Page 10 of Wraith
Unease knots in my stomach as I go back to what he said when we arrived. Who the hell is Abby? Something sharp and achy wedges up in my chest, nearly stealing my breath. Abby… a house full of poop smeared all over—it seems like something a child would do.
Surely someone would have told me if today I wasn’t just becoming a wife, but also a mother of sorts? And who was looking after her? Did he leave her alone?
My head swims and I have to take a step forward and blink hard against the blackness edging in at the corners. My hand grips the wood railing, and I curl my fingers around it, letting my nails bite into the wood painfully in order to ground myself.
All I can do is stand out there and take large gulps of air. I try to force myself to think about my sisters. How they’re going to find their new lives. The beast picked me up so fast at the hall, that I left everything behind. My backpack in the roomwe had to get dressed in. My duffel bag of clothes in my father’s truck and my boxes of things in my brother’s.
I guess I’ll have to deal with it in the morning. Right now, I don’t even have a phone. I left my purse back in that room, under the stack of clothes I wore to the hall before we were forced to put on this sham of a wedding.
Stephanie seemed happy enough with her man. The light-haired, gentle faced Wing was completely captivated by her. Thinking about their easy, shy smiles undoes a few of those tightly coiled knots in my belly. When I think about Ami, though, her dark-haired groom passed out at the table for everyone to see, Ami looking like she’d rather cut and run than go home with him… I just hope that she can get it figured out. We don’t need any kind of trouble. Not between our clubs.
I want to laugh out into the night, into the rows of darkened houses, the light leaking out behind closed blinds to alleviate the inky black. One streetlight stands on the corner, casting a bronze glow onto the crumbling asphalt street below. I wonder if it would take notice, if I laughed. If there would be anyone to hear me and peek out the window and wonder about the wide eyed, frantic looking woman standing in a torn wedding dress looking like it’s her funeral, not the happiest day of her life.
I hate my father at the moment. There have been many times over the years when I detested him. When I wanted to snap and snarl and fight back against his rule. When I wanted to push back, lash out, scream and rage. Instead, I saved my tears for my pillow every night, where I could release my emotions in private. But this—using his daughters, his own flesh and blood, for this alliance, threatening us with the repercussions of war and people getting hurt if we didn’t agree—it’s too much.
I let my frustration at the unknown get the better of me. I don’t want to be some spineless thing forced into this new life. I don’t want to cower away. I want to face it head on. This is the first chance I’ve had to be out from under my father’s thumb. I’m not going to let another man rule me the way he did. I’m going to stand up for myself. Take charge…
Head held high, I storm back into the house to find out who the hell Abby is. Whatever awaits me in there, I’d rather know now, than stand out here, speculating about it, letting my mind run wild and letting panic claw its way into control.
The smell is still terrible, though it’s abated, like Wraith opened a few windows.
I don’t find him cleaning up. Instead, I round the corner from the entrance into the living room and find Wraith bent over at the corner. I can just make out the edge of something pale sticking out and I march over.
If that’s how he treats his daughter, standing over her and scaring her like a black robed grim reaper of the night, I have something to say about it.
I slam my hands to my hips and just as I’m ready to lay into him, I get close enough to peer over his shoulder and my words stick in my throat.
Because it’s not a child at all.
And Wraith isn’t trying to intimidate her or scare her.
One big palm rests on the shoulders of a cream-colored dog, tan with darker brown splotches. She’s shaking violently, her head down on the floor between her front paws. Her bottom end is dirty, confirming she is indeed the poopculprit, and it doesn’t take me long to figure out why. My eyes stray down to her back legs, but they’re all wrong. They’re stringy, that kind of useless look that muscles get when they don’t have a purpose. They flop uselessly beside her, and I realize that she can’t use them.
Wraith keeps one hand on the dog’s trembling body and with the other, he gently smooths over her silky looking ears.
I sneak a glance at his face, and all the breath rushes out of my lungs. He undoes me, with the gentle concentration there, his bottom lip worried between his top teeth, his eyes burning with love and compassion. He’s so fierce, but so gentle too, that it makes my heart stop. It restarts with a thud that shocks me. Wraith doesn’t have one of those faces anyone would call beautiful. It’s too ruggedly masculine for that, but in that moment, he looks wondrous. Enough to take my breath away.
Because the lost little part of myself, the part of myself that was never truly loved or wanted by either of my parents, wants someone to look at me that way. Look at me like for the first time, I’m really being seen. Look at me like I’m treasured beyond everything imaginable.
His dark eyes sweep to me, and I’m struck by their tenderness. “This is Abby,” he says softly, his voice as beautiful as that tender expression. “Her back legs are paralyzed. She has a wheelchair, but I don’t put that on her when I’m gone, because if she tips over, it can be hard for her to get it righted. She’s used to scooting around the house. It’s easy for her, on the wood floors. She wears a diaper, but I guess it came off.”
I blink. This is not at all what I expected. “Why- why is she shaking?”
Wraith’s shoulders heave with his breath. His face changes, contorts with rage when he faces me, his eyes becoming nothing less of fearsome, and the perverse part of me, something I didn’t know existed, the animal part of me, embraces that dark rage. I want him to be spurred to that black protectiveness for me too. That look that says he’d kill anyone who hurt Abby.
“She came from a shelter. Kind of. They got a call about a bastard who beat his dog all the time. He’d do it in the fucking front yard for the whole neighborhood to see. One day he laid into her. Beat her so bad she wasn’t moving. Left her out there to die. A woman who lived a few houses over finally couldn’t take that shit anymore. She called the cops and they got animal protection involved. They took her away from the bastard, but they were too late. Never fucking did a thing until she was paralyzed. He kicked her so hard he broke her spine.
“They were gonna put her down, but that lady who called checked in on her and said she’d take her and find her a home. She helped raise money for her surgeries online, for the care she needed. No one knew what her name was, but that lady, her name was Nicole, she thought Abby sounded nice. It stuck.”
He pauses to stroke the dog’s ears. Rubbing his fingers gently in a soothing manner. “The community raised almost ten grand for her. When I joined The Riders, I’d had a hard run of shit for a while. Steel thought it would be good for me to have something to care for. Something to keep me straightened out, I guess. He was right. He got Abby for me. Don’t know how, because there were probably a ton of people who wanted to adopt her, but he got her and gave her to me. She’s been like my kid ever since. I reached out to this company I saw online, when I was researching how the hell to care for a dog who wasparalyzed, all the medical stuff I had to figure out, and they built her a wheelchair so she can run again.”
“So…” It’s a little hard to force out words past the fist-sized lump clogging up my throat and the pain in my chest. “She’s scared when she thinks she did something wrong?”
He nods and his features soften out again. When he smiles, it takes me by surprise. I feel that strange breathlessness again, that sensation that goes straight to my stomach and clenches up in there. My hand itches and I have to dig it into the folds of my dress to keep from reaching out and tracing the curl of that smile, the way the tiny lines bracket the edges of his mouth. That smile transforms his hard features, turning them almost boyish.
Out of the three men, I have to admit that Wraith is the most handsome in a hardened, darkly potent kind of way. The shadows in the room play over his face, illuminating his sharp cheekbones and his hard jawline.
He looks dangerous. Sexual. Like a predator with all that latent power bunched under its skin, waiting to strike.
