Page 37 of I am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC 2)
Grainger is on the front porch, smoking a cigarette and staring down the length of the hill toward the parking lot. It’s the very same parking lot, in fact, that I stole Crown’s bike from. Cade just barely glances my way when I step outside.
“Am I going to rot in here forever, or is someone going to fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask, and he snorts at me, stabbing his cigarette out in a nearby ashtray. It’s filled with cigarettes, like maybe he’s been chain-smoking for the last several hours.
“You were shot in the chest,” he quips back at me, glancing over and then reaching out with a single finger to tug down the neckline of my top. His knuckle grazes my collarbone, and I’m forced to bite my lower lip to hold back a gasp. That’s not why he’s looking, I don’t think. Cade studies me with a furrowed brow, examining my injury with feigned disinterest. The bandage is still in place; Nellie’s been changing it out for me every so often, inspecting the puckered pinkness of the wound. “You’re not a superhero, much as you’d like to think otherwise.”
He lets go of me and turns back to his guard duties, staring out at the horizon and the distant shape of the clubhouse. I’ve just finally—thanks to Nellie—found out whose blood was pumped into my veins.
“Thank you, by the way,” I tell him, and I swear, he startles so badly that you’d think I slapped the guy. Grainger turns his brown eyes toward me and scowls—his usual go-to expression—but with substantially less heat than normal. “For your blood.” I reach out and run a single fingernail over the mark in his right inner elbow. He lets me do it and then shudders, taking his arm away and stepping forward so that he can rest his elbows on the porch’s railing.
“Don’t thank me. It isn’t like I had much choice,” he snaps, but that’s a lie. I know it is because Nellie and I have the same blood type, too. She told me that Grainger stepped in because she’d used after I went missing, and she didn’t want to expose me to that.
Maybe part of that is true, but I think it was something else.
It’s because he hates me so damn much.
I mimic his pose, resting my own arms on the railing. Our elbows brush together, and he scowls at me yet again. It’s his signature go-to look. I recognize it now for what it is: a mask. Living with the mafia for three months has brought me a strange, quiet sort of clarity. For years, I let my emotions blind me. That anger that Nellie mentioned, it’s had its hold on me for so long that I can’t even begin to pinpoint its initial birth. Not when my sisters died, but long, long before that.
“What do you want, Gidget?” he asks finally, his tone cutting and acidic. He’s angry at me. Because of Grey, I’m sure. But also … for not picking him? I can no longer stand around and plead ignorance to the world around me. For some time, I think, I’ve been reveling in it. Ignorance is, after all, its own special sort of bliss. “Don’t you have another grand escape planned? Some master plan to steal Beast’s bike and take off?”
I smile at him, my own expression a stropped razor.
“If only. That’s what you like about me, isn’t it? I can’t imagine you falling for a girl who’s anything less than wild.”
That gives him pause. For a moment there, he just goes completely still, muscles stiffening, hands clenching around one another. His tattoos look like comic book art, ready to pop off his knuckles in violent animations. He cracks them and stands up straight, turning to look at me with the most serious expression I have ever seen on his face. More serious than that day at the lake when he warned me that the mafia was back in town.
“Falling for a girl?” he repeats, but even though he’s almost scarily still, even though his face is a horribly sad and dangerous thing, I reach up to put my hand along his stubbled jaw. He wastes no time in pushing me away and stepping back, like I’m dangerous. No, more like he’s always done: like I’m impossible. “Get lost, Gidge.”
This time, I know I’ve got him where I want him. He called me Gidget first. Now it’s Gidge. That’s better.
“You can’t keep a secret for me and then …” I trail off, closing my eyes briefly as I remember his hot hands pushing the folds of my wedding dress out of the way. Fucking me. Even though there was a huge risk to both of us. It was like, we couldn’t bear to resist. Death was preferable to spending another second apart. Three months was too long. The two years between the time we first fucked and now … an eternity.
