Chapter 78
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
HUNTER
I come through the door, and the world ends.
Not with an explosion. Not with a sound. With a silence so absolute it swallows me whole. Lola is on the floor.
Face down. One arm stretched toward the doorway, fingers still wrapped around a gun. Her red hair is fanned across the wood, dark with blood at the temple. The gash is open and bleeding freely. There’s a pool beneath her head that’s still spreading.
She’s not moving.
My legs stop working.
For one second, a single, annihilating second, I think she’s dead. And in that second, I die too. Whatever part of me is human, whatever part loves and feels and exists beyond muscle and bone, it flatlines. Right there in the doorway.
Then I see her back rise. The smallest breath. A tiny expansion of her ribs that wouldn’t be visible from ten feet away. She’s breathing.
I’m on the floor beside her before my brain has given my legs the command. My knees hit the wood. I take the gun from her hand and press two fingers to her neck.
A pulse. My girl is in there, still fighting.
“Lola.” I cup her face with both hands and turn her head. The blood is everywhere. The gash is deep, but it’s not the wound that scares me. It’s her eyes. Half open. Unfocused. The green is dim. Like she’s not really in there.
The woman I love is dying in my arms.
“Lola, baby. Look at me.” My voice splinters, just like my heart does.
I’d switch places with her in a heartbeat.
Her eyelids flutter. A sound escapes her lips. It doesn’t even sound like a word, not even close.
“That’s it. Stay with me. You hear me? You stay right here.” I scoop her off the floor and into my arms. Her head lolls against my chest.
“Drago,” I roar. “AMBULANCE! NOW!”
Drago appears in the doorway. One look at Lola, and his phone is already to his ear. He turns away, speaking fast, coordinates, and uses medical terminology I can’t process.
Behind him, Jett is dragging Reese out by his collar, and that asshole is screaming. “Wait! Wait—you need me!” He’s clutching his stomach with one hand and grasping at the doorframe with the other. “Hunter—please—I have information—I can clear your name—”
I hold Lola tighter. “You did this,” I seethe.
“I recorded everything!” Reese screams. His voice cracks into something hysterical. “Beau came to me! He came to me with the plan! I recorded every conversation, every confession, it’s on my phone! It’s all on my phone!”
He reaches into his pocket with a shaking hand and holds up a phone. “Every word, Hunter! The Greeks! Ashley! The setup! I recorded it because I knew he’d turn on me! Take it—please, just don’t let me die here!”
I can’t look at him. I can’t think about him. I can’t process anything beyond the woman in my arms, whose pulse I keep checking with my thumb because every time her eyes close, I forget how to breathe.
Drago crosses the room and takes the phone from Reese’s hand. He looks at me. “If what he’s saying is true, this clears everything.” He pockets the phone. “The murder charge. The bail violation. All of it.”
I nod. I think I nod. My face doesn’t feel like mine.
“That evidence don’t save you, Reese. Not for this,” I tell him and turn to look my best friend in the eyes as I deliver his death sentence.
Tears roll down his face as he shakes his head. “Hunter, please. You know me. I didn’t mean—.”
“Shut the fuck up.” I hiss and look at Jett, “Get him out of my face.”
“I’ll handle the cops,” Drago says, his voice dropping lower. “The cleanup, I'll make it disappear. You focus on her. We’ve got Beau being moved out back so the paramedics don’t see him.”
I don’t care; my brother is dead. The only person in this building I care about is fading in and out of consciousness in my arms.
Her head rests against my chest. Her breathing is shallow. Every few seconds, her eyes open, and it feels like my heart is in my throat.
“Lola. Baby. I need you to stay awake for me.”
Her lips move. “…Wyatt?”
“He’s safe. He’s with Colten. He’s safe, baby.”
Her hand twitches against my shirt. Trying to grip, but she doesn’t have the strength.
“I love you, Lola. Do you hear me? I love you so fucking much it’s the only thing keeping me upright right now.” My voice breaks. I let it. “You don’t get to leave me. We had a deal. Ride or fucking die. And you are not dying on me. Please, firefly. Don’t leave me.”
Her eyes flutter open, and they find mine. Even as the tears stream down my face. For a second, the fog clears, and she’s there, really there.
“…love you,” she whispers.
A sound escapes me that’s half laugh and half sob. The most broken noise I’ve ever made. “I’ve got you, city girl. I’ve got you.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. Then her eyes roll back, and she goes limp.
“Lola!”
I press my fingers to her neck. Her pulse is okay. But that doesn’t stop the panic rising through me. The fear that the love of my life might leave me.
“Where is that fucking ambulance?” I shout.
“Two minutes,” Drago calls from somewhere behind me.
Two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds.
I press my face into her hair. Breathe her in.
“You saved my son,” I whisper against her temple. “You stayed, Lola. You chose him over yourself.”
My tears are falling into her hair. I don’t wipe them. “I told you this morning you were playing house. And you spent the whole day proving me wrong in ways I’ll never be able to repay.”
I rock her gently. Feel her heartbeat against my chest.
“You come back to me, firefly. You come back to me, and I’ll never say another stupid thing as long as I live.
I’ll worship you until the day I die. I’ll take you to the lake every night to see the fireflies.
I’ll cook you breakfast and carry you up the stairs and put my hat on your head every morning. ”
My voice is barely functional. “Just come back.”
Sirens wail in the distance, and the ambulance tears up the dirt road and skids to a halt in front of the house. Two paramedics jump out. They’re moving fast.
I don’t want to let go. I physically do not want to release her from my arms.
“Sir. Sir, we need to take her now.”
Ace is beside me. His hand on my shoulder. “Hunter. Let them work.”
I lay her on the stretcher. Her red hair spills over the edges. Her face is ashen beneath the blood. The paramedic checks her pupils with a penlight, and I watch her eyes respond.
“Head trauma. Possible concussion. Significant laceration to the right temple. Pulse is ninety-eight and thready. We need to move.”
They lift the stretcher.
“I’m going with her,” I say. It’s not a question.
The paramedic looks at my face. At the blood on my hands. At whatever he sees in my eyes.
“Get in.”
I climb into the ambulance and take her hand, holding it against my chest. Hating the fact that her rings aren’t there.
Ace stands in the open doors.
“I’ll finish this, brother,” he says.
“Thank you.”
The doors close, and through the small rear window, I watch the house shrink in the distance. And somewhere on that property lies the body of the man who used to be my brother.
I close my eyes. He did this to her. One of the people in my life I’d never thought would hurt me like this.
Lola’s hand is cold in mine. I bring it to my lips and press a kiss against her knuckles. “Stay with me, firefly,” I choke out. “We’re going home. And we’re going to have that big wedding you want. And all the kids.”
I promised her the world. And instead, being with me has left her fighting for her life.
The monitor beside me beeps, and it brings me some sort of comfort. She’s still here. And I will not let go of her hand until she opens her eyes and tells me she’s okay.
I don’t care if it takes hours. Days. The rest of my life.
I’m not letting go.
I’m standing in the middle of a corridor watching two nurses wheel Lola through a set of double doors that close behind her with a sound like a coffin lid.
And then she’s gone.
They need to run scans. Assess the head trauma. Check for fractures. Bleeding. Swelling. Words that a doctor said to me in a calm tone while I stood there with my wife’s blood drying on my shirt.
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t process. Just stood there like a fucking statue while they took her away from me.
I press my back against the corridor wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor.
My legs have given up. The adrenaline that kept me upright for the last six hours has finally emptied out, and what’s left is a man sitting on linoleum with his head in his hands, trying very hard not to fall apart.
I killed my own brother. I nearly lost my wife and son.
I’m failing.
My hands are shaking. My chest is so tight I can barely breathe. Every time I close my eyes, I see Lola lying there, blood running down her face. The gash on her temple. The way her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
I press my palms into my eye sockets and try to breathe. Even as my chest feels like a vice around my lungs.
A nurse walks past, and I barely even register her. “Sir, there’s a waiting room just—”
“I’m fine here,” I grunt.
She hesitates. I don’t even look at her. Instead, I pull out my phone and call Colten.
“How is she?” he answers immediately.
“They’re running scans. I don’t know yet.” My voice comes out wrong. “How’s Wyatt?”
“Asleep. Finally. Took a while, but he’s out. He’s safe, Hunter. Jerry’s here too.”
“Okay. Good.”
“How are you?”
I don’t answer. Because the honest answer would break whatever’s left of me. “I’ll call you when I know more,” I say, and hang up.
I sit on that floor for forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes of staring at a wall and making deals with a God I’m not sure I believe in. Promising things I have no right to promise.
Let her be okay. Take anything. Take the ranch. Take the money. Take every year I have left. Just let her be okay.
A doctor rounds the corner. I’m on my feet before he’s within ten paces. “Mr. Sterling?”
“How is she?”
He glances at the clipboard. Then at me. And for a second, I can’t breathe.