Chapter Five
Crowbar
Boundary crossed. I cursed, calling myself several kinds of idiots, in alphabetical order. Lifting Gunner, I set her down on my seat then crossed the yard.
That wasn’t a bruise from work, but I’d push too soon. Couldn’t help it. Spencer was so small, and I wanted to rip the spine out of whoever had hurt the male.
My wolf had chosen Spencer. I’d gotten the same punch in the chest Preacher had felt when Prez’s wolf had chosen Trent. I’d chosen him between the puppy cages and the display of collars.
The vampire she should avoid is usually the one she cannot forget.
Find another dark romance at Lokepub.
I rounded the side of the building, determined to catch Spencer before he reached his car, but slowed when I spotted him leaning his back to the brick. His knees were bent, and he was gripping his arms in a tight hold. The pain was too much.
“Go away.” He dropped his hand, only to grab his arm again.
“Not pushing.” I approached slowly, steps measured. “You ain’t gotta give me any details. Just want to examine your arm, is all.”
I wanted to catch the tear he swiped away.
“Promise no questions?”
He’d yet to lift his head or look at me. Spencer was embarrassed. Maybe even humiliated. Silence allowed abuse to continue. Secrets didn’t keep you safe. They kept you trapped.
But if I pushed, Spencer would shut me down completely. “Promise.”
The word felt like a razor blade sliding across my tongue.
“Okay.”
Lifting his arm, I gently turned and probed.
His cry of pain told me it wasn’t going to heal on its own.
The muscles along his forearm were rigid, knotted in a way that screamed torn fibers rather than a simple strain.
When I pressed gently below the elbow, Spencer sucked air through his teeth and his whole body went taut against the brick.
“Easy.” I kept my voice level, the way I talked to Gunner when a loud noise spooked her. “I’m gonna rotate your wrist. Tell me when it spikes.”
I turned his hand palm-up, slow, maybe two degrees at a time. He lasted about fifteen degrees before a sound ripped out of him that made my wolf slam against my ribs so hard I tasted copper.
“Stop,” he gasped. “Stop, stop, stop.”
I held his arm steady in both hands, carefully cradling it.
Nothing felt displaced. That didn’t rule out a fracture.
but the soft tissue damage was significant.
It would only get worse with every bag of cat litter he dragged across a linoleum floor, every cupcake pan he pulled from an oven, every night he slept on it wrong.
“Spencer.” I waited until he lifted his head. His eyes were glassy, lashes wet, and the look on his face was raw. “This needs urgent care. Tonight.”
“I can’t—” His voice cracked. He swallowed hard and tried again. “No insurance for ninety days.”
“I’ll foot the bill.”
His head snapped up so fast his skull nearly clipped the brick. “What? No. Absolutely not. You don’t even know me. You can’t just—”
“I can, and I am.” I released his arm with care, making sure he had it tucked against his body before I let go.
“This isn’t a negotiation. You’ve got torn muscles in that arm, maybe worse. You keep using it like this, you’re looking at permanent damage. The kind that means you can’t stock shelves, can’t bake, can’t hold a pricing gun. Can’t hold Gunner.”
That last one landed. I watched it hit him behind the eyes, the flicker of fear that meant losing the small, good things he’d built for himself.
“I’ll pay you back,” he whispered. He needed control back. Dignity.
“We’ll argue about that later.” I pulled my phone from my back pocket. “Sit tight. I need to talk to Prez.”
Spencer slid down the wall until he was sitting on the ground, his bad arm pressed against his chest, his good hand gripping his knee. He looked small against the brick. Smaller than he should have.
I walked far enough that he couldn’t hear me then dialed Preacher. He picked up on the second ring, the noise of the cookout filtering through behind him.
“Yeah.”
“Need to bounce. Taking Spencer to urgent care.”
A pause. Preacher didn’t waste words, but the silence was its own language. “How bad?”
“Torn muscles in his left arm. Could be partial tears, could be worse. He can’t rotate his wrist without damn near passing out.”
“He tell you how it happened?”
“No. And I promised I wouldn’t push.” I ground my teeth. “Not tonight. My wolf chose him, Prez.”
“Guessed it already.” Another pause, longer this time. I could picture Preacher reading between every line I wasn’t saying, the same way he’d read the situation with Trent before the rest of us had caught up.
“Take him,” Preacher said. “Use the club card for the bill. I’ll let Sledge know a charge is hitting the books. And, Crowbar?”
“Yeah.”
“Bring him back when he’s patched up.”
The line went dead. I pocketed the phone and walked back to Spencer, who hadn’t moved.
Gunner had somehow escaped the backyard and found him, her tiny body pressed against his hip, nose buried under his good hand.
She looked up at me with brown eyes that said fix this as clearly as if she’d spoken English.
“Working on it,” I told the dog.
“Did you just talk to the puppy?” Spencer’s voice was thin but steady.
“She started it.” I crouched in front of him, elbows on my knees.
“Here’s the plan. I drive. You sit. We go to the urgent care on Green Road. They look at your arm, do whatever they need to do, and you let them. Then I bring you back here for food, because you haven’t eaten anything tonight except your own fingernails.”
“I haven’t been…” He looked at his right hand. Three nails were bitten to the quick. “Shut up.”
“Can you stand?”
“I’m injured, not paralyzed.” He pushed off the wall with his good arm, wobbled, and I caught him by the waist before his knees buckled.
The contact brought his face close to mine, close enough to count the freckles I’d noticed at the register.
Seven across the bridge of his nose. Three more scattered along his left cheekbone.
“Steady,” I said.
“I’m steady.” He wasn’t. But his chin was up and his jaw was set, and something in the angle of it told me Spencer had been standing on shaky legs for a long time and had gotten very good at pretending otherwise.
“Stay here with Gunner,” I told him. “I’ll grab my keys.”
“Noodles.”
“We’re not doing this right now.”
“We’re always doing this. It’s our thing,” he volleyed back.
When I returned, I kept my hand on his back as we walked to my truck.
Not the bike. No way I was putting him on the back of a motorcycle with one working arm.
The truck was parked behind the row of motorcycles, a black pickup with a crew cab.
I opened the door for him. He climbed in without protest, which told me the pain had gotten bad enough to override his pride.
Gunner went on his lap, immediately burrowing into the space between his thighs and his stomach, and Spencer curled his good arm around her like she was the only anchor he had left.
Which was the reason she was going with us. I knew enough people who worked there that would look past bringing a puppy inside the clinic.
The drive to urgent care on Green Road took twelve minutes. Spencer was quiet for the first five, which was long enough to concern me. The man hadn’t stopped talking since I’d met him. Silence from Spencer was like silence from a smoke detector during a fire.
“The banana bread has chocolate chips in it,” he said at minute six, staring out the window. “I put them on one half. The other half is plain. I’m picky sometimes.”
“Thoughtful of yourself.”
“I’m a thoughtful person. It’s my tragic flaw, aside from never knowing when to shut up. I think about things until my brain eats itself, and then I bake about it.”
He shifted in his seat, wincing when the seatbelt pressed against his arm.
“I made four dozen cookies last Tuesday. Four dozen. I live alone. Who needs four dozen cookies?”
“What kind?”
“Snickerdoodle.” He turned his head to look at me, and the streetlights caught the green of his eyes. “You’re distracting me.”
“Is it working?”
“A little.” He looked back at the road. “I’m scared. Not of the doctor. Of what they’re going to find. And what you’re going to think when they tell you. Because I’ll give them permission to tell you since you’re persistent enough to find out anyway.”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Already told you. No questions tonight.”
“I know what you promised.” His voice dropped. “I also know what you’re thinking. You’re not stupid, Crowbar. Nobody gets an injury like this from stocking shelves.”
The silence between us filled with everything neither of us was saying. I pulled into the urgent care lot, killed the engine, and sat there for a beat, staring at the glowing sign above the entrance.
“Whatever they find,” I said, not looking at him, “doesn’t change a damn thing about tonight. You came to a cookout. You brought cupcakes. My dog loves you. That’s where we are.”
Spencer was quiet for so long I thought he’d stopped breathing.
When I finally turned my head, he was pressing the heel of his good hand against his eyes, shoulders trembling in that silent, contained way that people shook when they’d been holding everything together for so long that the smallest kindness cracked the foundation.
“I hate this,” he said to the windshield.
“I know.”
“Not the urgent care part. The part where someone I barely know is being kinder to me than—” He stopped. His throat bobbed. “Never mind.”
I reached over and rested my hand on the back of his neck. Light. No pressure. Just warm and steady contact, letting him know I was there without boxing him in. His skin was cool under my palm, and I felt the tension vibrating through him like a plucked wire.
“Let’s go get you fixed,” I said.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay.”
I came around to his side, opened the door, and walked him in.
The waiting room was half empty, lit by fluorescents in the same soul-crushing way every medical facility seemed contractually obligated to be.
A receptionist with tired eyes handed Spencer a clipboard.
She glanced at Gunner, then my cut, and had clearly decided she wasn’t getting involved.