“Hey, can we get out of here, man?”
Then I turned around and saw a second sight that should have been impossible. Patriot, though bleeding from the shoulder, looked at me with a thumbs up and a cocky half-smile, half-grimace.
“You’re alive?”
“I faked being dead,” he said. “Let them think the one shot got me. I see they put some makeup on you.”
“Yeah, fuck off,” I said, but I was smiling—or as much as I could with all of the battle wounds on my face. “Can you drive? I’m not sure I should be.”
“Yes, because as bikers, we care so much about the rules of the road,” Patriot said. “Yeah. Let’s get the priest in and get us to the hospital, huh?”
“Fuck, please.”
I tried my best to help Patriot carry Father Marcellus, but it really just felt like I was performing ten percent of the work. Still, that was ten percent I would not have been able to do if I was dead.
I still couldn’t believe I was alive.
Actually, I couldn’t believe anything that had happened in the last twenty minutes.
The Saints had known we were coming. Patriot had faked his own death. Father Marcellus had come to help me. Then, of all fucking people, my brother, hidden and absent for a year, had suddenly appeared to rescue me at the last second... and apparently, he’d formed his own offshoot of the Black Reapers?
The number of questions I had running around in my head hurt almost as much as the physical damage.
But for now, I was just grateful to be alive.
Angela
As soon as Beth had informed me that someone had found Cole Carter, Lane’s brother, I knew that he was perhaps the only person who could help Lane.
I refused to talk to anyone else on the Black Reapers after what Lane had told me about there being a spy. But I couldn’t let the information go by without doing something. So as soon as I got outside the hospital, I called Cole.
I still didn’t know how the hell I managed to convince him to come and help. I knew the turning point in the conversation was when I said he was getting justice for Shannon, but even then, it went from “fuck Lane” to “where is he going tonight?” When I told him he was going to take care of the Saints somehow and couldn’t tell anyone, Cole simply said, “He’s not going to be the only one,” and then hung up.
I must have remained in that hospital multiple arms’ lengths away from the remaining Black Reapers as I hoped and prayed that the arrival of Cole would be a good thing for Lane. I just hated the idea of him and two other Reapers going to fight, yet I didn’t want to meddle in club business. I knew what I had done was a risk on multiple levels.
If it ever got out that I had coordinated with club members to strike at someone, even if that someone was the head of a club that caused Springsville the worst trouble of all, I was all but barred from public office forever. If Lane found out I had contacted Cole... well, that seemed like it was going to happen sooner rather than later. I had to hope that he saw I did it because I cared about him.
I had broken so many laws tonight and had associated with so many characters, the Angela of just a month ago would have looked at me now in horror. But the biggest difference between that Angela and me now?
I knew what was more important between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.
“Coming through!”
I looked up to see some emergency nurses hauling in three men—one of them Lane Carter.
“Lane!” I shouted.
But before I could get any closer, a young Black Reaper cut me off, snarling at me.
“Beat it, bitch,” he said. “This—”
“Let her by!” Lane shouted.
I didn’t know how he heard me over all of the noise, but the member sure got the message. He backed off, looking unsure if he was supposed to keep growling at me or apologize and move to the side. I ignored his mixed facial expressions and followed the nurse into the operating room.
“Is he going to need surgery?”
“Possibly,” the closest nurse said to me. “But we need swelling to go down. We need to make sure his vitals are fine.”
