Chapter Thirty-Nine
AYDA
It felt like hours I’d spent trying to warm Drew’s cold body, waiting for anyone that looked like a paramedic to show up. I wouldn’t let anyone touch him as I pressed my hands against the gaping wound in his side, trying to staunch the bleeding. I was so afraid that one wrong touch and the shallow rise and fall of his chest would cease, forcing me to lose the only thing that was reminding me to breathe myself.
Drew was still alive, but glancing at him, I wasn’t sure for how long.
Everything seemed to move around us both. The thunderous beat of panic hammered through my chest and deafened me as my heart pumped blood through my body. I couldn’t have told you whose hands touched me or who spoke because none of that mattered.
Nothing but Drew mattered.
He had saved me so many times. He’d put his life on the line too much for me, and I wasn’t going to let him down now. I couldn’t. I kneeled by his side, tears blinding me.
I was so lost in my pleas and cries for him to wake up that I barely noticed when the paramedics finally rushed to our sides. In the blindness of my panic, I tried to fight them off,protectively covering Drew’s body with my own to shelter him from the onslaught of new people rushing closer. I didn’t see their uniforms until I blinked away a fresh round of tears, and only then did I relinquish control. This forced me to watch impotently as they did their best to save Drew’s life, while I batted away any arms of comfort that tried to close in around me.
I would not be moved from his side. Not now. Not ever again.
I tried to keep my composure as they worked on him, throwing around words like internal bleeding, collapsed lung, concussion, but the shivering that worked its way through my limbs made me feel like I was a walking vibration. My teeth clattered together too loud in my own head, and my hands, covered in Drew’s blood, trembled wildly. I was a mess, and I knew it, but my wide eyes always stayed on Drew’s chest.
The two men working on Drew asked me question after question after question about how he’d got in this state. They asked what he’d been stabbed with, so I pointed to the knife at Trigger’s feet.
They asked me how many fights Drew had had. The answer oftoo manystayed in my mind, but I heard another voice from around me—one I recognized as Slater’s—offer a number when I couldn’t.
“Were there blows to Drew’s head?” they asked me.Only when the other bastards cheated,I thought. Again, Jedd answered with the number I didn’t have as I mumbled under my breath for Drew to wake up.
“Was he hit with anything heavy? Where did he take the worst of the abuse?”
I answered as best I could; reliving every painful memory as we’d all watched Drew fight for his life.
Slater and Jedd were standing behind me now, and the rest of The Hounds were no longer being detained by ATF agents,each one of them looking stunned as they watched the guys wearing the Nav patches being cuffed and lined up on their knees along the wall farthest away from us. I wasn’t entirely sure what had gone down, or why only The Navs were being arrested and taken away. In that moment, I didn’t really care what was going on outside of Drew.
I was unwillingly eased away from my place next to Drew enough for them to get him on a gurney, but they couldn’t keep me away for long. I stepped right back by his side, my hand on his wrist, running alongside them as they wheeled him out of that fucking hellhole where the midnight blue sky held a spattering of stars. I breathed in my first breath of untainted air only seconds before Drew was loaded into the back of the waiting ambulance.
No one could keep me from climbing into the back of the rig next to Drew. Not the cops, the ATF, nor the paramedics, but they tried. I elbowed one of the agents in the ribs when he tried to hold me back forcefully, an action that was followed by a whole MC growling in defiance. No one else seemed inclined to come close to me after that, so the paramedics made room for me, and I took my seat next to Drew, watching as the paramedic affixed more wires and tubes to various parts of his body.
Terrified, I hadn’t said much since they’d asked their questions, but my tears fell uselessly, and my heart pounded painfully as I watched them moving around him.
There was eventually a beep from a machine that had wires connected to pads over his heart. It sounded too slow to be his heartbeat, even in that weird juxtaposition with the sirens screaming all around us as the rig began to move. I didn’t know what any of it meant, so I continued to watch that rise and fall of his chest, my breaths moving with his to assure myself he was still alive. Still breathing.
In and out.
In and out.
In and out.
Then... nothing.
Drew had stopped breathing.
So I did, too because breathing without him felt too hard.
I froze in place next to Drew, my breath a heavy weight stuck in my chest as pain pierced my soul, the words:no, no, no, no, no, stuck on repeat bouncing around my brain while my lips parted in a silent scream.
I watched as the paramedic sitting on the other side of Drew pulled out a defibrillator while screaming the words,“He’s coded,”over and over again at the driver who grabbed for a radio and gunned the ambulance. The urgency forced a roar of sound to rise from the engine and tangle with the already long drone of the flat line of the heart monitor and scream of the siren.
My hands were thrown from Drew, leaving me to only blink wildly as the technician pressed the paddles to Drew’s bare chest. I flinched when he shouted at me to stay back, and I watched helplessly as he shocked Drew with so much power, his body bounced and arched from the gurney.
I was dying inside, filled with layers of pain and darkness, thoughts and emotions aflame and burning me alive from the inside. I was now a silent ball of torture. I wanted to scream along with that deafening siren that was unrelenting overhead, but I had nothing left in me to give to the outside world. I had no breath in my lungs to release. All I had were tears, rivers of them falling in a constant line that burned my skin as they trailed down my cheeks and dropped from my chin.
