Free Web NovelChapter 40: I HATED CALLUM. I HATED REN
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 me 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 something 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 me anymore and that told me 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 meant his teeth were pressed together hard enough to ache.
The anger coming off him wasn’t something 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 formed 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 me instead, and there it was, that look, quiet and heavy and laced with something sitting right between concern and disappointment.
I felt the irritation rise in my chest almost immediately because I hadn’t done a single thing wrong tonight.
Everyone was out enjoying themselves, Callum somewhere across London doing whatever Callum did, Neve with her man, and Ren himself, who had clearly come from somewhere warm and comfortable, probably with his fiancée, so why was I the one standing here being looked at like I’d committed some 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 men, yeah? Thinks he belongs at the grown-up table." He laughed and the sound was sharp, mean and designed to embarrass.
"She’s way out of your league, little boy, because she doesn’t need someone 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 something small and irrelevant, something that didn’t deserve a second thought.
I could feel the shift in the air before anything happened, that particular stillness that comes just before something breaks.
Ren turned to look at the man for the first time, just once, but still said absolutely nothing, and somehow that was more terrifying than anything he could have said.
Then he turned back to me.
"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 came around my waist and he simply picked me 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 me instead of the dance floor and the world had tilted in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol.
"Ren." My voice came out stunned. "Put me down."
He didn’t.
He walked straight toward the exit, his jaw set, his eyes forward, carrying me 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 someone nearby laughing, and the humiliation of it crawled up my throat and burned there.
"Ren, I said put me 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 somehow made it worse. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"I am not a child. You cannot just pick me up and carry me 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 moment he pushed through the heavy exit doors into the alleyway behind the club, sharp and immediate after the suffocating warmth inside.
He set me down on my feet and I stumbled slightly before finding the ground.
The moment 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 me out of a nightclub," I said, and my voice was shaking, though not from the cold.
"You weren’t listening." His tone was still measured, still even, and it was the evenness that finally snapped something loose inside me because he didn’t even look sorry.
"I wasn’t listening?" I laughed, and it came 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 me up off the floor in front of everyone like I was something you owned."
Something 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 came 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 me 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 me and you never stop to ask, you never just ask, you just decide and act and expect me 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 me 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 screamed 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 me, Ren. You don’t own me!"
I looked him dead in the eye, using the one weapon I knew would hurt him the most. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
"I am older than you," I hissed, my voice trembling with bitter resentment.
"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 me 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 something cold, dark, and dangerous.
He leaned in even closer, his shadow completely swallowing me 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 came back to that table to find you because Neve texted me.
Everything I’ve ever done, every time 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 came to take care of you because of her. But you’d rather throw yourself at some 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 me," 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 me gasp. "You want to be independent? You want to prove how mature you are? Have fun finding your own way back to the apartment."
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, slammed the door shut, and the engine roared to life before the car sped away into the city darkness, leaving me 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 came 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.
