Page 67 of Gunner

He limps over and shoves an arm under my shoulders, jarring all of me so that I can’t keep back a hiss of pain, and pretty much hoists me up so my feet clear the ground. He walks quickly, out of that damn freezer, out back into the warmth. I didn’t realize how frozen I was until the warm air hits, stabbing at me like a thousand pieces of shrapnel cutting through my skin and organs.

There are men watching, standing around looking as stunned and frozen as Carlo, at the change in command. This whole thing has gone unbelievably sideways for them.

My world does the same, but I realize it’s not because I’m going to pass out. Carlo is fitting me into the passenger seat of a black, tinted out sedan.

It’s always black on black with bad guys. Leather, however, is a great thing, and the interior of a vehicle that may or may not see copious amounts of blood should always be a dark color.

“Blankets,” Diletta commands. “I need a blanket. He’s hypothermic.”

Shit. I should be taking better stock of my vitals.

“We don’t have any blankets.” The disjointed voice comes from somewhere far away from the car. There’s an argument in harsh, rapid Italian. A few minutes later, Diletta swims into view, looking like an angel again with the halo of light my eyes warp around her face. She has an armload of camo shirts which she tucks around me from top to bottom until I’m like a mummy.

More like a living corpse.

I’m shaming myself here, but not only can I not function enough to care about being unmanned, I basically can’t focus on any thought at all. I realize how close to passing out I am when I feel like I’m floating out of the car and rising up into the air. I’m losing touch with my body. I’ve known that sensation before, when I swam in and out of a sea of endless pain, a living hell with real flames and melted skin, when I was burned.

Turns out, freezing isn’t much fun either.

Diletta slams the door shut, then drops into the driver’s seat beside me.

The fresh scent of her, orchids and fruit, chocolate chip cookies and rich, dark coffee, mingles with the scent of bad guy car. I drink it in, like it’s my dying breath.

I vow that it isn’t.

I will not let this shit fest be my legacy.

Even so, it feels like my mortal coil is doing some heavy shucking as the world goes black and I float out of my battered body without crashing down back into it this time.

Chapter 20

Diletta

Adam Archer is a silver fox type of guy, clean cut, professional, probably in his late forties. His clinic might be state of the art down here, set up just for the sole use of Satan’s Angels MC, and Archer might even be okay, but he earned a spot at the top of my shitlist when he took Ronan from Crow and Preacher, and hustled him straight into a private room that I was locked out of, despite my protestations that I was an actual nurse, godammit.

I don’t give a fuck that he wants to run tests, get Ronan hooked up to an IV, and start repairing the damage my father’s men did to his body. I wanted to be in there with him. To be fair, which I don’t feel like being at all right now, I didn’t say a thing. Not when a few of Ronan’s MC buddies poured onto the sidewalk to meet us as soon as I pulled up. Not when they took their unconscious friend out of the passenger seat and carried him downstairs to the sterile secret clinic with the unmarked steel basement door. Not when they walked Ronan right to the back, where Archer was already gloved and scrubbed, prepared for the worst.

I haven’t said a single thing so far and it’s been twenty minutes.

Lark and Ella are here with me, as well as an older biker lady named Rita. She has boss babe, in control vibes about her, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the leader of the old ladies or the women who hang around the club, in some capacity.

They’ve all been quiet too.

The men hang on the periphery around the small waiting room. It doesn’t look like anything out of a hospital or doctor’s office. The chairs are too nice, the floor too clean. It looks more like the waiting area of a law office, minus the coffee table with the token magazines. The huge, rough bikers look out of place here, but they’re lending their support to their fallen brother and that means the world to me. If they’re angry with me—and I damn well would be if I were them—they haven’t shown it. They might be outlaws, but they had impeccable manners.

My insides are a mess, my thoughts roiling through me in waves. I don’t want to keep dwelling on the panic I felt driving from the cabin to Seattle to find that butcher shop. The thought that I might be too late, the paranoia that maybe a conversation meant with a bullet and not words. I’ll never forget the sight of Ronan strung up in that freezer like an animal.

I saw my father’s men roughed up while I was growing up and once, I walked in on a man being interrogated, but he was sitting down in a chair. It wasn’t any better, but he was a stranger. This was Ronan.

My Ronan.

The weeks ahead of me are going to be long and sleepless as my mind keeps bringing me back and around to the whole haunting drive from Seattle to Hart. I knew Ronan was unconscious. I knew he was tougher than a hard knock to the head and some fists and kicks. That didn’t stop me from thrusting my fingers to his neck every few minutes while I pretty much broke the barrier of sound and light trying to get here.

I have my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. I’m scrunched over, nearly bent in half, but it does nothing tokeep the sharp twinges of regret, grief, and anger from sparking through me. I want to be in that room with him.

After twenty or so minutes of silence, it’s clear that the women have had enough of leaving me alone with my thoughts. They’ve respected my need for silence, but that’s at an end.

Ella walks over to my chair and stands beside me. She puts her hand on my shoulder. She and Lark might have just met me when they dropped by my house to introduce themselves, thinking I needed a warning about ‘the life’ and about ‘the man’,but they both feel like people I’ve known for a long time. Some human beings take an eternity to get to know and others, you just mesh with instantly.

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