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Chapter Sixteen Raya St Claire
Laughter erupts from around the table when Storm entered the dining room with a tray of champagne and champagne glasses. He sets the glasses filled with bubbly champagne in the middle of the table, and starts to hand out a glass to each of us.
I fight a chuckle when I noticed that his nose was scrunched up in disgust. We weren’t champagne people, we were beer, vodka, gin and tonic type of people.
The newcomer grabs a glass of champagne too and takes a sip from the glass. “Fancy,” he mutters under his breath, “I didn’t think that you guys could be fancy.”
“Archie likes to play a host from time to time.” I tell him. “He keeps bottles of champagnes for occasions just like this one, but when Nikolas leaves, it’s back to drinking beer, something else other than this posh bubbly champagne, really.”
The newcomer nods and starts to twirl his finger over the rim of his champagne glass. “To be honest, I didn’t expect the leader of the Red Devils to be so young.”
I lift my right shoulder in a half-shrug, sipping my bubble champagne and feeling the tiny bubbles popping on my tongue. The champagne was very sweet, but I still preferred Geoffrey’s take on gin and tonic any day, or even a damn warm beer. Anything was better than champagne, really. “Archie is young too, you know.” I tell him after I swallowed down the entire glass of champagne in one big gulp.
It’s not that I wanted to swipe the entire glass of champagne in one go, but I needed it. The tension around the dining room table was tense with Bear still giving me the cold shoulder, and the way he still made me feel inside made me want to take the entire bottle of champagne instead of a small champagne glass.
“I expected him to look… scarier … somehow.” The newcomer says. “Like with tattoos on his face, bigger biceps, a beard, a leather jacket and combat boots.” The newcomer looks at the leader of the Red Devils again. “Not a suit and tie, styled hair, and a fancy watch he keeps checking that cost more than all my damn guns.”
I thought the same thing when Archie introduced us to Nikolas a few years back, but although Nikolas did look scary at times, especially when he would have no sign of any emotion on his face, I never really thought he was intimidating.
It’s probably because he was one of the few people we actually trusted.
“Nikolas is intimidating,” I nod, “but he sees us as equals.”
“Archie trusts him?”
“Yes.” I tell him. “You probably thought that Nikolas would come in here and bark out orders at us, did you?” I ask, seeing him lift the champagne glass to his lips before he took a small sip. I could actually hear the bubbles popping on his tongue.
