“That was the hospital calling about Miami,” he said.
The floor tilted. For a heartbeat, all I could smell was antiseptic and that too-bright corridor from the last time we’d walked out of a hospital without one of our own.
“Is he—” I started.
The front doors suddenly slammed open.
“Look who just fucking showed up with his ass hanging out!” Priest’s voice boomed across the room.
Everybody’s heads snapped that way.
Priest stood just inside the doors, grinning like a wolf. Voodoo and Jabs flanked him, both looking exhausted and smug. Between them, leaning on a single crutch like it was a bad joke he hadn’t decided to laugh at yet, was Miami.
He looked like hell. Bruised. Stitched. A little too pale. But he was upright. Awake. Breathing. And grinning like a man who’d just broken out of jail.
For a second, the room just stared.
Then Quinn screamed his name.
“MIAMI!”
She nearly knocked over two chairs in her rush. She skidded to a stop just shy of slamming into him full-force, hands going to his shoulders instead, carefully working around the bandages and sling on his arm.
He winced anywayand laughed through it. “Easy, baby girl,” he rasped. “I just got all my pieces back in the right order. Don’t want to scramble the puzzle again yet.”
Her hands shook as she touched his face, his chest, like she didn’t quite believe he was real.
“You idiot,” she said. “You absolute fucking idiot.”
“Love you too,” he replied.
Blackjack was moving now. So was 8-Ball. So was everybody else.
“You left the hospital against doctor’s orders?” Blackjack demanded as he reached them.
Miami shrugged, which looked like it hurt. “How’d you know?” he said.
“Because I just got a call from them. She said, ‘We can’t stop him. He signed the AMA form and said something about rather dying in leather than being another name on some morgue paper.’ Miami…”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Miami admitted. “They did what they could. They fixed what they could fix. Now I’m either going to live or I’m not, and if I’m not, I’m not doing it hooked up to a beeping machine while some stranger checks my chart. I’m doing it here. With you assholes. With my brothers. With my woman.”
8-Ball barked a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob. He clapped Miami on the shoulder carefully. “You dramatic piece of shit,” he said.
“Pot, meet kettle,” Miami shot back.
He shifted his weight on the crutch, scanning theroom. His gaze snagged on Turnpike, who stood near the wall, new patch on his cut.
“Look at this,” Miami said. “Motherfucker leaves me on ice for five minutes and comes back patched in.”
Turnpike snorted. “Somebody had to keep your attitude in the air,” he said.
Miami’s eyes kept moving, doing a lazy sweep that landed on the bar.
On Valkyrie.
She’d stood when the doors burst open, done that calculation in one blink—threat or friend—and then settled, watching. Now she stood near the end of the bar, one hand braced on it, expression somewhere between relief and assessment.
Miami’s eyebrows went up.
