46. Angel
FORTY-SIX
ANGEL
The ride back to the Guild was the longest of my fucking life.
All I could think of was what if we don’t get there in time, and that was helping literally zero of us?—
The steps up the fucking stairwell in the parking garage felt like they took three times as long to climb to the main floor. Thankfully, Jackal met us in the foyer, no trace of his usual smugness in those dull eyes, wringing his hands as the other two members of his crew shored up Harper on either side.
She was so pale she nearly blended into the pale white leather couch.
And she was covered in blood.
So much blood.
"Harpie girl," Nash whispered beside me, crumpling to his knees at her feet as Dingo shifted to offer his spot up for someone else. "Look what they did to you."
Her eyelids fluttered open for a second, and a ghost of a smile flickered on her lips as she fought to stay conscious. "Nash," she rasped, a hand lifting from the pool of blood her abdomen had become, reaching for him as he drifted in a sea of tumultuous feelings and emotions he wasn’t used to having.
"Right here, Harpie girl." He leaned his head into her touch, and like a fucking dog, he sat at her knee and let her pet his hair, staring up at her in adoration as she closed her eyes again and took a ragged breath.
His eyes turned cold and rounded on Rowan, who stood there in shock, as if he couldn’t remember that he was a trained EMT.
"Help her," Nash pleaded. "Please, Ro, help her."
The man was broken, on his knees, begging our younger brother for help.
Under any other circumstance, I’d laugh. I’d rub it in his face, never let him live it down. But just like him, I was torn, an emotional dumpster fire as the girl I swore not to love, not to let in, sat there on the couch, bleeding out from between her slack fingers.
"Someone call Lilly," Jackal ordered, and his other man pulled out a phone and dialed a number quickly?—
She picked up on the first ring.
"This better be good, you buffoon, or I’m going to kick your ass."
"We need the Surgeon, and we need him like an hour ago. We’re in the commons."
Lilly didn’t ask any questions. The line went dead, and if I knew her at all, she’d be on the phone with the resident whack job who’d gone to medical school.
The Surgeon was a sort of on-call, on-hand doctor who’d gone through medical school and been a combat medic once upon a time.
Until he got caught carving up cadavers and killing assholes who ended up on his table and didn’t deserve to live.
The board took his license for killing those fucks.
Lilly gave him a job.
Rowan had both hands on Harper’s torso, trying desperately to keep what was left of her blood inside her as two sets of feet thundered down a nearby hallway. "Come on, dammit, Harper, just hang in there." Dingo and Coyote watched as he tried not to break in front of the crowd, but it was like fighting a losing battle. Tears choked his words, fell freely down his face, and dropped on her bare knee as he and Nash crumbled to pieces in front of her.
A part of me was glad she wasn’t awake to witness it.
A part of me still wished she’d died that night seven years ago.
Not because it would have changed our whole lives. But because I couldn’t stand to see her hurt like this. Facing death at her door, nothing in her hands but a wrench and an attitude, like some sort of avenging angel. She wouldn’t have been forced to run for her life tonight, chased by two complete psychos as they shot at her.
Bullet holes in her fucking guts, bleeding to death on the fucking leather couch in the Guild, of all places.
Nash stood suddenly as the Surgeon stepped up, bag in hand, and put a firm grip on my brother’s shoulder. "Okay, man, it’s time to get out of the way so I can help this young lady."
"If you don’t save her, it’ll be your head, Surg," he muttered, shaking off the older man’s reassuring pats like a recalcitrant child.
Lilly met Rowan’s gaze as he moved out of the way and let the man get to work, the two of them having an in-depth conversation without any spoken words.
"Angel," he began, but I shook my head. I couldn’t look away from her as the Surgeon worked on her life-threatening wounds. He sliced her top in two from the bottom, baring her blood-soaked skin to the room.
Dingo and Coyote had the decency to look away. Nash looked like he was one step away from snapping on a level none of us had ever seen before. Rowan looked like he might be sick.
Lilly looked at me. "Can you help him move her to the kitchen so he can work?"
I gave her a nod and put my hands around Harper’s shoulders, watching Surgeon put his hands under her knees, and we shifted her weight.
The scream she let out was inhuman.
"Fuck, man, fuck, fuck stop it, you’re hurting her ? —"
"Nash, man, chill the fuck out," Rowan yelled, gripping him by the collar of his shirt so he wouldn’t interfere. "She’s gotta move so he can get the bullets out."
"She’s in pain, Ro," he whined, nothing like the man he usually was. This was a broken Nash, thrown back to the years his younger brother took his beatings and all he could do was hide behind the door and whine as each lash of Father’s belt peeled a layer of flesh from someone else’s back on his behalf.
"I know, man, I know," Rowan muttered, wrapping his massive wingspan around Nash’s shoulders to hold him in place and keep him from falling apart.
Something in Nash snapped as he followed us into the kitchen, as he watched Harper wince as her body hit the cold steel countertop. The moment when Surgeon pulled a pair of hemostats and a scalpel from his bag, I thought he might hit the man.
Lilly saw it, too. Her glare of disapproval pegged Rowan on the spot. "Get him out of here so the man can do his work."
"I’ll kill them," Nash muttered under his breath, his eyes never leaving the Surgeon’s skilled hands as he pressed the scalpel to the edge of Harper’s gunshot wound and widened it, prodding her as she screamed, looking for the bullet. "I’ll fucking kill those two twatbags who thought they could hurt our girl and get away with it." He broke free of Rowan’s grip and whirled on the spot, marching from the room as he muttered about the creative ways he’d cut Clyde up and feed him to Bonnie, one body part at a time.
"Go with him and make sure he doesn’t burn down half the city looking for them," Lilly ordered Rowan, and just like that, the three of us were alone in the kitchen, and Lilly was rolling up her sleeves, moving to Harper’s head as she put her hands on the other woman’s shoulders and held her in place for the next part.
Her eyes met mine overtop the girl who’d successfully twisted up my insides and morphed me from who I thought I was to someone I could barely recognize.
"Hold her down while the Surgeon goes fishing. This part sucks."
Sure enough, Harper seemed to come alive with a vengeance as the Surgeon stuck his hemostats in the open wound and gripped the bullet, yanking it from where it’d buried itself in her muscle and tissue.
The clang of metal on metal as he dropped the bullet in the sink would stay with me for a long time.
"One down, one to go." Surgeon rolled her up off her back slightly, whistling low as he nodded to himself. "Maybe not. Looks like this one went clean through."
"Internal damage?" Lilly asked, her hands tightening on Harper’s shoulders.
Surgeon shook his head. "She was lucky. I have to stitch her up, but that’s the extent of it. They got her in the fleshy bits. She could do with a transfusion, though. Maybe a bag of blood?—"
"She’s O neg," I muttered almost absently, the memory like a fleeting figment of my imagination.
"I’ll make some calls," Lilly muttered, marching off to her office, leaving me alone with the Surgeon.
Who immediately turned to me and smiled in that friendly, sympathetic way guys do when they see a part of themselves in someone younger.
"You’ve got a hell of a woman here, Pretty Boy," he remarked, wiping the blood from Harper’s wounds on his shirt. "I don’t know how she managed to hold onto the back of a bike in her condition, but she’s lucky Jackal found her when he did. A second more, and she might’ve bled out."
"Can I take her upstairs?" I asked quietly, my fingers itching to touch her again.
All that time spent denying myself, fighting the instinct inside me that ached, begged, pleaded, screamed at me to set it free, the same one that I’d buried so deep I thought I’d never have to see it again, wasted in a heartbeat.
The Surgeon nodded, his smile softening. "She’s gotta get stitched up, but after that, I’ll help you make her comfortable, and then it’s a waiting game. I can hook up a bag of blood wherever you want. I daresay Rowan can take it out when he gets back, but I can show you as well, how to remove the IV?—"
"Wouldn’t be my first rodeo," I mumbled, fingers twitching at my sides. "Probably not my last, either."
"Suit yourself," he snapped, his dismissive attitude grating on my nerves. "Can you stitch her up, too, or should I stick around and handle that part?"
"Sorry."
"I know you are. Just try not to forget that others are human, too. You can care for her and still be a decent human being, Angel."
I glanced up in shock. "I didn’t know anyone even knew my name here."
His shrug was dismissive. "I know a lot more than anyone knows about. Just don’t spread that knowledge around."
An hour later, Harper was in my bed, not a trace of blood left on her, several new bandages covering the stitches Surgeon had laced her up with. Her black hair splayed out on the pillows like a fan, a halo, framing her face as the bag of blood Detective Keehn brought over slowly dripped into her veins.
She’d be okay in a few days. The stitches could come out in a week or two, provided she stayed put and healed.
All of this was a relief to me, and yet . . .
A gnawing worry still tore at my insides.
I couldn’t leave her, no matter how badly I wanted to.
I wanted to run from these feelings, wanted to separate myself from her, wanted to forget the way I felt when I saw her covered in blood, when I saw the red on the pavement and knew it was hers. I wanted to cease feeling like my heart might burst if she opened her eyes and smiled at me .
I didn’t want to love Harper Daniels. But life rarely gave me what I wanted.
I could have had the Surgeon and Lilly dress her in one of Rowan’s oversized shirts, or maybe even one of Nash’s. Instead, I’d pulled a pajama set of my own out of the closet and offered it up, the buttons in the front making it easier to slip it over her unconscious body.
Seeing her lying there in my bed, her head on my pillow, tucked in between my sheets, stirred possessive feelings in me, primal feelings in me, that no other woman before her ever had. I wanted to touch her, hold her, inhale the scent of her shampoo as she slept soundly in my bed. I needed to put my hands on her in some manner, to reassure myself she was okay. That she was real. That this wasn’t some sort of sick, delusional nightmare that I was living in my head.
Instead, I forced myself to pick up a phone and dial my brother.
Rowan picked up on the third ring.
"She gonna be okay?" he asked hesitantly, like he was afraid of what the answer might be.
I nodded before I realized he couldn’t see me. "Yeah, she’ll make it. She’s upstairs now. The Surgeon hooked her up to a bag of blood?—"
"Did you tell him she’s an O neg?"
"Of course. Who the fuck do you think I am? Nash?"
Speaking of our eldest brother . . .
I could hear soft moaning and agonized, muffled crying amidst pleas for mercy and the soft whoof of someone being punched in the gut, expelling their air in a rush.
"I take it you two caught up with Bonnie and Clyde?"
Rowan’s dark chuckle sent a shiver down my spine. "Let’s just say these two regret ever laying eyes on our girl right now."
Our girl.
The sound of that pleased me more than I wanted it to .
"They’ll have to come back alive so they can answer to Lilly," I pointed out, and I could feel the frustration in Rowan’s sigh.
"Nash isn’t going to be happy about that."
"Yeah, so I figured." My eyes trailed over Harper’s weak figure, so pale, so bruised, scuffed up hands and knees where she’d fallen to the concrete in a fight for her life. "Those are the rules, straight from the boss lady herself."
"I’ll see what I can do. No promises."
I shrugged, forgetting he couldn’t see me again as I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. "Not my problem. I’m just the messenger."
"We shouldn’t be long," he muttered, clearly distracted by whatever was going on wherever he was. "I hope."
"I’ll stay with her," I offered, knowing what he was about to ask. "You do what needs to be done."
"I’ll let you know when we’re on our way back."
When he hung up, the room was silent once more, and I found myself giving in to my more base urges, breaking all my own rules for a fucking taste of what the others had.
My body curled protectively around hers, and I carefully, slowly wrapped my arms around her, relishing the sound of her heart slowly beating in the hollow of her chest as I lay my head atop it. My own matched its pace, the two of us alive in unison, two hearts acting as one as I let myself drift to sleep with the knowledge that she would be okay.
I might’ve wanted nothing more than to get rid of her, but now that I knew what it was to almost lose her, I could never see myself letting go again.
Harper was ours. She was mine. And when she woke up, I’d let her know.
I’d apologize for all the wrongs I’d done to her in my life as long as she forgave me.
She did this to me. Made me weak. Made me less than a man.
But was I really weak for admitting a part of her was inevitably wound tight into the very fabric of my being? Was it weak to love someone so much it ached to be apart? Was it a weakness to give yourself wholeheartedly to the protection and well-being of another person?
If so, maybe I wanted to be weak.
Because a life without Harper in it was pointless now.
I was too blind to see it before, but now, there was no turning back.
Weeks wasted tracking and tailing her while she worked, watching her coworkers, running background checks on anyone associated with her. Money down the drain thanks to Rowan having her tailed. And who knew what Nash had truly been up to every night while I slept?
We all needed her to be whole, as much as none of us wanted to admit it. She turned us into different versions of ourselves, but perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Maybe retaining a portion of our humanity was better in the long run.
She softened into my side and her hand found mine as a slow smile curled her lips. I wanted to know what she dreamed of. Was it something good? Was it something that hadn’t happened? Was it a memory, or a prediction of the future? A fantasy she might never voice out loud?
"Sleep well, bitch," I muttered, realizing what it truly was to hate someone and love them at the same time. "I’ll be right here."
And for the first time in a long time, I fucking meant it.