20. Gemma
Chapter twenty
Gemma
W hen I open the door to the SUV I was probably brought here in, Nikolai’s pale face greets me, with Jude on the other side of him, holding a bloody rag to his side.
“Jesus, you look like shit,” I say and climb in.
A gun is sitting on his lap, which I take and place in mine.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his breathing labored.
“Better than you, by the looks of it.” My eyes meet Jude, and his jaw tenses when he notices the bruise on my face.
“I’m sorry,” Nikolai says. “I didn’t realize our father was suspicious.”
I shake my head. “Shh. It’s not your fault. We’re going to get you to a doctor and they’ll patch you right up.” I look to Jude again, but his face doesn’t give anything away.
“He’ll be fine. He’s a tough-as-fuck Russian badass. Right, Petrov?”
Nikolai wheezes out a shallow laugh that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in me.
The door next to me is thrown open, and I don’t recognize the man. Before he can get a word out, I grab the gun in my lap and point it directly at him.
“Whoa, whoa,” Jude rushes out. “That’s Kingston. He’s part of my brother’s outfit.”
I don’t lower the gun for a few moments as Kingston holds my stare. My nerves are fucking shot. I just watched my mother die in front of me and thought I was going to be sold as a sex slave and never see anyone I cared about again. My father is still out there, and my brother is sitting next to me, bleeding all over the fucking place. I don’t know which way is up.
“Gemma, you can put the gun down. He’s one of the good guys, I promise,” Jude coaxes.
Are there good guys in this life? Is anyone actually safe?
I lower the weapon and stare at Kingston. He’s not angry that I just had a gun trained on him. It’s almost as though he could hear the thoughts that were racing through my head and was letting me work it out. Brave fucking man. Or stupid fucking idiot .
“Come over on this side,” Jude says, and Kingston gently closes the door he was holding without speaking.
“Man of few words,” I mumble, and Jude chuckles.
When he opens Jude’s door, the biker slides out and Kingston takes a look at the wound. He pours something over it and Nikolai hisses.
“Slows the bleeding,” Kingston comments, then places a bandage over the wound. “We need to go.”
He gets out of the vehicle, and through the window, I see him walk over to speak to Liam as Finn and Eoghan make their way to us.
Finn jumps in the driver's seat and grabs the keys from the visor. “Hate the Russians, but appreciate the predictability,” he says as he starts the SUV. Eoghan opens the door to the back seat, but Kingston walks up behind him and tells him he needs to sit in the front.
“Fuck that,” Eoghan mutters.
He walks around the hood to my side and opens the door. “Slide over for a second.”
I do as he asks, not that I can go far with my bleeding brother next to me. When he sits in the car, his arm goes around my waist and he hauls me onto his lap.
“There. Get in, Kingston.”
The other man doesn’t say anything as he hoists himself into his seat and Finn takes off, leaving Jude to drive the other SUV filled with the girls that were in the basement with me. We’re only in the car for a few minutes before we arrive where they parked the vehicles they took here. Nikolai is looking worse than before, and I look at Kingston, who doesn’t seem particularly bothered by his state. The bleeding seems to have stopped, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s going into shock.
The other girls pile out of one SUV and into the other with Jude again at the wheel. From wherever we’re going, Kingston assures me he’ll find places for the girls to go, either home or to a house they have set up for the girls who were working the streets before being picked up by Viktor’s men. No one looks for missing prostitutes, he said, but he assured me if they want a way off the street, Liam has places set up for them so they can get a fresh start.
“We’re a little less than an hour from the doc,” Kingston tells Finn once we have Nikolai situated in the back. Then Kingston gives my brother a shot of something, and he seems to finally rest on our way to the doc.
Forty-five minutes later, we pull up to a nondescript farmhouse off a dirt road and I’m worried we’re making another stop that we really don’t have time for. A woman who looks to be a couple years older than me, wearing a pair of dark-blue scrubs, meets us on the front porch of the two-story white home.
“Was Liam too chickenshit to face me?” she asks Kingston when he opens the door.
“He’s busy tying up some loose ends, Doc. We expect him in the next hour or so.”
Kingston steps out of the way and the doctor takes a look at my brother and shakes her head. “Jesus. Get him inside. Courtney’s in there and we have the OR prepped.” Then she catches sight of the other eight women spilling out of the SUV Jude was driving. “Who are they?”
“Hitchhikers,” Kingston says.
“Right,” the doctor replies. “Liam is damn lucky Talia’s with my mom for the night.” She looks at the girls and sighs. “Alright, ladies, come on in. Mi casa es su casa, I guess.”
Kingston meets my questioning gaze as I stare at the woman who has the bedside manner of a fucking rattlesnake.
“She’s good at what she does, and we can trust her. That’s all you need to worry about,” he says before he and Jude haul my unconscious brother from the back seat and up the porch stairs.
When we get inside the house, the doctor walks us through what looks like your typical family home with flowery wallpaper and pictures of a little girl and the doctor, smiling and happy. Huh, so the scowl isn’t permanent. Then we head to a set of stairs that leads to a basement. I stop at the top and stare down. There's a light at the bottom, and I hear two women talking with soft music playing. Even the steps are illuminated along the bottom, but I can’t move. The last basement I was in, I thought life as I knew it was over. And in a way, I suppose it is.
“Blondie?” Eoghan asks behind me.
I’m safe. With Eoghan here, nothing bad is going to happen to me. I know all this in my head, but my damn feet still won’t move.
“Do you want to wait in the living room with the other girls while I find out what’s going on with your brother?”
I stand motionless at the top of the stairs for a few more moments, staring down them to the light I see at the bottom. It’s not the same stairs or the same house, Gemma.
I shake my head and exhale a long breath. “No.”
“Okay. How about I go first?”
I offer Eoghan a weak smile and nod. When he grabs my hand and begins walking down to the basement, his grip keeps my mind rooted in the present instead of flying off to the last twelve hours. God, has it only been twelve hours since Viktor took me? The sun was just peeking over the horizon when we pulled up to the farmhouse, and the sun was setting yesterday when I left my office. One night. That’s all it took for my life to change irrevocably.
There’s a young girl at the bottom landing wearing a pair of cheery yellow scrubs that look wholly out of place after the night we just endured. She smiles at me with a clipboard in her hand.
“I’m Felicity, one of Dr. Lasher’s nurses. Do you know your brother’s blood type?”
I shake my head. Hell, I don’t know anything much about the man. “No.”
“That’s okay. We have a lot of O -neg on hand,” she says and notes something on her paper.
“I’m O -neg,” Eoghan says. “Can I donate while I’m here?”
“Sure,” Felicity says with a little bounce to her step as she walks away.
I take a moment and let my eyes wander around the basement of the house. It’s the complete opposite of the one I was in earlier. The walls are stark white with a row of uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs against one side, just like the ones you would find in a regular hospital waiting room, and a metal desk sits on the other side of the room with several large filing cabinets behind it. Next to those are giant glass cabinets with all manner of vials and medical equipment inside. Jude and Kingston walk out of the door at the opposite end of the basement, which leads to where I assume the OR is that Dr. Lasher was talking about.
“How is he?” I ask Kingston when he and Jude step over to the metal sink in the corner and begin washing the blood from their hands.
“He’ll be fine. Doc is prepping him for surgery now,” Jude answers.
“Does she have everything she needs?” I find it hard to believe in a space so small, but I suppose looks can be deceiving.
“We aren’t the only clients of the doc’s. Or the only ones who donate to her cause. Trust me, there’s nothing any other hospital would have that she doesn’t. Hell, her stuff is probably top-of-the-line and more advanced compared to anywhere else.” Kingston’s comment inspires the barest of confidence in me.
Felicity comes back through the door to the OR with empty blood bags and a couple of those blue sterile packages in her arms.
“Ready?” she asks Eoghan in an upbeat voice.
He nods and squeezes my hand before letting go to walk to the large chair like you would see in a phlebotomist lab.
“Nikolai is going to have a little Irish in him, just like his sister,” he jokes then shoots me a wink.
Jude coughs a laugh, and I send Eoghan a narrow-eyed look. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You love it, blondie.”
Felicity gets to work getting Eoghan prepped, and Kingston makes his way up the stairs.
“Want to come and see what we can do for the girls?” Jude asks as the blood begins pouring into the bag. I can’t take my eyes off it.
“No. I’m going to stay here with Eoghan,” I reply.
“We’ll be done in just a minute, then I’ll come up and see what they need. Would you mind grabbing a few sets of scrubs in case any of the girls need them right away?” Felicity asks Jude.
It strikes me as funny as he takes a couple piles from the shelves next to the stairs that Little Miss Sunshine has no qualms about bossing around bikers or mobsters, in her own sweet way, of course. Makes me wonder what kind of people come through these doors.
When Eoghan’s bag is full, she hands him a cookie and a little bottle of juice from the small fridge behind the desk. I laugh outright, watching him eat it and down the juice while she cleans up and takes the blood to the OR.
“What?” he asks with his mouth full, dusting the crumbs from his shirt.
The laughter immediately turns into sobs. God, I’m a fucking mess. My boyfriend is donating blood for the brother I still hardly know because he was shot rescuing me from our father's human trafficking operation. I’ve barely had a chance to get used to the idea of having a brother and he could very well be dying on a metal slab in an illegal OR run by a woman who I know nothing about.
“Come here.” Eoghan opens his arms and I walk over to him, positioning myself on his lap before burying my face in the crook of his neck. I hear the door close and Felicity softly tells Eoghan to meet her upstairs when we’re ready.
Once I have my emotions back under control, I raise my tearstained face to his and offer him a smile. “I’m sorry. I can’t seem to get it together.”
“You don’t have to.” His warm hands cup my cheeks as he stares into my eyes, imploring me to hear his words. “Not with me. It’s only been a couple hours, Gemma. No one expects you to be some emotionless robot. Least of all me.”
But I do. I shouldn’t be freaking the hell out like I am. The bad guys are dead, except for Viktor. Everyone I care about is safe. My mother…I don’t know how to process that one yet.
“Come on,” I say, standing from his lap. “Let’s go see what we can help with.”
Liam and Cillian arrive at the house shortly after we’ve all sat down to eat. Thankfully, Dr. Lasher had a case of burgers in her freezer. Jude manned the grill outside, and the girls sat on the doctor’s wooden deck under the breaking dawn. Some just picked at their plate and others gobbled the burgers down, even asking for seconds. I have no idea how long some of them were in the basement, and none of us have any clue what the next step is.
When Liam opened the back door and popped his head out to tell us he was here, the relief was evident on Jude’s face. Finn looked at Liam with a question in his eyes.
“Cillian’s in the living room. Everything was taken care of.”
Jude and Finn head inside, probably to get a debriefing of what went down with the buyers when they showed up, but Eoghan stays on the back patio with me.
“You can go in if you want,” I say, trying to not sound like that’s the last thing I want and probably failing miserably.
“Nah, I’m good where I am,” he replies, leaning back in the chair next to me.
We stare at the light-blue sky together in silence for a few minutes, and the memories of yesterday before being taken swirl through my mind. The East Coast is all I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine being away from Eoghan, but yesterday, my life took a turn I didn’t see coming. The danger we’re all living in has never been more apparent than it is now, sitting here with eight other women who were kidnapped from wherever they were. Liam and Cillian just got back from killing a group of people who buy women, for God's sake. My brother is still in surgery from a gunshot wound he got while rescuing me from our deranged father, who killed my mother in front of me. How is this my life? Do I even want this to be my life?
“Yesterday before I…was taken…Natalie came to see me in my office.”
Eoghan’s hand is still holding mine. Still keeping me tethered as his thumb gently runs back and forth across my hand as I stare at the sky.
“She had an offer for me, a really fucking good one.” My gaze turns to Eoghan. “Her and Jean want to promote me to VP of marketing.”
“That’s amazing, blondie. Fuck, you deserve that,” Eoghan says, leaning over and giving me a kiss. “I’m so damn proud of you.”
“Thank you. There’s a catch, though.” I inhale a shaky breath before I continue. “It’s in California. Not exactly sure where. Natalie and Jean are going out next week to look at properties. He wants something by the beach.”
My eyes stay locked with Eoghan’s while he processes what I just told him. He isn’t angry or sad. He still has a smile on his face, but I can tell it’s somewhat forced. It breaks my heart that I’m even considering moving across the country, but after everything that happened in the last several hours, not to mention the fact that this is a huge opportunity that I worked tirelessly for, I can’t not consider it.
The back door opens again before Eoghan has a chance to respond.
“Doc’s out here with an update,” Finn says, looking between me and his brother.
I get up first, and Eoghan follows me into the house. The doctor is waiting for us in the living room, where she seems to be having some sort of silent standoff with Liam. She looks pissed as hell, and he’s smiling like the cat that ate the canary.
Liam turns his attention to us. “Oh good—just in time for the beautiful and ever-talented Dr. Lasher to give us an update on your brother.”
“Don’t think flattery is going to get you out of the enormous bill I plan on sending you, Liam.”
“I’ll gladly pay it, Doc. As I have many times before. I’ll even throw in a bottle of your favorite wine. Do you still like that little winery in Italy?”
Her face turns beet red. “Do. Not. Bring up. Italy,” she grits out.
I'm seriously concerned for Liam’s safety while she stares at him with a violent promise behind her green eyes. He should probably watch what he says, considering she seems to be handy with a scalpel.
Dr. Lasher turns to me then, her face wiped of any emotion whatsoever. “Nikolai had a bullet in his spleen. I removed it and he’ll be fine. I’ll allow him to stay here for a day or two to make sure infection doesn’t set in and keep him on IV antibiotics and pain medication, but after that, he needs to find a place to recover, preferably with someone who can help take care of him for the next week or two.”
“He’ll be staying with me,” I say and she nods.
When she leaves, I fall into Eoghan before he wraps his arms around me.
“Everything will be fine, blondie. We’ll get it all sorted.”
I don’t think he’s only talking about my brother.