Page 26 of Viper's Desire
I’m there before it comes down. The bat lands across my shoulder instead of her head, and then I have him. Throat and belt. I lift him clear off the ground and slam him back into it. He quits holding the bat. He’s unconscious.
The fourth man is already behind the wheel. He lays on the horn, and the ones on the ground drag themselves and each other in through the side door. The van is driving off before the door shuts.
There is no rear license plate. They planned this to avoid getting caught.
Sirens are far off, but closing in.
“Up.” I get an arm under Trapper. “We’re leaving.”
“My bike,” he slurs.
“Is coming with you. You’re riding it.”
“He isnotriding.” Eden has his head in her two hands, thumbs finding the split above his ear. “He’s got a head wound, and his ribs are cracked. He needs?—”
“He needs to not be in this lot when the cops roll in.” I haul Trapper to his feet and hold him there while the ground quits moving for him. “Ambulance means hospital. Hospital means reports, means his name on an assault, means questions about why four men with bats attacked him. He rides, or the law decides what happens to him. Pick.”
She looks toward the sirens’ direction, then at Trapper, swaying but upright, and I can see her hating every part of this.
“Pupils,” she says, and grabs his chin, and checks one eye and then the other with her face an inch from his. “Follow my finger.” He follows it. She steps back. “Fine. Slow. You stay in front where we can see you, and if you drift one inch, we’re stopping. And when we get there, you’re mine until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Trapper says, grinning through the blood, because he’s young and an idiot.
We pick his bike up off the asphalt. The headlight’s gone, and the bars are scraped, but it starts. I put Eden on behind me, her arms locking around my ribs. We roll out with Trapper in front of us.
The first cruiser’s lights show in my mirrors as we take the far exit.
He drifts twice. We don’t stop. Eden’s arms cinch tighter both times, and that’s the only argument she makes the whole ride home.
Eden has Trapper flat on the long table with his scalp stitched, his ribs wrapped, and a bag of frozen peas from the bar kitchen mashed against the side of his face. He’s grinning under it, telling Joker that four grown men needed a minivan and a head start to take down one prospect.
“You ran toward it,” I say.
She doesn’t look up from packing her kit. “He was on the ground.”
“Eden.”
“He wason the ground, Viper.” Now she looks up. Green eyes level, not one inch of give in them. “You don’t get to be surprised. You met me kneeling on a county road.”
There’s no answer to that, so I take her hands instead. A bruise is forming on her forearm where something caught her that I didn’t see. My thumb moves over it once.
Rage is a cold thing in me. It always has been. It drops another degree.
“I’m fine,” she says, gentler. “You were there.”
“Sit,” she says then, and points at the chair. The whole clubhouse pretends not to smile while the club’s Enforcer sits down on command. She flushes the cut on my forearm, threads the needle, and sews me shut for the second time since she found me on that road.
Only two stitches this time. Barely anything. Probably didn’t need them.
“You’re making a habit of this,” she says.
“You’re the one who keeps showing up where I’m bleeding.”
“Somebody has to.”
By the time Doc arrives, there’s nothing left for him to do.
The porch door bangs. Saber comes in with Crash behind him, and the room changes. Joker straightens. Trapper quits talking.
