“Ayda, you don’t need more answers that will haunt you. Not today.”
“I understand,” she whispered with conviction, her palm landing flat against my skin as her head tipped back down. “So what now? Are we safe?”
Safe. Wouldn’t that be a peaceful thought?
There would be a time for me to tell her what we were and where we stood. There would be moments of quiet in the future where the boredom and silence would leave her with little option but to think and wonder what had happened when she left that warehouse. I made another vow as I lay beside her, holding her in my arms—a vow to always answer as honestly as I could when she asked what was going down with the club. She’d earned that right in the last twenty-four hours. She’d earned it the first night I met her when she stood up tome the way no other woman ever had.
It just wasn’t the time to go into it all. She didn’t need to know how I’d made Cortez take his last breath. She didn’t need to know about the explosion Kenny had rigged at the warehouse, or the scene that Jedd and Slater had pieced together to make it look like some kind of Emps fucked up ritual gone wrong. She didn’t even need to know about the conversation we’d had with Sutton to fill him in and officially get him on our side for the first time in the club’s history. This wasn’t just a schoolyard plan we’d hatched that could be told in a few simple sentences.
It was a complicated MC web of lies, deceit and murder.
It was about our survival and their destruction.
What happened beyond that was anyone’s guess, but all I cared about as I held herwasher. Everything I did was for her. Without Ayda to live for, I’d have died several times over already.
As the dusty morning sunlight tried to peer through the cracks of the heavy curtains in the room, I curled my free hand around hers that lay against my chest, sighing into her hair before pressing a painful kiss to her head.
“We’re safe.”
For now.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Ayda
I’m not usually the kind of person who remembers their dreams. The moment I open my eyes, reality seeps in and anything that lingers is eaten with the appearance of the sun. That morning, curled into Drew, I woke up sweating with my hair plastered to my damp cheek and the lingering nightmares of what we’d been through making my head feel gritty and dirty. I was so confused. It took a moment for me to realize that the heat wasn’t from my body at all. It was radiating from the chest below my cheek. Drew’s body. I wasn’t sure what to make of the situation at first. For a full minute I was convinced that it was just the heat of the day and our bare skin generating too much warmth, which for us wasn’t that unusual.
Eventually, it was the shivers and the twitches that finally alerted me to the fact that something wasn’t right.
“Drew, baby?” I asked quietly, pushing up and away from him. One look at his body in the fading light and I knew it wasn’t a good situation. His skin was pale and damp, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, and his eyes were darting around behind the membrane of his eyelids. Reaching out with a tentative and shaky hand, I brushed the sweat from his face and pushed myself onto my aching knees, ignoring the screamof pain in my body as my palms moved from his clammy cheeks to his forehead.
He was burning up.
“Drew? Wake up!” I pleaded as my hands moved to the sweat covering his chest only to find the angry looking wounds on his body.
He groaned, the sound throaty like he was struggling to breathe, while his body curled in on itself with no obvious instruction from him when my hand barely brushed his abs. As I watched him struggle, I could feel the panic clutching at the walls of my sanity again, but I shoved it back to the deepest recesses of my mind. Drew neededmethis time, and there was only one thing I could do for him, but he could be damn sure I wouldn’t let him down.
Without further thought, I launched my aching body from the bed, limping and stumbling toward the door, grabbing a stray shirt to cover myself with on the way out. It took everything in me to stretch my back to pull it down over my head, but I managed before tugging on the door with both hands, forcing it out of the way so I could stumble into the corridor.
There were about five people lingering outside at first glance, but I was in no place to put names to faces even if I knew them well. There was only one person that could help me and I wasn’t even sure I knew what he looked like.
All of them were startled as I appeared, panting in pain and completely frantic about Drew’s condition. Even the walls heaved in a breath as though waiting for me to finally spit the right order of words out.
“Where’s Doc?” I shouted, my volume and tone completely out of my control. The faster my fear andadrenaline pumped through my body, the more limber I became, my own agony pushed aside at the thought of Drew’s pained groans.
“Drew?” Slater asked, pushing past men and bearing down on me. Any other situation and I would have shrunk back, but this was Drew’s health and not even the Reaper himself was going to get past me.
“Where the fuck is the doctor?”
“Here.”
The voice was unfamiliar, but the face was one I recognized as he appeared behind Slater and searched for a way past the human wall of muscle blocking his path. For the first and, I hoped, the last time in my life, I pushed my shoulder into Slater’s gut to move him aside and let the doctor through. I, more than anyone, appreciated who and what Drew represented to him, but if he thought for a second he meant any less to me, he needed a reality check. I’d always loved Drew, but the thought of losing him had done something to me. It was a trigger to a stronger and more aggressive woman inside of me. Kneeling in that warehouse, I’d come to the realization that I would die for Drew. If it meant he got to live, I would die a thousand deaths.
That was the only reason I was able to get Slater away from the door and stop him from entering with one look. It was the strength and conviction that I’d always had when it came to Tate. Drew was just as much my family as my brother was, and no one was getting past me until he was ready to see them.
The moment the doctor was inside, I backed up with hobbled steps. My legs weren’t matching my determination, but I managed to shut the door without so much as anargument, even as the doctor flicked on the lights and rushed to Drew’s side.
“God dammit. I told him to stay where he was, but the man is as stubborn as a mule.”
