Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Finley
I go in and out of consciousness, doing everything I can to hold onto that thread that’ll keep me aware of my surroundings.
I fail more often than not, but I hear flashes of words consisting of Neptune, medic, clinic, no hospital.
I try to verify that but my tongue feels swollen and heavy, formulating words is near impossible.
But I do manage to nod my head when I hear Mercury state that I was insistent that I’m not taken to the hospital.
“Don’t worry, darlin’, we’ll get you taken care of,” a foreign male voice promises as I feel myself being lifted into the air.
I whimper from the movement because everything on my body hurts, even the follicles of my hair are painful against my scalp.
My feet are raw, scraped, and bloody from running through the foliage without shoes.
The arrows and bullet wounds should be the biggest pain I feel, but those areas have grown numb.
Nausea has bile climbing up my throat, but I instinctively know that if I vomit, it’s going to hurt so much I’ll probably pass out.
“H-h-hurts,” I manage to wheeze out. My lungs feel like they’re collapsing, but that could be my imagination.
Mercury’s face comes into view and I see him frown when he looks at me. “Neptune? She sounds wheezy and her chest is sawing in and out.”
“Thinking one of the arrows or even the bullet might have punctured a lung,” Neptune, the voice I didn’t recognize, replies. “Not much I can do for her right now, but we can’t afford to waste any time, brothers.”
I can hear the warning behind his words and realize that while I was fortunate enough to be rescued, I’m nowhere near out of the proverbial woods, especially as darkness encroaches on me once again. As the blissful oblivion creeps over me, I whisper, “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not dying on our watch,” Mercury insists. “Try to relax, Finley. I know that’s hard to do under the circumstances, but if you tense up, this is going to be harder on you in the long run. We have to go down a dirt path that is on an incline so you’re going to be jostled.”
I grit my teeth and prepare for the worst. My entire being already feels like it’s on fire, and if their adjustment of me already has me wanting to reach out for the bliss of darkness, I can only imagine that feeling is going to get ten times worse as they carry me out of this nightmare.
Digging deep inside to the place where the runner I used to be lives, I mutter, “Just do it. Rip it off like a bandaid. Worse that can happen is I pass out and that might be for the best all things considered, right?”
“She’s not wrong about losing consciousness,” Neptune imparts. “Her respirations will automatically slow down, which will help with the punctured lung.”
“Then let’s go,” Mercury commands. “Just be as careful as possible, y’all,” he warns.
I don’t know what I’m on, to be truthful, because my vision was already blurry, but it’s almost like I’m on a stretcher, but I know I’m not correct.
Maybe it’s like one of those things they use when they’re doing mountain rescues.
While the word I’m looking for is just out of reach, I focus on that instead of the pounding pain that’s now coursing through me as they move me.
One particularly rough bump has me diving into the darkness, no longer worried about the pain I’m in or what happened to me.
The male voices float away from my subconsciousness as I drift off into the land of unawareness.
Beeping sounds hit my ear drums as I begin to rouse.
I don’t know how long I can hang on to my conscious state, but I can tell by what I am hearing that the men who rescued me are standing around me as Mercury tells them everything I shared with him.
My eyelids are too heavy to open, but my ears are tuned into their conversation.
“Where did you say they got her again?” A gruff sounding man asks who I’m presuming to be Mercury.
“The hospital parking lot. Just like they did Skippy,” Mercury answers. “They’re ballsy because those lots are covered by CCTV monitors.”
I have no clue who this Skippy person is, but if they went through what I did, that tells me this is not new behavior.
I wish I knew who was talking since my eyes won’t cooperate, because the only one whose identity I know for sure is Mercury.
Everyone else is just a voice right now, which has my fear ratcheting up, because what if they’re involved too?
I know Mercury said they were Kings, but that doesn’t really tell me a whole lot.
“Which means this is being covered up and those tapes are being erased,” another man concludes.
“That’s only an assumption,” Mercury states. “We can’t take opinions to the authorities, especially when those officers are most likely knee deep in this fiasco.”
“No we can’t because it’d be covered up just like it is at the hospital,” another unfamiliar voice says. I’m losing count of how many strangers are in the same room as me while I’m vulnerable. That thought causes shivers to race up and down my spine.
“Shhh, calm down, Finley.” Mercury’s soothing timbre is next to my ear and I can feel myself relaxing.
“You’re safe. You’re going to be okay but you’ve got a long road to recovery ahead of you.
As soon as the doctor says it’s okay, you’ll be coming to stay with us and trust me when I say this, nobody will get near you.
They’d have to go through every single one of us. ”
Licking my dry, chapped lips I manage to ask the question roaming through my mind. “Who’s us?”
“Right now, it’s me, Gemini, Neptune, Pisces, and Orion,” he replies. “The rest of my brothers are checking into a few things, and another is watching over Sutton while she’s with Skippy.”
“Sutton?” I query, my raspy voice sounding like I’m a three-pack-a-day smoker.
“She’s my old lady. I’m Gemini, president of the Kings. Skippy is her friend who was found in a similar state as you were.”
A cool sensation crosses my lips as Mercury says, “Sip slowly,” just as a straw is positioned at my mouth.
While I’m more of a juice or soda girl, I want to cry with relief at how good the slightly chilled water tastes as it slides down my parched throat.
After a few more sucks on the straw, it’s pulled away causing me to cry out in distress.
“I’ll give you some more in a little bit.
I don’t want you to have too much because you had surgery and it might make you queasy.
No sense in you vomiting and undoing all the work the doctor performed to fix you, right? ”
“Fine,” I grumble.
“Ah, the dreaded ‘fine’,” he teases. “I think I can live with that, Finley. It’s more important to me, to us, to get you moved to where we’re staying so we can keep you safe while we figure out what the fuck is going on around here.”
“Nothing good,” I complain, waving my arm that has an IV in it. “Case in point.”
“Oh, she’s sassy, I like it,” a male baritone jests. “Orion here.”
“More like class clown,” Gemini states. “And as far as her being sassy, Orion, she needs to pull her strength from wherever she can, don’t you think?”
The more time I spend awake, the stronger I start to feel. I have a boatload of questions I need to ask but one of the most prominent ones I desire to know is, “Who are the Kings?”
“How long have you lived here, Finley?” The man who has the monogram Pisces stitched onto his leather vest, asks.
“About two months,” I tell him. “I moved here shortly after my parents passed away in a car wreck, needing a place to start over. Dad used to visit his grandparents here, they had a farm, and he told me stories about the beauty of this town and made it sound like a dream.”
“More like a nightmare,” the one who introduced himself as Orion says.
“True,” I say, attempting to shrug my shoulders only to wince when the stitches pull. “Ouch. Note to self, keep your body as still as possible.”
“Do you talk to yourself a lot?” Orion inquires, tilting his head and angling it in my direction.
“Only when I need smart company,” I snark, my comeback rude and snappy, but dammit, why is he mentioning my shortcomings? That’s rude. And with everything I’ve just lived through, I should be getting pampered.
“You’ve got your hands full with this one, Mercury,” Orion says, his remark chock full of amusement. Now I see what he meant earlier when Gemini called him the class clown.
“To answer your question about who we are, we’re a motorcycle club,” Gemini says. “Most of us are from Texas, but we got an offer we couldn’t refuse from the national president of the Kings of Anarchy so here we are.”
“So we all moved here wanting greener pastures,” I muse. “Hope it works out better for you than it did for me.”
“We’ll make it safe for you too, Finley,” Mercury promises. “It’s gonna take some time which is why we want to move you in with us so you’re under the umbrella of our protection.”
“Do you think that’ll make the asswipes that took me leave me alone?” I ask, and when I notice the doubtful looks on their faces, I harrumph. “That’s what I thought.”
“Even if you move away, there’s no guarantee they’ll leave you alone and let you flee, Finley. You’re a loose end,” Mercury reminds me.
“Lovely,” I mutter. “I always wanted to be someone’s loose end.”
“She’s a smartass, she and Sutton should get along splendidly,” Pisces jests.
“Don’t borrow trouble, brother,” Gemini says out of the side of his mouth as if he was trying to keep that between the two of them, but he messed up, because I heard every word.
“Skippy’s the same,” Orion muses. I see a sad look cross his face and wonder what has the goofy clown reacting that way. I guess if I’m going to be staying with them, I’ll soon figure it out.
“They’re gonna need a nickname,” Pisces says, grinning. “The Terrible Trio, The Gruesome Threesome.”
“The three musketeers?” I ask. “I mean, I don’t know either of these two people as it is, so giving us our own nickname is kind of counterproductive, don’t you think?”
“She has one of those word of the day calendars, I just know it,” Orion teases.
“Most people improve their vocabulary through reading, Orion,” Pisces jeers. “You’re the only one I know who gets one of those fucking calendars every year.”
“Makes me sound smart,” Orion retorts shrugging.
I’m about to say something to keep their bickering going when I feel a coolness go through my IV. Before I can open my mouth, it’s lights out once again, Finley.