Coin’s Debt (Saint’s Outlaws MC: Morgantown, WV #3)

Prologue

Leah

There's a specific sound a bone makes when it's broken badly enough to puncture skin.

Most people never hear it. Most people go their whole lives blissfully ignorant of the wet snap that separates a clean fracture from the kind that makes seasoned ER nurses hold their breath.

I've heard it more times than I can count.

I've set the bones, cleaned the wounds, and held the hands.

I've looked mothers in the eye and told them their child would be fine when the blood was still warm under my gloves.

Tonight is no different. Except it is.

The ambulance bay doors blast open a few minutes after seven-thirty p.m. on a Tuesday that had been, up until this moment, blissfully uneventful.

I'm mid-bite into my freshly DoorDash’d Taco Bell quesoburrito—the first thing I've eaten since the sad excuse for a breakfast sandwich I choked down twelve hours ago—when the radio crackles and the charge nurse calls my name.

"Mercer. Bay three. Sixteen-year-old female, compound fracture of the left tibia. Four-wheeler accident on a back road off Route 7."

I drop the food on my station, tighten the lanyard holding my WVU Medicine badge, and move.

My sneakers squeak against the linoleum as I round the corner and push through the curtain into bay three, already pulling gloves from the wall dispenser.

The girl on the gurney is blonde.

That's the first thing I notice—white-gold hair fanned across the pillow, tangled with leaves and dirt and what looks like dried blood near her temple.

She's pale beneath a summer tan that hasn't fully faded, her jaw clenched so hard I can see the muscles jumping beneath her skin.

Her left leg is splinted but the damage is visible even through the temporary dressing—the kind of break that makes you wince no matter how many years you've spent in trauma medicine.

She's trying not to cry. I can tell because I've been that girl.

Sixteen years old and determined to prove the pain can't touch her, even when it's eating her alive from the inside out.

"Hey there," I say, stepping into her line of sight. I keep my voice even. Warm but not pitying—teenage girls can smell pity from a mile away, and they hate it. "I'm Leah. I'm your nurse tonight. Can you tell me your name?"

She blinks at me. Blue eyes—bright, sharp, furious at the world for putting her in this bed. "Wrenleigh," she says through clenched teeth. "And before you ask, yes, it hurts. And yes, I know it's bad. I saw the bone."

The name tugs at something in the back of my mind, but she's covered in dirt and blood and pain, and I'm already in work mode. I file it away and focus on what matters—the break.

"Well, Wrenleigh, since you've already done my visual assessment for me, how about you let me check the rest? I promise I'll be quick."

Something flickers in those blue eyes. Not trust—not yet. But the faintest crack in the armor. "Fine. But if you tell me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten, I swear to God—"

"Wouldn't dream of it." I snap on my gloves and get to work.

She's tough, this one. Tougher than most adults I treat.

I clean the wound around the fracture site and she hisses through her teeth but doesn't scream, doesn't pull away.

Her hands grip the side rails so hard her knuckles go white, and she makes jokes through the pain—terrible, dark, sixteen-year-old humor that has no business being this funny in a trauma bay.

"Bet the four-wheeler looks worse than I do," she mutters while I irrigate the wound.

"I wouldn't take that bet," I tell her, and she lets out a laugh that turns into a groan halfway through.

I like her. Instantly. The kind of immediate, bone-deep understanding that happens so rarely it catches me off guard when it does.

This girl is fierce. This girl has been through something—I can feel it in the way she holds herself together, like she learned a long time ago that falling apart isn't an option.

I'm checking her vitals when the curtain rips open.

Not parts. Rips. Like whoever is on the other side doesn't have time for the gentle swoosh of hospital curtain etiquette.

And the man who comes through is not the kind of man who does anything gently.

I know him before I see his face.

The leather cut, the compact frame, the way he moves like every step has already been calculated three moves ahead.

Coin. My brother's club brother.

The quiet one who sits in the corner of the clubhouse and clocks everything with those pale blue-gray eyes—never the loudest man in the room, but somehow always the one who knows exactly what's happening in it.

I've seen him at the clubhouse a handful of times when I visit Garrett and Vanna.

He's always in the background, steady and still, the kind of man you'd overlook if you weren't paying attention. I've never been good at not paying attention.

But I've never seen him like this.

He's not tall—not compared to the men my brother runs with, the ones who wear leather and patches and fill doorways like they were built to block them.

He's average height, maybe six foot, or six-one, but there's nothing average about the way he carries himself.

Compact. Solid.

Like every ounce of him has been pressed down and hardened into something unbreakable.

Dark hair—black or close to it—and those eyes I've only ever seen calm and watchful are wild right now with a terror so raw it makes the air in the room change.

His whole world has narrowed to the girl on that gurney, and everything else—me, the monitors, the beeping, the blood—has ceased to exist.

He crosses the room in three strides and his hands find Wrenleigh's face, rough palms cupping her cheeks with a gentleness that doesn't match the panic in his eyes.

The girl on my gurney is Coin's daughter. Wrenleigh.

The same girl whose Sweet 16 the club threw a few months back—the one I watched him toast with a voice so steady and so full of love that every woman in the room went quiet.

"Baby. Baby, look at me. Are you okay? Where does it—" His voice is low, steady on the surface, but I can hear the fractures in it. The hairline cracks running through every word. "They said compound fracture. They said—"

"Dad." Wrenleigh's voice is different now. Softer. The armor she wore for me falls away and she's just a kid, just a sixteen-year-old girl who's scared and hurting and needs her father. "Dad, I'm okay. It's just my leg."

"Just your—" He chokes on it. His eyes drop to the splint and I watch the color drain from his face. He swallows hard, jaw working, and I can see him forcing himself to hold it together. Not for himself. For her.

That's when I notice the second girl.

She's standing just inside the curtain, small and still, dark hair falling around a face that's all sharp angles and wide eyes.

Blue-gray eyes. His eyes.

She's maybe thirteen, and she's got one hand fisted in the back of her father's cut like if she lets go, he'll disappear.

Her other hand is clutching a pair of crutches that the paramedics must have handed off.

Sadie Jo. I've never met her—she wasn't at the party—but Garrett mentioned both girls by name once, the way club brothers talk about each other's families.

Like they belong to all of them.

She's staring at the blood on her sister's leg, and she looks like she's about to shatter.

I move before I think about it.

It's instinct—the same instinct that made me become a nurse in the first place, the same one that drives me to fix what's broken and hold together what's falling apart.

I crouch down to her level and make sure my voice is the softest thing in this room.

"Hey, sweetheart. I'm Leah. I'm taking care of your sister." I wait until those blue-gray eyes find mine. "She's going to be just fine. I promise. Can you tell me your name?"

Her lower lip trembles. "Sadie Jo."

"That's a beautiful name, Sadie Jo. Can you do me a favor?

There's a chair right around the corner in the waiting area.

It's got a really terrible vending machine next to it, but the hot chocolate is actually pretty good if you hit the button twice.

Can you go sit there for me while I finish helping your sister? "

She looks at her father. He hasn't turned around—his hands are still on Wrenleigh's face, his forehead pressed to hers, murmuring something I can't hear.

But he feels his younger daughter's eyes on him the way parents do, some sixth sense that never sleeps, and he turns just enough to nod.

"Go on, Sadie Jo. I'm right here."

She lets go of his cut.

Slowly, like peeling her own fingers back costs her something.

Then she looks at me one more time—measuring, deciding—and walks toward the waiting area with the crutches tucked under her arm like she's carrying them for someone else.

Because she is.

She's thirteen years old and she's already carrying things for other people.

Something in my chest tightens.

I turn back to my patient.

Her father has pulled a chair to the bedside and he's holding Wrenleigh's hand, his thumb moving across her knuckles in slow, steady strokes.

The panic has receded behind his eyes—not gone, but leashed. Controlled. He's rebuilt the wall in the space between breaths, and now he's what she needs him to be: solid, present, unshakable.

I know that trick. My brother does the same thing.

Garrett can be falling apart on the inside—I've seen the wreckage of it, the nights he showed up at my apartment with hollow eyes and shaking hands after pulling Vanna out of another overdose—but the moment someone needs him, the mask goes on. Feel everything, show nothing.

I wonder if Coin knows he's not hiding it as well as he thinks he is.

"I need to get her to imaging," I say, pulling up beside the bed.

Professional. Competent. These are things I'm good at.

These are things that don't require me to feel anything I'm not prepared to feel.

"The fracture needs to be set properly, and I want to make sure there's no additional damage.

An orthopedic surgeon will be handling the procedure. "