went on quickly, not sugar-coating it, not treating me with kid gloves. "Stitches. Couple days. Week maybe."

  "Was she..."

  "No," he cut me off, arms squeezing me.

  Okay. She was okay. Her back was cut up somehow but we had people at Hailstorm with medical pasts. They would stitch her up. She would be good as new. She was beaten again, but she wasn't raped. Thank God for small miracles. She would come back from that. If I knew her at all, she would be pitching a fit after two or three days in that bed. Cash would have to get inventive if he planned on keeping her there long enough for her to heal properly.

  I felt a strange laugh/snort hybrid escape me as I realized that if there was ever a man up for the task, it was him.

  "Tell me they killed the mother fucker."

  "Saved him."

  "For Lo?" I asked, pulling back
and giving him a smirk. "Cash locked him down so she can do it?"

  "Yep."

  God, he was good. When she healed, when the shock wore off, she would want blood. He was a good guy who must have known her pretty well to give her that.

  I felt the weight fall away from my shoulders.

  She was okay.

  Suddenly, I felt bone-deep tired, more so than I had ever felt before. Maybe it was my body's defense mechanism. Too much had happened so quickly. There was so much I needed to think about, to face. Too much. It was all too much. All I wanted to do was shut down.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I'm tired," I shrugged, pulling out of his arms and moving toward the bed, kicking out of my shoes on the way. I climbed into the bed, dragging the blankets up and over my head to block out the light, and I passed out.

  I woke up to a nightmare sometime after darkness had fallen to find that Wolf had climbed into bed beside me again, though not touching me like he had done the night before. I reached for my book and read for as long as my eyes would let me then drifted off again sometime around sunrise.

  When I woke up the second time, Wolf was gone. Harley and Chopper were in the bed with me, looking up with groggy eyes when I shot up off the mattress.

  "Where'd he go?" I asked them as I reached out to pet them.

  Wolf was not the note-leaving type. So I piddled around the house for hours wondering where he was and getting more and more pissed at myself for said wondering.

  What was I doing worrying about the absence of a man I barely knew? True, I'd been living with him for like... six days. But still. I'd lived with people at Hailstorm for years and never worried when they went missing for whole days at times.

  A small voice whispered that maybe I was curious about his whereabouts because he mattered, because I cared about him. Because I was starting to have feelings about him.

  But that was ridiculous.

  I didn't have feelings for any man. Not that way. I never had. I never would.

  If I found myself feeling all romantic, well, that would be the day that the fucking Earth started revolving around the moon.

  "Guys wanna go for a walk?" I asked the dogs as they stretched languidly and hopped off the bed. "I'm gonna go stir crazy in here."

  As I led the dogs outside wrapped in Wolf's shirt that was more mine than his anymore, I knew the walking I should have been doing was walking away. I knew that the last thing I should have been doing was staying and playing house. Because I knew all that was going to come of it was a broken home, a broken heart... or two. I was not the kind of girl who got to have relationships. I wasn't the girl who got to have a man's arms around her every night, to drift dreamily into that thing called love, to wrap it around herself like a security blanket.

  Wolf was a good man.

  I didn't need him to give an Ayn Rand-worthy monologue intimating to me every large and infinitesimally small detail of his life for me to know that. Wolf was a man whose actions spoke volumes when his tongue did not. He saved me. He healed me. He gave without asking for anything in return.

  He was good in all the ways that mattered.

  He deserved to have a woman in his bed who didn't wake up screaming. He deserved a woman who wouldn't flinch away from his touch at times. He should have someone who wasn't a minefield, hidden explosions all around. One misstep and you could lose an arm, a leg, a heart. I couldn't let him be taken down with my shrapnel.

  The dogs led me toward a stream where they bound off and I figured they were hunting so I sat down and waited, contemplating the water that should have been soothing.

  I had to go.

  It was the second time I came to that realization in the past month.

  This time should have been easier. It should have been easier to decide to leave Wolf than it was when I decided to leave Hailstorm and everyone within its fences, people who had become like a makeshift family to the orphan I had turned out to be.

  But as I sat by the river and listened to Harley and Chopper barking manically at something from a distance, I realized it felt the same. It felt like I was trying to convince myself it didn't feel like ripping my roots out of the only ground I had ever felt comfortable in, ground that nourished me and helped me grow, ground that I felt safe planted in.

  I felt the tears tease my eyes and blinked them furiously away as I made my way back toward the cabin, confident the dogs would see themselves home when they were ready. I sat down at Wolf's laptop and I fell into the black hole the dark web afforded me, purposely avoiding that one thread, that one forum, that one post that was what drove me over the edge in the first place, the post that made me decide to throw away everyone I cared about and build bombs in an abandoned store front in the industrial part of town then destroy a building in the hopes that it could destroy the things inside me that made me wake up screaming, that made me untouchable, that made me a grenade with a missing pin.

  I couldn't go there again.

  I was barely hanging onto my sanity as it was.

  So I went on and I found my plans for escape. I found the motel in the mountains where I planned to set up camp for a few weeks before moving onto something more permanent. I hacked into the city cameras to see if my car was still where I parked it at the paid lot beside the docks. Then I searched the fastest route from Wolf's cabin to my car's location.

  I did all this, cleared the history (as if Wolf was tech-savvy enough to even know what a browser history was), ate, showered, watched night fall.

  Still no Wolf.

  I climbed into bed with the dogs and read.

  Morning came.

  Wolf didn't return.

  At this point, I was pretty much the Mom in every teenager's house when they stumbled home after missing curfew and got the 'dead in the ditch' speech. Worry took on a whole new meaning, bringing its close friend Paranoia to the party that had me hacking into all of the city's camera feed looking for signs of him or signs that something was amiss at The Henchmen compound in general.

  After half a day and nothing to show except an alarming amount of drug hand-offs that no cop seemed to spot and business-as-usual at the compound, worry and paranoia gave way to righteous anger. If something was up with Wolf, surely there would be action at the compound. They wouldn't let their road captain go missing without at least sending someone to the cabin like they sent Cash a few days before. So... he wasn't missing. They knew where he was.

  The 'worst-case-scenario-is-the-likely-scenario' part of my brain decided that he probably was at the compound. Most of the members had rooms there. So he must have had a room there. And that pesky negative part of my thought process also latched onto another realization: that where you found hot, dangerous biker dudes... you found hot, skanky, shameless club whores.

  And, well, that made sense, didn't it?

  He'd been holed up with me for a week, sharing close quarters, getting handsy with me, but getting absolutely no relief that wasn't self-induced.

  Of course he would seek out sex elsewhere. How stupid of me to not consider that when I realized first thing in the morning that he was missing.

  I took another walk with the dogs, I rummaged around in the closet, I ate, I showered. Then, with nothing else to do, I hit the laptop again. But this time, I couldn't resist it. I found the forum; I found the post. Then I looked over it until the memories felt as vivid as if they were happening in real time, until the helplessness, anger, pain, and horror were as much a part of me as they were eight years before, until I realized they always would be. I would never be free of them.

  And on that, I threw myself into the bed, knowing the nightmares would come, but not having any other way to keep myself from flying through the woods, tracking him down, and taking aim again.

  "Janie, wake up!" Wolf's voice demanded through my dream. I felt my shoulders being shaken hard and flew up in bed on a silent scream. My heart was hammering in my chest, my body broken out in a cold
sweat. "Easy," Wolf said, his hand moving out and swiping my hair out of my face where it was stuck there with sweat. "You're safe."

  My head whipped in his direction, his massive body, his beard that tickled, his eyes that had a depth I thought I could drown in, sitting on his knees in the middle of his giant bed secluded in the woods. And I realized his words were false, that when I had believed them myself over the past few days, that it was all an illusion.

  "I'm never going to be safe," I choked out, my breath hitching on a sob that felt ripped from somewhere primal and unstoppable inside.

  "With me, you are," he objected.

  I felt my head shaking roughly side to side. And then it happened too fast to fight. The tears welled up and spilled over, running hot streams down my face. There was no stopping them. The dam inside broke and I realized for the first time that the well it stopped was bottomless. It was fed from somewhere deep and might never dry up. I could feel my face twisting into horror that I finally lost the fight with my emotions after all this damn time. Wolf made some sort of rumbling sound in his chest, his hands reaching out and brushing the wetness off my face. But it was just replaced a second later.

  "What is it?" he asked, his face a mask of masculine ineptitude when faced with feminine tears.

  "I can't," I objected, shaking my head as I dropped my face into my hands.

  "I can take it," he said with so much confidence that I wanted to believe him.

  "No... you can't," I objected. No one could. I barely could and I had lived through it.

  "Janie..."

  "Fine!" I screeched, flying off the bed, vision blurry with tears as I threw his laptop lid open and started typing. "Fine. You think you can handle it? Fine. Look!" I demanded, storming away from the laptop on the dining room table and sitting down in the center of the bed, arms crossed, not bothering to try to stop the tears because I knew it was no use. Everything about me was a challenge, daring him to go, to look, to see that he didn't have the stomach for it.