Chapter 41
Lumi
My heels hit the floor hard as the stranger’s grip was wrenched off my hips, and the sudden loss of contact made stagger backward, the alcohol swirling through my system making everything tilt at a dangerous angle while I fought to find my footing.
I blinked through the strobing pink and blue lights and reached into the empty air for sothing solid, but there was nothing there, so I just stood, swaying slightly, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
When my vision finally settled, the man I’d been dancing with was already straightening himself up, but he wasn’t looking at anymore and that told everything I needed to know before I even turned around.
Ren.
He stood between us like a wall, broad and unmovable, his shoulders cutting off the rest of the dance floor as if he’d simply decided the world behind him no longer existed.
Even in the low, pulsing light of the club I could see the rigid set of his jaw, the kind of tight that ant his teeth were pressed together hard enough to ache.
The anger coming off him wasn’t sothing you could ignore because it had actual weight to it, like a pressure change in the air.
The people dancing closest to us felt it too since they’d already started drifting backward without quite realising they were doing it, until a wide, unspoken circle had ford around the three of us while the music kept thumping like nothing had shifted at all.
The stranger looked Ren up and down slowly and I could see the alcohol doing all his thinking for him, giving his spine a confidence it probably didn’t own sober.
He stepped right back into Ren’s space with his chest forward and his chin lifted, completely blind to exactly what he was walking toward.
"Hey! What the hell is your problem, man?" he shouted over the bass, jabbing a finger toward Ren’s chest.
Ren didn’t even flinch.
He turned and looked straight at instead, and there it was, that look, quiet and heavy and laced with sothing sitting right between concern and disappointnt.
I felt the irritation rise in my chest almost imdiately because I hadn’t done a single thing wrong tonight.
Everyone was out enjoying themselves, Callum sowhere across London doing whatever Callum did, Neve with her man, and Ren himself, who had clearly co from sowhere warm and comfortable, probably with his fiancée, so why was I the one standing here being looked at like I’d committed so kind of offence for simply dancing.
"Ohhh, now I see what this is," the stranger announced loudly, his voice rising as a slow, ugly grin spread across his face.
"You’re one of those boys that likes to hang around with the big n, yeah? Thinks he belongs at the grown-up table." He laughed and the sound was sharp, an and designed to embarrass.
"She’s way out of your league, little boy, because she doesn’t need soone still finding himself, she needs a man who already knows exactly who he is and what he wants. A man that can handle her."
He waved his hand at Ren the way you’d wave off sothing small and irrelevant, sothing that didn’t deserve a second thought.
I could feel the shift in the air before anything happened, that particular stillness that cos just before sothing breaks.
Ren turned to look at the man for the first ti, just once, but still said absolutely nothing, and sohow that was more terrifying than anything he could have said.
Then he turned back to .
"Let’s go," he said quietly.
"I’m not ready to leave," I started, but his expression didn’t change, and before I could finish the sentence or argue or plant my heels any harder into the floor, his arm ca around my waist and he simply picked up.
Not roughly. Not violently. Just completely and without any real discussion, one arm under my knees and one across my back.
Suddenly I was off the ground and pressed against his chest, the ceiling of the club was above instead of the dance floor and the world had tilted in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
"Ren." My voice ca out stunned. "Put down."
He didn’t.
He walked straight toward the exit, his jaw set, his eyes forward, carrying through the parting crowd like I weighed nothing and like the dozen pairs of eyes following us didn’t exist, and I could feel the heat of the stares on my skin, could hear soone nearby laughing, and the humiliation of it crawled up my throat and burned there.
"Ren, I said put down." My voice was sharper now, loud enough that the people closest to us glanced over.
I pressed both hands flat against his back and pushed, but he held on without effort, without even tensing, and that sohow made it worse.
"I am not a child. You cannot just pick up and carry out of a room like I’m..."
"We’ll talk outside," he said, and his voice was calm, which was its own kind of infuriating.
The cold night air hit my back the mont he pushed through the heavy exit doors into the alleyway behind the club, sharp and imdiate after the suffocating warmth inside.
He set down on my feet and I stumbled slightly before finding the ground.
The mont I was steady I stepped back and put as much distance between us as the narrow alley allowed.
I stared at him angrily. He stared back like he didn’t care about my anger.
"You just carried out of a nightclub," I said, and my voice was shaking, though not from the cold.
"You weren’t listening." His tone was still asured, still even, and it was the evenness that finally snapped sothing loose inside because he didn’t even look sorry.
"I wasn’t listening?" I laughed, and it ca out hollow and a little broken.
"Ren, I was dancing. I was having fun, which I am apparently not allowed to do while you go off and live your life without a second thought about mine."
The tears hit the back of my throat without warning and I swallowed hard against them because I absolutely refused to cry right now.
"You left. You went to be with your friends, your fiancée, whoever you wanted to be with tonight.
And I was just here, just trying to get through an evening without falling apart, and you marched in and picked up off the floor in front of everyone like I was sothing you owned."
Sothing moved behind his eyes but his expression didn’t break. "That man had his hands on you."
"I know where his hands were." My voice cracked slightly. "I was handling it."
"You weren’t handling it, Lumi, you were drunk and you were letting him..."
"I was dancing!" The words ca out loud enough to echo off the brick walls around us and I pressed my fingers to my temples, breathing hard.
"That’s all I was doing and you turned it into this, you turned it into a scene and you carried out like I was a problem you needed to remove.
Everyone in that fucking club saw it and I have never been so humiliated in my life."
"I wasn’t trying to humiliate you," he said.
"But you did!" I was literally shaking.
"You always think you know what’s best for and you never stop to ask, you never just ask, you just decide and act and expect to be grateful for it." I shook my head slowly.
"You were grinding against a fucking total stranger, Lumi! You let him put his hands on your body! Do you know what I had to do just to keep my wolf from tearing his throat out right there on the floor?" I could see his anger was back and that pissed off.
I should be pissed. I should be mad and angry not him. It’s my life that looked like a joke not his, his life was perfect.
"I don’t care about your wolf!" I scread right back, the tears finally spilling over my eyelashes, hot and fast down my flushed cheeks. "And I don’t care about your rules! You don’t get to command , Ren. You don’t own !"
I looked him dead in the eye, using the one weapon I knew would hurt him the most.
"I am older than you," I hissed, my voice trembling with bitter resentnt.
"I am a mature woman. I have a child. I have lived a whole life while you were still growing up. You are just a boy compared to what I’ve been through, and you do not have the right to tell what to do!"
He recoiled as if I had physically struck him across the face. The muscle in his jaw ticked violently, and for a second, the sheer silence between us was louder than the music inside the club. The hurt in his eyes turned into sothing cold, dark, and dangerous.
He leaned in even closer, his shadow completely swallowing up, his voice dropping into a low, jagged whisper that cut straight to my bones.
"Then start acting like it," he spat out, the words dripping with pure venom.
"Start acting like a mature woman, Lumi. Because right now, you’re acting like a reckless, selfish child who doesn’t care about anyone but herself."
The words stabbed through my chest like a physical blade. My breath hitched, my mouth hanging open in complete shock.
"You think this is about control?" He continued, his voice shaking with a dangerous level of emotion.
"I ca back to that table to find you because Neve texted .
Everything I’ve ever done, every ti I’d ever showed up, was because of Neve. So stop thinking I want to control you, I just don’t want you to stress my sis.
I ca to take care of you because of her. But you’d rather throw yourself at so random pig in a club just to prove a point to a ghost who isn’t even here." His words shouldn’t have hurt this way but it did.
"Get away from ," I choked out, pushing him with all the strength left in my body. "Just go. Go back to your perfect life and your fiancé. I hate you!"
"Fine," he barked, stepping back completely and throwing his hands up in the air.
The distance between us felt miles wide, and the cold air rushed in to fill the space, making gasp. "You want to be independent? You want to prove how mature you are? Have fun finding your own way back to the apartnt."
He turned on his heel, his heavy boots slamming against the road as he marched down the alleyway toward his car.
He didn’t look back. Not once. He got into the driver’s seat, slamd the door shut, and the engine roared to life before the car sped away into the city darkness, leaving entirely alone in the freezing cold.
My knees shook so hard I had to slide down the brick wall, my hands gripping my bare legs as the tears ca in a violent, unstoppable wave.
The green silk dress felt like a joke now, a thin, useless piece of fabric that offered no protection against the night.
I hated Callum. I hated Ren. But most of all, I hated myself.
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