*****
The next few days settled into a strange sort of routine. Magnet improved. Slowly. Painfully. But enough.
Enough for the ventilator to come out. Enough for the sedation to lighten. Enough for him to open his eyes and mutter insults at his brothers while Suzy cried all over him and Emmie threatened to smother him with his own pillow if he scared them like that again.
The club rotated through ICU constantly. Brothers in cuts lingering quietly beside machines and monitors like they belonged there now. They brought noise with them. Presence. Life. Even the nurses had stopped looking startled every time leather filled the corridors.
And somehow, somewhere in the middle of it all, I’d become part of it too.
Mamma Dot started appearing near the end of my shifts, carrying plastic tubs full of homemade dinners wrapped in tea towels. Cottage pie. Broth. Sausage casserole. Panacalty.
“You’re all skin and bad decisions,” she’d mutter every time I protested.
And every time, I ate it.
Suzy and I started sitting together in the quieter moments. Sometimes talking. Sometimes not. Just existing side by side while machines breathed and monitors beeped around us. Ryan came when he could. Never making demands on my time. Never asking for more than I could give.
But always there. Like somewhere along the line, without either of us noticing, he’d become something steady in the middle of all this chaos.
And in all the noise and bustle of leather, brothers and a family I’d never asked for but apparently needed, my father messaged.
‘Your car hasn’t moved in five days.’
My stomach tightened instantly. Somehow my father still reached in. Still watched. Still controlled. I stared at the screen a moment before replying.
‘I’m staying with a friend’.
The typing dots appeared almost immediately.
‘Does this friend wear a cut and ride a Triumph Rocket?’
Ice slid down my spine. I lifted my head automatically, gaze darting towards the hospital entrance beyond the waiting room windows, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there himself. My father never dirtied his own hands when someone else could do it for him.
Another message appeared before I could answer.
‘You’re making dangerous decisions, Sophie.’
My fingers tightened around the phone. Suddenly I was seventeen again. Watching windows. Explaining myself. Being monitored so subtly that everyone else mistook it for protection. Except now I could finally see it for what it really was.
Control.
Chapter Thirty One
Rain hammered against the windows hard enough to blur the skyline beyond into nothing but grey smears and fractured lights. Outside, the world drowned. Inside, Magnet looked better. Or at least less like death had one hand wrapped around his throat.
Colour crept back into his face through the bruising. The ventilator was gone. So were half the machines that had surrounded him those first couple of days. He still looked rough as fuck. Tubes hanging out of him. Staples. Dressings. But hewas awake. Talking. Being a pain in the arse again. Which felt normal.
And after the last week, normal felt dangerous. Like the second you relaxed, something came along and ripped it away again.
“You should’ve seen Reap’s face when the nurse said she needed to catheterise me,” Magnet rasped weakly from the bed, eyes glassy with pain meds but still full of that same stupid humour.
I snorted from the chair beside him. “I was laughing because your knob’s too small to find.”
“Fuck off,” he muttered.
The monitor beside him flickered faster for a second as he laughed, and instantly, I saw Sophie’s face in my head, warning him not to push too hard. Funny how often she lived in my fucking head these days.
Suzy had finally gone downstairs with Emmie after six straight hours sat beside his bed. Indie practically forced her. Mamma Dot had shuffled off, muttering about hospital coffee tasting like “burnt dishwater and disappointment.”
