Chapter Twenty-Five
Gracie
I knew that when gunshots were ringing out, what you were meant to do was stay low, make yourself small, become less of a target.
But someone I loved was out there.
So I shot to my feet at the first shot.
I was standing there to watch the second bullet rip into Perish’s body, making him jerk, stumble.
But he recovered even as blood bloomed through his shirt. Then charged forward again toward his old protégé.
The third bullet had him dropping to his knees.
And Cameron?
Cameron closed in, aimed higher.
“No!” I shrieked, throwing myself over the counter and tackling him to the ground.
I heard the gun fall and slide, hopefully out of reach.
That was fine.
I didn’t need a gun.
My aunts had busted their asses to teach me that my own body was a weapon.
I found that when I was fueled with terror—not for myself, but for someone I loved—I was ready to be a lethal one.
I scrambled on top of Cameron in a mounting position, all my weight pressed to his chest, my legs pinning his arms to his sides.
Normally, this was when my aunts would tell me to go for soft targets: eyes, nose, ears. Or, if I had the strength advantage, to close my hands around his throat and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
But I was seeing red.
Red blood.
Soaking through Perish’s shirt.
Draining out of his body.
I didn’t go for soft targets.
I went for the hardest one around.
I grabbed the sides of Cameron’s head, yanked up, then slammed down.
Down.
Down.
The sick crack of his skull against the cement was drowned out only by a deep, feral scream.
I didn’t know where it was coming from.
Not until hands seized me, yanking me backward.
“We got it, baby, we got it,” my father told me as the sound died. The ache in my throat said it had been coming from me all along.
I saw movement as men swarmed in beside us as my father kept pulling me back.
“No!” I shrieked, yanking against his hold. “No! Let me go! Let me the fuck go!”
It was probably the uncharacteristic curse that had my father releasing me.
I flew forward toward Perish’s body, all the first aid training classes coming back to me without thought. I shoved my hands hard against the areas where the blood was most accumulated.
Perish hissed, but that was good. It meant he was conscious. It meant we could save him.
“I’m okay,” he assured me. But, God, I’d never heard his voice so weak.
“You’re shot,” I said, sniffling hard. It was only that sound that made me realize I was crying. Tears flooded down my cheeks, slid off my chin.
“Not my first time.”
“You can’t die,” I whispered, leaning down so no one else could hear me. “I need you not to die. I need… I need you.”
“No!” I yelled when hands grabbed me again.
“We need to get him to a hospital,” Fallon’s voice said.
“It’s okay,” Perish assured me, but his voice was getting even weaker. “Go with your dad.”
The choice was taken away from me then.
My father wrapped his arms around my middle and pulled me away as I kicked and writhed.
I watched helplessly as Fallon, Voss, Uncle Reign, and Uncle Malcom grabbed Perish and carried him quickly out of the building.
“Dad?” I cried, all the strength suddenly leaving me, all the fight falling away. My body went slack, and my father nearly dropped me. “Daddy?” I whimpered.
He scooped me up like he used to when I was a little girl, holding me to his chest.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay.”
But I saw Perish as he was pushed into the back of the SUV.
His body was slack.
His eyes were closed.
It wasn’t going to be okay.
I turned my face into my father’s chest and cried.
He never let me go. Not as he slid us into the backseat of someone’s car. Not as the car started moving. Going where, I had no idea.
It wasn’t until I was pulled back out of the car and heard the buzzer attached to the gate that I knew where I was.
Hailstorm.
“Oh, baby,” my mom’s voice said, her hand smoothing down my hair as my father carried me down the long corridors toward the inner depths of the building. Then, to my father, “Where is all the blood coming from?”
She was trying so hard not to sound panicked, but there was an electric tension in her voice.
“It’s not hers,” he said, hugging me a little tighter. “It’s Perish’s.”
The pained animal sound that escaped me had my mom’s hand going to my arm, rubbing up and down.
“Right over here,” a voice said as the scent of disinfectant and antiseptic met my nose, making it wrinkle even as I sniffled hard.
“I’m fine,” I insisted as I was lowered onto an exam table. “I need—”
“You need to get looked at,” my father said, his hands pushing me flat.
I knew far too well that there was no reasoning with a parent who was afraid for their child.
So I went limp against the stiff mattress, staring blankly up at the stark white ceiling and the fluorescent lights that made the migraine slice into my eyes.
“Oh,” my mom whimpered as she got a look at my face for the first time.
My gut instinct was to assure her I was fine, to brush it off.
But this once, I said nothing.
It would have been a lie.
Physically, I was okay.
Emotionally? Not so much.
My mind kept flashing back to Perish as he took those bullets, as he tried to reassure me that he was okay, then as he was loaded into the SUV unconscious.
A pained sound escaped me, making both my parents reach out to me.
But I couldn’t accept their comfort. Not when they had no idea why I needed it.
So I did the only thing I could do to get through the washing, cleaning, and dressing.
I disassociated. I slipped so deep inside myself that I wasn’t sure I would be able to surface again.
There was a prick in my vein.
Then I was drifting out of consciousness.
—
It was someone clearing their voice at my bedside that had me snapping awake, staring at the strange ceiling for a long moment before I remembered where I was.
Hailstorm.
The rest came rushing back so fast I felt dizzy.
Stranger still, it was Rune, of all people, standing over me.
“Rune?” I asked, my voice raspy from the choking.
“Your parents went to get something to eat,” he told me.
“Okay. But… but why are you here?”
To that, Rune shot me a small smirk. “I’ll try not to take offense to that.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
Sure, we’d grown up together just like all the other cousins. But when he and his brother took off at eighteen, the bond we’d known as kids slowly but surely disappeared. It felt a lot like meeting new people when they finally made their way back to Navesink Bank.
“What?” I asked when he stared at me for a long moment, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“No one said you were this fucked up,” he told me.
“Gee, thanks.”
I hadn’t gotten a look at myself, but if the way I was feeling was anything to go by, then, yeah, I bet I looked like crap.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he went to the foot of my bed, snatched up my file, and started to flip through it.
“Checking to see if there’s anything I gotta worry about.”
“Worry about how?”
“I’m gonna smuggle you out of here,” he said, making my brows pinch.
“What?”
“Got the club SUV. If we’re careful, we can get out before someone stops us.”
“Why would you sneak me out?”
“To go see Perish.”
I shot upward.
The world spun.
But I twisted to swing my legs off the side of the bed.
I was dressed in a hospital gown but had no memory of being changed. Maybe my mom did it after the meds knocked me out.
“Whoa. Slow down.”
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
“He’s just getting out of surgery,” Rune said, holding a hand up to me. “He’s gonna be in recovery for a bit. We have time.”
“Did it go okay? Is he alright?”
“We’re not getting a lot of information. No one is family. He’s got no next of kin listed. What we do know is what Fallon has bribed out of the staff.”
But he was alive.
That was something, right?
“Why would you bring me there?”
Rune watched me for a long moment, the look in his eyes wise beyond his years.
“I think we both know why.”
“How long have you known?”
“A while,” he said, shrugging.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“It’s not my business.”
“There are rules.”
“Pretty sure you two are the ones breaking them, not me.”
“Except for now.”
“Yeah, well, this would just be a slap on the wrist. Here,” he said, striding away to one of the many white metal storage cabinets and coming back with an outfit inside a sealed bag.
Cream sweats.
Rune helped me get the pants up over the bandages on my legs, then helped me get to my feet so I could pull them all the way back up.
It was right then that we heard footsteps.
“Shit,” Rune hissed.
Then there was my mom, the image of what I was going to look like in a few years.
In short… lovely.
She paused, taking in the scene, then exhaled hard. “Are you sneaking her out to see him?” she asked, long strides taking her right to Rune’s side.
“Yeah.”
“Well, we better hurry up.”
She snatched up the sweatshirt, pulling it down over my head before untying my hospital gown and slipping it out from under the shirt.
“How are you getting her out without one of the guards seeing?”
“Why can’t I just leave?” I asked. “If Cameron has been dealt with?”
“Fallon just wants to make sure there are no other threats from his former crew,” Rune explained. “The girls are mostly still here. Except for Kit and Ria. But they tapped out a few days ago.”
“Wait… how?” Protection was always mandatory for us.
“Dunno. They talked to Chris. Chris sent guards to the farm. Which is good because the club didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with all the animals. Was funny as fuck to watch my brother get chased by a pack of geese, though. One of ‘em bit him right in the ass when he tripped over a rake.”
A laugh bubbled up out of me at that.
But then my mom was yanking my hoodie over my head and reaching in to tuck my hair away. “Since the girls are still here, most of the guards aren’t going to give you a second look.”
“Just keep your head down,” Rune added.
“I’m going to go distract your father,” my mom said, giving me a quick squeeze then rushing away.
“Alright, so I can see how we’re getting through the halls,” I said, following beside Rune as we moved through the twisting inner world of Hailstorm’s compound, “but how are you going to sneak me into a car and out of here?”
“Got my brother running distraction at the gate. You’re gonna hide under a blanket in the backseat, but I doubt they’re going to look.”
With that, we made our way out of one of the side doors where he had the SUV pulled up right to it.
Really, it was surprisingly easy. Enough that I was shocked one of us hadn’t attempted it in the past.
I guess because we knew we wanted to be safe.
“Hey,” Rune said after rolling down his window at the gate, “I’m gonna head out. See if you can catch a ride back when you’re done.”
Croft made some kind of joke that had the guard laughing and hitting the gate button.
And that was it.
We were out.
“You can sit up,” Rune said when we were halfway down the hill.
“Do you think they’re going to let me in looking like this?” I asked, pulling down my hood.
“The worst of it is hidden by the sweats. But I think it might work in your favor. Say you were there with him, that you were getting treatment, that you want to see your husband.”
“My husband?”
“Right. Here. Rings,” he said, handing them back to me.
“But Perish doesn’t have a ring.”
“They’re probably not going to think about it that much. You look like crap. You’ve clearly been crying. You know his name and room number. They’re gonna let you in.”
“Why didn’t the club bring him to Hailstorm?”
Rune’s jaw tightened.
“The hospital was closer.”
But hospitals meant mandatory reporting, cops, questions. That meant that Perish was likely in even worse shape than I thought.
A little sob escaped me, making Rune’s gaze look at me in the rearview. “He survived surgery. That’s a good sign.”
I nodded, but that didn’t stop the tears as we drove to the hospital.
And Rune was right; they worked in my favor when I made my way onto the ICU where he was being cared for after surgery.
I tried not to think that meant he was at serious risk of death as I moved into the room and listened to the steady, slow beat of his heart on the monitor before I could make my way over.
He was an enormous guy. The bed looked too small for him. But he looked reduced, smaller, pale.
“Hey,” I said, my voice catching on a cry as I moved closer to take his giant hand in both of mine. “It’s me.”
I never got to see him still.
Sometimes, in bed, I would doze off for a little while. Each time I woke up, he was still wide awake, holding me, running his hands over me.
Maybe if I’d seen him asleep, seeing him in the hospital bed like that wouldn’t have been so upsetting.
“I, um, I guess I need to thank you. You know, for taking bullets for me. But, well, you shouldn’t have done that. Because now look at you.” A loud, ugly sniffle escaped me at that.
“I think he’s gone,” I told him. I heard mixed things whether people who were unconscious could hear you or not. But I figured if he could hear me, he’d want an update. “I think I killed him.” I nudged my hip onto the edge of the bed. “So, you can just wake up now. It’s safe.”
I paused, rubbing his hand, my gaze vacillating from his face to the monitor.
“Hey, so, I just really, really need you to be okay,” I said, my voice thick with more useless tears.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I slid up onto the bed that wasn’t nearly big enough for him, let alone both of us.
My head rested on his chest, his big, familiar body comforting and horrifying at the same time.
“I think I might be in love with you,” I whispered. Then I gave in to the migraine stabbing behind my eyes and the bone-deep exhaustion in my bones and mind.
It was the sensation of an arm tightening around me that finally woke me up some time later.