Chapter 30
thirty
Tape, tubing, pulse ox—gone.
Pain detonates across my chest, bright and mean, but I’m already swinging my legs over the side.
“Sir, absolutely not.” A nurse appears out of nowhere, small and pissed off, hands up like she can body-check a bull. “You will lie back down right now.”
“Where is she?” My voice sounds like gravel. “Melinda.”
“She’s stable and in recovery.” She plants a palm to my sternum. I grunt; she doesn’t flinch. “You move again and you’re bleeding internally for an audience.”
“Then bring her here.”
“That is not—”
“Bring. Her. Here.” I tip my head to meet her eyes. “Or you’ll be bleeding externally for an audience.”
“He’s up,” Adrian says dryly from the hall. Footsteps. Caleb first, laptop tucked under his arm. Atlas behind him with a duffel. Last is Adrian, guided by two fingertips of Caleb’s free hand. He stops just inside the doorway, reads the room by breath and heartbeat like he always does.
“He won’t hurt you,” Adrian says to the nurse. He finds the chair between our beds like he put it there himself. Dark glasses. Jaw tight. He angles toward the sounds of the monitors.
“Back down,” the nurse mutters, trying to steer me. I don’t budge.
Atlas lifts his free hand. “Okay, big guy. Before you pop stitches you don’t even know about, she’s fine. Lay your ass down.”
“Where?”
“Next door,” Caleb says. “They tucked you in your own room because you kept trying to kill the telemetry in ICU. You’re welcome.”
“What the fuck is telemetry?” I ask before I realize I don’t give a fuck. “Bring her.” The words grind out of me. The only thing I do care about. “Or I go to her.”
The nurse looks between the three of them like she’d love to sedate all of us. “He’s a liability.”
Adrian tilts his chin toward my bed. “We move her.”
“You can’t just—”
“We move her,” he repeats, voice flat enough to frost glass. “Or he will. I prefer the version with fewer lawsuits.”
The nurse blows out a breath that sounds like surrender and homicide mixed together. “Ten minutes.”
They leave me with a blood pressure cuff strangling my arm. I stare at the doorway until the universe gets the message.
Wheels squeak a few minutes later. The door bangs. Her bed rolls in. Everything in me that’s been holding the world up lets go.
She’s pale, eyes clear. IV in her arm. Big pressure dressing over her shoulder where Sava packed the hole. Hair braided back, messy and perfect. Alive.
“Cassius,” she says, soft as breath. “You look terrible.”
“Flirt,” I rasp. She reaches across the gap and I catch her fingers. The monitor on my side slows.
“Both of you, do not sit up,” the nurse warns, snapping brake pedals down and sliding Lindy’s bed so close our knuckles bump. “I will restrain you.”
“Romantic,” Atlas says, trying for light. He sets the contraband coffee on my nightstand out of reach. “You get to look at each other. That’s it.”
“How long?” I ask, eyes on Lindy.
“Night and a day,” she answers. “You coded. I didn’t, so I win.”
I huff something that wants to be a laugh and almost black out for the effort. She squeezes my hand.
Caleb turns his face toward the blended sound of our breathing. “Girls are safe.”
The room stills.
“How many?” I ask.
“Seven at the site,” Caleb says, voice clipped. “Two more in transit. Dominic grabbed the driver. They’re all at the clubhouse.”
“Any losses?”
Atlas shakes his head. “None of ours. Havoc’s knuckles look like ground beef, but he’s thrilled. Marianna asked Emmy to see if she can ID any of them. I’m not sure she should try.”
“And the center?” I spit the word like a pit.
“Ghosted,” Adrian says. “She has half a dozen aliases but was born with the name Lavinia.”
Caleb opens his laptop. An artery map glows with lines, nodes, red dots pulsing like a heartbeat. “A living graph of Spider,” he says.
“We have to start collecting every debt we were ever owed because it’s going to take them all,” Adrian says.
“Is there a head above her?” I ask.
“It doesn’t seem like it,” Adrian says. “Either way, we break the fucking hourglass.”
I close my eyes for a second. Blood and tile and a blade and the moment I looked away and Lindy saw me the way dead men do. Her thumb strokes across my knuckles.
“We finish this,” I say, wanting nothing more than to pull my wife on top of my aching body.
She holds my gaze, unflinching. “Yes,” she says. “But you don’t do it without me”
Everything in me screams no. I swallow it. “You’ll know everything.”
Atlas clears his throat too loud. “Okay, barf.” He lifts a bag. “I brought donuts.”
The nurse shoots him a death glare. “I brought orders.”
“My thing is better,” he says. He does not open the bag. “Glazed makes everything better. Doctor Elsie will cut you off after half, but I’ll stage a diversion.”
“Don’t stage anything,” Elsie says from the doorway. She steps in, checks Lindy’s IV, my dressings, the machines. “You get five minutes before I kick everyone out, including all the people in the waiting room.”
Adrian tilts his head toward the hall. “Door’s covered.” He doesn’t say by who. “Vex has eyes on the street. Mavik is already scrubbing the cameras you shouldn’t have been on. Rest. When you’re discharged, we sit down and pull the thread clean.”
A draft slips in as the nurse moves; something warm, clove and steel, rides it. Adrian goes still, a faint crease between his brows. “Familiar,” he murmurs, almost to himself. Then he lets it go. Footsteps pause outside the threshold and don’t cross it.
“Copy,” I say.
Caleb squeezes my ankle. Adrian taps the bedrail, a little too hard, because feelings make him itchy.
Atlas, in true little brother fashion, makes a huge show of kissing my fucking forehead on his way out the door.
The room exhales. Vegas hums outside the window, but inside it’s just beeps and antiseptic and the quiet of still breathing.
Lindy studies me. “You tried to escape?”
“I had to see you for myself.”
She smiles. “You’re impossible.”
“When it comes to you, yes.”
“Did you really threaten to kill the nurse?”
“I will not apologize for that.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she says and leans over, wincing from the pain, to kiss my shoulder. My cheek isn’t within reach. “I’m okay.”
“Say it again.”
“I’m okay.”
I close my eyes and let that be true for the space of a breath. The monitor settles. The pain is still there, but the panic loosens its teeth.
“I can’t believe I liked that woman,” she says after a bit.
“I never suspected her. She’s too good to be new. The way she shot without an ounce of hesitation. The way she talked about kids like inventory.”
“It’s like you said before,” she says. “The legs keep regrowing, she replaces them, but if we take off the head together…”
“Together,” I echo, because it’s apparently the way I’m built now. I can’t imagine taking her on another job and I can’t imagine letting her out of my sight. Impossible math. I hate math.
She reaches for the phone on her tray, unlocks it, and turns the screen so the glow paints her face.
“I came to Vegas for two reasons,” she says.
“One I’m sure you found in your snooping.
My boss wouldn’t stop harassing me. But the other reason, Mila, she stopped everything.
I made a list to prove I could be okay alone. ”
The photo on the screen is her list pressed between the pages of my favorite book.
stand in a closed room with a man at work and keep my breath steady
edit a book that makes me believe in love and magic
make one real friend and don’t spend the whole time waiting for them to leave
spend one whole day alone on purpose and have fun
unpack every box and hang art without measuring
drive the Strip by myself and not shake
learn my way around the city by heart without maps
say no once and don’t apologize after
“I crossed some of them off,” she says. “Some I… didn’t.”
I read each line. “We’ll spend our whole lives writing and re-writing bucket lists, Lindy, darling,” I tell her. “I promise you.”
“I’ve lived more with you than I ever would’ve with that list,” she whispers. “It’s scary at times but not in the way you think. Mila was my best friend in the entire world and one day she looked through me and decided we were strangers.”
“You want to fix it?”
“No. I begged her to the point of being pathetic to explain and she refused. You showed me that I shouldn’t have to beg to be wanted.
I may never know why she cut me off the way she did, but I’m done letting the unknown decide how I live.
I choose the ones who stay. I choose the Accord. I choose you.”
“Just like that?”
“I bled for it. Gives a woman perspective.” She laughs and then winces at the pain. “I love you Cassius. Everything else is,” she shrugs her shoulders. “Just everything else.”
Later that evening, a different nurse returns to bully me, clean and re-tape my wounds. I let her, but only because I know Lindy will be next.
“Separate rooms,” the nurse announces.
“No,” I say.
“It’s policy.”
“New policy,” I say, nodding at Lindy’s bed. “She stays and I don’t kill anyone.” They cave. They always cave when the alternative is me.
Recovery is nasty. It takes days to breathe around the chest wound without sounding like a punctured tire.
Watching Lindy try to sit up with a belly full of stitches and the bruises from those bastards’ boots is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever witnessed.
If I could take her pain, I would. I’d take all of it.
Our meds come together. I make sure she swallows hers. I take the antibiotics; I refuse the pain meds. I want to be conscious for her nightmares.
The Accord filters through in quiet waves.
Dead Man’s Hand comes in full leather cuts and silver jewelry, and I can hear their fucking bikes roaring in and out of the parking lot all the way from my room.
Marco smirks and sets a paper bag on my tray.
Espresso and cannoli, because he’s a sentimental bastard.
Sava never crosses the threshold when Adrian’s around.
Uncle Leven arrives a few days later. He fills the doorway without moving, grief and iron stitched into the same suit.
He doesn’t touch me. He never does but he stands close enough that I can smell winter on his coat.
He surprises me when he kisses the top of Lindy’s head and says, “I’m happy you’re okay, Melinda. ”
Eland follows with his fancy-ass leather folio and a look that says he’s already fixed three problems I haven’t thought of yet. “Hospital admin’s paperwork now reflects a carjacking gone wrong.” He glances at Lindy. “If anyone asks you about what happened, direct them to me.”
“What do I say?” she asks.
“You tell them you don’t talk without your lawyer and give them my card. I’ll leave some with you,” Eland takes one of the seats by the window. Uncle Leven is still standing.
Evie slips in like a shadow. She sets down a small velvet pouch on my tray—two keycards, a burner, and a hotel master override. “Your discharge gifts,” she says, grin sharp. Then to Lindy, conspiratorial, “If you ever want to disappear for an afternoon, I am an excellent bad influence.”
Elsie comes in last, snapping on gloves before the door shuts.
She doesn’t bother with hello, just checks Lindy’s dressings with a surgeon’s hands, then angles toward me.
“You tore two steri-strips,” she says, and I swear I hear Adrian smirk from the wall.
She re-tapes me. “Quit fucking moving so much or I swear to you Cassius I will separate you two.”
“I will move more if you take her, not less.”
“God damn it. If you cough blood, don’t tough it out, call me.” Elsie grabs Lindy’s hand and squeezes it lightly. “Make him call me.”
“I will,” Lindy says. “I’ll call myself. I promise.”
At night, when the halls mute and the beeps slow, Lindy and I watch the city lights through the blinds and trade truths. She traces the edges of the bandage covering her shoulder and tells me what she remembers in pieces.
“I wasn’t hallucinating in that room,” she says.
“I don’t care what they are,” I say. “Bargain with anything that keeps you breathing.”
“Gideon’s the only one here now,” she says.
I look at the door, if I don’t blink maybe I’ll see him too.
“He always wears a black Bolo-Hat, an old suit, desert dust at the cuffs, and a turquoise oval wedding band that’s cracked through the middle like lightning.
And he says this thing sometimes that makes me think of you. ”
“What is it?”
“Pay the house first.”
Everything in me goes still. “Say that again,” I tell her.
She looks at me, unsure. “Pay the house first.”
My voice comes out rough. “Holy shit. You are seeing the old man. My mother kept a sepia photo of him in the hallway. Black Bolo-Hat, that same stone, crack and all. He built our empire on that saying. You don’t touch women, you don’t touch kids, and you pay the house first.” I drag a breath, something like awe and fury braided together.
“You’ve been seeing my great-great-grandfather. ”
Her fingers find mine under the blanket that stretches across both our beds. “Explains a lot.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why he’s the only one who doesn’t hate you,” she laughs.
“Fucking unbelievable,” I say. “If he’s with you, we follow his rules.”
“He’s never steered me wrong,” she whispers once, half-asleep.
“What’s he tell you anyway?”
She goes quiet. I know that look. Her mind’s circling something dangerous.
“Say it,” I tell her. “Whatever it is. I’ll never walk out on you again.”
“If Gideon says London’s alive,” Lindy whispers, “then we have to keep hunting. We never give up—not until I see her spirit too.”
For a beat, the world holds its breath.
“We?” I thread her fingers through mine, grounding both of us. Her shoulders ease, the first crack of peace I’ve seen on her face since Vegas bled red.
“Keep standing there, Gideon,” I tell the man I can’t see. “Keep her breathing. I’ll do the rest.”