Page 26 of A Love So Hard

“No, I didn’t go fucking get her because you stopped fucking breathing and I needed to make sure you lived first.”

“I’ve lost her.” The words slipped from my lips with the ring of truth. All of the anxiety I had been feeling for the past couple weeks had been preparing me for this inevitability.

“You don’t know that,” Merc stated softly as he finally looked me in the eye.

“I do. She promised she’d never let someone’s words send her running again without talking to me first. She also swore if she ever saw me behaving the way you do that she wouldn’t bother looking back when she left.”

“Fucking hell,” he muttered miserably. “I’m so goddamn sorry, D. I should have checked on you when you hadn’t come out any earlier, but Lily showed up and she was throwing a fit because one of the whores had the audacity to approach me with my wife standing right there.”

“I’m a fucking adult, man. It’s not your job to babysit me. I knew better. Hell, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen at the club that mother fuckin’ Stiff wasn’t to be trusted, and what did I do? I let him dose me and set me up.” My throat burned for the effort of saying so much making me regret saying anything at all.

“I’m so sorry, man. We’ll find her and get her back for you, I promise you that.”

I turned away from him then because I knew, somewhere deep down inside, that it was going to be next to impossible to do. Once she told Jack Carter what she’d seen, he’d make sure she disappeared. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past my own fuckin’ prez to make sure it happened since he didn’t want her involved with the club anyway.

“You didn’t seem surprised when I said his name.” I ended up coughing through the last of the sentence, but I needed to know whatever they had found out.

“When I pulled Savanna off of you and realized you had stopped breathing I backhanded the bitch and dared her to leave the fucking room. Told her I’d put a bullet in her right there if she moved. I breathed for you a couple times and then Snatched up the phone in your room and tried to get through to the office. Couldn’t so I dialed 911 and had an ambulance head our way. Tried the office again and got Timeless then.” He gave me a half smile as he finished.

“I fucking kept breathing for you until the ambulance got there, man. It was the scariest shit I’ve ever seen. They dropped that tube down your throat and the whole time that fucking cunt was sitting there crying and blathering on like she wasn’t just...” he cut himself before he could make the words come out. “Crow went with you in the ambulance so I could stay behind and get some answers. Knew the hospital was going to need to know exactly what had been done to you.”

“Skip all the emotional shit,” I warned, my anger getting the best of me at that point. “Just tell me what you learned.”

“Savanna was approached by Stiff earlier that day. Said he had a plan to make it so you wouldn’t be so caught up in Lucy’s pussy and you’d finally see the women of the club and give one of them a shot.” Savanna was one of the women who tried really fucking hard to get my attention during the time that Lucy was gone. She failed. I never touched her or any of the others during that time. “Three of them fell for it. The other two were Amber and Marley, the ones I saw talking to Lucy when I first noticed her at the party. Anyway, according to one of the prospects that overheard what they said at the bar they were covering for Sav, because they kept calling her Brenda and using different names for themselves. Guess they didn’t think anyone else would ever know who had been in that room with you.”

“They all three new I’d been drugged?”

“Yeah they did.”

“Did they,” I started to ask and hated the way I felt about the words I couldn’t speak. Fuck, I was a man. How the hell did I ask my best friend if I was actually raped?

“Amber and Marley said they didn’t. Don’t know if I believe them. There was evidence that they’d both had sex and whoever was with them hadn’t wrapped up. We could have it tested, our man took samples from them.” I was shaking my head already. No fucking way did I want to drag that out in any way that would mean having even more people know what happened. “Sav for sure was not pretending when I saw her. I’m sorry man. When I threw her off of you, it was obvious what she had done.”

I closed my eyes and let that sink in for a minute. “How the hell is that even possible when I was out cold?”

“Nature of the drugs apparently. Plus, the doctor thinks it was a whole cocktail of shit you got slipped and not just the GHB. They took blood to test, but wouldn’t release the results to us, or maybe don’t have it back yet, I don’t know.” He stopped talking for a minute until I opened my eyes back up and nodded. “Sav was quick to point the finger at Stiff. We have him in holding at the clubhouse.”

“What about her and the other two?”

“The other two are in their own holding room. Sav is no longer of this earth, brother. Figured you’d want to deal with Stiff yourself, but I couldn’t let that bitch live after what I saw her doing.”

I nodded once more. “Get Jack Carter here and get me a notebook and pen,” I told him and then I passed out, the exhaustion and probably a little depression pulling me under.

I was released from the hospital the following day, and Merc came to get me in his truck since I didn’t have my bike and wasn’t exactly in any shape to drive it anyway. He took us straight to the clubhouse. It was so quiet when we arrived that I had to ask. “Where the fuck is everyone?”

“Timeless thought it best to clear the place out until you were settled back in,” Merc explained. I just shook my head.

“Take me to where they’re being held.”

He took me first to the room underneath of our garage where the two lying whores were. The room itself was hard to maintain in Charleston. It had once been an in-ground pool. Instead of filling it in when the club bought the property they built right over top of it and left that information off of the plans. The pool served as our wet room. It wasn’t often that it was needed anymore, but there was a time when our club had its own troubles and it got more use than it saw these days. Didn’t matter, because today it was finally going to be put to use again. The minute those whores saw me they dropped down and started begging for their lives.

“Please, Double-D, we didn’t know what they were doing. We thought it was fake. We thought it was just a joke.”

“Just a joke?” I parroted back in question. Amber nodded her head. “Just a joke. Some bitch rode me while I was passed out and you sent my woman back to see that. Then I stopped breathing, damn near died, and it was just a joke?”

“No, it wasn’t supposed to be like that,” she whined. I just nodded my head and then I put a bullet in hers. I didn’t wait for Marley to say a word. I just turned and fired on her as well.

“Jesus, D,” Merc hissed out.

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