Page 12 of Never Trust the Living (Battle Crows MC 7)

But the next time I woke, it was with the room dark, and the only thing making noise being the monitors.

One monitor, in particular, was really fuckin’ annoying.

The heart monitor.

I hated hospitals.

I reached blindly for the wires that I could feel tangled around my hands, but then cold fingers stilled my blind grab.

“Hey,” the quiet whisper said. “Still. Don’t do anything like pull those out. You need those to keep pumping you the medications that make the pain stay under control.”

My eyes opened to darkness.

Darkness but for one small sliver of light coming in from the hallway. That sliver of light lit up the girl that’d been the one to save me.

“Hey,” I rasped. “You finally snuck in.”

She smiled. “I just wanted to make sure that you were alive.”

“Still kickin’.” I paused. “Barely.”

My head hurt.

Other things hurt.

Hell, who was I kidding? I was barely kicking. But I was kicking. So there was that.

“Good,” she whispered. “I just… I just wanted to make sure. That you would live. That you were okay and nobody… for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry. I’ve tried so hard to tell everyone. To make them understand…”

But nobody would believe her.

I’d heard my dad talking about it earlier.

It made sense.

If she’d tried, that was all that she could do.

It wasn’t her fault that her brother was nuts.

“My brother is in police custody.” She spoke so quietly that I could barely hear her. “He’s admitted to six murders.”

I felt my stomach tighten. “Seven? I thought there were two.”

She sighed. “There was even one more. Before. A kid at the foster home that I tried to convince the police about, but they didn’t believe me. They didn’t believe me about our parents, the foster parents, or my two friends, either.”

“Well,” I said. “May he rot in hell.”

She sighed. “That’s just it. I doubt he’ll rot in hell. My guess? He’ll get lucky and go to a psychiatric facility. He’ll be back one day.”

That didn’t mean good things.

Not at all.

CHAPTER 4

I’m not always an asshole. Sometimes I’m asleep.

-Bram to Dory

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