Of course, that was more than true.
Sadly.
Huffing out a breath, I inquired, “How’s Quin?”
“Still inside.”
My brow puckered. “I know that. I meant you were going to see him the other day, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. He was talking all kinds of cryptic shit.”
I fell silent at that. “Oh.”
Her silence said it all too.
“Oh. Yeah.”
MC business.
Fuck.
It was everywhere. Like a venomous snake that kept on growing with each bite, with each kill.
It never died, but it could infect everything in its vicinity.
“He’s only in there on a short sentence, why would they get him involved in something—”
“We can’t talk about this,” I warned her, and my voice was hard because even though I knew she wanted to, and I got it, there was nothing to say.
When you patched in and became a member, you signed yourself over to the club.
I hadn’t even done that, but I was just as tied.
Money.
Rex had knotted me in with my college fees. I was one of the only people not struggling to get by, thanks to student loan debt, but my debts would last a helluva lot longer than most people’s would.
I blew out a breath. “Aside from the cryptic stuff, he doing okay?”
“He’s buff.”
I snorted. “They always are.”
“They work out more in there. I swear, if he wasn’t my baby brother, I’d think he was fine.”
“You’re an artist. You can think he’s fine.”
She sniffed. “It’s wrong, but dayum, he’s pretty.”
I laughed. “You get a picture?”
“Just sent it.”
I pulled the phone away, went to the messaging app, and whistled the second I set eyes on him.
Fuck, Caleb was pretty. Even in a blue jumpsuit.
I whistled again, unable to stop myself. “When did that happen?” I muttered.
“What? When did he get beautiful? Or when did we get old?”
“Fuck off, if you’re old then what the hell am I?”
She snickered. “Ancient.”
There was a four-year age gap between us, and while that had never presented itself as an issue aside from when we were at school and we were in different years and classes, now that we were older, it meant bupkis.
“Fuck. He’s like ‘robbing the cradle’ beautiful.”
She sniffed. “Now you see my predicament.”
“I do. Oy vey.” My heart clutched at the thought of him in prison though. “Be better when he’s home, love.”
“Yeah. I miss the little shit. I can’t believe he got put away like two weeks after getting patched in.”
“Sucks.”
It did, but that was the life. Fuck, that was the major problem with every part of the life.
Jail.
It was always at the other end of things.
That, and death. But hell, death came to us all. Didn’t matter if you were in an MC or not.
I couldn’t even say that you could guarantee a nicer death by being a good person. Good people died in shitty ways too.
Case in point, what was going down at the hospital.
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s okay.”
Her voice alone told me that she didn’t get it, and neither did I, but we weren’t in the life. Both of us had made specific choices and decisions that took us away from it, yet somehow, we were all tangled up with them regardless.
Indiana, because both her brothers were patched in with the MC.
Me, because when it had come down to it, and I’d had the rug pulled out from under me when my scholarship had fallen through, I’d had no alternative but to rely on the MC to achieve my goals.
The only constant in my life was a desire, a need, a burning fucking urge that was like a decade-long UTI, to be a doctor.
It was my dream. My passion. My goal.
Rex had helped me achieve that, and sure, I’d sold my soul to the devil to get it, but at least I’d be able to do what I was born to do.
I pursed my lips at the thought, then murmured, “What did they ask?”
“To take some pictures in.” She sighed. “Don’t like getting involved with that shit, you know that.”
“I do.” And I didn’t blame her. It was a shitty thing for her to have to do. Take something inside that might eventually lead to extra time tacked onto Caleb’s sentence.
But I got it. That was the life.
The fucking life.
“What pictures?”
“That’s what made no sense. Of this fucking bike Link had just tuned up. It was this massive fucking issue too, because I was late in going.”
“Why?” She was never late.
She huffed. “You’ll get mad.”
I hummed. “Sure I will. Doesn’t mean I won’t give you a wedgie the next time I see you if you don’t tell me now.”
“I took some of that Remeron you told me not to take.”
My brows lifted. “The shit I specifically said your quack of a doctor shouldn’t have prescribed? That shit?”
“Yeah. It worked the first night, but the second? Jesus, I felt like death warmed over. I went to the ER with it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“What? And get served a dose of ‘I told you so’?”
I snorted. “Since when has that stopped us from ever telling each other shit?”
Her gulp was audible. “This was different.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m fucking exhausted, Stone. I’m not sleeping. At all. And fuck, the dreams are back. I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.”
The words resonated with me in a way I couldn’t even begin to describe. “It’s funny you should say that.” What with Harriet, now Indy, and me? Maybe insanity was airborne right now.
“Funny?” She huffed. “Thanks, babe.”
“No, not funny har-har, but funny as in strange. I’m pretty sure I’m losing my sanity too.”
I didn’t have to see her face to know that she was probably glowering at my words.
We both knew what her problems were.
Nyx.
Quin, aka Caleb.
Her bros.
Both men were in a one-percenter club. Both men were leading violent lives.
More than that, she’d been having nightmares since she was a kid, and I knew why too.
She’d seen her bro fuck around with her uncle’s shotgun before said uncle had been killed in an ‘accident.’
The uncle who’d been screwing her older sister, Carly, and who’d messed with her some as a kid too.
I was the only person in the fucking world who knew all those things, and that was why she suffered.
If Nyx knew that the cunt had touched her as well?
We both knew he’d go insane, and Nyx was already pretty fucking mental. He didn’t need any help becoming a weirder motherfucker.
I didn’t have to be an integral part of the MC anymore to know there were ways he’d found to release his anger at the world.
I hadn’t failed to miss the recent uptick in vigilante-style deaths of pedophiles in states that were linked to the Sinners’ chapters.
Yeah, just because I stayed out of the life didn’t mean I couldn’t figure out what the fuck they were doing.
It was just a wonder they weren’t on the FBI’s radar. That’d make more fucking sense than a doctor picking up on shit.
I hummed under my breath. “I’m pretty sure there’s an angel of death.”
“A what?”
I sighed. “Some sick fuck who wants to end people’s suffering, even if they’re not ready to die yet.”
She exhaled sharply. “You mean a murderer? A murderer is walking around the fucking hospital where you work?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I think I’m also parano
id just because of where we come from. There isn’t murder and mayhem wherever we go. I just need to take a chill pill and stop seeing monsters in the closet—”
“Stone, darlin’, you’re not paranoid. You’re sensible. You and I both know how this shitty, fucked-up world works. It sucks. It does. And you’re not losing your mind. If you truly think that, then maybe you should alert someone—”
“I don’t know who to alert. Crap like this gets swept under the rug.”
“Surely there’s protocol?”
“There is, but it’s ignored. Especially in places like this one. They’re all swanky and shit here. No one would dare kill rich people,” I mocked.
She snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, death is only for the poor.”
My lips twitched. “Exactly.” I rubbed my brow, then I twisted around when I heard the door behind me squeak.
Not wanting to be overheard, I muttered, “Indy, I’d better go—”
That was when I felt them behind me.
A second later, I felt the stab of the pinprick in my throat, and I tried to cry out, “Indy!”
But it was too late.
A cloth with the cloyingly sickly-sweet stench of chloroform on it was pressed to my mouth and nose, and it had me struggling with my attacker until I didn’t even have the impetus to do that.
Whatever they hit me with, combined with the chloroform, I could already feel my faculties starting to be affected.
Fuck!
What was that?
I tried to keep myself alert by going through my symptoms, but no matter what I did, registering that I had to have been dosed with diazepam for the chloroform to be working so fast, maybe a dose of adrenaline too—
My thoughts blurred until I could feel all cognitive function starting to slip away.
I felt sure Indy’s tinny voice from my cellphone speaker was a dream, but maybe it wasn’t.
One second, it was there, and the next, it wasn’t.
Just like my consciousness.
Indy
My heart was pounding in my chest so hard that it made the nightmares that tormented me nightly look like a walk in the park.
So far, in my life, only the people who’d deserved to die had died. I’d never dealt with death on a regular basis like Stone had, like my bro Nyx did.
But here, now? I knew what I was facing.
Someone had just hurt Stone.
Someone had hurt her after what she just told me.
An angel of death.
I sucked in a sharp breath, trying to reason that nothing was wrong. Maybe her service had just cut out. Shit like that happened all the time, didn’t it?
And the only answer that resonated with me was the fact that, yeah, this shit happened all the time to normal people. Coverage cut out, batteries died—on normal folk.
Nothing about Stone or me was normal. We tried to be, fuck how we tried, but we weren’t.
By blood and bone, we were tied to the Satan’s Sinners MC, and that meant karma liked fucking with us.
I stared at a mandala I’d photographed three weeks ago, one that sat on Sin’s woman’s finger and hand.
Her brand.
The mandala gave me a kind of peace that couldn’t be feigned. There was an eternal beauty to mandalas, a repetitive symmetry that gave me a deep sense of comfort.
I found no comfort in that today.
Stone was…
Fuck, I didn’t know what Stone was.
Needing more calm than I was currently feeling, I ceased listening to the blank space on the other end of the line and quickly called the hospital where she worked.
I had them as a contact because I was her ICE, but when I connected through, without waiting on the receptionist to greet me, I asked, “Can you please page Dr. Walker?”
“Dr. Walker? Of course. Which unit?”
My eyes widened at the simple question, and for too long, I just gaped even harder at the wall opposite me—I couldn’t remember.
She’d transferred a few months ago, and oddly enough, even though people died a lot there, she loved it.
Trouble was, people died in every unit.
Which fucking unit was this one in particular?
“Ma’am? Do you know? Because I have other people waiting on the other lines.”
My lips were dried out from how long I gaped, then I croaked, “Oncology.”
I prayed that was the correct one, prayed with all my heart and fucking soul that was right and that I hadn’t gotten it wrong, and when she replied, “I’ll page her right now. Is there a message you’d like to give her?” I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Tell her to contact Indiana?”
“The state?” the woman questioned, confused.
“No. Family. Please, just do so quickly. I have bad news she needs to hear.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I’ll contact her now.”
“Thank you,” I rasped, then when she disconnected the call, I reached up and pinched the bridge of my nose.
There was a difference between a nightmare being real and a nightmare happening and unfolding while I was in bed.
This was, most definitely, the former.
I could feel my heart starting to pound once more, and the rushing of blood in my ears was so deafening that I didn’t hear the door to my section open, and when it did, I jerked when a scent I recognized filled my nostrils.
Nyx.
He always smelled like that—like musk, bikes, and aftershave. Like he’d doused himself in Axe so much as a kid that his skin forever held the imprint of it now. Somehow, it worked on him though.
When I recognized it was him, I stared at his face, terrified beyond belief.
I knew why he was here. He was trying to get me to ink his next tattoo, and while I’d agreed to do Giulia’s the last time they were here, I’d refused to do his because I was mad at him.
He was pissed at Caleb for getting caught, and I was pissed at him for not even calling our baby bro, who was doing his first stint inside.
None of that mattered now. I jerked up, slipped my arms around his waist, and whimpered, “Nyx, it’s Stone.”
He tensed in my hold, and I knew why, but I wasn’t saddened by it. We weren’t tactile by nature, any of us, so for me to hug him, that meant shit was real.
“Stone? As in Steel’s Stone?”
The state I was in could be considered panicked, but even I had to roll my eyes at that. “She isn’t Steel’s Stone.”
He scoffed, “I beg to differ.”
“Shame he isn’t begging,” I groused, then I shook my head. “Anyway, now isn’t the time for this conversation! Someone took Stone.”
“Someone took her?” He pulled back so he could look down at me. “Is this a joke?”
“Do I look like I’m having fun?” I snapped, pissed that he’d think that.
“Why do you think someone took her?”
“It’s crazy, I know, but she was just telling me that she thought there was an angel of death at the hospital, and then the line went dead, it was like she dropped her phone, but I could hear her breathing still. Like she was rasping or something.”
“Rasping? You sure you’re not misreading things?”
“No, I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not misreading things, Nyx! How do you misread those things?” I snarled at him, shoving him away now that he was starting to piss me off. “I called the hospital and asked them to have her paged, but they haven’t gotten back in touch with me yet.”
“Yet being the operative word.” He patted me on the back. “I’m sure everything is fine.”
“You think there’s no correlation that after she told me someone was murdering patients in her unit she goes quiet?”
My words were cool, calm.
But there was iron behind them, and he heard it, so he eyed me warily.
“Angels of death are, what? The fucked-up weirdos who kill sick patients as a kind of euthanasia, right? There’s a difference between actively doing that and
then murdering someone.”
“No, there fucking isn’t, dipshit. Do you even hear yourself right now?” I scowled at him. “Anyway, less of the fucking judgment. We both know murder is murder.” I tipped my chin up at him, watching his eyes narrow into slits.
“What do you want me to do, Indy?”
“Get her fucking back.”
“And what if she hasn’t gone anywhere? What if her battery just died?”
“It didn’t. I’m telling you. She cut off mid-sentence, then she was breathing, and then nothing. Someone else cut the call!”
When I saw my urgency was finally starting to get through, I almost wanted to cry, because if he believed me, then he’d act.
His new patch that was tacked onto the front of his cut declared him VP of the Satan’s Sinners MC, now that Storm had traipsed down to Ohio to become the Prez of the chapter down there. Leaving his kid and wife behind.
Dumb fuck.
If anyone could help Stone, it was Nyx.
I tugged the wrist of his Henley. “Please, bro, do something. I swear, I’m not making this shit up.”
He bit the inside of his cheek for a second, then he reached into his pocket and grabbed his cell.
I watched him, too wary to hope, and when he muttered, “Rex, there’s an issue with Stone—” I felt the relief hit me.
The Sinners were better than the cops at getting shit done. I knew in my gut something was wrong, a gut that hadn’t led me astray in all these years.
Stone would have figured out a way to have messaged me back by now if something had happened to her phone. We knew each other’s numbers like they were our own. She could have sent me a text or called me from a landline. She knew I liked things done a certain way.
I liked to end each call by telling her that she was a pain in my ass, and she liked to tell me that I was a stitch in her side.
Not exactly loving words, but they were ours.
That was how we did shit.
Jesus.
How had our conversation derailed so badly?
And what the fuck would I do if she was hurt? For real hurt?
She was my lifeline some nights. When I couldn’t sleep and I knew she was on night shift, she was the only person who could get me back into bed without feeling like it was a hot tin roof and I was a cat.
She had to be okay.
Not just for me, but for all the hundreds and thousands of people she was supposed to save in her life.
Steel: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 4) Page 6