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The words are right there. We need to put clothes on. We need to stop drinking. We need to have an actual conversation about what happens next that doesn’t involve us being mostly naked and increasingly drunk and way too comfortable with each other.

But before I can get any of it out, there’s a sound from outside.

Heavy. Metallic. The sharp sound of something hitting something else with force.

A crash.

The door shudders in its frame.

Every muscle in Wraith’s body goes tight. His head snaps toward the door, and his whole posture changes in an instant — from relaxed to coiled, from soft to dangerous, from the man who was smiling at me over wine to something else entirely.

“June,” he says, and his voice is low and urgent and absolutely fucking serious. “Hide. Now.”

Chapter Fifteen

Wraith

June’s hand appears in my peripheral vision, something metallic glinting between her fingers. The keys. She tosses them and I catch them, fumbling the small brass pieces between my palms while she’s already moving, her bare feet slapping against the floor as she runs for the bathroom. The door crashes open as I get the key into the second ankle cuff. Wood splinters. The frame gives with a sound like bones breaking.

Two men barrel through with guns drawn.

Bruiser comes first — six-four, shoulders like a semi-truck, with a face that looks like it’s been rebuilt from spare parts after losing an argument with a blender. Hawk follows half a step behind, leaner but meaner, with cold eyes and a scar that runs from his eyebrow to his jaw.

Both of them are Sons.

Both of them have their weapons up.

“You thought you could escape, bitch?” Hawk yells into the apartment, his gun sweeping from left to right. “You’re fucking dead.”

Then they see me.

Both of them freeze.

I’m sitting on the floor against the radiator, surrounded by shackles, cuffs, a ballgag, and a cock-embroidered blindfold, wearing nothing but boxer briefs that are doing absolutely nothing to hide the situation happening underneath them. The bondage gear is scattered around me like evidence of something deeply wrong. The almost-empty wine bottle is in my hand. My hair is a mess. There’s a faint red mark on my temple from where June hit me with a lamp.

And I’m hard.

Blatantly, protrudingly, lengthily — you’re damn fucking right — hard.

The silence that follows is the silence of men whose brains are trying to process information that doesn’t fit any category they have available.

Bruiser’s gun lowers slightly. “Wraith?”

“Hey, Bruiser,” I say. “What’s up?”

Hawk’s gun stays up, but his expression has gone from predatory focus to genuine confusion. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I look down at myself. At the cuffs. At the shackles. At the whip that’s sitting on the table about six feet away. At my erection, which has not gotten the memo that now would be a great time to go away.

“What the fuck does it look like?” I say.

“I don’t fucking know,” Hawk says. “I really fucking don’t.”

Bruiser stares at me. Then at the wine bottle in my hand. Then at the scattered clothes on the floor. Then back at me.

“We thought you were dead,” he says. “Or arrested. Or... fuck, man, we didn’t know what happened to you after the clubhouse.”

“I took some personal time.”