Page 80 of Ruthless Reign

“Three hours is going to have to be good enough.”

“Kaleb?”

I looked up, finding Becca in the doorway, clinging to the frame with no weight on her right foot. Her face was pale. Dried blood coated her leg from thigh to ankle. There were bruises on her neck. On her face. Cuts, too. One on her cheek that was going to scar.

My throat constricted and something inside of me crumpled.

Ma was up and over to her in an instant, quicker than I had time to properly take her in. She helped Becca hobble to the bedside, muttering curses.

“Christ help us, you’re just as bad as they are,” I heard her grumbling.

I stood and felt the blood drain from my head in a way that had the room spinning until I fell back on my ass, grimacing. “Vixen?” I choked just as her arms came around me.

She hugged me gently as her warm tears smeared onto my collar, but I pulled her hard against me, inhaling her scent, tainted with the earthy copper of blood.

“Don’t, you’ll hurt yourself,” she protested weakly, her voice watery, but I only squeezed her harder.

“You’re okay?” I asked.

She laughed against my neck. “Really? You did not just ask me that.”

I pulled her back to look at her, ignoring the cold sweat rushing over my chest and back. “What the fuck did that bastard do to you?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

She looked at the bandage dressing on my chest with pain and guilt in her eyes. I placed my palm on hers, right between her breasts, where I knew she had a wound that likely looked a lot like this one. “We match now, Vixen.”

She wiped her nose and huffed a dark laugh just as a doctor was unceremoniously shoved into the room. He tripped, catching himself on Ma’s chair to right his glasses.

Hardin appeared in the doorway behind him and a nurse squeezed past with a tray of medical supplies she placed uneasily on a rolling table.

Ma relinquished her chair for Becca, who grudgingly stepped away from me to sit down as the doctor set to examining her wounds.

“Brother,” Hardin said, his dark eyes analyzing the bandages before tracking upward. He nodded as his gaze met mine, a rare depth of emotion in his stare. His fists clenched, and he swallowed.

You good? he asked without words.

I returned his nod and a tiny notch of the tension straining in his shoulders loosened. A muscle in his jaw ticked.

Good.

“Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Becca hissed as the doctor started to clean the wound in her thigh.

I swung a leg off the bed at the same time Hardin stomped further into the room.

“Boys,” Ma growled. “Let the doctor work.”

But then she herself slapped the doc upside the back of the head. “Charlie Baker, your mother would have your balls for that bedside manner. Give the girl something for the pain before you start poking around like that.”

“Right,” the young doctor blurted, dismissing the nurse to go and get something for her. We didn’t have to come to the hospital often, our resident ex-military medic was able to handle the majority of injuries we had, but when we did, they knew better than to dose us up with pain meds. The doc probably just thought Becca was no exception to this rule.

Or at least that was what I rationalized to myself to stop from wanting to scalp him for being so rough with my girl.

“N-no,” Becca stuttered out. “No, I don’t want morphine. We need to talk and I can’t be fucking out of it for this conversation.” She gripped the arms of the chair and gave the doc a hard look. “Just get it over with.”

“I’ll lidocaine the area,” the doc offered, and she nodded, flinching as the needle injected the freezing agent into her skin.

Hardin threw his hands through his hair, turning to look away as the doctor worked. He didn’t have to explain why.

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