Chapter 48
Chapter Forty-Eight
Drew
Ididn’t hang around to spend time analyzing what I saw.
The moment she came into view, there was only one thing that held my attention, and it was the same thing that always had: the blue of her eyes.
They were staring back at me with a look I couldn’t read properly, but I’m pretty sure it must have mirrored the shit on my own face.
Relief. Disbelief. Anger. Sadness. But more than anything, the heavy stuff—the stuff that got me through the last however many hours of absolute torture. The love stuff.
Doc didn’t speak once I’d opened the door to her room. I wasn’t even aware of where he was anymore as I pushed the wood into the frame behind me and made my way over to her, trying my hardest not to show the agony that stormed its way through my entire body with every step I took.
As soon as I saw the epic fuck up of her back, I crouched down beside the bed and reached out for her one good hand as carefully as I could.
There wasn’t anything I wanted to do other than pick her up in my arms and hold her to me, just so I could feel her and know she was still alive and still real.
But neither one of us were capable of doing what we really wanted to do.
I eventually looked up and stared into her eyes.
Curling my fingers around hers and ignoring the splintering pain through every knuckle, I found myself swallowing as the emotion and relief threatened to take over. Leaning forward, I pressed my lips to her hand over and over again and pulled in a breath through my nostrils.
“Look at you,” I whispered, closing my eyes to compose myself before staring up at her again. “No words will ever be able to tell you how sorry I am, Ayda. Please, don’t…”
I stopped, not wanting to beg her not to leave me after all this, but needing her to know how fucking sorry I was.
The palm of her hand was so close to my lips, she trailed her fingers over them and down through my beard as she took in every cut and bruise that was there. “You didn’t do anything you need to apologize for.”
The tear tracks on her cheeks looked like a permanent tattoo of the torture she’d been put through, yet there she was comforting me.
Breathing out, I tore one hand away from hers and lifted it to her face.
I wanted to trace every mark on her skin just to remind myself that what I’d just done to Cortez was the only option I’d had.
I wanted her wounds to burn me, just to remind myself that letting her go from that warehouse in the arms of someone other than myself was the only thing I could have done, because I had to be the one to make sure he paid the highest price.
I had to be the one to spill his blood, own his last breath.
The marks her body wore were my validation.
Letting my bust up hand fall to the side of her face, I pushed my fingers through her hair and brushed my thumb over the apple of her cheek.
“I have so many things to apologize for. The main one being that for the last few weeks, all I’ve done is break all my promises to you over and over again.
I vowed to keep you safe and I didn’t. Tonight—last night—whatever day we’re on now, I don’t know and I don’t care, but it was the worst night in the club’s history beside—” I cut myself off, knowing his name was on the tip of my tongue.
“Besides the night Pete died. I’m sorry you were a part of that because of me, just like he was. ”
Ayda looked up, the shuffling of someone slipping from the room the only indication that Deeks’ woman had been there at all.
The moment the door clicked closed, she shifted slowly, trying to hide the wince as she slid her bruised legs to either side of me and shuffled to the edge of the mattress.
“You haven’t broken a promise to me, Drew.
Okay, I’m a little beat up, but I’m alive, and so are you.
That is all that’s important right now. That’s the only thing either of us needs to focus on.
This isn’t your fault. Up until we saw that kid, it was one of the best nights of my life. ”
I stayed down, my hands on her as much as they could be without causing her pain.
“Don’t do that,” I said softly.
“Do what?” she whispered, meeting my eyes.
“Panic,” I answered, rising up until my face was level with hers so she could see the absolute certainty of what I was about to say.
“I’m not going to push you away again, Ayda.
This isn’t me telling you your life would be better off without me.
I realized a lot of things in that room, and one of them was the irony of that stupid fucking quote that tells everyone that if you truly love someone you should set them free.
I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t even know if I believed it in the first place.
I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.
We belong together and I know that now more than ever before.
I won’t lose you. Not now, not ever. Where you go, I go. ”
When her lips began to tremble, I was sure she was about to cry, but she surprised me as they formed into a smile.
“Good, because you’re stuck with me whether you like it or not. You’re not the only one who realized a few things in that place.” Her tongue darted out to run over her dried and cracked lips. “Like I realized I can’t and won’t live without you in my life.”
“Damn right you won’t.”
I tried to offer her a smile of some sort, but I had no idea if it looked as bad as it felt.
I was all blood and torn up skin. Everything was three times the size it was yesterday and a hell of a lot more painful.
Dropping my hand to her chin, I let my thumb hover over her bottom lip before gently tugging it down.
“This is it now. You and me. I mean it. No more half assing it on my part. You and me.”
“Took you long enough, asshole,” she said with a laugh as the tears formed. She tried to blink them back, but one of them escaped, forcing her bad hand up so she could brush it away on her wrist, her eyes rolling.
I reacted without thought, pulling her focus back to me as gently as I could, my face falling serious as I reached for and held both her wrists in my grip. “Don’t do that, either.”
“Do what?”
“Refuse to believe that what I’m saying isn’t just more bullshit words that I’m whispering in your ear to comfort you,” My voice was smaller than a whisper as I let my forehead brush against hers.
“I mean it, Ayda. I’m not going anywhere.
Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not in a year, a decade, or any amount of time you can come up with.
I’m never going to leave you or ask you to leave me.
I want every single bit of you I can get… forever.”
She continued to search my face, the tears now flowing easily and cutting through the marks on her cheeks. Her voice was choked as her tears fell from her chin. She sniffed quietly, a small cough coming as she tried to clear her throat with no luck. “Drew Tucker, I love you.”
“Took you long enough, asshole.” I smirked.
She stifled a giggle, groaning in pain a little as her good hand moved from mine so she could cup my cheek with a feather-light touch. “Do you think you could do me a favor?”
“That depends…”
“On?”
“If it involves heavy lifting, physical exertion or me applying broken lips to any of your body parts that deserve way more attention than I am capable of giving right now.”
Tipping her head forward, she looked up at me from under her lashes. “Does that include just holding me in a bed with the lights out?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Moving sounded easier than it was, and it took me way too fucking long to hold all my body parts in place and rise to a stand.
Shuffling on the bed slowly, Ayda looked up at me and with a small, humorless snort, covered her face with both hands.
“Jesus, would you look at the two of us, moving around like ninety year-olds.” She reached out slowly and thought better of it. “Just how bad are you?”
I didn’t answer right away, instead reaching out for her offered hand and lowering myself down beside her.
All I was wearing was my sweat pants. The doc had been trying to clean me up before I stormed in here, unable to listen to any more of my injuries because all I could focus on was finding the one medicine I needed.
My shoulder was strapped up to cover the bullet wound that would be a new addition to the ever expanding war artwork that was splashed across my body, but that didn’t stop me from creasing my face together and holding it up high for Ayda to fall under.
It might not have made sense to her or anyone else out there, but I just needed to feel her against my chest. I needed her to breathe life back into me again.
“I’ve had worse.”
“Liar,” she whispered, settling in against me as gently as she could, her breaths coming in small puffs as her fingers traced the packing slowly. “But I promise, you’ve got yourself the best little nurse around.”
“You’re not nursing anyone.” I smiled, resting my hand on the top of her ass. “For once, you’re going to let me look after you. No arguing.”
Ayda went quiet for a while before she released a quiet yawn. “You always look after me.”
“There’s always room for improvement. You might want to prepare yourself for me dressing you up in bubble wrap from now on. Three guard dogs everywhere you go. No venturing out after dark. Maybe a collar…” The smile on my lips hurt as I teased her, waiting for her to bite the way she always had.
“You don’t think one’s enough?” she asked thoughtfully. “I mean, technically, with…” She lifted her head an inch from my chest and sucked in a breath. “Wait. What happened to the girl? Sofia?”
I frowned quickly, my body tensing slightly beneath hers. “What?”
“The girl that identified you?” she asked, tipping her head back slowly so she was looking up at me. “What happened to her?”
“I…” There was no way to say what she wanted to hear, and while I never wanted to shut her out of anything anymore, I also knew that then wasn’t the time to relive more pain.
Sagging into the mattress, I closed my eyes and nudged her closer.
My body was working hard to pump blood to all the places that needed it the most. It was a feeling that left me floating but grounded me at the same time.
I was anchored by agony, yet lost in a headspace that made everything seem unreal.
Especially what we’d just done. Pushing my lips to the top of her head, I held them there as I spoke through the haze of the memories and the pain.
“Ayda, you don’t need more answers that will haunt you. Not today.”
“I understand,” she whispered with conviction, her palm landing flat against my skin as her head tipped back down. “So what now? Are we safe?”
Safe. Wouldn’t that be a peaceful thought?
There would be a time for me to tell her what we were and where we stood.
There would be moments of quiet in the future where the boredom and silence would leave her with little option but to think and wonder what had happened when she left that warehouse.
I made another vow as I lay beside her, holding her in my arms—a vow to always answer as honestly as I could when she asked what was going down with the club.
She’d earned that right in the last twenty-four hours.
She’d earned it the first night I met her when she stood up to me the way no other woman ever had.
It just wasn’t the time to go into it all.
She didn’t need to know how I’d made Cortez take his last breath.
She didn’t need to know about the explosion Kenny had rigged at the warehouse, or the scene that Jedd and Slater had pieced together to make it look like some kind of Emps fucked up ritual gone wrong.
She didn’t even need to know about the conversation we’d had with Sutton to fill him in and officially get him on our side for the first time in the club’s history.
This wasn’t just a schoolyard plan we’d hatched that could be told in a few simple sentences.
It was a complicated MC web of lies, deceit and murder.
It was about our survival and their destruction.
What happened beyond that was anyone’s guess, but all I cared about as I held her was her. Everything I did was for her. Without Ayda to live for, I’d have died several times over already.
As the dusty morning sunlight tried to peer through the cracks of the heavy curtains in the room, I curled my free hand around hers that lay against my chest, sighing into her hair before pressing a painful kiss to her head.
“We’re safe.”
For now.