Chapter 8: Wolf.e: Chapter 7

As expected, my men trailed through the crowd behind me, Layla and her girl gang following behind them.

The tables are large and each seat twelve easily. I watch as Brinley hesitantly takes a seat directly across from me, opening and spreading her napkin in her lap like she’s at a state dinner.

The movement from her shaking out the fabric fans her scent over me. She smells like sweet summer blooms and fear. It’s fucking intoxicating. She fidgets with her cutlery, rearranging it. I’m lost in watching her place her fork on the left, knife on the right, just as she’s probably been taught. A good girl with manners, etiquette, and class. I should be bored as fuck right now but there’s just something about her that continues to draw me in. Her first finger slides up the blade of her sharp steak knife, caressing it as she sips her glass of wine. I wonder why she’d pick the knife as her comfort while I sip my whiskey in silence. She continues as she looks around, not even realizing she’s doing it, and my thoughts run wild with the possibility of what lies beneath her surface.

The table listens intently as Kai rambles on with a story like he always does. Fucking kid never stops talking. I shift forward in my seat, just enough that I can make out her scent in detail… I take in a heady breath and my mouth waters. Jasmine with a hint of honeysuckle.

The chatter is never-ending while more whiskey is poured, and dinner is carted out. The local catering company the club hired has been working all day in the commercial kitchen attached to the hall.

I watch Brinley listen intently to Layla ramble on about wedding details but I don’t really hear any of it. The candlelight from the table casts shadows on her supple skin, her shiny lips are painted a glossy pink. She wraps them around the rim of the glass. When my cock pulses I know my plan to find her uninteresting is failing me.

She’s completely out of her element, but she’s curious. Looking around the room trying to drink us in, trying to make sense of why we seem so civil. We aren’t but what she’s getting is our club on best behavior for Ax.

“So, Brinley, you grew up here?” Kai asks, leaning forward onto his palm with a fuck me look on his pretty boy face.

She smiles at him in response and it’s fucking earth shattering. The way those full pouty lips curve upward over straight white teeth for Kai of all people serves to heat my blood.

As do those gorgeous dimples in her cheeks that appear for him. They match the one in her chin.

This fucking guy. His dick is still probably wet from the blonde he took into the pool hall earlier.

“Yes, over on the corner of Netherwood and Spruce,” she answers in that raspy, soft voice. “I just got back to the house last week. My mom left it for me when she passed but I haven’t been the best at keeping up with it the last couple of years.”

“The McCurry boys gave her an insane cost to replace the porch.” Layla takes a bite of fresh bread. “You boys need to have a chat with them about it,” she orders, nudging Ax.

Ax nods of course. He’s a fucking slave for this woman.

“No, that’s fine, termites are an expensive fix…” Brinley says. “I don’t want any… trouble.”

My men look around the table at each other and grin. She’s Layla’s friend so they’ll be respectful. She probably thinks we’re gonna go bang down their door and threaten them.

I mean, it’s possible but the stereotype is amusing, nonetheless.

“The whole thing needs replacing. I just started working with Layla’s brother at Crimson Homes. I’ll have it fixed up by the end of the summer. No need for a talk,” Brinley adds, resting her hand on Layla’s arm, her pale pink fingernails shine in the dim light. The beast in me imagines what they’d look like with my blood under them after she tears up my back.

“I’m pretty good with wood, I could probably take a look for you.” Kai gives her his best dazzling smile, and I grit my molars to stop myself from cuffing him up the back of his head.

Brinley smiles nervously and averts her eyes from his, her innocence taking over. I kick him sharply under the table without looking up from cutting my steak. Kai turns his attention to me. I lift my gaze to take my bite and shake my head slightly only once, no one else would notice. Kai nods and grimaces, understanding I’m telling him to back off.

My eyes flit to Brinley’s and the moment I meet her gaze she looks away. I take another bite of steak and watch her talk to Layla. Every time I feel her eyes on me, I focus on her, and every time she looks away, pretending she wasn’t looking at me.

It’s a game I could play all night.

You can look away all you want, but you can’t run from me, little hummingbird.

My VP and cousin, Jake, stands with a head nod and a smirk to the table beside us. I follow his gaze to a sweetbutt and know he’s about to hook up. He’s always ready to party and is extremely impulsive which is why his father, my uncle Ray, nominated me to take over as president for him before he died. I didn’t want to take it from Jake, but luckily for me, Jake didn’t seem to care. He was happy to be VP. This way, he can drink copious amounts and party his life away. Two things I have zero interest in doing. I’ll knock back a shot of whiskey or two but aside from that, my body is my fucking temple.

I grab his arm. “Be back here in thirty minutes, you aren’t missing toasts,” I say, and he nods before stealing out the clubhouse door.

Jake listens and slides back into his seat twenty-five minutes later just as Shelly starts the rounds of speeches after dinner and has all the girls at the table tearing up. Ax’s father was my uncle’s Enforcer and his father before that was Sergeant at Arms for my grandfather. The club is in all of our blood, and Ax and I already have an unbreakable brotherhood. We served three tours in the Middle East together. That shit bonds you like nothing else.

I watch Ax now as his mother talks and Layla tears up, he’s all in for this fucking woman or so it seems.

Layla is cool, I’ll give her that, but as I listen, all I can think of is Ax on his knees before he met her, no more than a year ago, on the middle of the pool table while two brunettes traded sucking him off in front of everyone. A competition to see which one would earn his cum down their throat first.

He tried to pass them off to the rest of us after, to which I gave him a hard fucking no. I’m all for fucking women but there isn’t a damn thing they could do to earn my cock down their throat. Especially the ones who hang around here. No clue where their mouths have been.

I watch the two lovebirds across the table now. Ax has his arm around Layla’s neck and he kisses her on the lips like he is actually committed to her for all eternity.

Layla champions all her girls for more shots, and after speeches the party gets going. I take a few minutes to do my diligence of making my way around the room and talking to everyone important. We have several members from different charters here and some of their ol’ ladies. Not all the men bring them along, some of them treat events like this as a release from their constants. Ax and I also have ex-military buddies who have shown up for us. Men we spent time with in Kuwait and Afghanistan. Seeing these men here tonight brings back all sorts of memories from both ends of the spectrum. I make my way back to the table to find Brinley and Layla acting out some sort of choreographed dance while seated at the table, and I keep on eye on the proper little hummingbird that seems to be loosening up.

“We did at least ten of these over the years for our church youth groups,” Brinley tells the girls.

“Do you still remember every single one?” Layla asks her, laughing as I rejoin.

“I cannot see you as the little girl in the front row every Sunday…” Chantel says to Layla as she laughs, gulping back a shot—probably her tenth. I’ve seen that woman drink men under the table on any given night.

“New girl, I could see,” she says, pointing to Brinley to which they laugh again—all of them but Brinley, which just solidifies to me she may not always enjoy her good girl persona.

Before Brinley can speak, I sit. She straightens right up, and her eyes nervously focus on anything but me, instead paying attention to her half-filled glass, people talking and milling about, the girls.

It’s okay, I have a big enough ego to handle her evasiveness. I already know her secret.

She wants to look at me.

My phone buzzes on the table just as we’re all through toasting Chantel and her maid of honor’s speech. No sooner does mine buzz, but every one of my men’s start buzzing and dinging simultaneously.

I’m instantly on high alert, my hand covers the gun concealed under my cut at my hip, and I look around the room for threats. I open the text, it’s a photo from an unknown number, of myself, Kai, Ax and Jake in Jake’s dad’s old Silverado yesterday at a stop light leaving Lakeshore. DOS territory.

We were there to stake out across from the coffee shop watching for Gator’s men picking up his weekly Percocet. You can’t even see us through the tinted windows. I can’t understand how they knew we were there—Jake’s truck isn’t registered to him. There’s no way they would’ve known it was us—

The entire building shakes as an explosion rocks the outside of the club house. It’s instant pandemonium. Women scream and people get up and start running for shelter. I stand without thought and get to Brinley in one stride. I wrap one arm around her waist. She gasps and tips her head back, looking into my eyes, her face just a few inches from mine. Her eyes fill with fear as I pick her up in a rag doll carry and following Ax and Layla, we burrow the girls into a hallway alcove for safety.

When I set Brinley down her mouth pops open, but she doesn’t speak. She breathes in shallow breaths, the way the body does when it’s dipping into fight or flight.

“Stay,” I order.

She closes her mouth, gulps and nods. Her ocean eyes and the way her throat works to swallow threatens to hold me, but I know I have to go.

“Don’t leave them for one fucking second! And no one leaves this building!” I yell to Mason over my shoulder, then turn to Chris, one of our prospects. “Lock it all down, now!”

It’s only been twenty seconds, but I’m already running to the front door forty feet away. I see the Silverado is engulfed in a mass of flames and smoke in the parking lot near the hall. We fly through the clubhouse door. I don’t even have to turn to know Jake, Ax, and Robby J—one of my most trusted and longest-patched members—are behind me.

Mason, Kai, and the grandpa of our group, Flipp, stay inside and keep the room as calm as possible. Out here we’re poised and ready to attack whoever the fuck somehow got through our security system and our gates.

Ax and I are first. We move like trained operatives, organized and stealthy. I’m searching for something, anything I can shoot at. I two-finger point to Jake and Robby J then to the woods beyond our premises. A couple more of my men are outside now, putting out the blaze with the two-hundred-foot hose we use to spray down our metal building.

My boots are quiet on the gravel. I hear something near the gate and turn and aim my custom 1911 at the sound. I see the fucker instantly behind a stack of pallets at our gate. His cut tells me he’s a Disciples of Sin prospect and that he just failed.

He’s probably going to die, but not until I get all the intel out of him that I want. I’m seething as I move toward him. I want to know how the fuck he got past my security gate. He moves his hand behind his back when I approach him. He knows there’s no point in fighting. If he runs he’s dead.

“Don’t fucking do it,” I warn him. He tries to pull out his heat and take aim at me, but I’m faster. I take my shot and it hits him in the hand, blowing two of his fingers clean off. His gun drops to the dirt below and he howls in pain.

“Move an inch you’ll lose the rest,” I say, unmoving and calm. Once I make it to his kneeling body, I see he’s frantically squeezing his two severed fingers in an attempt to stop the bleeding. I pull his skinny ass up by the cuff of his shirt and rip his cut from his body in one clean movement, dropping it to the ground and spitting on it. He’ll never put it back on. I signal to Ax as I haul this pain in my ass to the cargo van at the side of the clubhouse.

Motherfucker.

Can’t even get one fucking night off.