Chapter 3
three
. . .
LANE
A distant beeping permeated my consciousness, getting sharper by the second.
As I rose from asleep to awake, I knew one thing for certain: this world was not the same one I’d left.
All sense of peace I’d had moments before was replaced by excruciating pain. I tried to breathe through it, but that seemed to only make it worse. Each inhalation set my chest ablaze, like someone pressing a hot poker to my lungs.
Nothing about this was right, and I was terrified to open my eyes and fully face my shattered dreams.
Groaning, I cracked my lids, instantly slamming them shut again as I was greeted by stark, sterile brightness.
Where the fuck was I? And why did my entire body hurt like I’d been run over by a truck?
“Lane?” a soft voice asked, and I perked up, only to deflate again when I realized it was one I recognized but not the one I wanted to hear.
“Where’s Sutton?” I rasped. The words scraped against my throat on the way out, like I hadn’t had a sip of water in years.
Silence greeted me, and I dared opening my eyes again, slower this time, allowing myself the chance to adjust.
Mama stood over me, worry etched into every line of her face. She looked like she hadn’t slept in ages, and her eyes filled with tears when our gazes caught.
“Oh, baby boy,” she breathed, leaning in to press a kiss to my forehead, like she used to do when I was sick as a little kid. “You scared us.”
“What happened?” I asked, throat clogging with emotion to see her so scared. “Where’s Sutton?”
She hadn’t answered the first time, and suddenly I was desperate to know.
“You were shot,” she whispered.
I inhaled, gasping, so sharply it seared my lungs. Squeezing my eyes shut, I let the memories come back to me.
The farmhouse. Reagan and Lainey running for their lives. That piece of shit appearing with a gun.
Him pulling the trigger.
Then blissful nothingness until now.
No, not nothingness. A life. Happiness. The kind of thing I’d only ever dreamed about but never thought I’d get.
Only to wake up and discover it was just a dream, and I was no closer to it now than the day I’d been shot.
“How long have I been out?” I asked, ignoring the tears escaping my eyes and streaking down my temples.
“Six days,” Mama said.
“It was bad then.”
There was no sense in beating around the bush. It happened, and though I was in more pain than I was sure one person could withstand—seriously, where the fuck were my pain meds?—I was alive, and that was all that mattered.
“Collapsed lung and a lot of internal bleeding. You fl-fl-flatlined,” Mama’s voice shook on the word, and she took a beat to compose herself.
“In the helicopter on the way here. Sutton got your heart beating again. It was touch and go while you were on the table, but the surgeon patched you up, and they expect you’ll make a full recovery. ”
Sutton saved my life.
Sutton saved my life.
“Where is she?”
Mama smiled sadly. “I don’t know, baby. She’s been…scarce.”
I gritted my teeth against the wave of anger that crested in my chest, a welcome distraction from the hot poker lancing my lungs with each breath.
I wasn’t angry at Sutton—never at Sutton.
No, I was angry at myself for being the reason she wasn’t coming around. Even though she’d saved my life and had every right to check in on me, she was steering clear because things between us were always so fraught with tension, she couldn’t stand to be around me.
And I certainly hadn’t done anything to make it easier in the last fifteen years.
My emotions were all over the place, and I needed five fucking minutes to collect myself.
As if sensing my distress, likely because the beeping of my heart rate monitor increased in frequency, Mama gently squeezed my hand and said, “I’m going to get the doctor and call your siblings. They’ll want to know you’re awake.”
I nodded without opening my eyes, waiting to do so until her soft footsteps retreated entirely.
But I must’ve drifted off, because when I next opened my eyes, Finn, Reagan, and Reagan’s twin, Lainey, were gathered around me.
“Scared the hell out of us, brother,” Finn said, lightly clapping me on the shoulder.
“Where’s Mama?”
“Went back to the ranch. Now that you’re awake, she went home to get some things done. She’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
“Thank you for saving us,” Reagan added, glancing at her sister. “This is Lainey, by the way.”
I chuckled, or tried to, but it turned into a hacking cough that filled my mouth with the taste of blood.
“Just doing my job,” I rasped eventually. A thought occurred to me then, and I focused on Finn. “What happened to…you know who?”
“Dead,” Finn said flatly. “Put the bullet in his head myself.”
I nodded. As a first responder, it was always my goal to protect life, to ensure the safety of the citizens of Dusk Valley, but I wasn’t all that sad to learn of my shooter’s fate.
Not only because he put a large caliber slug through my chest, but because I had no patience or tolerance for men who harmed women.
“Where’s the rest of the cavalry?” I asked.
“Home,” Finn said. “But on their way, I’m sure. Well not Crew. He’s on shift, but I’m sure he’ll be up to see you tomorrow.”
I loved my family, I really did, but there was only one person I wanted to see right now—and she was the one person I knew wouldn’t walk through that door.
“Ah, Mr. Lawless,” a man called out, entering the room in a flurry, white coat flapping and a stack of records attached to a clipboard in his hand. “Good to see you awake.”
“I miss the coma,” I admitted.
Doc chuckled good-naturedly, flipping through the papers in his hand.
“The bullet pierced your left lung, causing it to collapse. You suffered a lot of internal bleeding and general blood loss. You also flatlined on the way here,” he said, and Finn nodded.
“Wait, how do you know that?” I asked my brother.
“We brought you in by helicopter.”
My blood chilled. Sutton having to work on me was one thing. The woman did that shit for a living. But for my brother to have to endure listening to my heart stop? Unimaginable.
“Crew was there too,” he added, pouring salt into the wound. “He helped Sutton.”
Two of my brothers?
My eyes slammed shut, and I tried to breathe through the tangled knot of despair in my throat.
“All that aside,” Doc continued, “I expect you’ll make a full recovery.”
“When can I go back to work?”
Doc smiled sympathetically. “Let’s focus on getting you out of here first, okay?”
“Right, sure. When exactly will that be?”
“Let’s see how the next few days progress now that you’re awake, and we’ll go from there.”
“Can I at least get some pain meds?” I asked, lifting the hand without the IV stuck in it to rub gently at my chest, as if that would soothe the ache.
“Of course, of course,” Doc said. “You were actually due for another dose a few hours ago, so I’m going to see what happened with that.”
“Thanks,” I rasped as he left.
“We’ll get out of your hair,” Finn said. “Let you get some rest.”
“Finn?”
“Yeah, brother?”
“A word? Alone?”
He glanced at Reagan and Lainey, bending to kiss Reagan on the cheek before the twins disappeared.
“What’s going on, Lane?”
“I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
“I need…can you maybe convince Sutton to stop by? Or have Crew do it?”
After all, Crew had worked closely with her for years. Maybe he’d be able to get through to her.
My cheeks burned with the request, my voice barely above a whisper, but I couldn’t shake the desire to see her. After that dream, or whatever you wanted to call it, I was all out of sorts. Maybe laying eyes on her would set the world right again.
Finn nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, “but I can’t make any promises. She was…pretty fucked up after the accident.”
My heart squeezed. The last thing I ever wanted was to cause her distress.
“Just…try.”
“I will,” he assured me. With a final squeeze of my shoulder, he left.
Shortly after, a nurse appeared with a vial of what I hoped were good, strong drugs, which she extracted with a needle and stuck into a port on my IV.
In minutes, my pain eased considerably, and darkness descended once again.
The next time I awoke, I knew even without opening my eyes that I wasn’t alone. Feet softly shuffled against the linoleum floor, and a feminine scent lingered in the air, vaguely familiar but one I couldn’t quite place.
“Sutton?”
“Why would she be here?”
My eyes flew open and locked on Addie.
“Shit, sorry. I just thought—”
“Never mind that,” Addie said, railroading right over what I’d been about to say.
Probably for the best. I had no idea how to explain my desperate desire to see Sutton and, truthfully, the explanation would’ve been wasted on Addie anyway.
But why was she here?
“How are you feeling?” she asked, surprising me by coming to my side, brushing my sweaty, limp hair off my forehead, and bending to press a kiss to the clammy skin she revealed.
With Mama, the contact made me feel warm and loved, whereas with Addie, I found myself wanting to pull back.
We didn’t have that kind of relationship. Sure, I’d brought her to Crew’s wedding as my date, but we hadn’t progressed to anything more than a maybe.
And after the coma dream, where the life I’d always wanted had been dangled in front of me, I knew now that we’d never be anything.
Then I remembered she’d been there when I got shot and realized she must’ve wanted to check up on me.
“I’m okay,” I said, surprised to find I meant it. The searing pain in my chest had now lessened to a dull ache thanks to those pain meds.
“Your voice sounds horrible.” Turning this way and that, she searched the room, finding a pitcher of water and a cup on a small side table. She filled the cup, complete with a lid and straw, and brought it to me.
I chugged it down quickly, reveling in the way it soothed my throat.
“Better?” she asked when I handed the cup back and sighed.
“Much,” I replied, pleased to find my voice seemed stronger.