by Reid, Ruby
“Ten seconds,” Marco said.
As quietly as she could, Amanda brought her legs up to her chest. She stretched her arms down, her shoulders straining from the effort, until they were under her butt. She then brought her arms forward, under her feet in a very tight fetal sort of position. When her arms were free of her feet and in front of her, she relaxed her legs.
Alex was watching her the entire time. She saw that he realized what she intended to do and was terrified.
With her arms in front of her, she was no longer bound to the chair. Slowly, she got to her knees. When her left knee popped, she was sure that Marco had heard it and the he would turn around to see her freed from the chair. But he stared hard at Alex, waiting for that last ten seconds to expire.
Amanda walked on her knees, taking two small steps forward. As she leaned forward, she nearly shrieked when Marco spoke.
“Time’s up,” he said. Last chance, Alex.” He then reached behind his back for the gun. When he did, Amanda froze, certain that his head would turn just enough to see her. But his head remained locked forward, his eyes on Alex.
Alex said nothing and had even made an effort to not look at Amanda, not wanting to give her away.
Amanda’s hand fell on the gun just as Marco freed his own. Marco was quicker, as his hands weren’t tied together at the wrist. But still, Amanda was able to bring the gun up. She leveled it as best she could, her arms trembling.
She gathered her nerve and took aim just as Marco placed his gun to Alex’s left knee.
The building was filled with a gun blast.
Amanda screamed. The gun kicked in her hands, and for a terrifying moment, she was sure that it had bucked just enough to throw her shot off.
But the hole that she had placed between Marco’s shoulder blades said otherwise. And because she had pure adrenaline racing through her veins and had lived in utter terror for the last six hours of her life, she pulled the trigger again… and again.
The blasts were deafening in the small space. She watched almost amazed as another hole appeared in the base of Marco’s neck and then another near the top of his head. His body finally canted forward and toppled to the ground.
When he hit, his head was less than a foot away from Alex’s injured knee.
Amanda screamed again as she got to her feet and raced over to Alex.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice shredded with tears and panicked gasps of breath.
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t believe…can’t believe you did that.”
She sat by him in the floor and kissed him on the forehead. He reached out to her with his good hand and stroked her hand.
“Okay,” he said. “So…I might not be okay. I’m losing a lot of blood. My sight is getting swimmy. You need to call someone…”
“An ambulance,” she said. “There’s two cell phones in the car they brought. I can use that to call the amb—,”
“No ambulance,” he said. “That will be too official. Not yet. I need you to call a woman named Karla. It’s Jameson’s wife and she… she can help.”
Amanda nodded, understanding full well what could potentially happen to Alex if cops got involved. She assumed Alex had helped orchestrate scenarios to avoid the cops before. Maybe this Karla woman and Jameson could help them without the aid of cops—or, at the very least, come up with a concrete story as to what had happened here that would keep Alex away from suspicion.
“Okay,” she said. “I can do that.” She stood up and headed for the door, not able to take her eyes off of him. “God, Alex…please don’t die. Stay here… stay with me.”
He smiled sleepily. “I’m not going anywhere.”
But as she walked out of the door and he succumbed to the pain and the vague darkness that was beginning to tug at his vision, he wondered if he had maybe just lied to her.
CHAPTER 12
Amanda was sitting in a waiting room chair half asleep with a magazine in her lap when the doctor approached her. Realizing that he was likely bringing her the update she had been waiting for over the last three hours, she sat up and wiped away the tiredness with one sweep of her hand across her face.
“How is he?” She asked.
“He lost a lot of blood, but he’s going to be okay. He’s understandably very weak, but other than that, he’s out of the woods.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“We’re going to be taking him into surgery in a few hours to try to repair his knee. We’ve taken the bullet out, but there’s considerable damage.”
“How is he right now?” Amanda asked.
“You can go see him, if you like. He’s medicated, but I think he should be able to talk for a while.”
“Thank you,” she said again.
She followed the doctor out of the waiting room and down the adjoining hallway, through double doors. “Room 237,” the doctor said, gesturing her down the hallway.
Amanda headed that way, and when she walked into the room, she prepared herself for the worst. Yet when she walked to Alex’s bedside, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. He had an IV running into his left arm, and his right leg was elevated and heavily bandaged. He wore a hospital gown which was perhaps the most shocking thing of all. That, combined with the faded look in his eyes when he looked to her, was more shocking than anything else.
“Hey,” he said in a groggy voice.
“Hey yourself,” Amanda said, kneeling by the right side of the bed and taking his hand. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than I should, I think. I know my knee is hurting like crazy, but I can’t feel it. They’re giving me some good drugs.”
“I can see that,” she said.
“How did everything work out?” He asked. “Have you talked to Karla or Jameson?”
“I have,” she said. “Everything is okay.”
She then told him about everything that had happened after he blacked out. He hadn’t lasted very long after he had asked her to call Karla. He had passed out, coming to here and there in flashes of consciousness, but had no sense of what had been happening.
Amanda had run out to Marco’s car and retrieved one of the cell phones. When Alex had realized that he didn’t know Karla’s number, he asked Amanda to then run up the road to where the motorcycles were parked. She brought back Alex’s phone twenty minutes later only to find that he had gone under for the first time.
Terrified that he might die from blood loss, she had found Karla’s number of Alex’s phone. Karla had still been at the hotel, waiting on whatever ride Jameson had decided to send her. After Amanda had filled her in, Karla had called Jameson and the hour that passed between the end of that call and when Karla showed up had been the longest hour of Amanda’s life. Alex had come in and out of consciousness while the puddle of blood beneath him grew larger and his skin became paler.
When Karla arrived, she was driving a clunker of a car, an old Buick that sounded like a fighter plane under the hood. She and Amanda had carefully moved Alex into the back seat which had already been covered in a plastic sheet to keep the blood out of the seat. “Not for saving the interior,” Karla said, “but for easy disposal if this whole thing goes to hell and the cops end up checking out this car.”
But it had not gone to hell. Now, nearly four hours after Karla had arrived, everything seemed to have worked out. In the end, someone would eventually discover the bodies of Slim, Marco, and Marco’s two thugs down by the state storage building. Karla had drove Jameson’s bike to the hospital, following Amanda in the car and thus removing any link between Jameson or the Unknowns to the crime scene. There was, of course, the matter of the ample amount of Alex’s blood at the scene. Jameson had asked for direction to the building and said that he would have it taken care of. Amanda had asked how, but Jameson wouldn’t share the details. But she thought he knew what it meant. She thought there would be a few bikers involved, along with some gasoline and a book of matches. Sure, it sounded like something out of a bad TV show, but sh
e wouldn’t put such a thing past Jameson. She had only spoken to him on the phone briefly, but it was enough to let her know that he was a dangerous man that knew how to handle his business.
She went on to tell him that they had also taken the pistol that Amanda had shot Marco with, removing her from the scene, too. Karla had placed it into one of her suitcases and had ensured her that the next person to see it would be Jameson.
As Amanda waited for an update on Alex, Jameson had called her. He had spoken calmly and smoothly, and Amanda got the idea that he had to make these sorts of calls all of the time.
“Even if the cops do smell something funny about the scene at that building,” he had told her, “I don’t think they’ll do much looking. Slim has a record, and Marco has a nasty reputation everywhere. A few background checks will show that. I bet you anything the local PD will see it as some gang thing that got out of hand and call it a day. You and Alex should be safe.”
She relayed all of this to Alex as she held his hand at his bedside. He nodded on occasion, but seemed far too tired to actually speak.
“There’s one other thing,” Amanda said.
“What’s that?”
“He said you’re free of any obligations to him. He wishes you the best.” She paused here and then gave him a hesitant smile. “Actually, he wished us the best.”
“Us,” Alex said with a lopsided smile. “Sounds nice.”
“That’s an entirely different conversation,” she said. “You rest now. You have a surgery to get through.”
He nodded and gave her a playful thumbs-up gesture.
She stood up and kissed him softly on the corner of his mouth. “Can I sit here with you until they take you to surgery?”
“Please do,” he said.
She smiled at him and sat in the guest chair by the bed. By the time she had gotten comfortable, Alex was asleep.
CHAPTER 13
FIVE WEEKS LATER
She’d lived alone for so long after Stephen had died that it felt surreal to have someone else in her house. Sure, Alex had stayed there for those few days before he came clean with the truth about Stephen, Marco, and the Unknowns… but he had been here with her for four weeks now. It was starting to feel more normal, but there was still an oddness to it that, if she was honest with herself, made her feel out of place.
This sensation hit her the strongest when they were getting ready for bed. It was more than sharing her home and her heart, but also her bed. They hadn’t made love since he had been discharged from the hospital. Most of that had been her decision, but there was also the fact that his knee had not yet fully healed.
She thought of that sense of displacement as they sat on the couch five weeks after he had been discharged. They had just finished watching a movie. Actually, she had watched Alex most of the time. He had told her, among many other things, that watching movies and having plain stay-in dates where most of the time was spent snuggling on the couch was foreign to him. He seemed to like it, though. If he had any regrets about leaving his life with the Unknowns behind, he was doing a fantastic job of hiding it.
But Amanda didn’t think he regretted anything. She could actually feel the peace coming off of him sometimes—a warmth that let her know that if she would have him, he’d stay here with her forever.
They got up from the couch, Alex hobbling a bit as it was only his second day off of the crutches. Before the crutches, there had been the wheelchair that he had continually cursed at. It was good to see him on his feet again, even if he was a bit shaky.
“How’s the knee?” she asked as they headed to the bedroom. It was only nine thirty, but they’d both been going to bed early. The extra time helped to compensate for the broken sleep that the nightmares caused her. In those nightmares, she would aim the gun at Marco and pull the trigger only to find that the gun was empty. Another nightmare had Marco coming into her home with Stephen behind him. Marco would assault her (in one nightmare going so far as to rape her) while Stephen watched in tears behind them.
When she woke up from those nightmares, she was glad that Alex was there. That sense of being displaced was nowhere to be found when she slid up beside him in bed and motioned for him to put his arms around her.
She knew that she loved him now and sensed that the feeling of oddness with having him in the house rested on everything they had been together. They had shared a trauma together and had experienced more violence in two days than most people experienced in a lifetime. With each day he was in the house, that sense of displacement faded, and she started to think that things might actually work out for them.
She got ready for bed and sat on the edge of the mattress as she watched Alex brush his teeth through the bathroom door. He favored his left side, trying to keep as much weight as possible off of his right knee. She knew that this injury had come from his attempt to save her, and it made her feel guilty and loved all at the same time.
She watched him until he had rinsed and started walking into the bedroom. He saw her looking at him and gave her an inquisitive look. “What?” He said.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “We haven’t really talked about what you want to do.”
“What do you mean?” He asked, removing his shirt and slipping into bed. He was wearing a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, and it was yet another thing that made her see him in new eyes. It was a sign of normalcy—a clue that he truly was done with the biker lifestyle.
“I mean… if you’re going to stay here with me or if you’re going to head out and start your life up.”
He thought about this for a moment and shrugged. “I was sort of hoping I could do both at once. I’d like to start my life over, but I’d like for you to be a part of it.”
She smiled and leaned over for a kiss. It was quick and sweet. The passion in his kisses was another indicator of his lifestyle change. She knew he loved her even though he had not yet come out and said it. She could tell in the way he kissed her and even the way he looked at her across the room.
“I’d like that, too,” she said. She slid over next to him and kissed his cheek. “But there’s one other question that we need to address first,” she said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
She kissed him again, this time making it longer. When their tongues met, it was like electricity.
“If I climb on top of you, is your knee going to be able to handle it?”
Even before he answered her, her right hand was trailing down his chest. She gingerly traced her fingers along the scar at his stomach.
“I think it’ll be okay,” he said with a smile.
He then kissed her, and when his hand found her hips, she slowly climbed over to him, throwing one leg over him and straddling him. She leaned down and kissed him softly, her lips nearly nibbling at him. His hands slid along her body, cupping the side of her breast through her white tee shirt. When his hand trailed away, she recaptured it and placed it back where it was. He caressed it, running his thumb along the side and then around her nipple.
She sighed and then sat up on top of him. She removed her shirt slowly, loving the way it felt to know that he was looking admiringly at her body. She threw the shirt to the floor and then returned her mouth to his skin. She kissed his neck and chest, pausing just above the top of his stomach to look at the scar that was healing nicely, despite his having aggravated it while saving her from Marco. She ran her fingers along it and then kissed it intimately. He had almost bled to death from this wound, and he had done it for her.
She kissed it once more, and then her kisses went lower and her tongue began to skirt playfully along the skin above his navel. She did this enjoying the way he tensed up beneath her while her hands teasingly started to pull his pants down. Realizing that he couldn’t help with the task, she then trailed her kisses lower so she could fully remove his pants without him having to stretch his healing knee.
While she was down there, she couldn’t resist the urge that came naturally to her. She
traced the outline of his manhood with her fingers and then took hold of it as she ran her tongue along the underside of it. When he shuddered at this, the lust that had connected them so deeply in the first place slammed through her. It made her feel more alive than she could ever remember—the irresistible want of someone that was so deep that every nerve and muscle in her body jumped. Taking this in and accepting it was for what it was, she then slowly put him in her mouth. She worked just as slowly and intimately there as she had done with his lips. She glanced up to him as she worked and saw him relaxing, giving his body over to her.
The lust that had first attracted her to him filled her then, and she wanted everything. At the same time, though, she also sensed the tenderness between them. It was such an odd emption to feel—pure unbridled lust and tender passion fighting for control—as she rolled her tongue around his thickness as he filled her mouth.