Chapter Two
AFTER A GRUELING twenty-four-hour shift, Shauna was whipped.
The guys weren’t kidding about New Year’s Eve taking its toll, only they didn’t know the additional burden she carried.
Every time they were dispatched, she worried it would be for Brian, and she hated that feeling.
It made her resentful that after all their hard work, Brian was right back at square one, which wasn’t fair to him.
She knew addiction was a demon that could sink its claws into a person and lure them back to the dark side without warning.
It could do the same to her at any time, and if the tables were turned, she had no doubt that Brian would never give up on her.
Even with all of that going on, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the guy she’d helped on her way to work.
Those pleading blue eyes and the desperation in his voice—Don’t…
let me…go—still had her in a chokehold. The strange feeling that she shouldn’t have left him had stuck like glue, too, an urgent voice in the back of her mind refusing to be ignored.
As if her promise carried more weight than it ever had before.
She didn’t like not having complete control over her emotions and needed to put whatever this was to rest.
“You did great today,” her partner, Howie Glazer, a short, stocky paramedic with military-shorn red hair and an affable personality, said as he closed his locker.
“Thanks.”
He grabbed his bag and smirked. “But you might want to brush up on your cooking skills before our next shift.”
The crew took turns with firehouse chores, including cooking. The guys were always giving her shit about her mediocre cooking skills, and she gave it right back to them, all in fun, of course. “The way you shoveled the food into your mouth, I doubt you tasted a thing.”
He laughed and shook his head as he headed out the door. “See ya in a few days, Flores.” They worked a schedule of twenty-four hours on, then forty-eight hours off before reporting back for their next shift.
She put her belongings in her duffel bag and grabbed her coat before heading downstairs. As she came around the corner, she nearly bumped into the firehouse captain, Rodney Chaney. “Whoa. Sorry, Cap.”
Cap was a tall Black man with a trim gray goatee and the kind of face that could be stern as stone or warm as a summer day, depending on his mood. He was one of her favorite people and one of the biggest reasons she’d become an EMT.
“That’s all right. I know you’re anxious to get out of here.” A broad smile stretched across his face. “Congratulations. You survived your first New Year’s Eve with us. How did it feel?”
That was a loaded question for her, and he knew it. “Pretty freaking awesome. It made me even more grateful to be on the right side of things.”
“This job will do that for you.”
So do you and the rest of the crew. She would be forever grateful for all of them.
Shauna had never had a family that took care of each other the way Cap and the guys at the firehouse did.
She didn’t grow up with role models to help build her self-esteem or show her how to handle difficult situations.
Her parents had been angry drunks who’d partied too often and had cared too little.
Brian’s parents had been just as bad. It had been her and Brian fending for themselves since they were little kids.
They hadn’t learned much from their parents, but they’d learned how to drink and smoke to escape their painful lives, which was probably one reason she and Brian had continued partying long after they’d left town the day they’d graduated from high school.
As anxious as they’d been to get away from their parents and carry out their big plans of making names for themselves doing God only knew what, they were still just scared kids, guarding their freedom and afraid to come out from under the familiar haze of too much alcohol and weed.
Brian had gotten into heavier drugs on and off, but he didn’t do them every day, and she had never done them at all.
Somehow, in her young, convoluted mind, doing heavier drugs would make her exactly like her parents, as if she hadn’t already fallen into that trap.
They’d continued living in that rebellious, scared-child state of mind, or what Shauna had later deemed their escape state, for a little more than two full years.
Until the night of her twentieth birthday, July fourth, when she’d had nothing to show for those years but cottonmouth and a foggy mind.
That night, when she was rip-roaring drunk, she’d told a stranger she didn’t want to live that way anymore, and he’d said, Then don’t.
Every minute of the day is a chance for change. Make this one yours.
She’d taken his advice and had started partying less, trying to clean up her act so she could get started on her new life.
It wasn’t that hard for her to stop drinking or smoking, but Brian was still into partying, and his peer pressure made it more difficult.
She’d been trying on her own for a while when she’d found Brian unresponsive in the dank bedroom they’d shared, in a house full of people with substance use issues and runaways.
She’d called 911, frantic and sobbing on the inside but coherent and calm on the outside.
It was all a blur after that, men rushing in, peppering her with questions, giving Brian Narcan as she pleaded with them to save him and not call the police.
That was the night she’d met Captain Rodney Chaney.
He’d spoken to her with compassion, not judgment, and had said, We’re here to help, not to give him a reason to do it again.
She now knew that Cap said that to many people every year, hoping they’d find their way to a better life.
She also knew he never saw most of those other people again.
But she’d been so desperate for someone to see her and Brian as more than mirrored shadows of the only way of life they knew that his kindness, that olive branch, had been exactly what she’d needed to feel comfortable enough to seek him out and to try to find her way clear of her addiction.
That moment of kindness had also sparked the start of their friendship, which had led to his guiding hers and Brian’s journeys to sobriety and his mentorship. As always happened when she thought about that time of her life, her emotions snuck up on her.
She cleared her throat and said, “I’d better get going.”
“Give Brian my best. Is he feeling better?”
Guilt overshadowed those warmer emotions.
Cap had invited her and Brian to Christmas dinner, but since Brian was drinking again, she’d said he had the flu.
She hated lying to him. She just hadn’t wanted him to worry, and she had faith that with her help Brian would come out from under the beast before it swallowed him whole.
“He’s getting there. See you Sunday.”
She headed out to her car, and as she climbed in behind the wheel, she saw Zeke’s leather vest on the passenger seat.
Her chest tightened. She should have taken it with her in the ambulance today and dropped it at the hospital during one of their calls, but she had been late to work and hadn’t been thinking clearly.
Or maybe it was because whatever she’d felt when their eyes had connected was stronger than anything she’d ever felt before, and it had rattled her in the same way Brian’s overdose had, which made no sense.
She didn’t know this Zeke guy, so why would she feel anything beyond the normal emotions she felt when she was helping anyone?
The question made it impossible to ignore what she’d been trying to deny since yesterday.
She’d told him she wouldn’t let him go, but what if he hadn’t made it?
Her stomach twisted. Maybe if she saw he was okay, she could finally get him out of her head.
That leather vest was the perfect excuse to see him again.
She drove to the hospital and spoke with the emergency room desk clerk. The clerk couldn’t find a patient named Zeke who had been brought in yesterday morning, but she tracked the time of admission to an Alexander Wicked, who was in the ICU.
Shauna headed up to the ICU. The waiting room was packed with dozens of solemn-faced women and men.
Most of the men were wearing black leather vests with Dark Knights patches like Alexander’s.
She hoped that didn’t mean he was holding on to life by a thread and made her way to speak with Teri, the unit coordinator at the desk.
Teri looked up from the computer and smiled. “Hi, Shauna.”
“Hi. I was first on the scene for Alexander Wicked yesterday, and I came to drop off something that was left behind. He was in pretty bad shape. How’s he doing?”
“Zander? He’s got a fractured skull and a brain bleed. They’ve got him in a medically induced coma.”
Shauna’s chest constricted. “Oh, man. How bad is it?”
“They won’t know until he’s stable enough to bring him out of the coma. I heard he was totally out of it when they brought him in, combative and confused, didn’t know where he was or what had happened.”
“I guess that explains why he told me his name was Zeke.”
“That’s one of his brothers.”
“What about internal injuries? He had a piece of metal lodged in his side.”
“I heard about that. He got lucky. It wasn’t deep enough to hit any vital organs, but he has a couple of broken ribs, one of which punctured a lung.”
“He was lucky. I hope he’s going to be okay.”
“He’d better be. Did you see the waiting room?”
“Yes. It’s packed. I thought visiting hours didn’t start until ten.”
“They don’t. Most of them have been here since he came in yesterday morning.”
Shauna couldn’t imagine having that many people who cared about her. “He must be a special guy.”