Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Drew
The final smash of Ramirez’s fist landing square across Pete’s jaw had been designed to do nothing except finish the whole thing for good.
I didn’t have to wait for a verdict. I knew he was gone three hits ago.
The dread had been pooling in my stomach until the sickness had rendered me immovable.
Everything happened in slow motion. Pete’s head flew back one final time, the spray of blood washing out to the side of the ring, raining down over my face and clothes as Jedd used every bit of his weight to hold me in place, just like he’d been ordered to do.
Pete’s eyes rolled to the ceiling, all the life draining away from every feature he held until his body finally gave in to gravity and fell limp to the ring.
There was no convulsing. He didn’t shift. His didn’t push out his arms to stop himself from falling, and when his body made contact with the floor, every Hound in the room froze.
Jedd couldn’t stop me as I threw him away like he was nothing more than a fly for me to swat before I charged toward the ring.
Flashes of leather and darkness passed me by as I grabbed the ropes and jumped over them in one swift leap.
The moment my feet landed, the ring shook and Pete’s body bounced from the weight of it, yet he never groaned or called me the thoughtless dick he normally would have.
I didn’t breathe until I’d scooped him up in my arms and was cradling his lifeless head against my chest. Blood poured out of his ears.
The gashes to his cheeks were so deep he was an abstract work of purples, reds and browns.
His bare chest felt like glue. Cold glue against searing skin.
Glue that was once warm but was already turning to ice from all the lifeless crimson that was escaping him.
Each eye was swollen as I sucked in the harshest breaths I could force myself to take and begged him to stay alive.
The razor blades in my lungs were nothing compared to the knives in my heart.
I felt his chest move and for a single fucking moment, I saw a glimmer of hope that he would make it out of this alive.
But then it was gone, and that’s when I knew that the man who had brought me up, the man who had loved me more than all my brothers put together, and the man who had been a father figure had just taken his last breath in my arms.
My knees sank into the floor, my legs parting as I adjusted and pulled him harder against me, squeezing him so tight I could practically hear his bones screaming in my grip.
The strength he’d always possessed vanished, and all that lay in my arms was a broken shell of the greatest Hound I’d ever fucking known.
Pete was dead.
The world around me shifted until my mouth eventually fell open, my eyes scrunched together in agony, and I roared out in anger. I’d killed men before that moment—many, many men—but there were no words for the destruction I was about to cause Ramirez for what he had just done to my brother.
The laws of our lawless community were broken.
The calls to end the fight were ignored.
More blood would have to be shed, and I was desperate to spill the first drop.
Men charged around me but I couldn’t see them.
My eyes fell to the mass of broken muscle in my hands as my fingers clawed at his skin and the silent tears of agony fell straight from my eyes, down onto his wounds.
I gasped for air. Every nail I possessed dug into his flesh as I rocked us to hide the violent shaking that was taking over my body.
“No,” I began to whisper, my tight lips barely able to move as I watched and waited for him to move, as I watched and begged for him to be okay.
My skin turned cold and a shiver of disbelief rolled down my spine like death himself was taunting me with the fingertips that had just dragged Pete away and tossed him into a pile of the deceased.
My head rolled back as I pulled his body farther up to mine and screamed out my brother’s name in despair one final time.
The arrival of someone new, and the sudden touch upon my shoulder felt misplaced.
There wasn’t anyone who would have approached me as carefully as that person was doing.
Harry would have wrapped me up in his arms the way I was holding Pete.
Jedd would have gripped me to the point of causing pain, passing on his sorrow because a man like him couldn’t handle feeling so helpless or lost. Slater would have taken Pete from me.
The others would have stayed away. The Emps would have run.
The strays and the spectators would have fled the fucking country.
This touch stayed there like an angel on my shoulder.
Then the voice followed, but I was too lost to hear it thanks to the grief that was currently tearing a knife through my dark soul, moving at an extra slow pace to make sure the pain hit every nerve-ending I held inside me.
“Drew…”
I growled, the tears staining my cheeks and the fire burning harder in my throat.
“Drew, it’s me. I’m here.”
Pete’s body turned into dead weight, and I clawed at him with even more desperation as I began to shake my head from side to side. Whoever it was beside me needed to leave before I hurt them the way I’d unintentionally hurt my brother. Everyone who got close got hurt.
She whispered soothing words in my ear, her warm breath causing my brows to crease as I tried to warn her to escape without having to say the words. Didn’t she know I was grieving? Couldn’t she see there was no consoling me after what I’d just lost?
Her hand moved to my neck, her fingers placing feather light touches against my skin until her nail grazed my jaw.
I gasped for breath again, my mouth wet from the tears I couldn’t hold onto, and I instantly felt guilty for wanting her to do it just one more time.
I tried to pull Pete closer, reassure him that I was focused on him and nothing else, but when I moved my arms, he was gone.
She spoke again, her words unclear as my hands reached up to clutch my heart. I wanted to rip my chest open and squeeze it tight, to end my own life right there and then because this kind of pain was already threatening to choke me to death.
“Drew.”
“No,” I whispered back, shaking my head slowly. “No.”
I began white knuckling the bed sheets that had somehow worked their way beneath me. The woman’s touches kept on coming. It felt like her hands were everywhere until I was forced to open my eyes again, struggling to get enough oxygen into my lungs.
The cold hit my body first. Every part of my skin felt wet, and the tension in my limbs sent shockwaves through every muscle I possessed until her face came into view above me. Her legs scissored mine as she pressed her chest to me as gently as she possibly could.
“Come back to me, Drew,” she said quietly, her lips barely moving as one hand lifted to trace the worry lines away from my forehead.
“Ayda,” I croaked out desperately.
She never broke eye contact with me. Her baby blues were glassy and her breathing was heavy, but her touches kept coming, gentle and reassuring. “There you are.”
It took time for me to realize what had happened, but the moment I did, I dropped my head hard against the pillow beneath me. “Fuck,” I gasped.
Ayda laid still, only her fingers dusting over my skin. She seemed to understand that I just needed time to catch my breath before she spoke to me, but the gentle stroking of her fingers and the breeze of her exhale over my skin were all designed to remind me she was there when I needed her.
This was what she did.
My eyes closed and my hands unclenched from their death grips. I needed to touch her, but I couldn’t do much in that moment other than find my center again. Rolling my head lazily to the side, I looked up into her eyes.
“I’m sor—”
The words got caught in my throat as soon as I heard the clawing and scratching sound that came from outside my bedroom window.
Whether exhausted or not, my body shot upright, my arms circling around Ayda as I pulled her to me, as though she were another Pete that someone was about to rip from my grip.
Both of Ayda’s hands brushed through my hair before her eyes flickered to the window and back with a stuttered breath, “I-it’s just Tank, the yard dog. We’re safe here.”
I moved my mouth to argue with her, but nothing came out at all when the sound soon disappeared, and I realized she was right.
My paranoia was at an all-time high, and with her tiny frame in my arms, I should have felt like the strong one—only I didn’t.
I felt like a fucking baby. Closing my eyes one last time, I dropped my forehead to hers and blew out all the air in my lungs, refusing to look at her when I finally found my voice again.
“I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about, Drew. Nothing at all. I just…” She stopped as I opened my eyes and she blinked up at me, a small reassuring smile there before she rocked forward and kissed me lightly on the lips.
“You just wish I wasn’t so fucked up and complicated.” I paused, my chest expanding more than it should have been. “I wish for that, too. Things… They will get better.”
“No!” Ayda pushed up on her arms. “I wouldn’t ever change you, Drew.
I love the man you are, faults and all. I just wish you knew you could talk to me about…
about Pete and everything that happened.
I know it was one of the worst days of your life, but if you keep it all balled up inside like this… ”
She paused, unsure how to go on, but her eyes held mine.
“There’s nothing to say that will ever bring him back, Ayda. I fucking hate that you’ve just seen me that way.”
“Drew, the more you push it away, the longer your subconscious manifests it as dreams or nightmares. I’m not psychoanalyzing you. It's just what our bodies do. It’s how we’re wired. The less you deal with it, talk about it, the more it plays on your mind.”