Page 81 of Reckless

Marley comes surging out of the front doors at a dead run, hair flying, still in the leggings and oversized hoodie she was clearly wearing five minutes before someone called her, and she doesn’t stop until she’s crashed into me hard enough that I actually have to plant my feet to stay upright.

“Oh my God.” Her arms lock around me like she’s checking for structural damage by feel alone. “Oh my God, oh my God, Nitro called…” She takes a breath. “All he said was there’s been an incident on the ride, that you were shot at, and then he hung up. Which, by the way, is the single worst way to deliver information to a person, and I have spent the last twenty minutes assuming you were dead—”

“I’m not dead.”

“I can see that now.” She pulls back just far enough to grab my face in both hands, tilting it side to side like she’s checking for damage. “Are you hurt? Are you shot? Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost, no offense to your actual boyfriend?”

“Just a scratch on my arm.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect, though my hands are still not entirely mine yet. “Just—” I don’t have the end of that sentence.

Marley doesn’t need it. She pulls me back in, tighter this time, one hand coming up to press flat against the back of my head the way she has since we were teens and she found me crying in a library bathroom over an exam I hadn’t failed yet.

“Okay,” she says, quieter now, right against my ear. “Okay. You’re here. You’re standing. I’ve got you.”

Over her shoulder, I watch the rest of it happening the way you watch something from very far away. Millie already has an arm looped through Anchor’s, checking him over for injuries. Victoria is talking to Sin while rocking Marcus, with that worried look crossing her face like she is expecting her old Five-0 buddies to roll up through the gates at any given minute. Gia moves between them, somehow keeping everyone else from completely losing their shit.

Nobody here is pretending this is normal. But nobody is falling apart alone, either.

Marley finally lets go long enough to look at me properly, and whatever she sees in my face makes her jaw tighten in a way I recognize, because it’s the same look I’ve given plenty of people who came at her.

“Who do I need to threaten with forks?” She throws my own line back at me.

Despite everything, something in my chest loosens enough to let a laugh out. “It’s handled.”

“It’s handled how?”

I glance past her to where Ghost and Sin are talking quietly across the room. One look at them tells me club shit is going down, and apparently, I’m not invited to that conversation yet. “I’ll explain. Just, not yet.”

Marley follows my eyeline, reads Ghost’s face for exactly two seconds, and apparently decides she doesn’t love what she sees there either, but she lets it go, because that’s what she does.

Marley squeezes my hand once, hard. “I’m not leaving until you tell me everything,” she says. “But I can wait until you’ve stopped shaking to start.”

“I’m not shaking.”

She raises one eyebrow and points, wordlessly, at my very visibly shaking hand.

“Well, I’m not shaking badly.”

“Sure, babe.” She loops her arm through mine anyway, steering me toward the front door of the clubhouse, toward Gia, water, and somewhere to sit down. “Come on. Let’s get you a chair before you fall into one.”

Dr. Sarah Chen arrives within minutes of us getting inside, her kit already open on the bar before she’s said a word to anyone. She goes straight to Mace first, her hands steady and quick as she checks the ribs Ghost already flagged on the roadside, then moves through the rest of the brothers one by one.

Deek gets the cut above his eyebrow cleaned and taped. Bear tries waving her off twice before she ignores him and checks the graze on his forearm anyway. Koa sits through having his jaw looked at without a word, but his eyes never stop moving, tracking every person who comes through the clubhouse doors.

Marley has wandered off to check on Nitro while my eyes keep drifting to the windows.

To every engine I hear outside.

My phone feels like it weighs ten pounds in my pocket.

Those messages… I told myself they were just words. Creepy and unsettling. Easy enough to ignore if I refused to let them get under my skin.

But this?

This wasn’t somebody hiding behind a screen.

This was an SUV, with guns out the window, shooting at us.

Bullets close enough to tear through my jacket.