“No, my uncle made that for me long ago, before I was born. It’s been blessed, and maybe someday someone else will need it.”
His face softened and he held my hand in his. “Always thinking of others. I wasn’t always this way—the hard man that you see before you. I once wanted the same things as everyone else, but life turned me a different way. My uncle taught me to fear love, and that dark past in my family has shadowed me for years.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to come out of the shadows.”
He lifted his eyes to mine, and Lorenzo seemed different. “Let me take you home.”
Home never sounded sweeter. He helped me up and out of the room.
Before we reached the bar, someone caught my sleeve. I turned to see Atticus brushing at a few spatters of blood on his collar. He hadn’t intervened in the clash between packs because it wasn’t his place to, but he had saved my life.
“Can I still have that dance?”
My eyes drifted down to the tear in his shirt. “There’s no music, and…”
Atticus walked swiftly to a jukebox by the dance floor. After pushing a few buttons and kicking it, the music came on.
I laughed softly and looked up at Lorenzo. “I’m going to dance with that Vampire, and not with your permission. But I’d like to have your approval.”
I didn’t want to explain why I owed Atticus a dance. Maybe I just wanted Lorenzo to trust me.
Atticus lingered on the clean dance floor, the only place in the club that hadn’t been touched by violence. The dark floor gleamed beneath the spray of blue lights, and his bleached-blond hair made him look like a rock star.
And maybe in a different kind of way, he was.
Lorenzo dragged his gaze away from Atticus and rubbed noses with me before letting go of my hand.
And just like that, Lorenzo gave me something I was certain he had never given another woman before.
His trust.
Chapter 21
Home. That word not only defined how I felt with my pack, with the porch steps that led to our front door, and with the lavender scent of my sheets, but it was a feeling I was beginning to associate with Lorenzo Church.
Before we’d left the Blue Door, he’d cleaned every speck of blood from my cane. I felt a twinge of guilt knowing Fox had used it against him, but Lorenzo joked that it probably knocked some sense into him.
We didn’t bother cleaning up the bar before we left because it would have needed more than a mop and a trash can. Wheeler called the owner and suggested he run an estimate on the damages and send Austin the bill. Whether the owner would ban Shifters after this incident was uncertain, but Austin planned to have a talk with him to smooth things over. He didn’t want a backlash from Packmasters who frequented the club.
Cleaners collected the bodies and took statements to report to the higher authority. It was standard procedure to determine if any laws had been broken, which in this case they hadn’t been. Disputes between packs weren’t in their jurisdiction. A Councilman arrived and gave Austin a pat on the back. No one liked hostile rogues living in the community, and Austin gained a little more respect among his elders for handling things on his own.
“Let me look at it,” Reno said, leaning over April’s chair. The only light in the living room emanated from the fireplace on my right.
“You looked at it an hour ago. I promise you nothing’s changed since coming home from the emergency room,” she said with a hidden smile, still reading her book.
Without asking, he reached down and turned her arm so he could examine the stitches. Then he stormed out the door like he had the last time.
“He’s just reminding himself that you’re precious cargo he has to look after,” I said, pulling a beige throw over my legs.
She set her book down and played with a strand of her hair. “I know. It just makes me feel guilty being a liability around here.”
“The only liabilities are the clothes you leave on the bathroom floor that I keep tripping over,” Trevor said from his spot on the rug. He had his legs bent and one crossed over the other. The fire crackled behind him. “Maybe next time you should stay in the room like I suggested.”
I winked at her and gave Trevor a pointed stare. “Had she done that, Fox’s men might have overtaken us. Sometimes the most influential thing on a battlefield isn’t the men wielding their weapons, but the blistering sun, relentless wind, or hammering rain.”
He snorted. “So April is a snowflake? That’s special.”