Torched: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Paula Cox

  That was the last time I saw the outside or had contact with another person. Occasionally, I would see a new car drive up. The men would talk for a few seconds while the first one would drive away. They did this three times a day—some strange changing of the guard routine. I had it pretty timed so that it just became another way of passing the day, but I still held out hope that in one of those cars would be Mack.

  Now it’s been seven days—a full week since the fire. At this point, I am done hoping that my white knight is coming for me in this tower. My white knight turned out to be the person keeping me from my life, from my mom. Luckily, I always carry a spare battery pack for emergencies like this, and the doctors had been more than willing to keep me updated from afar as I lied and said I was traveling. Still, knowing I didn’t have much battery left if Mack planned to keep me another week or more, I asked the doctors only brief questions about her condition.

  She had had a heart attack. They explained to me that women’s heart attacks are much different than a man’s. Instead of feeling that burning in her arm or the strange taste in her mouth, my mom may have only felt panicked or feverish, and then, with a BAM!, it hit her. She had flagged down a motorcyclist outside who I am guessing was one of Mack’s handlers. They brought her into the hospital on the back of the bike unconscious but still alive. A few minutes later, and she would have been dead. For that, I have Mack to be thankful for.

  My mom spent the rest of her time in the ICU, hooked to a ventilator and countless other machines; the doctors tried to quickly explain their necessity. She couldn’t speak or move, but she did open her eyes a few times when Roxy came to visit her in my place. I only knew this because of the hundreds of texts Roxy was sending me each day asking me where I was and why I was refusing to come to my mom’s side.

  But today’s text is different. I can’t ignore this one. It says, “Anna, your mom needs you here today. I don’t know what else to say to you, but please come.” There’s nothing else. Unlike the other texts where she put all this guilt on me, she doesn’t follow it up with updates on what the doctors are planning on doing or if my mom moved her fingers or not. Some part of me breaks off knowing that Roxy’s few words have deeper meaning than she can even convey.

  The doctor calls next. His voice sounds distant, far different from the upbeat and hopeful self he usually is when I call in. “Ms. Fox, I know that you’re traveling, but if there is any way that you could come today, it’s best that you do it soon. She is holding on, but it won’t be long before…” His voice trails off. Behind him, I can hear the sound of faint, slow beats and women chatting in low tones.

  I gulp down the tears that have already begun to flow. I force myself to ask, “Before what?” Logically, I know the answer. The last few phone calls I’ve had with him and the few texts I’ve gotten the courage to read from Roxy didn’t really give me a picture of someone improving. Instead, she seemed to becoming more tired and the interventions they were giving her were more severe. There was talk of shocking her heart back into the rhythm or perhaps putting her on a transplant list, but she was already so frail and her body had taken such a beating from the original attack. They wanted to wait and see, but the wait was over. I could feel that.

  The doctor huffs into the receiver and whispers, “Ms. Fox, I am so sorry. There’s nothing else we can—” The phone slips out of my hand and falls to the floor. I grab the pair of shoes still sitting by the doorway along with a sweatshirt from my book bag. I put my hair into a quick ponytail as I walk outside into the cool, late fall night.

  I’m not even two feet out the door when the same man from before comes running at me. He stammers, “What the fuck are you doing? Did you not get the memo the first time, lady? Or do you really love the punishment?”

  I walk straight towards him in a near run, my hands find his collar, yanking him down to me. He can’t even react, he’s so shocked. “Listen to me!” I scream, needing him to hear my words. “I need you to drive me to Rosefield Hospital in the city NOW.”

  “I’m not doing shit!” he says as he spins away, nearly taking me to the ground. I grab his arm again as firmly as I can. My eyes force him to look back into mine. Tears have already begun to trickle down my face, and just one look at this changes him. His body relaxes, his face softens. That hard exterior seems to melt under the leather club jacket.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble with Mack or the club, but my mom is in that hospital and she’s dying. She doesn’t have long, and I need to say goodbye. Haven’t you ever lost anyone you loved? Don’t you wish you had more time with them?” The words fall out of my mouth like a stream trickling into a river, but the garbled, pleading mess does something to him.

  He pulls away slightly, checking his phone nervously. Shaking his head down at me, he points towards the back door and says, “Get in and get down. It’s not safe out there.”

  “Really?” I don’t know what comes over me, but I run into his arms, enveloping him in a bear hug. I whisper, “Thank you,” in his ear before slipping into the backseat and down to the floor. He grunts as he sits back into the driver’s seat and backs the car out of the long driveway. I feel us rolling back down the hill towards town. Streaks of light from the lamps along the road fill in the car while his classic rock music keeps me distracted. I hear him on the phone, but I try not to listen in. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. He’s bringing me to see my mom, and I’ll forever be thankful for him risking his club status to get me here.

  When we make it to the parking lot, my feet can barely touch the ground. I sprint through the hospital, completely uncaring of how I look or the stares of the people in the waiting rooms. The number 222 is seared in my brain as I storm up the stairs and through the security desk at the ICU. A guard trails behind me, but gives up panting when I make it through the closing security doors.

  As soon as I make it through, I am hit by the chaos that this place can be. Nurses run from room to room, following beeps and buzzes. Red alarms flash in a closed off room just to the right of me. A teenager clutches an older woman as they sob breathlessly just outside. This is no place to die, but it’s the place these people have come to do it.

  “Anna?” I break my freeze and turn slowly towards the open door just beside me. Roxy stands in the doorway clutching paper tissues in her hand. Her eyes are red and blotchy and her black jacket dangles off of her shoulders. She’s still wearing the scrubs she is required to wear at her job at the chemical research facility. “How did you… I thought you would never…” She steps towards me with her hundreds of questions, but they all drop to the side when she pulls me in for a long, deep hug. My head rests on her shoulder with my eyes closed tight.

  When I open them, my mom is there. Under a dim, sterile white lamp, she rests with her head turned towards the window. There’s a blanket around her chest, but her hospital scrubs have been pulled down enough so that the white wires attached to the machine could be taken off. As I break the hug and come nearer to her, I can still see the outline of the bandages on her pale, greying skin. The ventilator is gone too. The machines are turned off as well. Unlike the room with the screaming red alarm and the crying family, my mom’s room is a cold silent.

  Roxy steps forward, slipping around the other side of the bed so that she sits beside my mom. She takes my hand, urging me to join her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. They wouldn’t let me make any decisions. I had to bribe the doctor with a date to get them to tell me anything when I was here. We didn’t know when you would come, but I’m so glad you are here for this.”

  I want to tell her everything—the burning building, Mack and I making love out on the motorcycle, Riley coming back to life, but nothing seems like a good excuse for leaving my mom here alone in this hospital room when it should be me in Roxy’s place. I take one of my mom’s hands, placing them in mine. I half expect her to squeeze back like she would when I was a child lying under the covers of her bed at night, but she doesn’t. Her hand j
ust slides by her side and out from under me.

  “How much longer?” I muster up. Nothing would be the right answer to this question, but I have to know.

  “Not long now. The hospice worker they had brought in told me that she will struggle and then become peaceful when there’s only a little time left. She’s resting now. The nurses said they would leave us alone and monitor from afar. They’ll come in when it’s done.”

  “Thanks, Roxy,” I choke back. “Can I have… I think I need…” She reads my mind by folding my mom’s other hand across her lap towards me and then leaving the room. She mutters something about being in the waiting room when I need her and then takes off. I feel her pause at the door. She too wants this goodbye.

  Alone, I press my head to my mom’s chest and curl up beside her. Her skin is colder, but there’s that faint smell of peppermint that I used to love as a kid. She always carried mints with her wherever she went. Time passes by quickly, much faster than it did back in the safe house when I knew nothing. Now, it floats by outside my window, sped up. Time has a destination and I am not eager to arrive.

  There’s so much to say to her. I want to tell her about the time that I accidentally set the couch on fire when I tried smoking a cigarette in the house. She always blamed an outlet on that. I want to tell her about what I did to Riley and ask for forgiveness, but that seems too selfish right now. Part of me wants to fill her in on Mack, at least the good stuff. She always loved a good romance story, but I couldn’t bear to tell her that he was the reason I never came to her side.

  So, instead, I say nothing. I lay there with my hands around her waist and my head near her heart. I listen to the beat while watching the monitor out of the corner of my eye. The spaces between the jolts of green line grow farther apart, and I struggle to make out the sound of anything. Even her breath feels lighter on my hair.

  Minutes later, and there’s nothing. My entire world lays in this bed, wrapped up in a white hospital blanket. I take her hand into mine again, and I whisper out into the silence, “I love you, mom. I love you. I love you. I love you.” And then I close my eyes and drift away to a place where she is very much alive and well.

  “Ms. Fox?” Someone hovers over me, a hand holds on to my arm slightly shaking me awake. “Ms. Fox? I’m Mackenzie, the nurse.” My eyes flutter open up and towards a woman peering over me. Her face is forgiving. She’s been doing this for years. “I’m here to help you. Would you like to get coffee while they bring her down?”

  Bring her down? It takes me a few seconds to realize there are two men in the room holding white sheets in their arms. They are here to take my mom’s body away. I look over towards the clock. I’ve been asleep for about an hour now. Outside looks even darker than before.

  Gently, I remove myself from my mom’s side and walk out of the room, not wanting to look any of the hospital workers in the face. I can’t bear to see them bring her out with the sheet over her face, so I go back out the way I came in, past the security desk and towards the exit.

  As I get closer to the doors, I realize that I am choking. My throat is closing in on itself, my chest caves in, and my head grows heavy. I grab hold of the cold metal stairwell desperate for some support. My feet shake as I practically fall down the steps. I push my body up against the metal doors, but it doesn’t open. I hit it again and again until I force it free. I go flying, hitting something rock hard.

  The object picks me up, holding me to him. I can smell that familiar scent again, leather and oil. I suck in a deep breath as I force myself to look up into those dark, smoky eyes covered by the strands of blackish-brown rivets of hair. “How are you here?” I ask Mack, still gasping for air.

  He pulls me towards a chair in the hospital’s main waiting area, pulling it underneath me to force me back down. “It’s okay. I’m here. Try and take a deep breath if you can.” He pulls his jacket off and places it on my shoulder. The weight of it should overwhelm me, but it does the opposite. After a few minutes, I’m breathing normally and seeing clearly. The wave of panic has been pushed aside and something else has taken its place.

  “Anna,” he finally says, kneeling before me, “I am so sorry. Randall told me about your mom on the drive over, and I tried to get here as fast as I could. I… I don’t know what to say.”

  “Good. I don’t want you to say a damn thing to me.” I throw off the jacket, pushing it back onto his lap. “I should have been here seven days ago. If I had, she might have… she might have made it. But instead, I have to worry about burying her now.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Anna. I did it to protect you. You had to know that. That night, we had no idea what was happening. I lost three of my men to Riley.”

  “Stop it, Mack! I don’t give a fuck about Riley anymore—and I sure as shit don’t care about your goddamned club! I should never have taken you up on your offer. I should have dealt with this by myself. But now my mom’s dead—and it’s all our fault! Nothing you could do or say could make that any better.” I stand up. The pain and rage built up inside of me threaten to explode if I contain it any longer.

  “Anna… come on. Please. You know that I didn’t want you to have to go through this. Everything I did was because I love you.”

  “Love?” I almost giggle at the sheer absurdity of his dropping an L-bomb like that. “Are you fucking kidding me? You locked me into that home without even a phone call or a text. You wouldn’t let me go see my mom when she needed me to the most. That’s fucking love to you? Are you out of your mind?”

  I’m seething, my chest heaving, my heart beating incredibly quickly. I don’t even care; I just push forward. I feel my lips curl up into a sort of twisted smile as tears simultaneously sting my eyes. “I see it so clearly now. I was blind at first, but now I get it. You’re a narcissist and an addict. You’re not capable of loving anyone but yourself—yourself, and that goddamn club you’re so hooked on.” I stride past him, out towards the rest of the waiting room so that I can do the next part in public. I shake my head and say in a loud voice, “It’s your lucky day. You’re free. I’m done. We’re done. Goodbye, Mack”

  He calls out my name over and over again, but I am already too far gone. I head back towards my mother’s room where I know he can’t get to me and where I know I am meant to be.

  CHAPTER 21

  “If everything goes to plan, it looks like we can have the project completed in about ten weeks, maybe less if the weather stays warm and we don’t get any record rainfall for November.” My contractor stares back at me with a wide, satisfied grin on his face. No doubt, he thought I would be pleased with this news. He should know better. After working with me for the past two years, he knows me well enough to not push off crap as gold.

  “Ten fucking weeks? Are you serious, Orlando? You really think I am going to be okay with your men working on my property for ten weeks? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. It needs to get done, and it needs to get done within a few weeks. You hear me?” I place my hands on the top of my desk and push off to stand. I am done with this meeting. I should have canceled it, but after what happened in the hospital with Anna, I was too frazzled to think about the routine stuff I had on my plate the next day.

  “Mr. Steel, getting it done in a few weeks’ time isn’t realistic. For one, the fire department hasn’t finished the investigation. In fact, most of these renderings are based on what small glances we could get a look at from the taped off areas. If they take as long as they usually do, ten weeks could actually be a pipe dream.”

  “Don’t worry about the fire department or that investigation,” I shoot back. “I’ll take care of them. They’ll be gone tomorrow, and you’ll get your men in there to start working.”

  Orlando peers at me. Despite his best efforts to look unfazed by me, I can tell he’s uncomfortable just sitting here in this room with me. Like all the civilians I bring in to headquarters to do some contract work, he practically shrivels with me standing above him. He only sinks further do
wn into my leather office chairs when I open the door, calling for one of my men down below. I can only imagine what he thinks is about to happen to his poor soul.

  His voice shivers and quakes as he rings his hands around the rolled up blueprint renderings of the new brick buildings I am having constructed in place of the burnt ruins. “I—I can try, Mr. Steel, but that’s as good as I can promise. I guess if we moved around some of our other work and canceled on a client or two we could get it done sooner, maybe by Christmas—”

  “Thanksgiving. My sister’s restaurant needs to be opened by Thanksgiving. That gives you three weeks to get your shit together. You say you can cancel on other clients, do that. I’ll compensate you for it. Tell me the cost of those projects, and I’ll make sure your men get that pay in their timesheets and that your reputation goes up in my community.” I open the door further for him, ushering him out. He passes by me nervously, looking both to the left and the right before heading down the metal staircase. As he takes his first step away from me, I call back, “Have I ever given you reason to doubt me, Orlando?”