Chapter 13 #2
Four Destroyers rushed from their closed meeting room and grabbed the men with the different colors on their vests and hauled them outside.
Boo . Now I wouldn’t get to see the fun.
“ You okay?” Whoosh didn’t sound pleased.
I straightened my expression. “ Thank you.” He’d saved my hide. I let a little sincerity warm my tone.
“ Don’t thank me. Bear would have my ass if something happened to you. That shit you did with the woo-woo and your face? You learned that from that fucktard, Carl , didn’t you?”
The real story was much more complicated. “ Yeah , I guess I did.”
He nodded like he didn’t quite believe me and was trying to convince himself. Then his face changed. “ How long were you living with Carl ?”
Too long? “ A month.”
I waited as the span of time sunk in.
His face paled. “ You were there.”
I nodded slowly.
“ Fuck .”
I rubbed the dent in the rail. “ Consider us even. I didn’t see or hear a thing.”
He pointed the bat at me. “ Make sure it stays that way.”
“ Get that thing out of her face.” Bear shoved the bat away and pushed Whoosh from his perch on the bar. He landed with a stumble, but covered it with a tirade of expletives. They ended with, “ What took you so long?”
Wolf stepped in. “ Stand down… prospect .”
Whoosh’s face colored. “ Sorry . To both of you. Bear , I’m sorry.”
Wolf noted the dent in the brass rail. “ You did this?”
His face reddened. “ Yes .”
Bear interrupted, “ Next time, just make it their head and save yourself some scratch.”
“ I was trying not to add to my kill count,” Whoosh protested.
Both Wolf and Bear snorted. Bear went as far as mocking the last two words.
“ KC ,” Wolf muttered.
Bear stopped laughing. “ It works.”
“ Well , KC , what you did was effective. And you managed okay. Where the fuck is that dickhead, Hammer ?”
Whoosh , I guess now permanently dubbed “ KC ,” pointed to the far end of the room.
“ Hammer ! Get your ass over here,” Bear yelled.
The man practically ran across the room. He stopped short, glancing nervously between Wolf and Bear . “ Sorry man, I was watching your girl, but we were short-handed.” His pause fumbled his apology. “ Whoosh was watching her.”
“ That’s KC now. You’ll call him that, and we’re patching him in tomorrow after the run. You good with that, KC ?”
The guy, formerly known as Whoosh grinned. “ I’ll try not to let it go to my head.” His eyes shifted to me, then to Bear . “ We need to talk.”
“ Everyone needs to talk to me. I’m fucking tired of talking, so it’ll have to wait.” He reached for my glass. I put a hand over the top and protested, but he tugged it away anyway.
“ I haven’t checked it since that girl took it. You shouldn’t?—”
He chugged down the entire glass like it was water. I stifled any protests and let him joke and talk over me with his “brothers.”
The four who’d cleared out the guys harassing me returned and slapped Bear on the back. As if that were a cue, he turned and wrapped an arm over my shoulder, weighing me down. “ This is my girl, Rose . Mine .”
Then he leaned in.
The smell of whiskey was strong on his breath. “ Play along,” he said right before kissing me.
There was no magic in it. And as we parted, his eyes met mine.
They were slightly unfocused. “ I didn’t mean that,” he said.
Then he ran his nose along the side of my cheek, inhaling.
The heat of his body pressed against me.
I felt him wobble, planting a foot wider so he wouldn’t topple.
“ I wish I could kiss you like I want to.” His words slurred slightly.
“ Are you okay?”
He blinked. “ I don’t know.” Confusion scrunched his forehead into a peak of concern.
I dug under his beard to feel for his pulse. It beat sluggishly as it thumped in the hollow of his neck. “ Do you feel dizzy?”
Another blink. “ I’m drunk… on you.” His smile was lopsided.
This was highly unusual. “ You had one drink.”
“ Everything okay, Bear ?” Wolf laid a hand on his shoulder.
“ I think someone spiked the drink.” I indicated the glass where he’d thumped it down after ignoring me.
Wolf raised the glass and scanned the liquid at the bottom. I went on tiptoe to peek at it.
While I didn’t have the best view, what I could see looked cloudy. “ Do you have a way to test it?”
Wolf’s sharp glance accused me. “ Why ?”
“ Because not only were those two assholes bothering me, but a woman approached me earlier and took my drink for a moment or two. I didn’t have it in hand the entire time.”
“ Are you saying someone would dare to dose you in our bar?” Wolf’s tone warned me to deny what I suspected.
But I couldn’t lie. Not if Bear had been drugged.
Anger I hadn’t felt in years rose up inside and I braced for battle.
“ Listen , back in college, I was active with the campus security authority program. I lectured on the effects of date rape drugs. He’s showing signs of a central nervous system depressant, my guess?
Rohypnol . We need to get that glass tested, him to a safe place, and find a bitch with blonde hair and big Botox lips who I think dropped something in my drink. Move !”
I shoved Wolf with my free hand and coaxed Bear into following. “ Come on, big guy we’re going to find you a place to lie down.”
Wolf’s hand splayed across my chest. “ You’re not going anywhere.”
“ Hands off her boobs! That’s my turf.” Bear’s words were barely distinguishable. But the way his hands fisted was clear enough.
Wolf held his hand up, then poked three fingers in the air. “ How many fingers do I have up?”
“ Three , ash-hooole.” While he got the number right, his slur was getting worse.
“ I give it fifteen minutes before he’s immobile.” I might have guessed a bit higher than usual. But Bear was larger than most college coeds. I turned to him, “ Do you feel hot?” His brow was damp.
“ Hot . Like you.” His hands swept down my sides, lingering at my hips and pulling me in. “ I wanna fuck you so bad.”
Like that would happen in under fifteen minutes… “ Follow me.” I maintained eye contact with him as I shuffled backwards toward the door.
KC and Wolf directed me to a side door instead. A steep staircase loomed behind it. I shook my head. Getting him up it was going to be a nightmare if he went under too quickly. “ We need to get him outside.”
“ No can do. We haven’t cleared the place.” Wolf slipped an arm under his friend. “ One step at a time. Up !”
Bear wobbled, almost taking them both down.
I noticed Wolf’s prosthetic and shoved him off, then wrapped both arms around Bear and took a step higher than him to use my thigh strength to drag him with me. All the while, I urged him on. “ We’re going upstairs, you and me, Bear .”
“ Hell , yeah. I can’t wait until you ride me like a fucking sex jockey.”
Unfortunately , that came out much clearer than his babbling earlier.
KC snickered. “ I got his back. Let’s do this.
” He wrapped around Bear’s waist and I tugged from above as we led him up the steps.
I almost fell on my ass when I cleared the top and stumbled into the open space.
Bear slapped a hand on the wall to hold us both up.
He pinned me against it and sagged a bit.
“ We need a bed, Rose .”
I nodded. “ That’s right, a bed. Come on.”
It wasn’t lost on me that there were at least three rooms with mattresses in them I could choose from. I picked the nearest one for expediency. Wolf swept around us and tugged the sheets off, tossing them into a pile in the corner.
“ I’ll grab clean ones from my room.”
Bear fell to the mattress and landed diagonally across it. Face first was good, face-planted was not. I shoved his bulk to the side and curled in to use my body weight as leverage to position him better. His hand trapped my waist and tugged me close.
“ This is what I’m talking about.” The slur was back, worse than before.
I made certain he was on his side and comfortable before paying attention to anything else.
We’d gathered a crowd. Not only Wolf and KC , but almost a half-dozen more men stared at Bear and me.
This wasn’t an audience participation moment. “ Get out. Only one of you needs to stay to watch him, but not all of you.”
“ Woman , if you drugged him, we’ll all stay to make sure he’s safe from you.” I couldn’t identify who’d spoken, but the nods that got passed around meant they thought I’d done this. A few of them snickered and made crude comments about watching us follow through with Bear’s sex jockey comment.
“ Fine . This is my formal protest and a warning. You’ll have to explain your voyeurism to him when he comes to. He doesn’t deserve your ridicule. He needs help and a friendly face when he wakes up. Not your ugly mugs being dicks to him.”
“ That’s so fierce. She’s gonna give Tits a run for her money.” KC nudged Wolf as he spoke.
Wolf’s jaw worked to one side. “ Everyone out. This is Bear’s blue hair moment— Officers and KC only are allowed in. Rose stays. The rest of you assholes, find Skinner or Hickey and get them scrubbing through the interior feed. Find out who the blonde woman she mentioned was and detain her. Now !”
The room cleared almost instantaneously.
“ Blue hair moment?” I asked.
KC pointed a thumb at Wolf . “ Prez passed out at the wrong party and got a bad buzz cut and dye job he didn’t want.”
I flinched and gathered one of my loose braids.
Bear laughed and leaned heavier on me. “ You smell so good. I wanna eat you.” His breathing was too slow and heavy as he burrowed his face into my neck.
I could barely move because his weight had trapped me.
What hair hadn’t fallen loose was stuck under my shoulder.
I shifted, so it wasn’t as uncomfortable.
KC held out a hand. “ Need help?”
If it wasn’t guaranteed that I’d rip my scalp off trying to break free, I’d have taken it. “ I’m good.”
“ You sure? He’s not small.”
Bear certainly wasn’t. “ I’ll survive. Do you know anyone who’s got medical training? I don’t like how slow his heart rate is.” It was even more sluggish than before.
“ Probably a good idea. KC , call Ma . Tell her what’s going on.” Wolf crouched near the mattress as soon as KC left the room. “ She’s a nurse. And you sound like her. Why ?”
“ In college, I was an RA with a biochemistry major and a past. Identifying date rape drugs and helping victims was an unlucky by-product of my history.” I swallowed the memories. I’d given Wolf the sanitized version of my villain origin story. He didn’t need to know the ugliest parts of it.
His scrutiny meant I hadn’t sold it very well. Finally , he said, “ You know Carl .”
I sighed. “ Duh . Why do you think I cultivated that unhealthy psychosis?” Sarcasm laced my words.
He thought about it for a moment before asking, “ Did it work? Did you exorcize your demons?”
Unfortunately , I did not.