by Nicole Fox
We continued on down the alley, and the more we walked, the more a sick feeling began to form in my stomach.
Something wasn’t right.
“Lookin’ to buy a piece, huh?” said Spider. “Would’ve figured a hard-looking motherfucking like you’d already be strapped, you know?”
He laughed a weird, neighing kind of laugh.
“Just looking for something that can’t be traced,” I said, my eyes darting here and there.
“Word, word,” the kid said. “I got you.”
We then turned the corner. And as soon as we did, I was confronted with the sight of three massive men all lying in wait.
Now I knew exactly why I was feeling suspicious—this was an ambush. My adrenaline began shooting through my veins within seconds, and I was ready for a fight.
“Been waitin’ for you, my man,” said Spider, falling back behind the three men. “Was worried you wouldn’t show.”
“What the fuck is this?” I demanded.
“Just a little message from someone who thinks your ass is getting too big for your fuckin’ britches.”
Then the kid nodded, and the three men rushed towards me with speed that shouldn’t have been possible for men that size. I took a swing at the first one, a tall, round bruiser all in black with a head like a wrinkled melon. The hit connected, and he stumbled backward.
But there were two other men, both just as big. They set on me, and I turned just fast enough to see the fist of one of them fly towards my head like a big, flesh-colored bullet.
Then there was black.
Chapter Five
Anya
It was getting on in the evening, and the hangover from last night was just starting to finally, mercifully fade. I could finally open my eyes and take in the horrible antiseptic lighting of the hospital where I worked. It’d been a slow day at the ER, all things considered: some teen with a broken leg, a little girl who needed stitches, one of the old guys in town convinced he was having heart attack that turned out to be nothing other than a likely bid just to have some people to socialize with. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
I was sitting back in one of the hard plastic chairs in the breakroom, drinking my coffee slowly, and half-watching some reality TV garbage that was on the large flat screen hanging in the corner of the room. No one else was there, so it was just me and my thoughts.
And all I could think about was Bryce.
God, he was fucking gorgeous. I couldn’t shake the image of his shredded, toned body, his beautiful face, or his massive cock, out of my head. I knew I shouldn’t; I knew that I shouldn’t have even been talking to a man like that. After all, he was probably no better than the hoodlum trash that spent their nights getting wasted at Rooster’s. But still, there was something about him. He was just … so different than the men I usually dated. He had a hardness to him, an edge that I couldn’t help but find irresistibly sexy.
But I knew all about bad boys. They reeled you in with the mystery and bedroom eyes, only to toss you to the side once they’d gotten what they wanted. I knew that I wsas too old to get suckered into that routine. This man, on the other hand, I could just tell he wasn’t one of the tough-guy college dudes putting on an act, the kind that I knew in school who’d front like badasses but came from rich families. This guy was real.
It didn’t matter though, I thought as I absent-mindedly stirred my coffee; I didn’t even get his name. At least I had the memory, though. That ten minutes in the back of my car … God, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been screwed like that. I mean, it wasn’t enough that he had a cock like that—he knew how to use it.
I felt myself getting turned on just thinking about it. Crossing my pink scrub-clad legs, I bit my lower lip and let myself indulge in the memories for just a little while longer.
Then, the door opened with a whoosh, and the man who stepped through it was exactly the person I needed to see to dispel me of any sexual fantasies.
“Hey there, little lady,” said Jeff Mendelson, the head doctor on staff. “Getting some solid work done, I see.”
Jeff was … not the most good-looking guy in the world, to put it mildly. Short, with a squat, dumpy body, he wasn’t going to be winning any bodybuilding competitions anytime soon. And with a pudgy round face and a head with a horseshoe-shaped, dark brown hairline, he didn’t exactly shine in the looks department. But he was nice, mostly, and inoffensive. He had a good job, and was about as stable as they came. In short, he was exactly the type of guy that I should be dating.
A dopey smile crossed his face when he suspected that I might’ve mistaken his joke as a serious complaint.
“Just joshing you,” he said, taking a seat at my table.
“Hey, Jeff,” I said.
I wasn’t mad that Jeff had come into the breakroom—don’t get me wrong. But truth be told, what I wanted at that moment was just a little more time with my thoughts of last night before heading back into the grind.
“Late night?” Jeff asked, getting up and pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Huh?” I asked. “Oh, kind of. I went out for a few drinks with some high school friends. Why, that obvious?”
“You don’t exactly look your chipper self,” he said.
“Just a little tired is all,” I said.
Though the drinks weren’t the only thing that’d gotten me worn out. But Jeff didn’t need to know about any of that.
“Well, you’ve been pulling some crazy hours here recently,” said Jeff, taking his seat back down at my table and giving the white Styrofoam cup of jet-black coffee a blow. “You’re starting to put me to shame.”
“Just doing my part,” I said.
To be honest, I was already a little bored with the conversation. Like I said, Jeff was a nice sort of guy, but … I don’t know. Especially when compared to someone like Bryce; Jeff was just a little on the boring side. But every time I talked to him I wondered if something was wrong with me, if by this point in my life I should be attracted to safe, conventional men like him. But I just wasn’t.
Before the conversation could continue any further, however, Katie, one of the newer nurses, stuck her head into the room, her face a look of intensity.
“We got a beating,” she said, her brown eyes wide. “It’s bad.”
Jeff and I exchanged a quick look before bolting from our seats and rushing down the hospital hallway.
“A beating?” Jeff yelled as we dashed.
“Probably someone from Rooster’s,” I said as we turned a corner.
Soon, we were at the entrance where two nurses were standing over a man who was absolutely covered in blood.
“Jesus,” said Jeff, making an assessment of the situation. “What a mess.”
“We can discuss it later,” I said, running to the man’s side.
I rushed over to the man’s side, looking at the long trail of smeared blood that led from the entrance to where he was collapsed. Squatting down, I placed my fingers on his blood-covered neck and checked for a pulse. It was weak, but he was still alive and kicking.
“He must’ve dragged himself all the way here,” said one of the nurses.
“How do we know this was a beating?”
“That was the last thing he said before he went out,” said Jenny, one of the two nurses. “He just said …’jumped’ and that was it.”
“You guys can talk all you want later,” I said. “Stretcher, now.”
The two nurses snapped to attention and got what I asked for. I looked over the man as they did, trying to make out his features through the blood and bruising on his face. He was a wreck—if this guy hadn’t told Jenny that he’d been beaten, I would’ve guessed he’d been hit by a truck.
The nurses arrived with the stretcher, and with a grab and a heave, we got the man onto it. I looked over the guy again; something about him just struck me as unsettlingly familiar.
“Let’s get him to a room—now,” I commanded.
The nurses co
mplied, and soon we were rushing the man to one of the open rooms in the tiny hospital. Once we’d arrived I took a closer look.
“We need to get this blood off of him,” I said, scanning his body for any major lacerations or stabs, thankfully seeing nothing that seemed life-threatening.
Jeff watched from the doorway as the nurses brought me rags and water. A soaked cloth in hand, I wiped over one of his bare arms, revealing a thick bicep covered in tattoos beneath.
Wait a minute, I thought, the tattoos seemingly strangely familiar.
“We’ve got to ID this guy,” said Jeff.
“Yeah,” I said, “let me finish cleaning him up first. We should probably get this shirt off of him, too.”
Jeff approached, a pair of scissors in his hand. Tucking the blades below the sleeveless undershirt that the man was wearing, he cut through the blood-soaked fabric and pulled it opened, a beefy, muscular torso below.
“Someone’s not missing his gym days,” said Jeff, the two nurses standing behind him looking eagerly at the man’s sculpted physique.
“Less ogling, more work,” said Jeff, shaking his head as he looked the man over.
Now that it was clear that this wasn’t a gunshot or stabbing, the mood in the room lightened somewhat; the guy looked a mess, but he’d probably be fine.
I continued to wash the blood off the man’s torso, revealing no wounds that looked to be fatal.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d guess this blood wasn’t from him,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jeff. “No lacerations, no stabs, no gunshot wounds—nothing.”
“Maybe he got them as good as they got him,” I said.
Then, wringing the towel into the basin of red-tinged water, I moved to his face, which was caked with the hard black of dried blood. Starting at the forehead, I dragged the towel over him, wiping the blood off.
And when I’d gotten enough off to reveal his features, I gasped.
It was Bryce.
And then, before I could react with anything other than shock, his eyes opened and his hand shot out to grab my wrist.
“Where am I?” were his only words before going out cold once again.
Chapter Six
Bryce
My head was pounding when I finally came to. My whole body seemed to be screaming out in pain just from lying there, and it took serious effort just to open my eyes. A steady beep … beep sounded.
When I finally managed to open my eyes and looked around through my bleary vision, I realized that I was in a hospital. Panic ran through me as I tried to remember what had happened.
Adeline … Rooster’s … Spider …
It was coming back to me slowly, like a restless dream that I couldn’t quite remember. Looking down, I saw that my clothes had been removed, a sterile-looking white gown draped over my body. I opened my mouth and smacked my lips; I needed water, and now.
“Nurse!” I yelled out, the effort it took to speak sending waves of pain through my body.
No one responded.
“Someone get in here!” I yelled out again.
Right as I finished speaking, a woman dressed all in white, her head topped with blonde hair tied into a simple ponytail, opened the thin curtain separating me from the rest of the room. My eyes were still bleary and I couldn’t quite make out her features, but something about her seemed strangely familiar.
“Bryce Johnson,” she said, standing at the end of the hospital bed, a clipboard in her hands.
“I need …” I said, my thirst so intense that it was causing physical pain.
“Oh, right,” she said, speaking in that familiar voice.
She stepped over to my side, where a pitcher of water had been placed. But before she could pour a cup, I reached over, my chest now throbbing with pain. I grabbed the pitcher, pulled off the lid, and brought it to my lips.
“No-no-no,” the nurse said, “don’t overex—”
With deep, full swallows, I drained half of the pitcher, letting the thing drop onto the floor when I was done.
“—tend yourself.”
I let out a long breath, the water tasting like heaven in my mouth. Soon, my vision focused, and I was able to see the face of the nurse who stood over me.
It was the girl from the other night; it was Anya.
“What the hell is going on?” I demanded, looking around.
Anya held up her hand in a gesture that said “calm down.”
“Don’t get too worked up,” she said. “You got some bruised ribs; you don’t want to make things worse.”
“How the hell’d I get to a damn hospital?” I asked. “Who brought me here?”
“You … brought yourself here.”
“What?”
“You dragged yourself in through the front doors. Where were you last night? Do you remember?”
“I was at Rooster’s,” I said after taking a moment to think.
“Jesus, that’s a mile and a half from here,” Anya said, her voice disbelieving. “How you managed to drag yourself here in the shape you were in … that’s something else.”
“I’m hard to kill, what can I say?”
“Well, you looked like someone might’ve put you down for good. It was a little touch and go there for a while; you’re lucky that whoever attacked you didn’t use anything more deadly than their fists.”
I thought back to last night, remembering what I could.
“What do you remember?” asked Anya, now sitting on the edge of the bed.
Images of glancing weapons appeared in my mind.
“They … had knives,” I said.
“They did? The men who attacked you?” asked Anya. “But … you don’t have a single wound that looks like it could’ve been caused by one.”
More images flashed into my mind. I remembered the three men approaching me, weapons in hand, murder in their eyes.
“Donny gives his regards,” said Spider, his voice now sounding far away.
I remembered disarming the first man, knocking the knife out of his hands. Then, things got blurry.
“They … definitely wanted to kill me,” I said.
“What … who are you?” asked Anya.
Then she thought better of the question and started to get up.
“No, we need to call the police. We need you to give a statement, or something—whatever it is cops do.
I grabbed her wrist as she tried to get up, the effort in clenching my hand together sending waves of pain through my body.
“No,” I said, my voice stern as I could make it. “No cops.”
“What?” she asked in the naïve tone of someone who didn’t have the slightest understanding of the world that I lived in. “Don’t you want these guys in jail?”
Oh, they might spend a few nights in a jail. But as soon as they got out, they’d be spending every waking minute tracking me down, only satisfied when they put me down for good. And even if I managed to evade them for a while, my newfound reputation as a snitch would ensure that not a soul from my MC would be there to help me out.
But she didn’t need to know about any of that.
“No cops,” I said, my mouth a hard line.
“O…K,” she said, not getting it, but at least willing to trust me for the time being.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked, looking over my body for any particularly heinous injuries.
“Not much, truth be told. You had blood all over you, but when we saw that you hadn’t been cut, stabbed or shot, we took some samples. Sure enough, only a little of it was yours.”
“Then how’d I end up in here?”
“Looks like something slammed into you, hard,” said Anya, pointing to the swirling patterns of bruises on my left side, their colors a sickly purple and yellow. “We’re thinking it was a car.”
“A car?”
“That or a bull; something hit you and sent you flying.”
She shook her head as she looked over my chart.
“Lucky guy. Fi
rst, you survive getting jumped, then you survive getting hit by a car. And not just survived—you don’t have a broken bone in you.”
“What can I say? They broke the mold when they made me,” I said, tapping my chest with my fist.
“Tough as hell and modest on top of that,” said Anya, a sexy little smile playing on her lips.