Sixteen
“ A nd you haven’t been feeling exhausted or had any unusual bruising? Nosebleeds?” Eli Stedmeyer asked Perrie, only half-paying attention to her as he glared at me over her head.
It was easy to forget what a small world the city felt like until two parts of your life suddenly intersected in one of the most unexpected ways. I was definitely going to kill Edison for this later on.
When Perrie told me that it was time for her six month check with her doctor, I’d called Edison and asked if he wanted to go with her and he’d declined with a mysterious chuckle. At the time, I’d just figured the man was exhausted from doing all of the work that I usually helped him with.
He’d been out of the house for two weeks now, trying to fix the shit that had hit the fan the night of the wedding.
After the drunken reception shootout which had ended with one of the older branch members dying, we’d been alerted that one of our weapons shipments had been intercepted somewhere along the route and our guys on the ground had been wiped out completely.
From what he could tell thanks to the body of one of the perpetrators being left at the scene, all signs pointed to the Japanese being the ones to ambush our guys and take one of the largest shipments of weapons we’d had in a year.
But that was too easy a blame to shift and Edison was trying to do all of the groundwork before we brought it to Shuuhei Saito who’d been one of our closest allies since both of them took over around the same time two years ago.
I wished I was there with him—I didn’t like the idea of him being out there without me to have his back—but Edison insisted that I stay back with Perrie and make sure the first couple of weeks of her classes got off to a good start.
On that front, at least, I thought things had been going pretty well. She’d made friends and seemed engaged with all of her classes, not to mention the literal hours I stood around outside of the campus dark rooms while she developed the old camera film for her photography professor.
The only dark spot seemed to be the ever hovering presence of Perrie’s brother.
I wasn’t sure what was said between the two of them that day, but now when they saw each other on campus they pretended like the other didn’t exist.
It bothered Perrie, I knew it did, but it wasn’t my business to question her about it so I’d been letting her stew over it. I didn’t have any siblings and neither did Edison, so I had no idea if that was the normal way of things or if the relationship had been irreparably damaged by Perrie’s marriage to Edison.
Kind of how it seemed like my friendship with Eli was about to be permanently fucked up.
“No, everything seems normal. My stamina is returning the way you told me it would,” Perrie told the doctor, oblivious to his glares at me as he prodded at the lymph nodes on her neck.
Eli flinched at the word stamina, like he was trying to figure out if she meant stamina because somehow Perrie was now Edison’s wife or if it meant she was working out.
“She swims and does self-defense,” I couldn’t help but say, jumping into the conversation to defend Edison’s honor as much as was possible at this point.
Though, if I was being honest, he’d also done things that I knew Eli would lose his shit over.
I’d been trying my best to forget the sound of Perrie’s moans on the night of their wedding, but sometimes when I closed my eyes to get what little sleep I could, it was one of the last things I heard before dreams of her and Edison writhing together on soft white sheets filled my head.
“I see,” Eli muttered gruffly, his green eyes glaring at me so hard that I was glad that my friend was a pacifist or else I was worried he was going to throw himself across the room at me. “Well, I’m going to have the nurse come in and do the old song and dance with blood draws and we’ll get an EKG and some other scans done just to be sure, but from what I can tell everything looks good.”
Perrie seemed to be pleased with that because she turned and shot me a bright grin before she seemed to remember that it was me she was smiling at and her expression dropped.
I tried not to let it hurt my feelings. Feelings I shouldn’t be having in the first place. Leave it to fucking Edison to get into my head and then disappear into thin air to leave me in close proximity with the exact object of said head-fuckery.
“Mr. McCreary, can I speak to you outside for a moment?” Eli jerked his head towards the door and I winced, knowing this moment had been coming ever since we’d walked through the door and the nurse had handed him an updated chart with Perrie’s new married name on it.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Perrie who nodded at me absentmindedly as she watched the nurse start to take vials of blood from her arm.
Once we were in the hallway, Eli rounded on me. “What the actual fuck is going on, Rhodes? Why is one of my patients married to Edison—specifically Perrie Chandler?”
“Keane,” I corrected like an idiot, watching my friend’s face turn an even deeper shade of red.
“Don’t be coy with me, asshole,” Eli hissed loud enough for a group of passing nurses to shoot us strange looks. He lowered his voice for his next words. “Explain to me what is going on before I call omega protective services on the both of you.”
Those were fighting words and had it been anyone other than the formerly scrawny kid we’d roomed with our freshman year of college and I would have put a bullet through his brain.
“Watch it,” I warned, giving him a gentle shove away from me.
I gave Eli the Cliff’s Notes version of events, explaining how it was basically an arranged marriage on Edison’s part and that, really, the person to blame was Perrie’s asshole of a father.
“I still don’t get it. Why was it so important that Perrie specifically had to be his wife?” Eli, who’d long since let go of his initial anger, asked from where he was leaning on the wall next to me.
The nurse had taken Perrie down the hall a few minutes ago to go get her scans done, and while I knew she was safe, the itch to hurry after her and get her in my line of vision was making me twitchy as Eli continued to ask questions.
“Have I ever been able to explain Edison’s reasoning to you, El?” I asked, shooting the man a dry look.
Eli sighed, shaking his head. “No. The man’s mind is like a steel trap and always has been. But you’d think that he’d at least come to his new wife’s cancer checkup.”
“He would have but he’s away on business…” I trailed off, knowing that Eli would understand what I meant.
“So some dangerous shit that Perrie will inevitably get dragged into? That’s just great, Rhodes. She literally just recovered from leukemia and this is what she has to deal with now? It’s bullshit and you know it.”
“It was her choice—”
He cut me off. “And that’s even bigger bullshit. Her choice was basically to marry those Italian assholes or your Irish asshole. That’s not fair to her.”
It was far too late for Eli to try and make me feel guilty about this, and yet as he spoke I felt a little twinge in my chest because, standing in this familiar hallway, I finally remembered where I’d met Perrie before and why Edison had chuckled like he had on the phone.
Four years ago on the night that woman decided to try and kill Edison, I’d smuggled him here to get treated on the downlow. I didn’t have many options—If his father or any of his father’s subordinates found out that Edison had nearly been taken out by a woman in the middle of sex, they’d have lost all trust in him as a potential leader. That just left good old Eli to treat him under the table.
At the time Liam Flannagan was trying to push Edison’s younger cousin who was only nine at the time as the next head, arguing with Declan Keane that Edison’s relation to crazy Aine Keane would make him a poor leader.
But the man, while not being a very good father, was a very prideful individual and had even gone so far as to impregnate a woman whose mental health was fragile at best in order to secure his perfect heir. There was no way that some cousin would win out over that, no matter how disappointed Declan was with Edison.
Either way, that night with Edison bleeding from two bullet wounds and not wanting to call the clan’s doctors, Eli Stedmeyer had been our only choice. He’d patched the both of us up all through college, never asking too many questions, and when he graduated from Med school Edison had offered him a job.
Eli had declined because he wanted to specialize in Oncology. The man always did have a bleeding heart. It was probably why he’d never married himself—too busy with his job for any man or woman to make him turn his head.
And it was the same night that I’d brought Edison here, I now realized that it was Perrie Chandler that had been the bald, skinny girl that had been caught spying on us.
I’d realized it as soon as we walked into the room and saw Eli, that Edison must have realized it much sooner than me. The bastard.
We were going to have a serious discussion about him revealing shit like he was some kind of magician revealing a new trick.
I could already hear what he was going to say when I confronted him about this: ‘Well, it was in Perrie’s file which you refused to read, so really who is at fault here?’
“Dr. Stedmeyer?” a woman’s voice brought me out of my internal beat down of my best friend and I looked up to find a woman in an ill-fitting dress suit carrying a clipboard clutched in her hand. “I’m from billing and I was wondering if you could give me a moment to talk to your patient?”
“She’s in radiology right now, can I relay a message?”
The woman glanced over at me, probably not wanting to give away a patient’s information while a stranger was present.
Eli looked over at me before sighing. “He’s a part of her pack, so it’s okay, you can check her paperwork if you want to confirm.”
I stiffened at that, trying to keep the shock off of my face at his lie.
The woman looked at me one more time, her eyes wide as she took in my appearance before nodding. “Well, we need the patient’s updated insurance information or else we can’t process this visit and we will have to charge her as uninsured.”
“What do you mean? She’s been on the same insurance for years?” Eli, without any more preamble, yanked the clipboard out of the protesting woman’s hands. His eyes scanned the paper before his lips turned down into a scowl.
“That motherfucker!” he hissed, making the poor woman from billing flinch back as the doctor hurried to apologize, “Sorry, not you.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, wishing I could edge around Eli and try and read whatever was on the clipboard over his shoulder.
“Ethan Chandler pulled his insurance coverage for Perrie as of two weeks ago.”
Two weeks ago… also known as Perrie and Edison’s wedding day.
Just when I thought the rat who sold his daughter for political funding couldn’t sink any lower, he proved that the bar was, in fact, deep in hell.
When Perrie and Edison were negotiating she told us that the only reason she was marrying Pack Ricci was because her father threatened not to pay for her medical bills and now he’d made good on that promise despite the fact that he’d originally made the other end of that deal with Edison.
“I’ll handle her insurance information and get it all updated,” I told the woman, trying my best not to let the anger I was feeling leak into my voice as I turned to Eli again. “Take care of Perrie until I get back?”
Eli seemed to size me up, his expression still pissed, before he finally let out a long sigh as his shoulders dropped. “Yeah. Getting through all of the scans should take another hour or so.”
“Thanks and don’t mention this to her? I don’t want to stress her out.” It was all too easy to envision the little redheaded omega and how she would deflate like a balloon when she learned that her father truly was a monster. Just like I had when I’d learned that about my own father eighteen years ago.
Perrie was better suited for smiling as she fiddled with the settings of her too-complicated camera, or laughing at whatever her vapid friend Kailey had to say. Not this.
Eli eyed me with a contemplative look on his face. “Who are you and what have you done with Rhodes McCreary?”
Shrugging at him, I turned and followed the billing lady back down the hallway.
Because I wasn’t sure what I’d done with him either.