Slater’s voice woke me from my thoughts, his foot tapping me on the shin. “Drew?”
I shook my head, blinking quickly to look back up at my friend. “Sorry. What?”
“What’s the plan with this guy?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled quietly, turning my attention back to him as my hands reached out for the ropes around his ankles. “We need to let him rotate his legs. His circulation will be fucked if we don’t.” My fingers worked swiftly to release his left ankle. The man’s eyes fluttered open a little farther as he looked down on me with both confusion and gratitude.
“You beat the shit out of him on Thursday night and now you’re worried about his blood flow?” Slater whispered.
Lifting his leg, I grabbed his foot and moved it around in a slow circle, keeping my eyes on my rival’s bloody face the whole time. “I guess I am.”
“Where's your head at?”
“I don't know how to answer that.”
“You’re losing it.”
“Can’t lose what you never had,” I muttered back.
“Harry and Jedd have any ideas on what we should do here?”
Dropping his ankle down, I grabbed hold of the rope again, pushing his leg back into place before I made sure to bind him a little higher up. “They’re not speaking to me.”
“No shit. This is the biggest mess we’ve been in since…”
“Since I went inside. I know. You don’t have to say it, Slater. I know what a fuck up I’ve made, okay? Nobodyknows it more than me.”
“You’re not fucking kidding, bro. This could ruin us all. Pour into the mix the fact that you’ve allocated two of our strongest men to Ayda and her brother, we’re weaker than piss right now.”
My head snapped up to him at the mention of her name while my hands moved to the guy’s other leg and got to work blindly. “Weak or not, that's non-negotiable. She’s in this mess because of me.”
“We all are.”
It took everything I had to not snap back. My defensive side was always the first thing to come out when someone started laying blame at my door this way, only that morning, I had very little in me that would let me go head first into another fight. In a matter of days, I’d managed to ruin a lot of people’s lives without fully realizing what the hell I was doing along the way.
“I know,” I whispered back, lifting the Emperor’s other leg up in the air and holding his foot up next to my shoulder as I rotated it around.
“This could kill us all.”
“I know.”
“It could get her killed, too.”
I swallowed harshly, my eyes closing temporarily as I tried to block everything out and find some kind of magic plan on the back of my eyelids that would save the whole fucking lot of us. Everything in my body seemed to turn to shit at the words he’d just spoken out loud. My stomach dropped, my mouth went dry, and the dread fed its way through my body like it was slowly trying to poison me with nothing but nightmares of what could happen to her because of myactions.
As I parted my lips to try and reply, the words ‘I know’ seemed to get lodged in my throat, and then everything happened all at once. One minute, I had the guy’s foot in my hand and I was in control, the next, he’d taken full advantage of my moment of weakness, regained some power in his thighs and swung his leg out to the side before smashing it straight across my face.
I went down like a sack of fucking kittens. The ringing in my head was so loud, it made my hands rise up to grip both sides as I tried to regain some kind of control. My face was scrunching up in pure, absolute, undiluted agony.
Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the scraping of a chair on the floor, followed by the sound of our sergeant at arms getting to work as Slater poured his fists upon that Emp’s face like he was nothing more than a punch bag while he cursed and spat at him.
“You piece of shit.”Smack.
In the back of my mind, as I curled up in a ball, grit my teeth together and grunted through every passing second of pain, I thought of Ayda and I saw her face.
I thought of that kiss we shared when I acted like a dick and pushed her close to the point of breaking, before I even had the chance to tell her what I really thought of her.
I thought of that look she wore as she asked me to stay and I walked away.
