Page 27 of Pain

Oh, shit. We might not have done anything, but no one else knew that, and if they saw him leaving my room in the morning...

“Yes,” I said firmly. “The less complication, the better.”

He pressed a kiss to my forehead, then slid out of bed and left the room as quietly as he must have come in.

I put my fingertips to the place where his lips had touched me, the skin burning with the feel of his kiss, and watched the door close behind him.

***

AN HOUR LATER, I THOUGHT it had been long enough since Knight had left for me to officially wake up. If anyone had seen him walking the hallway and then seen me right afterwards, it would have been a sure giveaway that we’d been together. Not together, together, obviously, but no one else would know that.

I thought I was playing it safe by taking my time before emerging from my own room. The rest of the club might have voted to let me stay and even go to battle with Devil over me, but that didn’t make me a trusted member of the club. It didn’t even make me a trusted guest, really.

I didn’t have any room to step outside the lines, and sleeping with the president would most definitely have been stepping out of my lane. People would have assumed I was thanking him for letting me stay—or worse, paying him for the privilege—and I didn’t want that stigma hanging over either of us.

Okay. Enough thinking. I was hungry and badly in need of coffee.

I swung my legs out of bed and stumbled toward the only clothes I had here. I’d stripped out of them last night and left them on the floor, too tired to care that they’d be even more wrinkled in the morning. At some point, I needed to figure out how to get something else to wear, but for right now, for making my way to the kitchen and getting some coffee, these would do. I slipped into the jeans, which had seen better days, and then drew on my T-shirt, ripped in the shoulder from the fall from the truck, and then glanced at myself in the mirror over the dresser.

I looked exactly like someone who had jumped out of a moving truck and found herself in enemy territory, then slept twice without the benefit of refreshed makeup, should look. In other words, I was a mess.

I moved shampoo, conditioner, and new makeup to the top of my list for today, then reached for the doorknob and drew open the door.

The hallway outside was deserted and very, very quiet, and I paused in the doorway, realizing that all of the men were probably either gone or out in the garage, preparing.

They were going to war today. Going to throw the gauntlet down at Devil’s feet and pay the price for it.

And they were doing it for me.

I closed my eyes against the pain that brought with it and gritted my teeth against the sudden fear for Knight. Three days ago, I’d known him only as a name and a face, and as the embodiment of everything Devil hated.

Now he was a man who’d saved me not once but twice, who’d held me while I shook off a nightmare. He was the man who’d told his crew that he was willing to protect me no matter what. The man who’d gone to war with Devil because Devil had abused me.

So much more than a name and a face.

So much more than I knew what to do with.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the hallway and turned toward the kitchen. The path took me right past Knight’s door, and I paused there, my fingers tingling with the need to knock and see whether he was still here, maybe having gone back to sleep after a night of sleeping shoved into my tiny bed with me. Then I looked up and saw Mandy sitting at the table in the kitchen, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the table in front of her.

I froze, wondering whether she’d noticed me or not. I didn’t know Mandy well, but I knew her reputation, and she looked like she’d been up drinking most of the night. Her eyes were surrounded by dark circles, her mouth drawn down in something that was half-sob, half fear. She looked...

Terrified. She looked terrified. And the moment I realized it, I felt a stab right in my gut that told me I understood exactly how she felt.

I was hoping Knight was still in his room, sleeping off a night of having to comfort me. And I was hoping that partially because if he was still in his room, it meant he wasn’t on the road yet, headed right toward Devil and his crew and war.

Headed, potentially, toward his own death.

We hadn’t talked about it at all yet, mostly because I’d been too wrapped up in my nightmare to think about the world outside, but Knight was on his way to declare war against Devil, and he was doing it by heading right into Devil’s territory with all of his men. It was a suicide mission. A death trap.

A ride that he might not come back from.

And Gemini was in the same exact position. As Knight’s VP, Gemini was the one Devil’s men would shoot at second. First, if they were standing closer to him than they were to Knight. I had very little experience with Gemini himself. In fact that only experience I had was yesterday when he’d been listing for Knight all the reasons that they should send me packing rather than allowing me to stay.

I didn’t think he liked me much. In fact, I was positive of it. Not because he’d ever met me or because I’d personally offended him or anything like that, but because I brought danger to his crew. His family.

And now, because of me, they were on their way into the Devil’s lair, literally, to put their lives at risk.

All of those thoughts passed between Mandy and me in the space of a heartbeat, our eyes locked and our lips sealed shut, and I knew right then that she might not hate me—might even like me in another life—but right now, for whatever it was worth, I was the reason her man was out there putting his life at risk, and there was no way in hell she was going to sit there and have a conversation with me about it.