Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6)

by Susan Fanetti

  Pulling the modest ring from its pawn-shop box, Lorraine pushed it onto her left ring finger. It stopped at the second knuckle; twenty-five years of working with her hands had widened her knuckles. She slid the ring off and then put her finger in her mouth to wet it. When she tried again, with a hint of force, the ring went over her slicked finger and found its place.

  What would Ronin think to see her wearing it?

  She hoped she’d have the chance to know the answer to that question.

  ~oOo~

  The restaurant that night was busy but not insane. Over the past weeks, they’d found their new balance. She and Cameron had met with the neighbors and bought goodwill with ‘premium’ cards that gave them free drinks at the bar and special seating for dinner. They’d hired valets and rented the optician’s parking lot, which worked out perfectly; he closed at the same time they opened. And on the weekends, they had off-duty cops on the payroll, working traffic on the street outside.

  Inside, Philip continued his wizardry with reservations and seating. They hadn’t instituted reservations-only on weekdays yet, because they hadn’t needed to. With their traffic and neighbor problems solved, during the week, they ran smoothly at perfect capacity from an hour after open until an hour before close, and the other two hours geared up, or down, nicely. On Fridays and Saturdays, their book was full a month out. Every night, the bar hummed without going crazy.

  This was a pace that would maintain success. Lorraine knew they’d still have crazily busy nights and scarily slow nights, but on the whole, they seemed to have achieved just the right stride.

  With Peter working on this night, the kitchen ran with or without her, and she’d had a little time to work on planning Tristan Winter’s engagement party, which had been postponed a few weeks because the Winters had known Riley Chase and hadn’t wanted to disrespect her with a party too close to her funeral—which they’d attended, along with half of Hollywood.

  Cameron was off tonight, having a birthday dinner with Mac’s family. Lorraine looked at her old engagement ring on her hand and wondered whether she was seeing the signs between those two that would have Mac wearing a ring of her own soon—probably something more elaborate than this, but maybe not. Mac wasn’t much for finery or frippery. She was a jeans-and-tees kind of girl.

  They were young, though, too young to be so serious. Just starting out in their lives.

  Lorraine smiled at that thought. She’d been younger than they when Eddie had given her the ring she was wearing tonight. Her smile faded as she dug under her chef’s coat and pulled Ronin’s note from her jeans.

  I love you. I’m with you. Remember that.

  Why would she need to remember, unless he wouldn’t be there to remind her?

  But she would remember. She would trust in his love, and she would wait. She would be patient and wait.

  She put his note back in her pocket and focused on her work.

  ~oOo~

  She was doing a turn through the dining room, schmoozing with diners great and small, when a light commotion at the front drew her attention.

  Ronin was face to face with Philip, who was smaller than Ronin in every way and was much more likely to throw a tantrum than a punch. But her intrepid maître d’ was holding the angry bear that was her man off, with his hands on Ronin’s chest, literally holding him back.

  But why hold him back? Philip knew him, knew he’d be welcome. That question tempered the blast of relief she’d felt to see Ronin standing there.

  Confused, Lorraine went quickly to the front. As she neared, she realized that she’d been wrong. Ronin wasn’t angry. He was frantic. Wild. He seemed very near a breakdown, in fact. She’d never seen such a look on his face before. Never.

  He wore his kutte; he never wore his kutte when he came to her.

  And then Lorraine saw why Philip was fighting to keep him out of the restaurant.

  His shirt was stiff with dried blood.

  She ran the last few feet, no longer concerned about the commotion or the diners. “Roe! Are you hurt?” She reached for him, but he caught her arms in hands still grimed with blood in their creases.

  “I need you.” He gritted out the words.

  She nodded and pulled him forward, through the dining room full of people, and through the kitchen doors. The news had reached her staff, who stared agape as she dragged Ronin through, but she didn’t stop until she had him in her little office and sat him down on the extra chair. Then she closed the door.

  “God! Let me see!” She dropped to her knees before him and tried to open his shirt. “What happened to you?”

  Again, he grabbed her arms and held her off. “Not mine. Stop.”

  She let her arms relax in his hold, and she took what felt like the first breath since she’d seen him standing with Philip. “What happened?”

  He shook his head.

  Lorraine studied his face, his skin lined with stress and fatigue, his eyes wild with…she couldn’t say. Fear? No, not Ronin. Horror? Maybe. She wasn’t sure.

  He needed her, he’d said. But it didn’t seem that he would tell her what happened. So she changed course and asked instead, “What do you need, Roe?”

  With one of his expressive sighs, he dropped his head and shifted his hold on her so that he had her hands in his. Then he lifted them to his face and held them there.

  “Roe,” she urged. “Baby, tell me what you need.”

  “You,” he said without looking up.

  She didn’t know what that meant, and he obviously wasn’t able or willing to offer her more. So she knelt there and let him hold her hands and be still, while she put her mind to the problem of what to do next.

  After a moment of long quiet, she thought she had a good idea. “Hey.” She shook her hands to get his attention; he hadn’t moved at all since he’d last spoken. “Hey. Roe.”

  He lifted his head and found her eyes. His still showed a tempest of emotion. She smiled, hoping it sent a calming vibe to him.

  “Take me for a ride.”

  ~oOo~

  Before they’d left, she’d taken him to the bathroom and helped him get cleaned up. When she’d put her hands on his kutte, he’d jerked away and then shrugged it off himself, folding it carefully and then laying it on the top of the small chest they kept for the kitchen’s substantial first aid supplies.

  Until his shirts were off and he’d washed from his neck to his waist, she hadn’t fully believed that all that blood hadn’t been his. But his skin bore no new wounds. She’d dried him and handed him a hoodie with the Mythic logo, from the stock she kept for the staff. His bloodied clothes, she’d wadded up and tossed into a garbage bag. He’d made no protest.

  He hadn’t spoken again since he’d said the word ‘you’ as an answer to her question of what he needed.

  But on his bike, once they were clear of the city traffic, Lorraine could feel his tension begin to ease within her arms. They rode along the coast, going north until theirs were almost the only wheels on the highway.

  When the road was theirs, he opened the throttle. Lorraine held on tight as they raced up the PCH, and then she could feel him truly come back to himself.

  They’d reached Point Mugu when he pulled off to the left and stopped the bike at a beach parking lot that had been chained off. Open hours had ended at dusk.

  He held out his arm, and she put her hands on it and dismounted. Then he walked the bike forward, around the chain, and parked on the lot.

  When he came up to her, she took his hands. “Why are we here?”

  Instead of answering, Ronin led her down onto the beach. He led her over the sand, straight to a cluster of rocks, as if he’d been heading toward them all along, and helped her up to a flat ledge. They sat together there and looked out over the ocean.

  The full moon made the sea glitter brightly and cast the night in a hue of rich blue. The breeze was light, and the tide eased quietly in. Lorraine wondered if they were simply going to sit and contemplate the water.
She decided not to question him. If he needed to sit and be quiet, she would wait with him until he had what he needed.

  After a few minutes, he sighed and lifted her left hand to his lips. He pressed a long kiss to her knuckles and then leaned back, running his thumb over the ring she’d put on earlier in the day. It was the first time he’d noticed it.

  “You still have this,” he murmured.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why wear it now?”

  “I don’t know. You left me that note this morning, and it felt like a goodbye. I was scared, and trying not to be. I took it out to look at it and remember, and then I wanted to wear it.” She put her other hand over his. “Don’t worry—I’m not wearing it like an engagement ring now. I don’t think a twenty-five-year-old proposal still stands.”

  “Would you?”

  “What—marry you?”

  He didn’t answer, simply stared into her eyes.

  She lifted her hand to his forehead and smoothed her fingertips over the furrows there—sorrow or fatigue or frustration. Or all of that. “Is that what you want?”

  If it was, would she say yes? If it meant living the way she’d lived the past few months, with him coming and going, flickering in and out of her world, going off to some kind of war every time, possibly never to return?

  She thought she would, yes. If that was the life he needed to live, then she would take him as he came. If that would make him happy.

  Ronin turned away from her and contemplated the sea. Lorraine followed his gaze. Clouds had begun to overtake the full moon, massing over its light, deepening the shadows on the beach. She remembered that there had been an unusual late-summer storm in the overnight forecast—a harbinger of the harsh El Niño predicted for later in the year.

  It seemed hard to believe, on a night like this, with the sea nearly glassy with calm, that the coast might be pummeled by storms soon, might even get a prelude later this very night.

  Minutes passed before Ronin spoke again, but Lorraine was with him, and she waited.

  When he did speak again, he didn’t answer her question. While his attention remained on the water, he said, “The night you told me about Cameron, I rode north. I was sitting right here when I called you.”

  “You were?”

  He nodded. “I sat here and felt all that anger and loss. I felt it and let it move through. Then I worked out what I wanted. You.”

  Feeling remorse dig into her heart, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “I’m so glad. And I know you don’t want me to say it, but I’m more sorry than I’ll ever be able to say, anyway.”

  He nodded and said no more.

  Another minute or two of quiet passed, and Lorraine asked, “Why are we here tonight?”

  A sigh. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you need to work out what you want again?”

  Another sigh. He wasn’t ready to say. So she hooked her arm around his and waited.

  A long time went by before he spoke again. When he did, he picked up her hand. “I didn’t think you’d still have this ring.”

  “I told you. I’ve always loved you. I’d never give this up.”

  “You gave me up.”

  “Roe…”

  A sigh. “I know. Everything’s falling apart, and I need to know what’ll hold.”

  “What happened today? Will you tell me anything?”

  He stared down at their hands. His fingers twisted her ring. “Lost a brother. No—a father. Our President died tonight.”

  “God, Roe. Oh, no.” She resisted the urge to say she was sorry, knowing that he’d reject it. The urge was strong to ask if that death had to do with the blood on his clothes, but she resisted that, as well, intuiting the answer. Of course it had.

  Instead of offering him words he didn’t want, she shifted on their rocky ledge and put her arms around him as well as she could. He let her pull his head down to her shoulder, and then he rested there, loosing a long, exhausted breath.

  They sat like that for another spell of quiet, long enough that the moon disappeared behind a dark ceiling of low clouds, and a cool, damp breeze kicked up from the ocean. Lorraine could smell the storm in it. Ronin didn’t seem to notice.

  He lifted his head. “You asked me once if I was happy in the club.”

  She remembered. “You said you didn’t know.”

  “I still don’t know. I know I love them. I know I swore to stand with them. But sitting here now, I know this, too: when Hooj was telling his son to let him die, he as much as said he’d already had his life.” Ronin put his hand on her cheek; his thumb smoothed over her cheekbone, and she knew he was caressing her freckles there. “I haven’t. I don’t want to go out like that, in violence and blood. You’re here, with me, and I feel like I’m just starting to live. I haven’t had my life with you yet. Not the way I want.”

  She put her hand over his. “Then leave. Come to L.A. To me. I want a life with you, too.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that easy. You don’t just walk away from the club. And I love my brothers. That’s my family.”

  “You and me and Cam are a family, too.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he dropped his hand from her cheek. “Are you saying I have to choose?”

  “No. I don’t like that club, and I don’t like that you do things with them that get people killed and tear you up like this. But we will be your family from now on, no matter what. I will take you as you come. If that means I get half of you, then I’ll take half of you.” She put her hands on his cheeks, framing his face. “Roe. I want you to be happy. I want you to do what makes you happy. Whatever that is.”

  He made a sound like a scoff. It wasn’t a noise he made often; Ronin wasn’t a man who scoffed. “Who says we’re supposed to be happy?”

  Unwilling to get into an existential debate about happiness, Lorraine simply redefined the parameters of their discussion. “Okay, then. Fulfilled. True to yourself.” She pulled his head to hers and kissed him lightly. “Roe. What do you want?”

  “You.”

  “You have me. You have me. What else?”

  When Ronin answered her with tears, shocked slammed through Lorraine. She’d never known him to cry. He tried to pull away, but she held on, pulling him back into her embrace.

  His tears lasted only seconds, and then he sighed them away. He didn’t push away from her, however, and they sat again in quiet. Away on the horizon, over the water, the sky lit with the subdued flash of distant lightning. A storm was definitely on its way. They had a wet ride in their future.

  “I’m tired. I want to rest.”

  She smoothed her hand over his head, offering a soothing caress. “Okay. Come home with me, then. We’ll sleep, and we can talk more in the morning.”

  He shook his head against her neck, then sat back. “No. I’m tired. I need to find a place I can be calm.”

  After a second or two of lingering confusion, Lorraine saw that he meant he was tired overall, that he needed calm overall. In his life. In general.

  “I understand. My answer is the same. Come home with me. There is a calm place for you in my life. In my house—which can be our house. I would love for it to be our house. That’s what I want. Is it what you want?”

  He did look exhausted and sad. Lorraine wondered what it had been like for him, what he’d been like, when she’d broken his heart. This inscrutable, taciturn body guarded a sensitive soul. She’d known that as long as she’d known him.

  She would give him what he wanted, whatever it was. She loved him and would take him as he came. And she owed him. He wouldn’t take her remorse for the past, so she would give him her patience and devotion forevermore.

  When he finally answered the last question she’d asked, it was with a nod.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Horde sat around their table in the Keep, all of them silent. The empty chair, draped with black, at the head of the table seemed to suck all light and energy from the room. Ronin sat in his s
eat at the opposite end of the table and stared at the void where Hoosier had always sat. Always. As long as there had been a Night Horde SoCal, no one else had ever taken that seat. And, though Ronin had been a member of a different charter in a different club before then, Hoosier at sat at the head of a table for long years before that. Most of the men sitting in sorrowful silence in the Keep today had never known another President.

  Since the club had voted, five years earlier, to return to dark work, they had buried four members: P.B., Lakota, Diaz, and now Hoosier. They had buried two Prospects: Peaches and Jerry. They had buried Bart’s old lady, Riley. They had been betrayed and wrought justice on a traitor. They’d nearly lost Trick to that treason.