Claimed by Werewolf, page 8
The shower cut off. “Demi,” he called.
“Uh, yeah?”
A beat, then a sound that lived somewhere between a laugh and a growl. “You dressed?”
I looked down at his sweatshirt. I was adequately covered. “Uh, maybe?”
“Get dressed,” he ordered. “We’re going to your place.”
He came out, toweling his hair. He wore jeans, still unbuttoned, and nothing else. I tried not to look. I failed. He saw me fail and didn’t look away, and that was somehow worse and better in the same breath.
“You look good in my clothes. Maybe put some pants on, too,” he smirked.
I rolled my eyes and grabbed my jeans from the floor. “I’m keeping the hoodie.” I pulled on my pants and piled my hair on top of my head.
“We’ve got eyes on us today.”
“We had eyes on us last night,” I said, arms crossed. “And you didn’t seem to mind.”
His gaze flicked to my mouth, lingered, then dragged up to my eyes with effort. “I minded,” he said quietly. “Just not enough to stop.”
The admission carried a danger all its own. He closed the distance, and I thought he’d kiss me, but he pressed the back of his knuckles to my cheek instead. Gentle. Abruptly tender. Like I was a thing he didn’t trust his hands with.
“Why can’t we stay here?” I asked, because wouldn’t it just be easier to stay here?
“Not today.” He looked past me, toward the window. “Word’s out. Tremor is stirring the pot, so it would be best to stay away from here until things blow over.”
“Tremor.” The name tasted like poison. “He enjoys pushing you.”
“He enjoys seeing weakness.” He tipped my chin up with a knuckle. “Don’t give him a read on yours.”
“And what are my weaknesses, exactly?” I asked and held his stare.
A slow, deep heat passed through his eyes. “I’m learning them.”
It was nothing like a kiss and exactly as dangerous. My breath hitched. He noticed, of course he did, and stepped back first, like he always had to be the one to pull himself away or we’d both go under.
“Come on,” he said, and tossed me my shirt. “We’re going to your place. You stay with me until we get to my bike, Demi. I mean it. Two steps either side and I won’t be polite about how I bring you back.”
“Your charm never fails.”
“Not selling charm,” he said. “Selling survival.”
The ride back to my apartment was thankfully uneventful, other than just enjoying being pressed against Werewolf.
At my door, he stood with his back to the hall while I unlocked it. A wall with tattoos, knife scars, and a patience I hadn’t earned but took anyway. “Inside,” he said. “And keep the blinds closed.”
“Bossy,” I muttered, and slid inside.
“Protective,” he corrected, and I couldn’t even roll my eyes because the word hit me right in the heart.
“Am I okay to shower, or maybe you could join me to make sure I’m safe?” I suggested.
His gaze raked up and down my body. He opened his mouth to answer, but his phone rang. He pulled it out, and any interest he had was now on his phone.
“I’ll just shower while you take your call,” I muttered and waved my hand over my head as I headed down the hallway to the bathroom.
I showered in record time. I scrubbed the scent of Werewolf from my skin until I hated that it faded. I toweled off and ducked into my room across the hallway to dress. Werewolf’s voice was a low murmur while he still talked on the phone. I pulled on a tank top and then pulled his hoodie back on. It was going to have to be pried out of my cold, dead hand before I ever gave it up.
When I stepped back into the hall, he was leaning against the opposite wall, staring at nothing like it had offended him personally. His eyes flicked to me, down my body, and then back up.
“Approve?” I asked.
He nodded. “You could wear a trash bag and I would approve, babe.” His eyes dropped to the floor. “We’ve got a change of plans.”
I frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Prez called. We’ve got church.” He paused. “Club meeting. I need to be back for it.”
Well, that certainly was a change of plans. “Is that a bad thing?”
Werewolf shrugged. “Won’t know until then.”
I looked down at what I was wearing. “I look okay for your wolves?” I asked.
“You look like mine,” he said, so simply it set off tingles under my skin I couldn’t control.
We were quiet on the way down the stairs. I noticed his hands hovering at the small of my back without touching, the almost-contact making my body overreact like he’d branded me. At the curb, he scanned the street. Something in his stance changed, stiffened a degree most people wouldn’t catch.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He didn’t move for a count of three. “Get on.”
We cut through the city to the clubhouse, the neon skull still buzzing even in daylight. The lot was busier than when we had left. Bikes lined like a shining warning, while men and women were scattered in loose clusters all around. Heads turned the second we rolled in. I made myself look past them and kept my palm flat between his shoulders as he eased the bike into a spot near the back door.
He turned the engine off. The sudden quiet rang.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” I said truthfully.
He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Honest. I’ll take it.”
Inside, the air was thicker with the music low and a TV murmuring in a corner. A few faces I recognized from the garage watched with open curiosity. The women’s looks were cleaner cut: evaluation in one glance, verdict in the second. A brunette in a leather bustier, with winged eyeliner, drifted closer on long legs and a sharper smile.
“So this is her,” she said, not bothering to make it sound like a question. “Tremor said you were too soft to bite a claim, Wolf. Guess he’ll eat those words.”
I made the mistake of meeting her eyes. Hers dipped to the hoodie drowning me. “Cute,” she said. “He’ll hide you in his clothes until you forget what you are.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, keeping my voice level.
“The flavor of the month,” she sneered.
“Enough,” Werewolf said to her, his voice quiet but like a razor. He looked at me. “With me.”
He steered us to the back hallway. We’d barely passed a door when Tremor’s voice called, “Wolf. Bring your shadow in here.”
Werewolf’s hand tightened a fraction at my hip. “You don’t call her that,” he said without raising his voice.
Tremor lounged by a desk with tattoos crawling up his throat like ivy looking for something to strangle. “What should I call her then? Your future problem? Your present distraction?”
“Try her name,” I said, surprising even myself. “Demi.”
Tremor’s eyes cut to me. Flat. Interested. A snake deciding which way to strike. “Brave. You teach her that, or did she arrive defective?”
“I was born like this,” I said.
“Most are,” he replied. “Then something breaks it out of them.”
Werewolf slid half a step in front of me. Not enough to block my view. Enough to remind everyone in a ten-foot radius he could. “Church in an hour?” he asked.
Tremor’s mouth twitched. “Wouldn’t miss it, and neither should you.” His gaze skated over me one last time, then he headed out of the office.
I exhaled slowly. “I don’t like him.”
“Good instinct,” Werewolf said. “Keep it.”
“What does he want?”
“To find the seam.” He angled his head toward the door to a storage room and nudged me inside. It smelled like old metal, lemon cleaner, and dust. “Yours. Mine. Ours.” The door clicked shut. The noise of the main room dulled to a hum.
“Why are we in a closet?” I asked.
He didn’t touch me at first. Just stood there. The room was small enough that his presence ate it. My skin prickled with awareness. The hoodie felt suddenly too warm.
“To talk without ears listening. You okay?” he asked without looking at me.
“Define okay.”
His eyes connected with mine. Whatever he saw in my face softened something in his. He closed the distance slowly, like he was approaching something skittish. The calloused backs of his fingers skimmed my jaw. My breath misbehaved.
“They’ll talk,” he said. “They’ll push. It’s how they see where you bend.”
“And if I don’t bend?”
His mouth curved, not a smile so much as a show of teeth an inch before one. “Then they try to break.”
“I’m not easy to break,” I said.
“I know.” His thumb traced the corner of my mouth like he was memorizing it. “That’s half the problem.”
“Only half?”
“The other half,” he said, and now his thumb was under my bottom lip and I couldn’t stop the catch of breath, “is that I want to keep you from finding out how close you can get to the line.”
“What if I want to know?” I asked. The words came out barely above a whisper. The room seemed to fold inward with them.
His hand slid to the back of my neck. He brought me in slowly, as if every inch mattered. The first brush of his mouth was a promise. I rose on my toes to answer it and let the world outside the door dissolve.
He kissed like I was his next breath.
He broke away a fraction. “Too much?” he asked, and the fact that he asked at all undid me almost more than the kiss.
“No,” I said. “Not enough.”
Something in his eyes flashed. He stepped me backward until my shoulders touched the shelves. Boxes rattled; a bolt rolled to the floor and spun. He kissed me deeper and pushed me into the shelves. My fingers fumbled at his cut, and he dropped his head to my throat.
“Demi,” he said into my skin, like the word was an answer and a plea all in one. His palms slid under the hem of the hoodie and over the thin cotton of my tank top. His fingers mapped me in slow, sure lines over my ribs, waist, the narrow of my back, and everywhere he could touch.
Voices moved past the door. The outside world returned for a heartbeat then receded because his mouth was at my jaw.
“Tell me to stop,” he said. It didn’t sound like a question.
“Don’t,” I said. It didn’t sound like a choice.
He kissed me again. Slowly turning hungry while bleeding into something that was on the edge of rough. I arched. He groaned. His hand splayed at my lower back. The other framed my jaw.
“Door,” I whispered, uselessly, because it was shut but not locked.
“It’s fine,” he said and kissed me until I believed him.
When we finally broke, the room felt too small to hold the air we were using. We stood forehead to forehead, drawing in the same breath and bargaining with ourselves about what to do next. He smoothed a hand over my hair like the gesture could put back pieces I hadn’t noticed he’d undone.
“I need to go to church,” he said, reluctant.
“I gathered.”
“I’ll keep it short.”
“I gathered that less.”
A huff, almost a laugh. “Stay here. Lock the door. If anyone knocks, no one will, but if they do, you don’t answer. You text me.”
I swallowed the protest, saved the eye roll, and nodded. “Fine. Stay in the closet.”
He kissed me once more, quick and possessive, then was gone. The door clicked behind him, and I was alone. I twisted the lock on the handle and sighed. Not at all how I thought I was going to be spending my day, but life hadn’t really been normal lately.
I checked my phone. No service in the closet. Of course. The hum of voices swelled through the wall, then settled into a rhythm. Time stretched. I traced the edges of a shipping label until the glue lifted.
Minutes or years later, I wasn’t sure, the doorknob jiggled.
My breath shot out of me. It happened again, sharper. “Hello?” a voice called, muffled. Young. Nervous.
Footsteps moved away. Silence returned, then the low thud of the bass from the main room resumed. I unclenched my fist and buried my face in the hoodie. It smelled like Werewolf, and it helped to calm me.
I forced myself to breathe slowly and my eyes moved around to inventory the small closet: two metal shelves, a stack of rags, eleven quarts of oil, a red toolbox with a drawer half-open, a patch kit for something bigger than a bicycle, and at least eight cans of paint.
I was about to start reading the paint colors on the cans when there was another knock on the door.
“Demi?” The voice was close to the door, pitched low. It was familiar, and I knew it was the brunette from the bar with the winged eyeliner. “You in there?”
I said nothing. My pulse kicked up. The knob turned once but didn’t open because I had turned the lock. “Look,” she said, “you can either learn how this place works the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is another woman tells you before the men shove you into it.”
My throat tightened around a dozen stupid responses. I said none of them.
“He’s got enemies,” she went on. “Some with patches, some without. You think being his makes you safe. It makes you visible. Learn where to stand and when not to talk. Learn who not to look in the eye.” A pause. “And learn that sometimes the thing you make a man do to protect you is the one that kills him.”
The floor tilted. I hated that her words got through the door. Hated more that they hit anything inside me that could be hit.
“See you around,” she said finally, and her footsteps receded down the hall.
About five minutes later, another knock sounded, but this time it was Werewolf’s voice that accompanied it. “Open the door, Demi. It’s me.”
I twisted open the lock and yanked open the door.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t really think there would be much happening in a closet, but you would be surprised. Some chick knocked, and then about five minutes after that, your friend with the eyeliner decided to try to offer an olive branch and clue me in on things…” I said. “And doom.”
“Which one?” His tone didn’t change, but his jaw did.
“Brunette. Wingtips sharp enough to cut a man.”
He grunted, somewhere between annoyance and amusement. “She’s under Tremor’s thumb. I wouldn’t listen to a word she says.”
I nodded and was glad I hadn’t opened the door to her. “How was church?”
“Shorter than I thought,” he said. “Longer than I wanted. Prez is… listening. Tremor has his ear and is doing everything he can to take me down.”
“And me?”
“You are what they’ll use to measure me.” He took two steps, erased the space between us, and cupped the back of my neck again. “Which is why I need you to do that annoying survival thing again.”
“You mean stay close and shut up.”
“Yeah, that.”
“You could at least say ‘please.’”
“Please,” he said, and it shouldn’t have hit as hard as it did.
We didn’t leave right away. He kissed me again, this time unhurried. My fingers slipped under the edge of his shirt, and I lost myself in him. It was so easy to do. The kiss ramped up, and his hands spanned my waist while I tried not to moan loudly.
“Wolf,” I said when his mouth cut a line along my throat. It came out like a confession. He lifted his head, and his eyes were a darker color than they’d been when he walked in.
“If I don’t take you out of this room now,” he said roughly, “I’m going to forget it’s not mine to keep you in.”
“We could continue this in your room, but I don’t think I will ever be able to be in a closet again without getting turned on,” I confessed.
His breath broke on a half-laugh that had no business being that wrecked. “Demi.”
“Although you seem to have more restraint than I do,” I said. “You step away like you’re the only one burning.”
“You think I don’t know you are, too?” He kissed me hard with one hand in my hair and the other skating lower. He eased the hoodie up an inch, and his knuckles brushed my bare waist. “Later,” he said finally. “Somewhere that isn’t a hole in the wall.”
“A closet,” I corrected, my head dizzy.
“Semantics.”
We pulled ourselves together. It took longer than it should have to smooth hair, straighten clothes, and find a breath that didn’t sound like it had been borrowed. He pressed his forehead to mine for one last beat, then took my hand and opened the door.
We made our way back to the common room, and Tremor leaned on the bar, talking low to a younger patched member I didn’t know. Prez stood with his back to us, broad and immovable as a door. I didn’t know if we were late to something or early to it, but there was something in the air.
“Run tonight’s still on,” someone called and tossed keys into the air. “Masks optional, bad decisions mandatory.”
Laughter answered. My hand tightened in his. He glanced down and squeezed once. “Stay with me,” he said under the noise.
“Try and stop me,” I said. I would die before I left Werewolf’s side tonight.
We moved together into the current. The winged brunette watched me pass, though her face was unreadable. A prospect wiped down a table like it might confess something if he rubbed hard enough. Tremor’s eyes cut like a blade, then slid away. No more personal commentary, which was somehow worse.
Close to the door, a man I hadn’t seen before unfolded from a chair. No patch, but he wore a cut like he’d been fitted for one and had walked out before they sewed the name on.
“Wolf,” he said, a nod like a test. “Need a word.”
