Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
C hainsaw…
The nearest hospital was in Slidell, which is where they took the girls.
We didn’t hang around. There were two dead Bayou Brethren in the front of the shot-to-shit van, and all the girls seemed okay.
But they were still being transported to the local hospital to get checked out and held for witness statements.
It was a long night.
We were cooperating with the cops, and when they asked where we’d been, we stared them dead in the eye and lied, saying “charity ride.”
It was the last bit of charity that the Marchesi’s were ever going to see from us. If they knew what was good, they would already be packing up and leaving the fucking area.
They wouldn’t let us back to see our women at first, but as soon as we were able, we made a beeline for their rooms and bays they were being kept in.
The curtain was whisked back, and I got to see Genesis, at long last.
“Hey.” I slid onto the doctor’s stool and wheeled myself up to her bedside railing. She took one of my hands into both of hers. Her lips were swollen and missing some skin, and there was a mark on her face, resembling a burn, in the shape of the corner of the tape.
She also had several scratches and marks along one side of her cheek, along the cheekbone, and around her eye. Not serious, already scabbing with only a little bit of bruising around them. I raised a thumb to lightly flick her skin near one and asked without saying a word.
“Bone fragments,” she said tiredly. “From when they shot Cypress in the face.”
“We saw it on the cameras,” I told her. “You alright?”
“Yes,” she said, then hesitated. “No… you know, I don’t honestly know how to answer that right now.”
“Yeah, that’s fair,” I said.
I felt it coming. Like this pressure on the horizon… that this was it – this had to be it. So much in such a short amount of time and this… There was no fuckin’ way she would stay with me now.
“Is it always like this?” she asked, and her voice sounded tired, vulnerable, weak almost.
“No.” I shook my head. “This? This has been building for a long time,” I said.
“Can we talk about it at home?” she asked, glancing out toward the hallway and the cops all milling around.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, and felt a sort of sense of relief in that she still had our backs. Then again, she knew the kinds of things that happened to people linked to MCs who proved disloyal, so that might have more to do with it.
I guess I’d have to see.
“What’d you say?” I asked low and she sighed.
“I told the truth,” she said, and her green eyes were intense on mine, saying that whatever was going to come out of her beautiful mouth next was a truth, but not the truth.
“That you guys went out for a ride, Cypress didn’t want to go because he pulled a muscle fishing, and it was too uncomfortable to ride.
He opted to stay back with us ladies and play Cards Against Humanity. ”
I nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s about right. You know how we all like to be there for charity rides, but Cy’s shoulder?—”
“Ribs,” she corrected. “The muscle along the ribs connected to his back.”
I nodded. “Right – his back and ribs, the shoulder thing was last year.”
She nodded.
“My mistake,” I murmured.
“I’m the doctor, after all,” she said, and I nodded again.
Silence stretched between us, and finally, when her voice came again, it broke on a sob, having lost all of its will to be strong.
“I tried to help him, to save him. I hope you know that.”
I looked up sharply, squeezed her hands in mine, and said, “I know, baby. We all know. We saw in the cameras.”
The story spilled from her lips in a quiet rush, how Cy had gone to the bathroom, and how they had all heard the bikes and thought that we had returned. How before anyone thought twice about it, Sandy had opened the door for us.
“She thinks this is all her fault, and that all of us will hate her.”
I shook my head. “No. No fuckin’ way. If she hadn’t opened the door, they would have blown it and more of you could and would have been hurt.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said, sniffing and working hard to regain her composure, wiping at her tears with one hand.
“Right now, on this, we’re cooperating with the pigs,” I said low.
She nodded her understanding.
“I’m so proud of you,” I told her and got up, hugging her tight and kissing the top of her head.
That’s how the medical staff found us – locked in an embrace. I held her tight, almost so tight I was waiting for her to protest that she couldn’t breathe, but no protest came.
She clung to me with all of her strength, and I looked over to the nurse who stood, discharge papers in hand.
“You’re free to go,” she said. “The police said they’d contact you later.”
I nodded.
“Thanks,” I said, and I helped my lady get ready to go.
“Everybody go home,” LaCroix ordered from the center of the knot of us in the parking lot. “Anyone doesn’t feel like going home, head to the Swamp House.” His daddy’s house.
I looked down at my girl tucked tight into my side.
“My house, if you please?” she murmured.
“Absolutely.”
Familiarity would help. A shower in her own shower would help.
I put my helmet on her head, even though it was too big for her, and we rode out as a unit. We only started splitting off and going our own ways once we’d crossed back over the lake.
I pulled up behind her house, everything as we’d left it, and trailed her inside.
“You want me to go?” I asked her and she turned, her hand light in my grasp, a tenuous touch, and I felt incredibly fragile in that moment, waiting for the rejection that would shatter me.
“No,” she said. “No, I need you,” she said.
I nodded carefully and said, “You’re sure?”
She dragged herself into my arms and wrapped hers tightly around my waist, and her voice trembling, confessed, “I must be crazy, after that… but I can’t explain it. I just feel like I need you, now more than ever.”
“Oh, baby… you have no idea how much I needed to hear that right now.” I held her tight, and she broke down in fresh tears. Tears of my own sprang to my eyes.
“We’ve only just found each other,” she whispered, and I felt that. I felt it to my very core.
“I know,” I muttered into her hair, and I couldn’t stop kissing the top of her head. “I know, I know, I know.” I sighed.
I didn’t let us linger in the rear entryway for very long, taking her with me, moving into the bathroom to help get her out of her bloody clothes — her top, jeans, and riding boots. Her jacket was gone, likely in some paper evidence bag with the forensics team.
I’d buy her a new one. Whatever style, color, fuck I didn’t care. She could ask for a three-thousand-dollar bougie piece of gear, and I’d drop it without so much as a quip.
I sighed, and she looked up at me.
“I think I’m going to take a few personal days,” she said, and I nodded.
“Whatever you want. Whatever you need. I mean that,” I said.
She turned and looked into the mirror over her bathroom sink.
She leaned in, peering at her reflection, the marks across her fair skin, eyes swollen and red from crying.
She looked almost vampire-like in the harsh lighting.
Her skin was so very pale and almost translucent with the warring body and brain chemicals she had going on.
I didn’t know the science behind it all, but I’m sure that she did.
“Come on,” I murmured. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
I got her into the shower and stripped down, quickly and efficiently, and got in with her.
She let out a trembling sigh and tipped her hair back into the spray. The angle made her look more drawn. Her cheeks were hollow, her hair slicked back, and the water filled it, running in a light pink stream down the drain.
I tried really fucking hard not to think about that. About how it wasn’t some stranger’s blood trickling out of her hair, tinging that water pink. About how it’d been my brother’s and my friend’s…
Fuck.
I held on.
Didn’t want to let go yet when she needed me to be strong for her right now. She looked forward and caught the look on my face, and her expression crumbled into one of deep empathy.
“I know,” she whispered. “I tried. I’m so sorry.”
Yeah. What the fuck ever. I broke then – gutted, and legitimately so.
I couldn’t hold it in anymore if I’d wanted to.
She took me into her arms at the same time I took her into mine, and we both just stood in the hot shower spray and sobbed.
Both of us grieving in our own way and our own things…
her, for the trauma she’d endured, a little for Cy, I was sure, and for what little innocence she had left in this world, having been burned away.
Me, for my brother, for my friend, and my club, and for her and her pain – I admit, that was part of it.
Fuck, we were a pair, she and I. Both clinging to each other, the soul tie between us tightening, binding us tighter, despite it having every reason to grow thin and weak, brittle from the fire we’d just walked through.
I had no explanation for that. Only gratitude.