But I didn’t want to leave her side.
“Uh, Axe?” Wolf asked from beyond Brielle’s closed door.
I stood to my feet and cracked my neck. “What?”
He jiggled the doorknob, but I was quick to put a stop to that.
“Don’t you dare open that door. What do you want?”
I heard him scoff. “Well, whenever you’ve got some free time to spare us, Your Majesty, you’re needed downstairs if you’re done distracting yourself up here.”
I growled as I charged the door, ripping it damn near off its hinges, swinging it open. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
But, instead of being met with Wolf’s face, I was met with his footfalls as they backtracked away from the door.
“Downstairs when you’ve got free time to spare us, Me Lord!” he shouted at me.
Oh yeah, we were about to catch hell from our guys over this shit.
14
BRIELLE
I woke up one morning and felt… surprisingly better. The sunshine streamed through the windows of the room that the guys had put me in, and as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, the telltale pain that used to waft up to my hips was no longer present. I looked down at my ankles and saw that my gauze was clean. I picked my wrists up, studying them for any sign of leakage, but found none.
Maybe I was finally turning a corner.
“Shower time,” I whispered to myself.
It helped, taking the gauze off in the shower. It didn’t stick to my skin that way. I shed my clothes and turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, ready to cleanse my life of the burdens it had picked up along the way. The steam overwhelmed the room as I slipped inside, drenching my gauze with water so that I could unravel it from my body and see what was beneath. And to my relief, the skin had healed over, covering the raw and irritated wounds with skin that now needed time to heal.
It felt good, not to feel pain with every step that I took.
“Oh, yeah,” I groaned as I stuck my head beneath the flowing hot water.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been in bed, but it was long enough for me to feel like I was caked in a layer of dirt and sadness. I grabbed whatever soaps and shampoos I could find. I scrubbed myself from head to toe, twice. While the conditioner that I was shocked to have found sat in my hair, moisturizing it after days of neglect, I took the liberty of stretching out my sore muscles. I raised my hands above my head. I bent down and tried to touch my toes. My back cracked and my joints popped, as if my body were settling back into its original groove.
It felt good to feel good again.
I showered until the water ran lukewarm. I knew the guys would be pissed, but I didn’t care. I deserved that shower, as far as I was concerned. And they owed me, big time. But all good things had to come to an end, so I rinsed out the conditioner and turned off the water.
Before wrapping a towel around my body and heading back into the bedroom.
“Well, well, well,” Mav said as he stood next to my bedside table, “what do we have here?”
I watched the stem of a sucker he had in his mouth wiggle with every word.
“Morning, Mav,” I said, standing there in the entrance to the bathroom.
He raked his gaze down my body and I enjoyed how hungry he looked. “Heard the shower kick on and I figured I’d come up and see if you needed help.”
“That’s very kind of you, thank you.”
His stare raked back up. “But I can see that you’re obviously feeling better.”
I gripped my towel with one hand and held my other one up for him to see my wrist. “Skin’s healing up nicely, too.”
He popped that sucker into his other cheek. “Perfect.”
