She smiled lopsidedly at me. “Don’t be so hard on them, yeah? They’ve got the good stuff.”
I giggled before placing a kiss to the tip of her nose. “Go to sleep, you weirdo.”
And as her eyes fluttered closed, it didn’t take long for her body to go limp.
“I love you, Tee,” I whispered.
“Now,” Goose said as he threaded his suture line through a needle, “why don’t you go get some food and something to drink? When I’m all done here, I’ll get her into a room, and then you can go spend some more time with her.”
My mouth watered as my gaze found the bowl of fruit sitting next to the oven. “I am a bit hungry.”
“As am I,” Fangs said as he moseyed on over to the fridge. “So, what would you like? Sandwich? We’ve got some steaks marinating in here, I bet they’d make a good surf and turf.”
As I stood up, my mind swirled a million miles a second. My mouth watered as Fangs continued rattling off food options and the lingering shadows of the men behind me that cloaked me made me hyperaware of just how close they had become. I watched as Goose penetrated my sister’s skin to stitch her closed, drawing blood with every puncture he made.
“She’s—she’s bleeding,” I said softly.
Goose nodded slowly. “Not too much, though. I’ll have her cleaned up before—you’re going to pass out, aren’t you?”
And as my body teetered around in midair, the last thing I remembered was his voice. Not Goose’s, but Fangs’s.
“Sleep,” he whispered as he caught my plummeting body. “You’ve earned it.”
So, for the first time since meeting him in that dark, decrepit basement, I did as he asked. I respected the fact that my sister trusted these guys and I allowed darkness of the rest I so desperately needed to consume me. My only hope was that they put me in the same room as my sister so that she didn’t have to be alone any longer. So that she didn’t have to suffer alone like she had for the past fourteen nights.
But something told me—even in the darkness—that Fangs already had it under control.
9
FANGS
“Well?” I asked as Goose hovered over a sleeping Julia. “How is she?”
He took her pulse one last time before shrugging. “I think she’s worn out and a bit dehydrated. But once she wakes up, she can get a good meal in her system, and she should be good to go.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, you know that?”
He removed his stethoscope from his ears and nodded. “So are you.”
“Do me a favor,” I said as I perched on the edge of the bed, “gather the guys for a church meeting in twenty. There’s a hell of a lot I found out while being held captive, and we don’t have a lot of time to move on it.”
“On it. Twenty minutes?”
I picked up Julia’s leg and placed it in my lap. “Make it fifteen. I’ll be down there soon.”
As Goose backtracked out of my bedroom, I eased Julia’s shoes and socks off her feet. The bruises she had up and down her shins had gone unnoticed by me in that darkened basement, but when I took stock of her feet? Anger bubbled all the way up my throat again and threatened to drown me. I mean, her toenails were broken back to the blood-stained nub. Her pinky toe damn near looked broken it was so bruised and swollen, and the broken skin around her ankles infuriated me. She had been through hell, her and her sister. And yet, somehow, her beauty stunned me.
In the dim lighting of that basement, all I saw was her long, wavy blonde hair and her big ol’ blue doe eyes. However, in the bright light of my clubhouse bedroom, there was so much more to her and amplified her features. Like the dark freckled spot right next to her left nostril. Or the soft scar than ran through her right eyebrow. Or the smattering of freckles she had up and down her arms that were so faint in color that they damn near blended in with her tanned porcelain skin.
I stood and reached down, smoothing her soft tendrils away from her dirtied forehead. And as I hovered over her, I couldn’t get over how absolutely gorgeous she truly was.
“As God as my witness,” I said as I wiped a bit of dirt from her cheek, “Bullet won’t live to see another week.”
I charged out of my bedroom, leaving the door cracked in my wake just in case Julia got up and wanted to go find her sister. I certainly wasn’t going to confine her to a room. Not after the bullshit her and Theresa had gone through. There just weren’t any more open rooms in the clubhouse. Nowhere else for me to put her except in the bed where I normally slept.
Though, I honestly didn’t mind if I was being truthful to myself.
“Good to see you,” Bender said as I entered the round table room.
