Chapter thirty-eight
Clive
The hospital vending machine ate my fucking dollar. I stared at it for a long moment, jaw tight, cigarette tucked behind my ear while a bag of stale pretzels hung halfway off the metal coil like it was mocking me personally.
“Seriously?” The machine hummed back. I slammed my palm against the glass. Nothing.
“Real productive, old man.” I glanced over my shoulder to find Abby leaning against the wall with swollen eyes and crossed arms. She’d changed out of her bloodstained clothes at some point during the night, but grief still clung to her like a second skin.
“You laughin’ at me?”
“A little.”
“Your sister’s fightin’ for her life upstairs and you’re laughin’ at a vending machine.” I huffed.
“She’d laugh too.” She refuted.
That shut me up. Because she was right. Nadia would’ve made some smartass comment about me losing a fight to hospital machinery.
Christ. I rubbed a hand over my face. The exhaustion was starting to settle into my bones now.
Dawn was creeping through the hospital windows in pale grey streaks, and Stonebridge was waking up without realizing one of its queens was lying unconscious.
upstairs. The town had no idea how close it was to detonating.
“You should sleep.” Abby pushed off the wall.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Pop.”
“I said I’m fine.” Her expression hardened immediately. There it is, that infamous Spencer temper. I’d raised that look myself.
“You haven’t moved from this hallway in seven hours.” She snapped quietly.
“You smell like smoke and blood, and you look like shit.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Or what?” She challenged.
Normally I would’ve barked back. Told her not to start with me, but I was too tired. Too angry. Too fucking scared. Instead, I leaned back against the wall beside the vending machine and stared through the ICU doors.
“You know what the worst part is?” I asked eventually. Abby’s expression softened slightly.
“What?”
“I can’t even tell her this ain’t my fault.” I paused.
“Because maybe it is.” Abby frowned instantly.
“What’re you talking about?” I laughed bitterly.
“This town.” I gestured vaguely.
“The gangs. The violence. All of it.”
“You didn’t create Stonebridge.” She argued.
“No, but I sure as hell helped keep it broken.”
That shut her up, because it was true. Every gang leader in this town liked pretending they were protecting their people.
Protecting their territory. Protecting their family.
But at the end of the day? We were all feeding the same machine, producing violence and fear.
Contributing to the blood in the streets.
And now Nadia nearly died because of it.
My stomach twisted viciously. She was supposed to be untouchable.
That was the thing about Nadia Slade. You looked at her and sometimes forgot she was human.
Forgot she could bleed. Forgot she was still just a kid I found half-starved and furious all those years ago.
I still remembered the first time she ever punched somebody for the LBC.
She was fourteen, and she somehow managed to break a seventeen-year-old’s nose for calling Abby a bitch.
Didn’t even hesitate. Afterward, she sat on the curb outside Spencer’s with split knuckles and blood on her cheek while I cleaned her hands with alcohol.
She didn’t cry once. Just stared ahead and asked:
“Did I do good?” I swallowed hard at the memory.
“Pop?” Abby asked carefully. I blinked back to the present.
“What?”
“You’re spiraling.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” She stepped closer then.
“You know this wasn’t your fault, right?” I looked at her.
Really looked at her. My granddaughter. Terrified.
Trying to hold everyone together while quietly falling apart herself.
And suddenly I saw it. The exhaustion beneath her eyes.
The dried blood still under her nails. The tremble in her hands she was trying desperately to hide.
She thought she was gonna lose Nadia too.
Fuck. I pulled her into my arms before she could argue. She stiffened immediately. Not because she didn’t want comfort, but because none of us knew how to receive it properly. Spencers weren’t built soft. Still, after a second, she melted against me.
“She’s gonna wake up,” Abby promised, forcing both of us to believe it. I closed my eyes.
“I know.” But for the first time in years, I wasn’t sure if I was lying.
_____
By noon, the waiting room looked like war headquarters. LBC members lined the halls in clusters. Phantoms occupied the opposite side. Normally that would’ve ended in bloodshed before lunch. Today? Nobody even looked at each other wrong. Because Nadia mattered to both sides.
And because Riven Devereaux looked one bad sentence away from committing mass murder. He sat at the end of the hallway outside Nadia’s room with his elbows on his knees and dried blood covering
his hands. Shane stood nearby pretending not to watch him unravel in real time. The kid hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t moved. I walked over slowly.
“You need food.” He scrubbed his hands over his face.
“I’m good.”
“You ain’t.”
“Did they find anything else?” He deflected, getting straight to business. Or, more accurately, straight to vengeance. I leaned against the wall beside him.
“The SUV was torched professionally.” His jaw flexed.
“But?”
“But somebody saw it entering the mining roads an hour before the race.” His eyes finally lifted to mine. Cold and deadly.
“South side?”
“Yeah.” The hallway air shifted instantly. Riven stood slowly, like violence had become deliberate now instead of reactive.
“That’s Kingsmen territory,” I warned.
“I know.”
“And nobody thought to mention that sooner?” He sneers.
“Watch your fuckin’ tone.” I spit. His nostrils flared. For a second, I thought he might swing on me. Instead, he laughed quietly. It was a horrible sound.
“You know what’s funny?” He muttered.
“What?”
“She told me I had no idea what was actually going on here.” That made my stomach drop.
“What?” His eyes stayed fixed on Nadia’s hospital door.
“She kept actin’ weird after she came back.”
“How?”
“Leaving in the middle of the meeting, rifling through the cathedral basement.” A cold sensation crawled down my spine.
“And?”
“And I thought she was paranoid.” Regret twisted across his face so violently it almost looked painful.
“I should’ve paid more attention.”
That hit me harder than it should’ve. Because suddenly pieces started rearranging themselves in my head. The burner phone. The sabotaged brakes. Nadia digging through the cathedral archives. Her obsession with the South side lately. Jesus Christ,
“She knew somethin’.” I muttered. Riven looked at me sharply.
“Yeah.”
“And now she’s unconscious before she can tell us.” The silence afterward felt heavy. Dangerous. Then, Shane appeared at the end of the hallway.
“We have a problem.” Riven stood instantly.
“What?”
Shane looked uncomfortable.
“The Kingsmen are mobilizing.” Of course they fucking were.
“Where?” I asked.
“Near the quarry roads.” Riven started moving before either of us could stop him.
“Riven.” He ignored me. I grabbed his bicep hard enough to stop him this time.
“You rush into South Side territory right now, and Stonebridge turns into a fuckin’ battlefield.”
“Good.” There it was again, that terrifying calm. Not rage, but worse. Resolve.
“You think Nadia would want this?” I snapped.
“She almost died because of them!”
“Almost.” His eyes flashed murderously.
“That word doesn’t comfort me anymore.”
For one horrible second, I saw Cordelia.
Not physically, but in him. That same self-destructive obsession.
That same willingness to burn the world down for someone they loved.
And suddenly I understood why Nadia had been so scared all the time.
Not scared of Riven hurting her. Scared of what losing her would turn him into.
“Listen to me carefully,” I said lowly.
“You go startin’ a war before we know what’s actually happenin’, and more people die.”
“They already touched my wife.”
“And you think that makes you special?” His face darkened instantly. Oops. Wrong fucking thing to say. I softened my tone slightly.
“You ain’t the only one who loves her.” That stopped him. Just barely.
“I know what grief does to people,” I continued quietly.
“I watched it destroy this town piece by piece.” Cordelia. My son. The Scorpions. All of it.
“And right now?” I nodded toward Nadia’s room.
“She needs us thinkin’. Not reactin’.”
Riven looked away first. Good, because I wasn’t entirely sure I could stop him physically anymore. The boy had always been dangerous. Now? Now he had nothing left to lose.
_____
Later that evening, I found myself outside Nadia’s hospital room alone.
The hallway was finally quieter. Abby and Isla went home to shower.
Deck was handling security downstairs. Shane dragged Riven to the cafeteria under threat of physically knocking him unconscious.
So, for the first time all damn day, it was just me and me.
I stepped inside carefully. Machines beeped softly in the dim room. Nadia looked pale beneath the blankets. Fragile and so fuckin’ wrong. I hated it immediately.
“You always were dramatic as hell,” I muttered, only to get no response.
I pulled a chair beside the bed and sat heavily. For a long moment, I just stared at her. The bruises. The cuts. The bandages around her hands. It was bad. I rubbed my palms together slowly.
“You know, I used to think you were gonna save this place.” Stonebridge, the LBC, all of us.
“You were smarter than the rest of us.”
Meaner too. Sharper. Nadia always saw ten steps ahead.
Which meant one thing kept clawing at my brain over and over again.
She knew something before the crash. And whatever it was scared someone badly enough to try and kill her as soon as she came back to Stonebridge after two years away. My chest tightened.
“What did you find, trouble?”
Silence apart from the monitor beside her beeping steadily. She was alive. Still here. Barely. I leaned forward slowly and rested my forearms against my knees.
“When you wake up,” I said quietly.
“You better start talkin’.”
Because if somebody powerful enough to orchestrate all this was hiding inside Stonebridge? Then, the town wasn’t rotting anymore. It was infected.