I wasn't sure that screaming would help me anyway. Not after Lazarus talked to all the neighbors about me detoxing already.
He used my hair to guide me, pulling me back toward the table. His hand landed on the back of the chair and pulled, making it scrape across the floor before he tossed me down onto it.
"Now sit and listen to what Pops has to say," Sunny growled, moving behind me, blocking any possible escape.
Fear was a swirling feeling inside, a sweatiness to not only my palms, but seemingly every surface of skin. I swallowed hard, finding my mouth way too dry as I looked over at Mitchell.
Dr. Mitchell Andrews.
And his sons, Dr. Christopher Andrews and physical therapist Sunny Andrews.
They were an entire organization to themselves.
Their evilness wasn't masked by their professions.
Oh, no.
Their professions were the source of their evilness.
"What did you think you were doing, running away?" Mitchell asked, voice bland, but I had known him long enough, had seen him on a daily basis for half a year. There was a muscle ticking in his jaw. There was a tightness to his eyes that made wrinkles form beside and underneath them.
Generally, he was a good looking man. He was long and lean with salt-and-pepper hair, hazel eyes, and good, aristocratic bone structure. His sons inherited most of his looks but where Mitchell and Chris were thin, Sunny was solid from his relentless hours in the gym.
But if you knew him, if you really knew him like I knew him, all you would see is ugly when you looked at him. You would take the curve of his lips as nothing but maliciousness or condescension. You would see the light of his eyes not as friendliness, but opportunistic enjoyment.
"I wasn't running away." That was true enough. I had almost died then been held mostly against my will and then just... didn't go back yet. Mitchell's hand waved out in a casual invitation to explain myself. And in that moment, the fear seemed to take a turn toward anger. "I was fucking overdosing." My voice was like a whip in the silent apartment, the crack of it making Mitchell's brow raise slightly. "And then detoxing," I added, resisting the urge to reach up and touch my throbbing cheek and eye. The area around it felt tight- a sure sign of more swelling.
"And?" Mitchell's tone was bored, like every word out of my mouth was a waste of his precious time. It was a sound I was familiar with. In fact, it never occurred to me before how similar his way of speaking to me was to the way my father spoke to me.
A cycle, maybe?
"What do you mean, and? And I was so busy throwing up and in pain that I couldn't get out of bed."
"You have a phone."
"It was a weekend."
"That you were supposed to be working."
Because I worked every single weekend. I guess I had been so messed up in the past that it never bothered me.
"The world hasn't seemed to implode," I said, realizing my mistake when Sunny's giant palm closed around the front of my throat, cutting off my air supply, making my chest immediately tighten, my face feel weirdly hot and tingly as he yanked me up off the chair by it and held me against his body.
"Show some mother fucking respect, Beth," he growled.
"We need her conscious," Mitchell reminded his son who released me enough to allow a small amount of air, but not nearly enough to stop the lightheadedness and strangled feeling in my chest as I tried to gasp for more. "No one said you have to be a junkie," he went on like nothing was unusual about this particular meeting. That was because, for him and his sons, it wasn't. "But you do have to work and you do have to follow the rules." He stood slowly, turning his wrist to look down at the shiny face of his watch. "Well, we have another appointment. I expect you to ice that eye, put makeup on that neck, and be at work the day after tomorrow."
With that, Sunny's grip completely loosened, unexpected, making me drop down to the floor, gasping like a fish out of water, as they walked past me and let themselves out.
The door clicked close- the sound like relief. My hand went up to cover my mouth to try to muffle the sop that escaped me. The tears were expected and unstoppable as I sat there trying to calm myself down.
I knew it was going to happen eventually.
I knew they would find me.
I knew they would hurt me just enough to make a point.
And I certainly knew that there was no way they were going to let me go.
Because I knew too much.
I had too much dirt.
I could send them away for decades.
I was a liability.
It was easier to manage when I was too high to give a damn about anything.
But I was another problem entirely when I was clean and clear-headed.
How long would it be before they found a way to get me to use again, to use that to control me again? Until, eventually, it killed me and solved their problem for them.
Hell, Mitchell was probably downright disappointed when I said I had overdosed and lived through it.
I swallowed hard, my own saliva burning like battery acid as I pushed myself up and walked on numb legs toward the bedroom and into the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror.
It wasn't pretty.
I had been expecting as much.
My eye was swollen, the whites inside red in color, the area under taking a bluish hint that I knew time would only darken. My throat was ugly, long bands of finger-shaped bruises all across the front. Again, they would only darken.
My hands reached up and scrubbed the tears off my cheeks, knowing they were useless, knowing there was no reason to cry over a situation I had no control over.
Over in the bedroom, the generic ring of the burner phone made my heart fly up into my throat as I moved and found it under the blankets, the screen illuminated with his name.
Lazarus.
Good, sweet, perfect, caring, selfless, protective Lazarus.
He would come back, see me, and demand to know what happened, ask for all the ugly details of my life before. I would have no choice but to give them to him.
Then, well, I knew to my bones what would happen.
He would go after them because of what they did to me.
And he being a badass former junkie, former dealer, current cage fighter and guard at an underground fighting club as well as an outlaw biker who dealt in arms, yeah, he would think he could take them on.
He wouldn't listen to reason.
And then he would get hurt, likely fatally.
And it would be all my fault.
I couldn't live with that. Not after all he had done for me.
No way.
I had to go back. I had to learn to live with the consequences of my actions.
He didn't.
I wouldn't let him.
My heart was a giant wound as I put the cell down on the nightstand as it started ringing again. I found my shoes and my wallet, and figured my phone was a lost cause so with that, a pit the size of Texas in my stomach, I walked out of the apartment.
I walked out of the building.
I left the impossible life behind.
I should have known it wasn't something someone like me could have.
Nothing I had done in my life would suggest I was deserving of all that Lazarus had to offer.
In a way, maybe it was better I got out before I got in too deep.
Too late, my heart said.
My brain had no valid argument to that.
Because it was absolutely too late.
I was pretty sure I was falling for Lazarus.
And, if the pain I felt as I let myself into my apartment was anything to go by- it was absolutely, positively excruciating.
ELEVEN
Lazarus
"You need to get your head in the game," Edison warned, watching me hit the call button for the fifth time in a row. Worry was a coil in my stomach ready to spring with even the slightest provocation.
I told her I would call.
And maybe if
she was sleeping or in the shower, I could understand if she missed the first two or three calls.
But four or five?
Every nerve ending in my body was firing off sparks, telling me something wasn't right.
Still in the beginning stages of a detox, she would have been half out of her mind with the need of some way to distract herself. She would have been waiting for the call that I told her was coming.
The call went to the robotic voicemail, making my stomach clench hard enough to make me wince, convinced there was only one good reason she wouldn't pick up. And that, oh, that was not good.
She wasn't in the apartment.
And the only feasible reason I could come up with for that would be she couldn't take it alone, it was too soon to expect her to be able to not backslide. It had been different with me. I had been up and down so much. I had been beaten and gutted and used as a pawn. I had been detoxed and hopped up on Subs. I had been arrested. I had years of trial and error before I was finally strong enough to be able to do it all on my own.
She didn't have that.
She didn't even have that long of a history.
Six months? She was a baby addict.
I had thought, wrongly as it turned out, that that worked in her favor. Maybe if she had only been in the lifestyle for half a year, then she wasn't so entrenched in the habits. Once the actual drugs were out of her system and the hard phase of the body withdrawal was over, I thought she would just... adjust.
Stupid.
So fucking stupid.
I knew better.
I hadn't even brought her to a goddamn meeting.
Selfish. I had been selfish.
I had held her as she suffered. I had listened to her talk about her mom, her dad, her sister. I had listened to her prattle on about her childhood and her failed attempt at college. I watched her interact with my friends like it was the most natural thing in the world to be around bikers. She saw me fight and didn't flinch away from my touch.
Then, well, the sex.
Fucking out of the world sex.
I should have been focusing less on how much I wanted to taste her pussy, feel it wrap around my cock and squeeze as she came, and more on how she was actually handling everything.
"She's not answering," I barked back at Edison who was pulling the overnight shift with me.
We had reached the drop about three hours before, Reign, Cash, Wolf, Repo, and Duke greeting the Polish mafia like old friends and being pulled inside their clubhouse to, we imagined, drink and party and hand over the money.
I had momentarily felt a swell of hope at the idea that maybe they were going to get it all over with and we could head home the same night. No one wanted to be on the road. Everyone wanted to be home with their women if they had them. If they didn't, they just wanted to be home, not on fucking guard because we all knew that any ally could turn enemy in a blink.
Which had me and Edison standing outside the small guesthouse that was really hardly any bigger than the average pool house, late at night- all the others inside and passed out. The night before had caught up with them before they could really get crazy with the Polish guys.
But we were told to stay.
And because Reign didn't want to spit on someone's hospitality, never knowing what affront might send any particular organization into a crazy spiral, he had agreed.
They had bunkered down.
Edison and I were given huge mugs of coffee and left to guard the rest of them while they slept. We would get relieved at around four in the morning by Duke and Cyrus so we could catch an hour or two before we hit the road.
Until then, we were on our own.
And there was literally nothing for me to do but listen to the night sounds, watch the darkness for any threats, and fucking obsess about how bad things could get for her before I got back to her.
"Maybe she took a page out of your book and took a walk." Edison wasn't usually the kind of guy to try to comfort and sugarcoat, always being someone you could rely on for the truth, even if it was brutal.
"That's not exactly helping," I snorted, my head shaking as I raked a hand down my face, feeling the callouses of my hand get caught on the rough stubble on my cheeks. "You know my neighborhood."
"Third Street might be assholes, but they aren't known for hurting women either."
That was true enough.
But the hurt I was concerned about had nothing to do with them putting their hands on her and everything to do with them putting their drugs in her hand and letting her walk away to use them.
She wouldn't have the same tolerance if she used again, a fact I wasn't sure she was even aware of. She wasn't some deadbeat junkie who had been down the road. She was someone who got pulled into the awful world of needed prescription pain killers becoming a crutch and then a full-blown addiction.
She never touched illegal drugs.
God, if she went to fucking heroin...
My gut felt pressed between a vice grip as the bar tightened.
Would I come home to find her overdosed in my apartment?
"I don't know what kind of fucking party these Polish fucks are throwing when they don't have any chicks around," Pagan said, making my head swivel to find him standing in the doorway, awake as could be despite being the one who perhaps partied the hardest the night before. "Spending my night in a goddamn Barbie Dream House with six other fucking men isn't exactly what I'd call a good night," he added, stepping out, closing the door, and leaning back against it, tipping his beer up in salute before taking a long pull. His eyes moved between us, furrowing slightly. "What's with the mood?"
"He's worried about his girl," Edison supplied, making me sigh out a breath.
"Yeah? The girl from Hex? You think she's fucking someone else or slipping up?"
Mother fucking Pagan, man.
It was easy to underestimate him- being a brute, a general whack job, and as a whole not seeming like someone who picked up on much.
"Slipping up?" Edison asked, dark brow lifted, his dark eyes accusing like he already knew I had been purposely keeping shit from him.
"She was drinking fucking ginger ale at Hex, man." Pagan shrugged, looking not the least apologetic as he went on. "No one drinks ginger ale unless they're driving but I knew your bike was there. So the only other explanation is she's clean." He paused, taking another pull of his beer before adding, "Like you."
Knowing there was no going back, I exhaled and gave it to Edison. "She was clean. But only for a couple of days."
Edison, being Edison, was quick to put two and two together. "You were detoxing her. That's why you wanted us to cover for you, why you missed church." His smile went a little devilish then. "And that comment about fucking electrolytes didn't have a goddamn thing to do with fucking." He looked off for a minute, his face slipping into a mask of seriousness. "Call Reeve and send him over if you're worried. Don't need to worry about protecting the secret anymore thanks to old Loose Lips over there," he went on, jerking his head toward Pagan.
"I prefer an una-fucking-pologetic truth speaker. Besides, how the fuck could I know the rest of you would be so blind?"
I took a steadying breath and scrolled for Reeve's number. Despite the late hour, he picked up on the second ring. "Yeah?"
"I need to ask a favor." I wasn't sure I had ever heard my voice quite so desperate before. Suddenly, I was glad I called Reeve and not Renny who would have taken that information and run with it.
"Whatever you need." I could hear him moving around as he spoke, likely getting himself dressed.
Reeve was perhaps the most mysterious of all of us. Even Cyrus who would talk about any goddamn thing in the world, was uncharacteristically tight-lipped about his older brother. We knew about their dad being in the MC before he died, about how their mom pulled both them and their sister, nicknamed Wasp, and kept them the hell away from the bad influence of The Henchmen MC. We all knew that they had always wanted in, wanted the legacy, wanted to follow
their father's footsteps. After the war, they saw an opportunity and took it.
Cyrus was a guitar player and ladies man.
Reeve had been an electrician- quiet and serious.
That was about all we knew about their past though. Or, maybe it was more accurate to say, any past that involved Reeve. Cyrus talked all the time about every time period of his life, but Reeve was almost never a part of the story.
Where had he been?
What had he done?
They were questions we had no answers to still.
I didn't even know if Reign did for that matter.
But all that being said, he was a steady brother. He didn't question orders. He never complained. He always stepped up if you needed him to. Almost always, without questions.
"I need you to go to my apartment and check on Bethany." I didn't need to tell him where a key was hidden or how he could get in without one. For those of us who had residences elsewhere, Reign demanded spare sets of keys for emergencies. They were hidden in a floor panel in the common room under the coffee table.
"Is she sick?" He wasn't prying. That wasn't his style. If anything, I figured he might have been wondering if he should bring anything with him in case she was.
"She's detoxing and she's newly clean and I'm worried she might use and OD."
There. It was out.
The silence on the other end of the phone was deafening and long enough for me to pull the phone away to make sure we hadn't disconnected somehow.
We hadn't.
"If she has?"
I could hear the slam of a door and the crank of the engine. He was wasting no time. Thank God.
"If she is, make her throw up and call the cops."
"Wouldn't it be faster to..."
"Cops carry Narcan shots in our area. It's faster."
Cops would make it to an overdose call in under two minutes in our town and, thanks to an increasing number of heroin deaths in the area, the police force started carrying Narcan shots to reverse the effects of an overdose.
It could save her life if she was in trouble.
"On it. I will call you as soon as I know what is going on."
With that, he ended the call.
"I'm no doctor here," Pagan interrupted the tense silence a minute later, "but I'm pretty sure you should be breathing. You know, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Won't be helping anyone if you pass out."
Lazarus (The Henchmen MC Book 7) Page 14