But that should be enough.
It needs to be because I’m running out of energy.
“Sugar?” Beast queries quietly, his voice tight with concern. Grainger might not have a hold on Beast’s heartstrings the way he does mine, but these men are as good as brothers. They trust each other implicitly. More importantly, they trust each other with me. That’s how I know for sure that this could work, as possessive as each and every one of them can be sometimes.
It takes me a moment to catch my breath because that was intense in there. It was the most unnerving thing I’ve ever seen in my life, someone I love resting on a wire, mired in a strange reality between life and death. When Queenie was shot, it was over in an instant. There was no wondering or hoping or waiting; it was just a fact. By the time I got to Posey, the result was the same.
She was gone.
Grainger … is not.
“He’s still here,” I breathe out, my knees weak. Beast helps me into a chair and cushions my head on his jacket when I lean it back against the chair. “He’s alive.”
The words taste sweet but uncertain. Granger is stabilized. But he was stabilized earlier in the day and crashed quickly. Based on what they said to me, it seems like his medical team’s located the cause, but I don’t speak hospital, so I don’t know other than to say he’s okay for right now.
“How’s Sin?” I whisper, because I’m not sure if I have the energy left to stand up and look for myself. If he’s stable, I’m not moving. If he’s not … I wait for Beast to reply, keeping my eyes closed.
“Same as when you went in. No change.” Beast takes a seat and pulls me into his lap. It’s a weird position for me to be in, for sure. Like, we barely fucking spoke to each other before. Even that day we had sex for the first time, I knew little to nothing about him. We were strangers.
I think, in many ways, we still are.
But I know this: I like sitting here with him.
“I can’t believe we got married today,” I murmur as he tucks me under his chin and grunts.
“That we did. And believe me, darlin’, I’m going to show you the way a man should treat his wife.” He strokes my hair with his right hand, the same hand that’s put so many people to death, buried them in Gram’s backyard, washed away so much blood. “Now go to sleep. I’ll wake you up if they need you.”
I don’t mean to listen to him; I really don’t.
When I wake the next time, I find myself faced with the same nurse from before. She looks annoyed with me. Maybe because I told that liaison worker that I was Grainger’s wife and here I am sitting in another man’s lap.
That’s the only part of this possibility, of these four men, that I don’t like, that there might not be a way to get others to recognize that I belong at Grainger’s bedside the same way I do at Sin’s or Beast’s or Crown’s.
I sit up as the woman stares down at me with such a confused expression on her face that I’d love to give a penny for her thoughts. She must know by now who we are. I wonder if she also knows that Cat will pay off whoever he has to in order to keep this quiet. Nobody needs to know that some of his people showed up here today, that anything at all went down on the compound.
This will be buried, just like anything else.
“Would you like to see your … friend?” she asks me, studying my swollen face with a well-earned cynicism that I cannot, in any way, fault her for. I force myself up to a standing position with Beast’s hand on my arm. I sway a little, but when he releases me, I’m standing and I feel a bit better already. That’s a good sign, right?
My friend, she said. Only, she can’t possibly know that Colton Young is so much more than that. He’s a part of me, an integral part. He’s a piece of my past, a majority of my present, and a hopeful beacon for my future.
So yeah.
I would like to see my goddamn friend.
My lover.
My … soul mate? Are damned souls even allowed to feel that way? Are they allowed to feel that way about more than one person?
Implicitly, I know that the answer is yes.
It is because I do.
In this hospital—arguably a place that the hot, fragrant tea of the underworld has seeped into even more thoroughly than at Gram’s house—it’s easy to see that. Hubris and hurt feelings and semantics don’t matter very much here.
“I would,” I tell her, meeting her gaze dead-on and hoping like hell she doesn’t start calling a bunch of agencies over my well-being. I would bet my left tit that Cat has already paid off the cops more than once today. But I don’t need to be dealing with anything else.
