by Anne Malcom
I squeezed her hand. “Babe, I’m okay.” I frowned at her. “Don’t faint,” I commanded. Then I smiled. “They gave me morphine. This is aces.”
She gaped at me, tears welling in her eyes. “Someone shot you. Someone shot at us.”
I shrugged, ignoring the twinge that came with that. “It happens.”
“It does not happen,” she shrieked. “Hangnails happen. Bad hair days happen. Drive-by shootings do not happen.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Bad hair days do not happen.” I frowned, patting my hair. “Not to me at least.”
“This is my fault,” she whispered.
“My hair is not your fault. It’s those damn doctors messing it up,” I snapped.
She looked at me, her eyes glassy. “No, this, the shooting. It’s my fault.”
It was my turn to gape at her. “You? No, the list of people who I’ve pissed off enough to try and ruin my shopping day by shooting me is almost as long as my shoe wish list. Trust me, this is my fault. Therefore I’m glad I’m the one lying here with the bad hair, not you.” I paused. “Your hair looks great.”
“I’m serious, Rosie,” Polly said, face grim. “This happens the first day I’m in public after… you know who,” she whispered.
I rolled my eyes. “He’s not Voldemort. You can say his name, however bullshit it is.”
“He’s got connections, Rosie. Bad ones,” she continued, wringing her hands.
I laughed. “I doubt it. Someone as cowardly as him does not have enough pull to organize a drive-by, especially in broad daylight.”
“But—”
She was cut off by the aforementioned fallen cop, plus another man with murder in his eyes—his whole body, actually—following close behind.
I didn’t think Polly was cut off by my murderous man. She was cut off by another.
Heath.
Guess he was back.
Couldn’t fault the guy’s timing.
“Holy fuck, Rosie,” Luke all but yelled, pushing past a male nurse who was about to take my blood pressure.
His hands gathered my face with a gentleness that didn’t match the rest of him. “You got shot,” he whispered.
“So they tell me,” I murmured.
“Baby,” he rasped, his tone broken, defeated.
I put my hand on his. “I’m okay.”
“You got shot,” he repeated.
“But I’m okay,” I repeated.
He wanted to say more, I could tell. He wanted to declare how he would protect me forever and how he’d failed in his job and how he was never letting me out of his sight. The usual things an alpha male said to his woman when she’d just been shot.
But we weren’t usual. We were real. We were different. Different than the saint and sinner we’d once been. The cop and the criminal.
We were just Luke and Rosie now.
“We’re going to kill every single person responsible for this,” he declared.
I smiled. “Yes we are. We’re well overdue for that kind of date night.”
“Um, sir?” an uneasy voice interrupted.
Luke didn’t turn. “What?”
“I’ve got to take her blood pressure.” The nurse Luke had almost bowled over had finally gathered the confidence to speak, but fear saturated his tone.
It was strange, seeing the effect this Luke had on people. The Luke from before, Luke in uniform, in his saintly white hat, he put people at ease, made them feel safe.
That was his job, after all.
But this Luke, the one I’d torn the white hat away from and stained it with blood, he scared people, intimidated them. Just like animals in the wild could smell a threat, people could too. They could sense someone who didn’t play by society’s rules, smell when they weren’t safe with them.
It was a mixture of pride and shame that curdled my stomach at that thought. Or maybe it was the cocktail of drugs on an empty stomach.
Could’ve been the bullet wound.
I doubted it, though.
Luke didn’t answer or move. His eyes did a dance with mine, refusing to let them go. Then he pressed his forehead to mine, inhaling sharply, like he was testing the scent of my aliveness, making sure the stench of death wasn’t clinging, hidden somewhere he couldn’t see.
Satisfied, he moved back, though only slightly, still keeping a firm grip on the side of my neck.
The nurse stared at him for a moment.
Luke snapped his eyes from mine. “I thought you had tests to take,” he snapped.
“I’m going to have to ask you move away, sir,” the nurse said in a small voice.
“Don’t care if you have to ask it or not, it’s not fuckin’ happenin’,” Luke said.
The nurse paused, then awkwardly brushed past Luke to take my vitals.
I smiled, shaking my head. “You couldn’t just play by the rules?”
He smiled back. “Been doin’ that my whole life. Now that someone’s taught me how fun it is to break them, I’m not going to play by shit anymore.”
I grinned wider, tasting the sweetness of his smile, ignoring the sour of the thought that maybe it might backfire on me, this lesson I’d taught.
Maybe he’d turn into someone who resented me for taking those rules from him.
Maybe I’d turn into someone who resented myself for doing that.
Chapter Twenty
They discharged me from the hospital a couple of hours after they made sure I wasn’t going to die and then they’d have a lawsuit on their hands.
Well, I kind of discharged myself. They wanted to keep me overnight, but in the words of Cher from Clueless, “As if.”
“They say you need to be here overnight, then you’re fuckin’ staying overnight,” Luke clipped, trying to stop me from getting up.
I raised my brow. “Them saying that is a rule, and I’m pretty sure you said you’re done following rules not two hours ago.” The morphine was wearing off and my arm had started to ache. Not that I’d tell Luke that.
He kept his hand where it was, right over my heart, exerting gentle pressure. He flattened his palm so my heartbeat vibrated it slightly. His eyes found mine. “Not all rules,” he murmured. “Any rules concerning your health and safety are nonnegotiable. Not when everything I am is attached to them.”
I swallowed roughly. “I’m safe. With you, I’m safe, right?”
He gritted his teeth. “Of course.”
“Then I need you to get me out of this hospital. I hate them. They’re not safe for me.” My eyes glimmered with the words I didn’t want to say, scared that if I mentioned Death, he’d hear. He lingered around these sterile hallways.
His eyes softened and his palm moved upward to my jaw. “Only if you promise complete bed rest.”
I waggled my eyes. “I can totally promise that.”
He narrowed his. “That’s not what I mean. Rest,” he said firmly, no hint of sexual innuendo in his tone.
I grinned wickedly. “I can rest with your head between my legs.”
His face darkened. “I’ll allow that,” he rasped.
Unfortunately, that plan was ruined by my family.
You’d think with the commonality of shootings within the club, they wouldn’t be dropping everything to break the land speed record to land here in LA almost immediately after we got home. Not for a mere shoulder wound, at least.
But apparently they did.
“Where is she?” Cade hissed, pushing at Luke before he could even answer.
“She’s resting,” Luke clipped, stepping back so almost the whole club could pile into my tiny living room, all of them with grim faces.
Well, not Gage. He was smiling.
But that didn’t count because he was fucking insane. Drive-by shootings were like his Christmas. And he wasn’t one to get all soft about something as simple as a flesh wound.
Cade’s eyes ran over me, focusing on the bandage visible under my thin tank, resting there for a long time. They looked blank. Empty. Cold.
I knew different.
I knew he wasn’t moving or speaking not because of fury. Well, it was certainly part of it, but I knew he wasn’t because he couldn’t. Because he was replaying everything that could’ve happened, trying to remind himself that it didn’t. He was waiting to speak, to move, until he trusted himself to do it in the way the president of the Sons of Templar: California Chapter should do.
I winked at him.
It did what I’d intended, pissing him off enough to react. “Who the fuck have you pissed off now?” he demanded.
“We don’t know this is Rosie’s fault, so why don’t you lay off?” Luke said, face and voice hard.
Cade turned his glare to him. “You’re acquainted with Rosie, right?” he shot. “Of course this is her fuckin’ fault.”
Luke clenched his fist. “You better watch what you say about your sister being responsible for getting herself shot, almost fuckin’ dying. That bullet was three inches shy of her heart. Think she’s that eager to leave this fucking world?”
Luke’s words carried silence with them. Silence in the men in the room who were presented with yet another death.
They didn’t hold onto that for long. At least Cade didn’t.
“You need to tell me what the fuck you’re tangled up in. Right fucking now,” Cade demanded, crossing his arms over his chest, obviously deciding to ignore Luke’s presence altogether.
I wanted to cross mine right back, to make a statement. Kind of hard to do with the burning pain in my arm. “Why do you think it’s me who’s tangled up in something? It could’ve been an unlucky coincidence.”
Cade gave me a wide-eyed look. “There are no coincidences when it comes to you. Especially when there’s drive-by fuckin’ shootings involved.”
“He’s got you there,” Lucky muttered.
I silenced him with a glare.
The uneasy silence was broken with a loud banging on the door, which of course meant every male in the room whipped out a gun and just overreacted in general.
I rolled my eyes, pushing up from the sofa. “Chill, commandos. I ordered pizza.”
Lucky was first to lower his gun and make his way to the door. “Great, I’m fucking starving.”
Luke, who had all but arm-wrestled Cade to stand between me and the door, glared at me. “You ordered pizza?”
“Getting shot makes me work up an appetite.”
“I’ll give you two-point-five seconds to show me a pie or I’ll shoot you,” Lucky said from the door he’d just opened, obviously not to someone wearing a Domino’s uniform.
Of course, that meant all guns were raised once more.
“I’m looking for Rosie.”
I groaned.
The deep and irritated voice was familiar.
I stepped around Luke and Cade who both wore matching scowls when I managed to do so without either of them snagging me.
“It’s okay, Lucky. I know him. You can let him in.”
Lucky turned to raise his brow at me. “Okay, but I’m guessing he’s an unexpected visitor, which means he gets no pizza,” he whined.
He stepped back to let our newest arrival in, the men eyeing him warily, Luke with open hostility.
Well, everyone but Gage, who grinned at me. “I knew you coming back would mean I got to have some fun.”
“Who the fuck is this?” Luke demanded.
I ignored that too. “Lucian, what are you doing here?”
“The team’s dead,” he said in answer, voice blank and somehow breathless. Not from the distance up our stairs after the elevator crapped out. He was a fit guy. Had been before, and now with the veins in his biceps pulsing and exposed by his Army-green wife beater, it seemed that he was more so.
Breathless from running. Not upstairs but obviously all the way from Venezuela. From some very bad fucking men.
I was a little breathless myself. Death was there, standing at Lucian’s back.
Or maybe he was there all along.
“All of them?” I choked, remembering Arnie’s declaration about winning back his childhood sweetheart once he’d gotten his shit together. Richie talking about how his dad was his best friend and they were going to go fishing when he finally stopped killing assholes.
Lucian nodded once. “They made us.” His eyes went to my shoulder. “Fuck, they’ve found you.” He stepped forward, as if to brush his fingers over my collarbone. Luke made short work of that stupid gesture, pulling my uninjured shoulder gently into him, positioning me so I was slightly behind him.
“You wanna keep that arm, I suggest you keep it to your fuckin’ self,” he growled.
Lucian looked from me to Luke, understanding. There was no anger, no jealousy from a lover who’d been pining for me. It wasn’t like that with us, not really. We’d both used each other for different reasons.
“Not here to fight. I’m here to warn Rosie.” His eyes went to the men scowling at him—apart from Gage, obviously—each with hands resting on their weapons. Cade was still holding his. “Looks like you don’t need warning.” His eyes went to Luke. “Or protecting.”
“She’s never needed protecting. She does a pretty fucking good job of that herself,” Luke clipped. His eyes went to me. “Thought you said this shit was staying in Venezuela?”
I gave him my best wide-eyed puppy dog look. “Well I did think that. I don’t know everything. I’m not Beyoncé.”
“Someone needs to tell me what the fuck’s going on. Now,” Cade demanded, stepping forward.
“I’m gonna need to bounce,” Lucian said. “I’m runnin’ from one lot of guys with guns. Don’t need any more on my tail. Looks like you’re covered, Zee.”
Cade lifted his gun. “You’re not goin’ anywhere.”
Lucky moved swiftly to stand in front of the door, grinning and winking at Lucian. “Sorry, bro, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
Lucian kept his mask on. He didn’t scare easily and didn’t look perturbed by the sheer weight of hostile glances focused on him.
“Lucky, let him go. He has nothing to do with this,” I ordered.
“Do not fuckin’ move, Lucky,” Cade clipped.
Lucky moved his eyes from me to Cade. “Fuck,” he murmured. “I can’t figure out which one of you is less likely to kill me if I listen to the other one.”
“I’m the one with the gun, and I’m your fuckin’ president,” Cade ground out.
“But Rosie stabbed me once for telling her that I liked her better with bangs.”
I rolled my eyes. “It was a graze, harden up. And no one except J-Law looks good with bangs.” Then I moved my eyes to Cade. “You’re not going to get anything from him that you won’t get from me. I know you need to throw your power around in high-pressure situations but also, don’t be an asshole. Lucian was doing the right thing coming here. He risked his life for me, so how about you let him go on his way? We’ll take care of this.”
Cade gripped his gun. “Yeah, we fuckin’ will.”
There was a tense moment, and then Cade finally lowered his gun.
Lucky stepped back, looking relieved that he didn’t have to make the decision.
Lucian turned to me. “I’m disappearing. You’d do well to do the same.”
“I don’t disappear,” I told him. “I was kind of born to stand out. Plus, I don’t run. I fight.”
He didn’t look insulted. “Then you’re an idiot.”
Luke stiffened beside me. “You just got lucky when Cade lowered his gun. You call her an idiot again, you won’t be lucky anymore. And I won’t lower mine, not until after I’ve used it.” His voice was steel and full of promise.
“You can’t fight this shit,” Lucian said, speaking to the room. “Not even with a motorcycle gang at your back. They’re bigger than that. You can’t win.”
“Well we don’t lose, ever, so it looks like it’s going to be interesting,” I said.
Lucian shook his head. “Good luck.”
Then he was gone.
>
“Pussy,” Lucky muttered. “Running from a fight.” He looked at me. “So you’ve pissed off a couple of drug dealers. We’ve handled worse.”
I chewed my lip.
He regarded me. “It’s worse, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Little bit.”
Cade stared at me. “How much worse?”
I looked to Luke. He looked back.
“I thought you said you were gonna protect me,” I whispered.
He laughed. “I will, but you don’t need protecting. Your brother isn’t going to hurt you.”
I rolled my eyes.
“How much worse, Rosie?” Cade demanded.
“Quite a bit, I’d say.”
Everyone swore.
“I knew you weren’t done with the drama,” Lucky said cheerfully.
And we weren’t.
Not by a long shot.
After I told Cade, it was immediately decided that I was to leave for Amber and the safety of the club.
I expected Luke to argue.
He did not.
I didn’t know who was more surprised, me or Cade.
“What? No spiel about how this is a job for the police or how you can look after me?” I demanded.
Luke regarded me. “Babe, you’ve never been a job for the police. And I’m not dumb. This is not somethin’ for cops who get paid shit and have worse hours to deal with. They’ll be bought off. The ones who aren’t bought can’t and won’t do shit. They know they can’t win.” He paused. “I can look after you, but I’m not fuckin’ stupid. This isn’t a job for just me. This is a job for your family. You know better than anyone that any battle you fight is theirs too. And a few extra guns isn’t gonna hurt. We’ve got a date.”
“Um, now is hardly a time for a trip to Olive Garden,” Lucky interjected. “Though those breadsticks are great.”
“No, our date night consists of killing everyone responsible for shooting me and my whole team,” I told him with a smile.
Lucky gaped at me. Then Luke. “Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered. “Me and Becky are going to have to do something crazy like rob a bank so you don’t steal our thunder.”
“We goin’, then?” Cade demanded, ignoring Lucky.
I sighed.