Ride or Die (Rejects Paradise 4)

“What the fuck are you doing? I need to get you out of here,” he murmurs low, gripping my arm tightly. As he pulls me towards his Veneno, he keeps me right by his side, more than ready to pick my ass up and toss me in if that’s what it comes down to.

“You can’t,” I insist, speaking through my teeth to try and keep our conversation private. “If you try to take me, Snake will kill you. Just please, you have to go.”

Colton finally stops tugging at me as we step in beside his car, and he glances up at Snake, watching him cautiously. “What are you doing, Jade? Just get in the fucking car, we can sort this out later. I’m not about to leave you here.”

“You have to. I walked in here and gave them my word. If I go back on that … just please, Colton. You don’t understand. I know you hate this but, you have to trust me.”

“Trust you?” he questions, taking my shoulders and giving them a tight squeeze, silently letting me know how badly this is killing him. “Are you insane? You just walked straight into the fucking Wolf Den without even thinking about it. Forgive me, but trusting you isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities right now.”

“I know,” I murmur, reaching up and taking hold of his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m just … I don’t even know. I haven’t had a chance to really process everything that’s going on, but I swear, I’m safe here. They need the information that I have, and they know that if I was to get hurt, I’d never give it up.”

“Babe,” he groans with pain in his eyes. “Please just get in the fucking car. We can sort it out later, just let me take you away from here. You don’t belong here.”

“It’s too late,” I tell him. “The second I stepped over the threshold, I accepted my place as a Wolf. I'm one of them now, and there’s no going back. If you try to take me away, they’ll see it as an attack against them, and they won’t hesitate to come at you.” I step in closer to him, needing to feel his body close to mine. “I’ll never forgive myself if you were to get hurt because of my bullshit drama.”

“Hurt?” he scoffs. “If getting hurt is what it takes to get you free from all of this, then I’ll fucking do it. I’d give it all up, Jade. I fucking love you and seeing you here … you don’t fucking belong here. You belong with me.”

I shake my head, willing my eyes not to fill with tears. “I can’t,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t understand. Too much has changed. A lot has gone down today and I haven’t even had a chance to process it all but if you knew what was going on, I promise, it would all make sense. You just need to trust that I’m doing the right thing despite how fucking crazy it sounds. Believe me, if I could have settled this any other way, I would have.”

Colton’s hands run down my arms and over my body until they come to a stop at my waist. He meets my eyes, holding me close. “I know about the baby, Ocean,” he finally tells me his tone filled with the deepest kind of agony.

My eyes bug out of my head as I study him in horror, feeling my world begin to crumble around me. How could he know but more importantly, what could he possibly think of me now? I'm tainted, used, and abused. “What? How do you … I haven’t …”

“I know,” he says, his thumbs moving back and forth over my waist. “Eli, Sebastian, and Kairo came to see me today. Eli told me.”

Betrayal slices right through me. That dickhead promised he wouldn’t say a word. He hovered just outside my car door and gave me his word that he wouldn’t say a damn thing, but apparently, the promise of his word doesn’t hold the same kind of weight that it used to.

“Don’t,” Colton says, cutting off whatever bullshit was about to come flying out of my mouth. “He was worried about you. They all are. He followed you after your appointment this morning. He said you were acting strange, and he wanted to check that you were going to get home alright, but you made a stop that he wasn’t expecting.”

Fear races through me. “They know I’m here?” I question, knowing damn well that if they know I’m here, then Nic would know, and if anyone was able to figure out why I’d come, it’d be him, which means that we’re all in trouble.

He presses his lips into a tight line and nods. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Eli saw you walk in there, but before he could do anything about it, it was already too late. That’s why they came to me. They assumed that you must have told me about the baby and I didn’t take it well. They’re pissed, babe.”