Page 99 of Riot’s Revenge

“Registered to who?” I asked before Reaper could.

Spider slowly pushed another sheet of paper across the table.

I looked down, hot lava raced through my veins as the breath whooshed from my lungs. Because I knew the name, we all did.

40

MARIA

I rolled over and reached for Riot, but was met with cold sheets, again. My hand rested in the empty space beside me while I stared at the faint morning light creeping through the curtains. His pillow hadn’t been touched, and the sheets on his side of the bed were still smooth. He hadn’t come home, Or, if he had, he hadn’t stayed long enough to make it as far as the bedroom.

I closed my eyes and released a slow breath through my nose. It wasn’t unusual for Riot to leave before I woke up. Club business didn’t care about ordinary working hours, and neither did the men who caused trouble for the Dead Knights. But leaving early was different from never coming home.

Lately, I barely saw him. Some mornings, I woke to the sound of the front door closing and caught the smell of cigarette smoke lingering in the hallway. Other mornings, I found a half-empty coffee cup beside the sink, the only evidence that he had been there at all. Whenever I asked where he’d been, he gave me the same answer.

Club business. Two words that were supposed to explain everything. Two words that explained absolutely nothing.

I pushed myself out of bed and grabbed my dressing gown from the chair. Riot’s shirt lay across the back of it, exactly where I’d left it three days earlier.

The apartment had become too quiet without him. I hated the thoughts that crept into my head whenever the night stretched on and the space beside me remained empty. Because I remembered who Riot had been before me. The club girls waited around the clubhouse wearing almost nothing, hoping one of the brothers would take them into a back room. I knew Riot had never been the kind of man to turn them away. It was part of his past, and after Brandi, I had told myself that was where it had stayed. But every night he disappeared made it harder to believe.

By the time I got to the clinic, I was running on four hours of sleep and enough caffeine to qualify as a medical concern.

Jenna took one look at me as I shoved my bag beneath the reception desk. “You look terrible.”

“Good morning to you too,” I said as I shoved my bag and coat into my locker.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You could’ve at least waited until I’d finished my coffee before destroying what little confidence I had left.”

Jenna snorted and handed me a stack of patient files. “Late night?”

“Something like that.” I carried the files toward the nurses’ station, doing my best to ignore the phone in my pocket. I’d checked it before leaving the apartment, then again in the parking lot. Then at the traffic lights outside the clinic, but nothing. Not even a message telling me he was alive.

I placed the files on the desk and pulled out the first one, but my attention kept drifting toward the entrance every time the doors opened.

For years, Riot had appeared at the clinic so often that Jenna had started keeping a spare mug behind the desk for him. Sometimes, he brought coffee, sometimes food and sometimes he just leaned against the nurses’ station and watched me work until my shift ended. Now days passed without him showing up at all. Apparently, it was possible to miss somebody and want to punch them at the same time.

By lunchtime, my mood had deteriorated enough that even the patients seemed to notice. An elderly man apologized three times for asking me for another blanket. A teenager with a sprained wrist stopped complaining the second I looked at him.

Jenna waited until the waiting room had emptied before leaning against the counter beside me. “Everything all right?”

“Fine.”

Jenna folded her arms. “I’ve known you for over ten years, Maria. Is this about Riot?”

My head lifted before I could stop it. “That obvious, huh?”

Jenna’s eyebrows rose. “Only because you glare at the door every time it opens and look disappointed when it isn’t him.”

I sighed and turned back to the paperwork. “He’s busy. Club business.”

Jenna’s silence said more than words could have.

I sighed and rubbed the space between my eyebrows. “He barely comes home anymore.”

I hated it. I wasn’t the kind of woman who sat around wondering where a man was. I had a career, friends and a life that existed long before Riot forced his way into it. Yet there I was, staring at my phone and wondering why my husband no longer seemed interested in coming home.