Page 34 of Riot’s Revenge

She looked like she wanted to argue, but she shook her head and sighed. Her eyes met mine, then she nodded and turned to drag her feet toward her car. I waited for her to pull out before following her on my bike.

By the time we reached her apartment building, Reaper, Ghost, and two prospects were already there.

Maria climbed out of her car and stopped beside me. “How are they already here?”

I shrugged. “They were close.” That wasn’t entirely true. Ghost had probably broken several traffic laws getting there.

The building itself looked nice enough, but the furniture scattered across the pavement didn’t. A sofa sat beside the entrance. A dining table leaned awkwardly against a fence. Chairs, lamps, and boxes had been piled beneath a cheap tarp that had done nothing to protect them from the weather. And hers wasn’t the only pile. Pieces of people’s lives were left all over the sidewalk.

“This is mine.” Maria pointed to a pile, and the brothers immediately started grabbing her stuff and loading it into the van.

Then a window above us opened, and a middle-aged man stuck his head out of one of the second-floor windows. “Oh, you’ve finally come back for it.”

The words carried across the parking lot, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Silence followed immediately. Conversations died, my brothers turned toward the building. Even the sound of boxes being loaded seemed to disappear beneath the sudden tension.

My vision narrowed until all I could see was the man leaning out of that window. “What did you say?”

The landlord looked down at me and visibly reconsidered every decision that had led him to open his mouth.

I started forward before I even realized I’d moved. One step. Then another.

Maria’s hand landed against my chest. The contact should’ve been easy to ignore.

“Riot,” her voice cut through the anger flooding my head, “don’t.”

For a second, I still considered walking upstairs, dragging the landlord out of his apartment and teaching him exactly why people lowered their voices when they talked about me. Make him load all of it while we watched.

Then I looked back at Maria.

The anger was still there, hot and ugly beneath my skin, but it collided head-on with the exhaustion written across her face. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, like life had been taking chunks out of her for weeks, and she was running out of pieces to give, and suddenly, it wasn’t about me anymore. The anger didn’t disappear, it just stopped being more important than her.

I pointed at the landlord. “If you ever open that mouth about her again,” I called up, my voice carrying across the lot, “you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if today’s the day I come back.”

The man’s face went pale, his mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out.

“You understand me?”

He nodded immediately, and the window slammed shut a second later.

Ghost muttered something about missed opportunities. Reaper laughed.

I blew out a slow breath, forcing the last of my temper back under control before looking at the pile of furniture still sitting beside the truck.

“Let’s get this loaded.”

Within seconds, everyone moved. The prospects carried some side tables, Ghost somehow managed to balance three boxes at once. I grabbed the sofa.

Maria took a step forward. “I can help.”

“No.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “No?”

“You’ve been awake for how long?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again before nodding and moving to stand by the back of the van.