Page 10 of Kings & Carnage

“Fuck,” Rock said. “Then you’re right, we do need to get out of here.”

Willa sat up and looked down at him. “You remember.”

“I remember being shot at by Roberto’s thugs,” he said. “And I remember the car flipping.”

“That’s more than I remembered when I first woke up,” Willa said.

“It’s enough to know we can’t stay here,” he said.

“You have a concussion,” Willa pointed out. “And maybe even more serious head trauma than that. Plus, your arm is broken.”

“I’m fine,” Rock said, sitting up.

Willa got off the bed. “We don’t even have a car. And I don’t know where our clothes are.”

There was a note of desperation in her voice as she tried to convince him we couldn’t leave.

“Those are solvable problems, Jezebel,” Neo said, heading for the door of Rock’s hospital room.

She glared at me when Neo disappeared into the hall. “This is insane. You’re all hurt and— ” she raised her voice to talk over me when I tried to protest, “don’t even try to tell me you’re fine because I can tell from the way you and Neo are moving that you’re hiding something under those hospital gowns and it’s not just the good stuff.”

I laughed in spite of myself. How did this fucking girl know us all so well? “It doesn’t matter, tiger, because if we stay we’re going to be a lot more than hurt — we’re going to be dead. Do you really think Roberto is going to let us watch reality TV while we recover in the hospital? That he’s going to let us saunter off into the sunset?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But it’ll take time to… I don’t know, assign the job to someone else, send them back up here.”

“We were all out of it for a while remember?” I asked. “We’ve already lost more than twenty-four hours. Even with the six-hour drive, he’s had more than enough time to regroup.”

Rock took her hand. “He’s right, kitten. And I think you know it. We have to get out of here. No discharge papers, no announcement, just a quick and quiet exit.”

An internal war played out across her beautiful face, but she didn’t have time to say anything else because a second later, Neo stepped through the door holding a stack of light green scrubs.

“Solved problem number one,” he said, tossing the scrubs on the bed. “Let’s go.”

Chapter5

Willa

This was a bad idea, but it was the best one we had, because the Kings were right: Roberto wasn’t going to let us walk off into the sunset. I didn’t know what we’d do or where we’d go once we left the hospital — it didn’t seem smart to go back to the Kings’ house — but we were sitting ducks in the hospital.

The Kings stripped off their hospital gowns then and there, like it was impossible a nurse or doctor would come in any second and see them bare-assed — and I did mean bare-assed — because there was no underwear under the gowns.

But it wasn’t their bare asses that got my attention — it was the bandages covering what were obviously serious wounds.

I gaped at the one on Neo’s chest, right over his heart. “Oh hell no. We are not leaving this hospital. You didn’t tell me you’d been hurt!” I frowned at Oscar, who had a similarly large bandage on his right thigh and a giant bruise on his chest. “I’m not surprised Neo would lie to me, but you? I expected better.”

“First of all,” Neo said, “we didn’t lie.”

“It was a lie of omission,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Second,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, “it’s fine. They fixed it in surgery.”

“In surgery?”

“Yeah, me too,” Oscar said. “Took the bullet right out.”

“See?” Rock asked. “We’re good to go, kitten.”

“You shouldn’t be saying a word,” I said, reconsidering the whole thing. “You have a head injury. You shouldn’t even be out of bed.”

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