up and leave, which I half-expected, to be honest. Wolfe wasn’t one to give apologies, and today had already come as a huge surprise. I’d never expected what had gone down today to go down period. At least, not until he opened up to me some more. Sex definitely hadn’t been on the cards, but I couldn’t regret it. Wouldn’t. Not when I’d been craving them and missing them for as long as I had.
Was he sitting outside, on his lonesome, when there was a party going down just a few feet away because he was regretting what we’d done?
It was hard to imagine Wolfe regretting anything.
He tended to do what he wanted, when he wanted. He was an asshole like that. Damn his sexy hide.
“Pepper found the drugs in your room. When Bomber confronted you, you didn’t deny you’d taken them. Just got into a fight with him. Then he exiled you,” Wolfe growled. “That was pretty much how it went down as far as I remember.”
I blinked. “I totally did deny I’d taken the drugs.”
“You didn’t, Luce,” Flame replied, and his voice was soft, loaded with regret.
I cut Dagger a look, but he was shaking his head too. “You didn’t,” he confirmed. “We were all waiting on you to deny it, then you didn’t, and when he told you to get out, you did.”
“And you didn’t follow,” I replied with a snarl, furiously thinking back and trying to recall whether they were speaking true or not. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. That day wasn’t a blank spot in my mind, but it was clouded over with heartbreak and loss. So much so that the details were beyond hazy when I needed them to be crystal clear.
“No. Because you were a traitor and we were loyal to our Prez.” Floorboards creaked as Wolfe moved, and in the shadows, I saw him appear from the gloom.
Christ, it was spooky how I saw his eyes first, and it reminded me too much of coming across a wolf in the wild. Shit, a wild wolf might show someone more pity than my Wolfe. I knew he was a killer, knew what he and the rest of my men were capable of, and I loved them anyway.
“You should have known I didn’t do it.” My eyes loaded with tears. “You knew how I was with him. I was always causing trouble, always getting into fights with him. I was a stupid attention seeker—”
“And taking the drugs fit the fucking pattern, Luce,” Wolfe ground out. “But this time, shit had deeper consequences. The drugs weren’t ours, were they? You got us into a whole heap of shit with the cartel we were running them for.”
“It wasn’t until later, and I’m talking years on, that I started to think you hadn’t,” Dagger told me, and by his tone, I got the feeling he was trying to reassure me. It didn’t work.
“Thanks, I think,” I muttered unhappily.
Flame lifted his arm and curved it around my shoulders. “I didn’t care if you’d done it or not, Lucie. I just missed you and didn’t care what you’d done.”
“You’re not making shit any better, Flame,” Wolfe retorted, and I had to withhold my laugh.
He wasn’t wrong, but nor was he right.
Somehow, Flame’s earnestness was all the more touching because I knew how he rolled. The pyromaniac didn’t even speak to many people, and when he did, it wasn’t like he was trying to be eloquent. He didn’t give a fuck about what anyone thought of him, and yet, here he was, trying to make me feel better.
He couldn’t. Not where this topic was concerned. But hell, I’d been set up with the drugs by my dad who, biological or not, had not only sucked at fatherhood, but who, apparently, had murdered my mother and had my men potentially burn any evidence down after he died too.
Yeah, none of this was going to make me feel better, and we weren’t even talking all that much about the situation itself.
One day, I’d come home with Ryan after an afternoon at the mall. It had been his turn to ‘guard’ me because my father didn’t trust me not to get into trouble—the dumbass didn’t realize I got into even worse shit with my guys around me. But, by that point, there’d been some kind of search in the clubhouse for a kilo package of cocaine that had gone missing.
It had been in my bedroom, tucked underneath my bed—because that