Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Leah
The girl on my table is twenty-three years old and she's dying.
Not in the slow, grinding way that most people die—the years of bad choices and worse luck piling up until the body finally says enough.
This is fast.
This is fentanyl-laced methamphetamine hitting a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman like a freight train, and I've got maybe four minutes to pull her back before her brain decides it's done.
"Narcan's in. No response." I keep my voice flat. Professional. The kind of steady that comes from six years of watching people try to leave this world on my shift. "Pushing a second dose."
The ER around me moves in the chaos that I've long since stopped noticing—monitors screaming, another nurse cutting the girl's shirt open, Dr. Boggs calling orders from two feet away.
I push the second dose of naloxone and watch the girl's face for any sign that she's still in there.
She's blonde.
Not Wrenleigh's white-gold—more of a dirty dishwater shade, roots growing in dark.
But she's young and she's blonde and she's somebody's daughter, and I can't afford to think about that right now so I don't.
"Come on," I mutter. "Come on, come on, come on—"
Her chest heaves.
One breath, then another, ragged and desperate, like someone surfacing from deep water.
Her eyes fly open—pupils blown, unfocused, terrified—and she starts to thrash.
"There she is. Hold her—gently. She's going to be confused."
The girl grabs my wrist.
Her fingernails dig in hard enough to draw blood through my glove, and she looks at me with eyes that don't see me at all and says, "Please don't tell my mom."
Twenty-three years old. Please don't tell my mom.
I hold her hand and I talk her down the way I've talked down dozens of people clawing their way back from the edge—calm, firm, present.
Her name is Brianna.
She bought what she thought was meth from a friend of a friend at a party off Campus Drive.
She didn't know it was cut with fentanyl.
She didn't know that the high she was chasing came with a side of cardiac arrest.
She's the third one this week.
It's Wednesday, for fuck’s sake.
Dr. Boggs catches me in the hallway after we've got Brianna stabilized and moved to observation.
He's a good doctor—mid-fifties, steady hands, doesn't rattle easily. But even he looks tired tonight.
"That's seven in ten days, Mercer."
"I know."
"Something's changed out there. This isn't the usual flow."
"I know." I strip my gloves off and toss them in the biohazard bin.
My hands are steady. They're always steady.
It's the rest of me that shakes, and only ever when no one's watching.
"Whatever they're cutting it with, the dosing is all over the place.
It's not consistent batch to batch. Some of these people are getting ten times the lethal amount and they don't even know it. "
He shakes his head. "I've been at Ruby Memorial for twenty-two years. I've never seen a spike like this."
Neither have I. And I've been here long enough to know what Morgantown's drug problem looks like on a normal day.
This isn't normal.
This is something new, something flooding in from somewhere, and the ER is catching the overflow while the source keeps pumping.
I chart Brianna's case, check on my other patients, and try not to think about the sixteen-year-old girl who came in last Monday and didn't make it.
Her name was Caitlyn.
She was a junior at Morgantown High.
I worked on her for twenty-six minutes before Dr. Boggs called it, and I haven't said her name out loud since because saying it makes it real in a way I'm not ready for.
I wash my hands at the nurses' station. The soap smells like nothing. My scrubs smell like sweat and adrenaline and the sharp chemical tang of Narcan.
There's a half-moon of blood on my inner wrist from where Brianna's fingernails broke the skin through my glove.
My shift ends at seven and I know I should go home. Shower. Eat something that isn't from a vending machine or a DoorDash order I forgot to pick up.
Sleep, maybe, if my brain will shut off long enough to let me.
Instead, I get in my car and drive to the clubhouse.
I don't know when visiting Garrett and Vanna became a habit instead of an obligation, but somewhere between book two of Vanna's life and whatever chapter we're in now, it stopped feeling like checking on my brother's recovering addict wife and started feeling like visiting family.
The clubhouse isn't what most people picture when they hear "biker compound."
It's not some run-down shack with broken windows and motorcycles rusting in the yard.
It's... lived in.
Worn in the way good leather is worn—creased and softened by use, shaped around the people who fill it.
There's a garage that always smells like oil and either gasoline or diesel, depending on the day.
A main room with a bar and mismatched furniture, and hallways that lead to rooms where brothers live when they've got nowhere else or nowhere better.
Garrett and Vanna's room is down the back hallway.
I knock twice—our knock, the one we've done since we were kids, two quick raps—and Vanna opens the door.
She looks exhausted in the way only new mothers do—the kind of tired that goes past the body and settles into the bones.
Her golden hair is piled on top of her head in something that stopped being a bun about three hours ago, and there's a spit-up stain on the shoulder of Garrett's flannel that she's stolen and will never return.
But her eyes are clear. Bright. Alive in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes.
I spent years watching this woman disappear into her own veins, and now she's standing in front of me with breast milk on her shirt and a sleeping newborn in the next room.
It's a lot. Even now. Even after everything we've rebuilt.
"Hey." She steps back to let me in, keeping her voice low. "You look like shit."
"Thank you, Vanna. That's exactly what every woman wants to hear after a twelve-hour shift."
"I say it with love." She looks at me closer, and the teasing drops out of her voice. "Bad night?"
"Three ODs this week. Saved all of them, but..." I trail off. I don't finish the sentence because I don't need to. Vanna knows what fentanyl does.
Vanna knows what almost dying looks like from the inside.
The fact that she's standing here, sober, a mother, with color in her cheeks and light in her eyes—that's not nothing. That's a miracle that somebody somewhere probably doesn't get enough credit for.
She pulls me into a hug.
She smells like baby lotion and the lavender detergent she's been using since she came home from rehab, and I hold on a beat longer than I mean to.
A small, strangled sound comes from the bassinet in the corner. Not a cry—more like a protest. A tiny human objection to the fact that the world exists and is too bright and too loud and not warm enough.
Vanna pulls back with the instinct of a woman who's been a mother for all of eight weeks. "That's his hungry sound. Give me a second."
She scoops Waylon out of the bassinet and settles into the chair by the window with him, adjusting her shirt to nurse.
He's so small.
That's the thing that gets me every time—how impossibly small he is.
Dark hair like Garrett's, though Vanna swears it's going to lighten up.
A scrunched, furious little face that relaxes the second he latches.
"He looks like Garrett," I say, sitting on the edge of the bed.
"He looks like a potato and you know it. A cute potato. But a potato."
I laugh. A real one—the first real one all day. "He's a beautiful potato, Vanna."
She grins down at him, and the look on her face—God. It's the look of a woman who fought through hell to get here.
Detox. Rehab. The assault. The cravings that still wake her up at night, though she doesn't talk about those as much anymore.
All of it, every single ugly chapter, led to this: a baby boy nursing in a quiet room while his mother smiles at him like he invented the sun.
"He's up every two hours," she says, stroking the dark fuzz on his head. "I haven't slept more than three hours straight since he was born. My nipples feel like they've been through a war. And I've never been this happy in my entire life." She looks up at me. "Is that insane?"
"Little bit." I smile. "But the good kind."
"Your brother cried when they put him on my chest. Full-on ugly crying. Don't let him tell you otherwise."
"Oh, I know. Garrett texted me a picture of Waylon thirty seconds after he was born and the text was mostly typos because his hands were shaking so bad."
"That sounds right."
We sit for a minute. Waylon nursing. Vanna humming something low and tuneless.
The room is quiet in a way that feels peaceful—not empty, but full.
Full of all the things that almost didn't happen and somehow did.
"Come on," she says once Waylon's done and burped and half-asleep on her shoulder. "Ellie's in the kitchen. She'll lose her mind if she finds out you were here and didn't eat."
We make our way downstairs and head straight into the clubhouse’s kitchen.
A big industrial-looking space with stainless steel counters and a stove that's seen better decades.
But when Ellie's in it, it becomes hers.
That's just how she operates.
The woman walks into a room and it reorganizes itself around her, the same way the whole club does, the same way Backroads did before it was hers and even after.
She's standing at the counter rolling out biscuit dough when I walk in, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder, her reading glasses pushed up on top of her head.
She's not my aunt—she's Ruger's—but she helped raise me and Garrett after the fire, and she's the closest thing to a mother I've ever had since I was four years old.
She doesn't need the title. She earned something deeper than that.
"There she is." Ellie doesn't look up from the dough. She never needs to look up to know who just walked in. "You eat today?"
"I ate."
"You ate what?"
"Crackers. And part of a protein bar."