21. Wolfe Moderate Sedation
twenty-one
Wolfe: Moderate Sedation
“Get the doc!” I shouted, kicking through the door.
The house felt musty, clinging to the beads of sweat and silence that perfumed the room as we clambered down the entryway.
“Move,” Nathem ground out, snapping his eyes to me for instruction, but the smells and sounds peeling off the walls caught my attention. Fear smelled different on men than it did on women. Not stronger. Not better. Just… different. And tonight, it was all around me.
“Over there,” I instructed, pointing near the kitchen, noticing the splatter of gore swiped across the toe of my Converse.
Blood was everywhere, and I couldn’t stop myself from following it in a straight, merciless line to the moment Threx pressed a goddamn barrel against my chest while Blade bled to death behind him.
What the hell had happened?
I had seen him slumping, the edges of his eyes shaking with withdrawal, but something in that fucking house had demolished what little resolve he was keeping in his rear pocket.
The question wasn’t whether he would fall.
It was how far I would let him go before I dragged Daphne back into hell to fix her monster.
Not that I was any better, just more skilled at hiding it.
It was not until Daphne moved out for midwifery school that I truly understood what it meant to miss someone.
The slow throb of a dull chasm building around the spaces that were once safe took me some time and a hell of a lot of whiskey to understand.
Because before Daphne, absence was transactional.
Meaning, you carve people into parts.
How they touched you. How they smiled. The methodical way they lined the dishes in the cupboard by pattern rather than by size. You compartmentalize them into functional memories and emotional responses, so your logic doesn’t break, even when your heart does.
But this did not happen with Daphne. I did not miss her in parts. I missed her whole.
It did not come down to the sex or the composition of her breath playing against the rain when she slept.
It was not how she would twirl her fingers into my hair or the sound of her tongue clicking against her teeth whenever she read naughty books beside the window.
I mean, those pieces were heaven, but it was not what hurt.
No.
It was the atmosphere of the house without her in it. In the way, I started bumping into shit because everything slipped one centimeter to the left the moment she walked out of the goddamn door.
Me included.
But not Threx. He did not shift. He dissolved.
“Holy fuck,” a level two breathed, rushing up to peer over Nathem’s shoulder at the injury.
“MOVE,” I snapped, blinking into the pale-yellow burn sinking behind my vision.
“I can’t believe he was hit,” the green one choked out.
What a stupid fucking thing to say, but I didn’t have it in me to fight the light in his eyes.
There is a moment for each of us when this all becomes real.
Most of the time, it arrives with your hand on the trigger and the cold knowledge that you are about to pull it.
But for others, it slips in more quietly.
Through a look from your family that loves you no matter what, but not no matter who.
Or after saying I love you to the woman waiting for you after spending half the night fucking someone else in every sinister angle you dreamed of.
Blade had been giving them shit in the kitchen this morning, and now he might die in it. Yeah, Buddy. This is what you signed up for.
“Get back,” Jessie snapped, forcing the space open with his body. “Did cleanup set out?” he questioned, already rolling Blade sunny-side up onto the plastic sheet laid out and waiting.
“Yes,” the level two replied, watching Blade’s head loll to the left.
“Where the hell is Threx?” Nathem asked, but I chose not to answer. There was only one place he could be, and I would get to him later. For now, my mind begged me to focus on one thing at a time.
“I’ve got it,” the doc barked, moving through the common room and dropping to his knees next to the bag of medical gear that clanged to the floor. “Tell me what happened,” he asked as he worked, his hands shifting up the wound before placing a pulse oximeter and a couple of leads on Blade’s chest.
The man was depraved. But in saving lives, he was reliable.
Jessie filled him in, leaving out any obligatory information that might implicate the bastard. Not that he wasn’t already.
“Here.” He shoved a pair of sterile gloves into Nathem’s and Jessie’s hands. “I need you to hold him still. I don’t have anesthesia, and this is going to hurt like hell.”
“You can’t give him anything?” Jessie bit out, grabbing the gloves and pulling them on.
“The best I can do is moderate sedation, and even that might not stick.”
Moderate sedation made it possible for a patient to be conscious during a procedure with no memory of the pain.
It was compliance without the trauma, one that let you walk away free of the breaking, kind of like what Daphne did to Threx by being near him, coaxing his physiology into a state that allowed him to survive.
But now that he was waking up, there was no way to stop the dam. To keep him from feeling everything. From processing the loss of her not just in his space, but in his goddamn body.
“Hey,” Jessie looked up at me. “It’s a bad time, but the diagnostics came back on that phone you had me look into.” He kept it ambiguous on purpose. Aside from Threx, he was the only one who knew about Lyla’s involvement in selling Daphne to Karsten.
“And?” I asked, blinking through the procedure. Nathem’s grip clenched when Dr. Jace inserted the tweezers, opening the wound to get a cleaner view.
“AAAAAAAAH!” Blade’s scream burst through the night.
“It’s okay, buddy. We got you!” his friend coaxed, holding him tighter.
“Get the fuck off me!” Blade wrenched to the side, his boot lifting in a sporadic lurch before landing square in the doctor’s face.
Crack.
“I told you to fucking hold him down,” the PhD growled through the blood coating his teeth, spitting onto the floor.
Nathem’s fangs were pretty well trained not to react to assholes, but the night must have gotten under his skin because his fist launched into the air before I could stop it.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” the doc raged, his face still twisted to the side as if it were being held there.
“We are doing our best.” Nathem leaned forward, grabbing the doctor by the collar. “Now do yours.”
“Help them,” I nodded to the recruits standing around us. “Hold Blade down and don’t let go until he has stopped bleeding.” And I did not so much as blink when one by one they fell into place like the good, loyal pieces of shit they were. “Jessie. You were saying?”
“It came back as a yes.” His eyes swept to mine, and Nathem shrugged, breathing through his exhale.
It was not an appropriate time to smile, but the edges of my mouth twitched.
Not because it was funny. Believe me, there was absolutely nothing amusing about the way my little queen turned out to be a useless bag of traitorous shit after I spent months explaining every bit of what would become her new reality if she said yes. One that nearly got Daphne killed.
No, what was comical was that I could do nothing about it.
I couldn’t make Lyla an example or call her out on her shit.
Why? Because if I brought any attention to the fact that I chose a queen who put my club at risk, forget righting wrongs.
There would be a mutiny against my leadership, and I did not feel like cleaning out half my men over that two-faced, shitty-ass human being whose tits didn’t even get me hard.
So, I had to sit pretty instead of hanging her off the side of the wall with the rest of the traitors, where she belonged.
“Hold him down!”
See, it was really that simple. You do not compromise the club. You protect it at all costs. Easy to remember. And apparently, easy to forget.
“Remove our hold on the contract and open it back up to the market,” I mumbled quietly, feeling every bit as blank as the order sounded. “After that, burn the fingerprints and take care of the phone.”
“My pleasure,” was all he said, and we left it at that.
Unfortunately, this meant I needed to shift direction, and fast.
“Christopher,” I leaned low, catching the flutter in his eyes at the sound of his name echoing between his ears.
Unless you were Daphne, we believed our previous selves were dead, but I had learned a thing or two from her over the years.
When you want the monster, you call it by its title, but when you need the human to survive, you remind them they have a name.
“I removed the bullet, and I don’t believe there will be any permanent damage, but we must keep the blood flowing and load him up on antibiotics until his body heals,” the doc explained. “And it won’t be quick.”
“Right.” I attempted to conjure empathy from one of the four corners of my being, but all I could think about was the fact that I had one man out after being gunned down by a novice crawler and the other running around fucking Seattle with a broken heart.
“Nathem, get Blade to his room.” I stood quickly, pulled off my sweatshirt, and tossed it to a recruit before extending my hand for a fresh one. “And you are to stay with Blade until he is stable. The men will provide you with breaks, but I don’t want you leaving his side.”
The doc shot me a look of twisted annoyance, but I did not give a fuck. “Do you understand?”
“Of course,” he shrugged, cracking his nose back into place.
Daphne was right; he really was a slimy piece of shit.
When the fresh clothes hit my palm, I tugged them on and turned toward the door.
“Where the hell are you going?” Nathem barked from behind me.
“To get Threx.” I shot him a look, and he nodded in agreement. “Jessie, give me two hours before you release that hold,” I said from the doorway.
“Got it,” he agreed. “And be careful. You should have Daphne on the ready for backup, just in case.”