Chapter 28
Saint
The morning after the rescue is the longest morning of my life.
I’ve spent plenty of nights awake. Surveillance.
Retaliation. Runs that stretched too long and warehouse problems that needed my hands on them before they turned into bodies.
Those nights had motion in them, and motion is something I understand.
Engines, maps, weapons, men waiting for orders, blood drying under my nails while the next problem arranged itself in front of me.
This morning has nothing but the chair beside Oisín’s bed, the low lamp near the wall, and the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath the blanket Tally tucked around him like cloth can protect what the rest of us failed to.
I haven’t slept or moved except to shift my weight when my back locks up or lean forward when his breathing changes.
Harlan told me to let him rest. Tally told me the same thing with a look that dared me to turn fear into orders.
Moth came in sometime after four to tell me the corridor held, Canon’s men broke against the trap, and Bricks was handling cleanup at the barn with the kind of enthusiasm that makes the rest of the club nervous.
I heard every word. None of it reached the part of me sitting in this room with Oisín’s blood still in the creases of my hands.
He’s quiet by nature, but this isn’t his quiet. Oisín’s silence usually has life in it, a small turn of his head when someone speaks, fingers moving absently over his ring, eyes tracking every detail in a room even when men think he isn’t paying attention.
This stillness belongs to injury and exhaustion.
One side of his face is swollen, the bruise around his eye darkening by the hour.
His lip is split. Bandages are wrapped around his forearm where Rook cut him.
His ribs are bruised deep enough that every breath seems like something his body has to work for.
My own side throbs where Canon’s knife went in.
It isn’t deep enough to matter, according to Harlan, which means it won’t kill me and therefore doesn’t deserve attention, though the bandage under my shirt is damp again.
No one has said anything about it, though, because Oisín is in the bed, and every hierarchy in this house has rearranged itself around that fact.
Around dawn, Harlan comes back in. He’s scarred across both hands, and calm in the particular way of a man who has patched up armed idiots under worse circumstances and survived being threatened by men who thought fear made them more persuasive.
He carries his bag to the bedside without greeting me, sets it on the floor, and washes his hands in the small bathroom before he touches Oisín.
“Don’t hover over my shoulder,” he muses.
“I’m sitting.”
“You’re sitting like you’re considering where to bury me.”
“Then don’t give me a reason.”
Harlan gives me a flat look over his glasses. “I’m not the one who put him in that bed.”
My hand tightens on the arm of the chair before I can stop it.
The truth lands too close to the place where I’ve been bleeding all night, and Harlan must see enough on my face to decide not to press.
He turns back to Oisín and changes the dressing on his arm first. The cuts are clean now, stitched where they needed stitching and covered where they didn’t.
Harlan’s fingers move carefully as he checks for heat around the wounds, and I make myself stay seated even when Oisín shifts under the contact with a faint sound caught in his throat.
I’m halfway out of the chair before Harlan lifts one hand. “He’s all right. That’s expected.”
“He made a sound.”
“He’s going to. He hurts.”
I sit back down because standing over the bed won’t help Oisín, and he’s had enough men making their fear his problem.
Harlan checks his pupils next, then the bruising along his jaw and cheekbone.
When he presses gently along Oisín’s ribs, Oisín flinches even unconscious, his breath catching around pain.
My hand curls into a fist against my thigh.
The doctor keeps working because stopping would make it worse.
“No hospital?” I ask.
“Nothing is broken badly enough for me to force that conversation right now,” Harlan says. “If he gets confused, vomits repeatedly, has trouble staying awake later, or his breathing worsens, I’m taking him in whether you like it or not.”
“You’ll come back in six hours.”
“And before that if Tally calls.” He packs his instruments with the patience of a man who has decided my panic is more irritating than dangerous.
“Six hours, Saint. Wake him every few. Small sips of water when he’s alert.
No crowding him, no yelling, no club bullshit in this room.
He needs quiet more than he needs you proving how worried you are. ”
“He’s not going to be alone.”
“I didn’t say alone. I said no crowding.” Harlan closes his bag and stands. “There’s a difference. Learn it.”
He looks at my side again before he leaves, but whatever he thinks better stay behind his teeth if he wants to walk out with them. The door shuts after him, and the room settles into the soft, awful quiet of waiting.
When Oisín wakes properly, it’s almost seven.
His lashes flutter first, then his mouth tightens.
Pain reaches him before the room does. I see it happen in the small changes, his brow drawing together, his fingers twitching against the blanket, his breath shortening when his body reports everything at once.
I lean forward but don’t touch him yet, that restraint costing more than it should.
“Sín,” I whisper.
His good eye opens. For a second, he looks through me instead of at me, still somewhere between this room and wherever his body dragged him to survive.
Then his gaze finds my face. His mouth moves, but no sound comes out.
I reach for the water on the nightstand, slide one hand behind his head as carefully as I know how, and help him take a small sip.
“You’re home,” I tell him.
The word leaves my mouth before I decide whether I’m allowed to use it.
His gaze drops from my face to my hands, then moves to my left side, to the dark stain spreading slowly through the shirt near the bandage. His fingers shift under the blanket, reaching in that direction before pain stops him.
The first proper thing Oisín does after waking up beaten, cut, concussed, and half-drowned in pain is look for where Canon hurt me.
“I’m fine,” I push out, though my voice sounds wrong to my own ears.
His eye drifts back to mine. He doesn’t believe me. “You’re bleeding,” he whispers.
“So are you.”
His mouth twitches like he might try to be annoyed if he had the strength. “That’s not an answer.”
“No,” I say, brushing my thumb over the edge of the blanket near his hand because I’m afraid to touch anything bruised. “It isn’t.”
He watches me for a long moment, the silence between us holding all the things I didn’t say before he walked out. Tell me what I am to you. He’s too exhausted to ask it again, and I’m not enough of a coward to pretend that means it disappeared.
“I didn’t mean to say anything,” he whispers, shame roughening what little voice he has left. “I tried to keep it back.”
“I know you did.” I keep my voice low because anything harder will land like blame. “Moth walked me through it. You gave them old pieces, wrong pieces, enough to make Canon think he had the board and not enough to save him from walking into the trap.”
His eye closes, and for a second I think I’ve lost him to exhaustion again. Then his fingers move under the blanket, searching until they find the edge of my hand. “I tried,” he says, the words coming out small enough to gut me.
I slide my fingers under his, careful around the swelling, and hold on.
“I never thought you chose that. Not once.” Tears gather in my eyes but I quickly slap them away, confused on what happens next.
This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten with a partner and I don’t know what to do.
I stand, clearing my throat, the awkwardness settling in. “I’m making coffee.”
Oisín blinks at me, seeing through me as I move into the small attached kitchen. The bedroom is on the other side of the clubhouse, meant for guests who need the whole experience. And now it’s my husbands so he can be close to everything he could possibly need.
The coffee machine sits on the counter, simple enough that I’ve seen prospects operate it without injury. I manage to fuck it up anyway.
The first attempt comes out too thin. The second smells burnt.
The third somehow smells worse, like charcoal dissolved in regret.
I stand there with one hand braced on the counter, staring at the mug like it has betrayed me personally.
I run a pharmaceutical-grade XR3 operation with margins that would make cartel accountants weep.
I can coordinate multi-state distribution, bait a rival crew into a false corridor, and kill three armed men in a hallway without raising my voice. I cannot make coffee worth drinking.
Tally would never let me hear the end of this if she saw it.
I bring the least offensive mug back anyway.
Oisín is awake when I return, eyes half-lidded, face gray with pain but aware.
He watches me cross the room like the coffee is either a peace offering or a threat.
Maybe both. I help him sit up just enough to drink, one hand behind his shoulders, every sound he makes landing under my skin.
He takes the mug with both hands because his fingers are still unsteady, and I keep my hand close in case his grip fails.
He takes a sip, and nothing in his face changes. That might be the cruelest thing he’s done to me all week.
“It’s bad,” I say.
His mouth twitches, his split lip pulling at the edge. “Yes.”
The honesty almost knocks a laugh out of me. “You drank it anyway.”
“You made it.”
I watch him as he continues to sip it, his face warming in fractions until I can’t help myself but lean in to kiss him.
His hand comes up and settles flat against my chest, holding me in place, fingers trembling against my shirt.
My whole body stops because that hand isn’t refusal exactly, but it’s a boundary, and after last night I know the cost of misunderstanding one.
“Sín?”
His eye stays on mine. “This doesn’t change us.”
I sit back slowly as Oisín’s hand falls from my chest back to his mug.
He looks exhausted by the sentence, like it cost more strength than drinking or waking or breathing through the pain.
“I’m grateful,” he says. “You came for me. I know what that means.” His eyes glaze over with tears as he meets my gaze.
“But you have to prove to me you’re different from your father. ”
My first instinct is to argue around the words.
But I’m smart enough to know that rescue isn’t repair.
Coming for Oisín with guns and fury proved I’d kill for him.
It didn’t prove I’d change for him. He needs the second thing, and the second thing is slower, uglier, and far less satisfying than putting bullets in men who deserve them.
I sit back in the chair beside his bed and nod once, Oisín watching me like he expected resistance and doesn’t know what to do with the absence of it. “Okay?” he whispers.
“Okay,” I say.
Tally arrives within the hour and takes one look at both of us before deciding the room belongs to her. She has a tray in her hands, a bag over one shoulder, and the expression of a woman about to commit acts of care with military force.
“You,” she says, pointing at me. “Out.”
“No.”
“Saint.”
“He just woke up.”
“And he needs clean sheets, warm water, coffee that wasn’t brewed by a man taking revenge on coffee beans, and five minutes without you staring holes through every inch of him.
” She sets the tray on the dresser and softens only when she looks at Oisín.
“Sweetheart, you want me to help you get cleaned up?”
Oisín’s good eye shifts to me, then back to her. “Please.”
Tally doesn’t gloat, which is kind of her. She only steps aside as I bend over Oisín, stopping far enough away that he can decide whether to meet me. After a moment, he tilts his face slightly. I press my mouth to his temple, where there’s no bruise.
“I’ll be outside.”
His fingers move against the blanket, gently pressing against my arm. “Okay.”
I leave before I make it harder on him and push into the main area, looking for something to occupy my time.
Demo hovers near the end of the hall with a cup of coffee he probably brought as an excuse to stand there. His eyes flick toward the door every few seconds, his mouth opening once before he decides against whatever useless thing he was about to ask. He finally settles on, “How is he?”
“Alive.”
Demo swallows hard and nods like he’s trying to make that enough. “Good. That’s good.”
He stays there another ten seconds, vibrating with helplessness, before Bricks appears behind him and puts one heavy hand on his shoulder. “Kid, I need you to go check the south lot.”
Demo blinks. “Why?”
“Because I asked real nice.”
“There’s nothing in the south lot.”
“Then it’ll be a quick check.”
Demo looks from Bricks to me to Oisín’s door, then seems to understand enough to stop arguing. “Right. Yeah. South lot.”
Bricks watches him go, then leans against the opposite wall, his eyes dipping to my wound. “You’re still bleeding. Planning to do anything about that?”
“No.”
“Stupid.”
“Probably. But until I know that Oisín is okay, it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters.”