5. Hayden
5
HAYDEN
I was going to die.
At least the clearing, awash with pink and gold as the sun rose, was a pretty place for it all to end.
“Does somebody want to tell me why the fuck we have two dead members and a Sinner in our compound?” War roared from the middle of the crowd, his gaze centering on me. He pulled his gun. “What kind of fucking death wish do you have, Chaos?”
“Don’t shoot him,” Hawk said with reluctance from the bottom of the hole where he was monitoring Kara’s breathing. His tone was anything but convincing, as if he did kind of wish War would put a bullet through my head. “At least, not until Kara’s out of the woods.”
War dragged his gaze away from me and onto his VP. And then to Kara, lying in the hip-deep hole on her side, so deathly quiet in the midst of the drama surrounding her.
War dropped his gun and knelt at the edge of the hole. “What the fuck happened?”
He’d been late to the party, but somebody else was going to have to fill him in.
I focused on Hawk, hating it was him down there and not me. It had taken everything inside me to not shove him out of the way and take his spot.
But I knew exactly how good Hawk was with anything medical. He might not have had a degree in anything, but he knew what he was doing. I was alive as walking, talking proof of that. I didn’t know the first thing about checking pulses or doing CPR.
I was completely useless to Kara right now, and as much as I hated to admit it, she needed him in this moment more than she needed me.
That hurt like fucking hell.
“Can we move her yet?” I asked him. “She needs a hospital.”
War glared at me. “Hawk knows what he’s doing. She doesn’t need—”
“She does,” he interrupted. “She does need a hospital. She needs X-rays or something to check her lungs and make sure she hasn’t inhaled dirt. I can’t do that here.”
War nodded. “Shit. Okay, yeah. I’ll get the club van.”
Hawk went to nod, then screwed up his face and shook his head. “Chaos has a van. We’ll take her in that.”
Surprise punched through me.
Clearly, it caught War off guard too.
Both of us were plain shocked when Hawk gathered Kara up in his arms, lifted her, and then held her out to me.
He glared at me when I didn’t move. “Fucking take her, Chaos. I can’t get out of this damn hole carrying her.”
Shit. I crouched at the edge of the grave she’d nearly died in and took her from his arms. The breath whooshed from my lungs. Just hours earlier she’d stood right in front of me, eyes bright, skin pink with health. Now she was barely conscious, her body a dead weight in desperate need of medical attention.
“Hayden,” she mumbled, her voice raspy, like she’d been screaming.
“It’s me, baby. I got you.” I stepped toward the woods, the van abandoned somewhere beyond.
Hawk whistled sharply. “This way, asshole.”
I didn’t argue with him. Hawk might have been lacking in a lot of areas, his personality in particular, but this was his territory.
So I shut up and followed him, clutching Kara close and keeping pace with Hawk, who slow jogged through the trees.
It was easier than the trip in, despite the addition of Kara’s weight. Anything was easier than blindly running through the woods in the darkness.
Hawk opened the sliding door on the van and closed it after me when I got in. There were no seats, the back designed for deliveries, so I sank to the cold metal and put Kara on my lap. She curled in on herself, resting her head on my shoulder and closing her eyes.
I didn’t like the sound of her breathing. It seemed too shallow and wheezy, and she winced with each inhale.
“Hawk,” I said, a low warning in my tone.
He glanced back at us in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, I know. I can hear it too. I’m driving.”
All I could do was hold Kara close and pray she’d be okay until we got to the hospital.
Hawk pulled up outside the ER with a screech of brakes and the blaring of his horn. “Can we get some help out here!” He got out of the van and slid the back door open.
Kara’s breathing was barely a rasp. I wasn’t even sure if she was just exhausted or unconscious.
I got us out and met the attendant running out with a gurney.
He took one glimpse of Kara’s dirt-covered, vaguely gray skin and put his fingers to her neck, checking for a pulse.
That’s how fucking dead she looked, even though her chest did rise and fall with shallow breaths.
“She has a pulse and she’s breathing,” Hawk barked out, gripping the side of the gurney and pushing it toward the hospital doors. “Now move!”
I grabbed the other side, helping it along.
“She was unresponsive for an unknown period of time,” Hawk continued. “And she might have inhaled dirt. A lot of it. So make sure you do whatever the hell checks you do for that.”
The attendant nodded, repeating the information to the medical professionals as we entered the hospital.
One of the male doctors looked at her and then at us. “What happened to her?”
Hawk, who had been full of confidence, barking out orders a second ago, froze.
I knew what he was thinking. He’d ditched his MC jacket while he’d been driving, but if we told these people the truth, that she’d been buried alive, the police were inevitably going to ask us where.
Hawk and I were both known to the cops. It wouldn’t take them long to get a search warrant for my house. The restaurant. The Slayers’ compound. Wouldn’t be long until someone found a trace of what had happened out there.
Or the dead body of a biker. There had been a couple to choose from.
I could dump Hawk in it pretty bad right now. Luca, too, which he would deserve after he’d tried to use me as his pawn, once again. The cops would surely find some sort of evidence at both the restaurant and the Slayers’ compound, but my house was squeaky clean since I’d been out of the game so long.
I could walk away into the sunset with Kara and Hayley Jade. Maybe we’d send Hawk and Luca a postcard from wherever we ended up, addressed to the Saint View jail where they’d both be seeing out their days.
My gaze met Hawk’s. His expression was full of anger and indignation, and maybe even some resignation.
But then he ran his hand over Kara’s forehead so tenderly, and I remembered the way he’d brought her back to life. My stupid fucking tongue wouldn’t form the words to dump him in it. “We were at a party,” I told the doctor. “She got too close to the edge of a small cliff and ground gave way. She didn’t fall that far but brought some dirt and soil down on top of her.”
The doctor swore beneath his breath and barked out a lot of medical talk to his team around him.
I didn’t understand a word of it but I looked at Hawk, who nodded at the doctor’s commands. He didn’t argue. If what the doctors were doing was good enough for Hawk, when he clearly loved Kara so much it had changed his whole personality from abrasive, rude jackass, to tender, attentive boyfriend, then it was good enough for me.
“One of you her husband?” a nurse asked, jotting notes down while the team rushed Kara through the corridors.
“I am,” I lied quickly, knowing that with a serious health complication, only immediate family would be let in. Fucked if they were keeping me away from her.
Hawk shot me a glare that was so full of malice I was surprised it didn’t wither me to the spot. “I am,” he growled.
The nurse glanced between us, confusion etching her forehead into lines. “You’re both her husband?”
Hawk looked ready to punch a hole through my face, but he grit his teeth and answered, “That’s what we said, isn’t it?”
The woman stopped us at the door, forcing us to let Kara and her medical team carry on without us. She tapped something on her iPad. “Noted. Go take a seat over there somewhere, and I’ll come get you as soon as you can see her.” She pointed to some chairs that formed a small waiting room.
Neither Hawk nor I moved, both of us standing there, peering through small rectangular windows on the door until Kara was out of sight.
The nurse’s gaze danced between the two of us. “So just out of interest, you’re…” She cocked her head to one side, considering her words. “If it’s sister wives for women…does that make you brother husbands?”
The way the color drained out of Hawk’s face at the mention of the two of us being husbands would have been funny if Kara hadn’t been lying on a gurney somewhere, struggling to breathe.
“Your homophobia is showing, husband.” I ignored the woman’s question and passed him to move toward the seats.
He ignored the nosy nurse as well, shoving me instead until we were out of her earshot. “Fuck off. I don’t hate you because you love the dick. I hate you because you are one.”
I rolled my eyes, slumping into a seat, no idea where he’d gotten this idea that I liked men from, but more than happy for him to pick a fight because it beat remembering the sickly color of Kara’s skin. I had no problem with Hawk assuming I was into guys. But clearly, he did. “No? You’re saying your balls didn’t just suck right up into your body at the mere thought of me fucking you?”
His gaze met mine.
And for the briefest of instants, it wasn’t disgust I saw there in his expression.
It was white-hot fucking heat.
It hit me too. That same rush of attraction I’d felt when we’d been stuck in jail together for a night.
“Don’t talk about my balls, Chaos.” Hawk scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m dirty and tired and probably in shock. The last thing I want is you traumatizing me some more.”
The hospital bustled around us, our conversation made private by the dull hum of machines beeping, medical conversations, and beds on wheels being moved up and down the corridor.
“Because you’re not a homophobe? Right. Gotcha.” I was tired and dirty too. I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, and he wasn’t the only person sitting here nursing a new mental scar from seeing Kara buried beneath the fucking dirt like a corpse. So fuck him if talking about his balls was easier than thinking about the fact Kara could have stopped breathing again, and neither of us would even know it until some doctor walked out here and decided to drop a bomb.
The thought had me clenching my fingers around the plastic armrests so tight my knuckles ached.
His hand fell away, and he glared at me. “Because we both know you’d rather talk about my dick, right? About how fucking much you want it?”
I raised an eyebrow. Talking was better than silence. I couldn’t stand the way the silence whispered this was my fault. If I hadn’t come between Hawk and Kara earlier, none of this would have happened. Sure, she probably would have been naked in his bed, but at least she would have been protected. Happy.
I would have been miserable, but look where being selfish had gotten me? I was miserable anyway.
Poking at Hawk’s barely disguised bi-awakening at least stopped me from thinking about anything else. I sank my head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “That how you’re trying to play this one? That it’s me who wants it? Okay, sure, let’s talk that out since we have nothing better to do.” Neither of us had a phone or a book or anything else to pass the time. “Tell me how I want it?”
Hawk recoiled. “What?”
I snorted at his horror. “Yeah, come on. Tell me how I want it. In my mouth? Or in my ass?”
I glanced over at him.
My breath quickened at the expression he tried to cover.
I sat up straighter and shook my head. “Nuh. No fucking way. You actually were seriously just thinking about that, weren’t you?”
He sank down in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “And you weren’t?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
It was such a fucking lie.
“You weren’t thinking about the way my dick would taste, Chaos?”
I glanced around the room. It was nearly empty, only an older man asleep in a chair at the far end and a younger couple who were engrossed in their phones. Nobody was paying either Hawk or me any attention.
All of a sudden I was thinking about what his dick would taste like.
I’d been playing, poking at him to get a rise, but the thought of getting on my knees for him was suddenly all I could see. “I’m really fucking tired if the thought of your dick in my mouth is getting me hot.”
He leaned in and lowered his voice. “How about my dick in your ass then?”
I wasn’t even sure if we were joking anymore or serious. Only that heat flushed through me so hot and fast that I stood to get a paper cup full of water, from a dispenser on the other side of the room, before my cock could get all the way up like it was threatening to.
I stood there for a good few minutes, drinking the water and pretending to read a pamphlet from a holder on the wall. My brain wouldn’t even register the words. They swam in front of my eyes, my brain just focusing on getting my dick to behave.
For once in his life, Hawk had nothing to say. When I returned to my seat, we fell into an awkward silence, both of us refusing to look at the other.
All I could think was I must have inhaled some dirt or something as well, because my chest was tight and my heartbeat raced at the very idea of Hawk wanting me like that.