Page 30 of I am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC 2)
I’ll take her off your hands? Really? What an asshole.
“You don’t have the time to waste wrangling this girl anyway,” Cat adds with a bit of a scowl—but one that isn’t directed at me, not this time. My father turns and leaves the room; René and the rest of the good ol’ boys go with him.
Crown watches him go, seething in silence. As soon as they’re gone, Sin moves forward and pushes the bedroom door closed, turning and putting his back against it. He looks almost … broken? Like the idea of me marrying Beast is a nail in his fragile emotional coffin.
“Don’t you think Daddy Dearest might get suspicious if we start having private caucuses?” I ask, rubbing at my face with both hands.
“We’re on guard duty,” Crown says dryly. “Again.”
I drop my hands to my lap and look up at him, right into those moss green eyes and classically handsome face. He could’ve been a star in thriller films or cowboy movies or something. He could’ve … well, Crown has potential. He clearly was and could’ve been so much more than an outlaw.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Gidge,” Cade snarls out, because that’s his favorite saying in all the world. Jesus fucking Christ. Told ya we had a religious thing going on. He stalks up to the side of the bed like he wants to start a fight with me. “You’ve been missing for three months and the first thing out of your mouth is marry my ass off?”
I look up at him; he’s shaking with rage, and I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t jealous. Or … he’s just mad about the whole ‘traitor to the club’ thing. Right. I must’ve lost a ton of blood; I’m fantasizing.
“What else should I have done?” I query back, sort of hating the fact that I’m cheapening this thing with Beast. It doesn’t seem as … out of convenience’s sake as I thought it would. “Gaz—and probably a large chunk of the club—is going to be suspicious. And you know the weirdest part? For the first time in my entire life, they’re right. For once, I didn’t toe the line. For once, I—”
“Sugar,” Beast warns, giving me a look as Sin finally pushes up off the door to come and stand beside us.
“You don’t want me to say it?” I query, keeping my voice low. Could there be cameras in here? Nah. The guys would tell me about them. And anyway, that’s more of a mafia thing, a snake in the grass sort of move. We revel in brute force and confrontation around here. “That I fucked Sin, stole his keys, and then kidnapped the mafia brat? That I took Crown’s bike with the intention of heading to the airport?”
None of them stop me when I start to talk. They just stand there and let it happen. I imagine this is a side effect of them having thought they’d lost me forever. I’ll get a bit more leeway than usual (for a short while anyway).
“What happened, Gidge?” Sin asks me, his voice low and thick with emotion. I look up and into his pretty gray eyes, wishing that I could’ve picked him. Not … instead of Beast, but alongside. How fucked up is that? There isn’t a single part of me that doesn’t wish we could talk like we did before, before my sisters died and he kissed me in the most inappropriate but devastatingly beautiful way on a rainy, ash-filled afternoon.
As nice as he seems right now, I know he’s angry with me. It’s there, in the trenchant glint of that blade-like mouth, those sharp-edged lips. He could so very easily cut me, make me bleed with words—or another kiss.
I blink past the metaphor.
“Not far from the compound, I came across a roadblock,” I say, remembering the moment like it was yesterday. “I tried to stop, but …” I shake my head and then push the blankets back, showing off my scarred legs for the second time. “The bike skidded, and I grabbed Grey. We jumped off just in time to watch it smash into a mafia-owned Caddy and … explode.” It sounds like a bunch of bullshit when I say it aloud, but that’s the truth right there, plain and simple. “Everything else is true.”
“Why’d you do it, suge?” Beast asks me, squatting down beside the bed and making me nervous in a way that I can’t quite explain. My eyes find his big hands and I wish with a strange fervency that he’d reach out and touch me. Not sexually, not right now, just … for comfort or something.
“Cat was going to make me kill Grey,” I tell Beast, realizing as the words come out how ridiculous they sound. Didn’t I just fire a machine gun into a crowd of wedding guests? Somebody will have died. I will have killed someone anyway, just the way that Cat wanted. So I’m tied to the club. I’m marrying into the club. Fuuuuuuuck. “I wasn’t going to put a gun to some kid’s head and pull the trigger like that.”
