Exquisite Danger (41 page)

Basically, we were fucked.

For a moment, I gave into the hopelessness and stared at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight pouring through the cracks in the boards.

The cracks in the boards... What could I see through those cracks?

Grabbing the rifle and ammo I tried to pick my way past a pile of rusty bikes that could trap my feet and spill me to the floor. Then, I tried to avoid a large blotched mirror that showed a monstrous reflection of me. I was coated in dried blood and looked like I was a stunt extra during the bucket of blood scene in the movie
Carrie
. When I gazed at myself, my eyes were empty and cold, and I saw someone savage, someone absolutely capable of killing to defend herself staring back at me, and that made me smile.

I looked through one of the larger cracks, stealing a glimpse of the back yard where the motorcycles were. One of the three men stood there yelling on a cell phone. I bit my lip, racing through all the implications of trying for a shot now. The rifle wasn’t mine, I didn’t even know if it worked, and it would be a huge risk for just one man.

Then another joined him and I decided on my course of action and stuck to it.

My breath came out in a smooth, cool rush as I shut down. Nothing mattered, not my body, not my bruised heart, not my grief over my mother or my anger at the people who had done this to us. It was all inconsequential now.

Nothing mattered but the shot.

Line up the sight.

Wait for an opening.

Take the shot.

In two successive, loud bangs I ended the lives of two more men, and a distant part of my mind that I tried to ignore, reminded me of my growing kill tally. Of all the families that now hated me, the children who would grow up without fathers. The mothers missing their sons.

I watched carefully, waiting for more men to run out.

Sure enough, a guy appeared on the porch, a big black man with long grey dreads. Just as I took the shot he moved, resulting me in missing the first one. The second and third caught him in the stomach before he disappeared around the side of the house so I was pretty sure he was out of commission by his pained screams.

From the other side of the barn came more men’s voices, and I tried to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t make anything out from where I crouched.

After the initial round of voices, things went quiet and I began to worry.

I liked them shouting, running around panicked, but I didn’t like not knowing where they were and what they were doing.

I didn’t have to worry for long because it soon became apparent what their plan was and it really sucked.

The first thing to catch fire was the house.

At first, I thought I was imagining the smell of a burning building, but the flames soon flickered into my line of sight and my heart dropped.

They were trying to flush us out.

My mouth went dry as I wondered if they’d do the shed next, and then the barn.

What if they were lighting the barn on fire right now?

I grabbed my rifle and tried to get back to Smoke as quick as I could but I got tangled up a couple of times in my haste, making a racket I would have worried about if the fire burning the house hadn’t started to roar and snap like an angry dragon. Large fires get loud, extremely loud. With that horrible noise playing as the soundtrack to my own personal hell, I came back to my man, only to find him passed out with a thready pulse.

“No, no, no,” I whispered and tried to find a place on him I could touch, frantic to keep his heart beating. “Please, Miguel, please don’t leave me alone. Please stay with me. I promise I’ll save you, I swear it. Don’t go. Hold on.”

His pulse fluttered against my fingers but kept beating. I have no idea how long I sat there in a daze, watching him and willing him to live, before smoke began to burn my eyes. Snapped out of my desperate trance, I wasn’t sure if the smoke was coming from the outside or inside, but I’d run out of time. I’d rather die from a gunshot than burn alive.

With no regard to making a racket now, I shoved aside piles of garbage with a strength I didn’t know I had, moving heavy furniture to the side so I could make it to the part of the loft that sagged closest to the ground. It was still at least a one-story drop, but that was better than two.

Grabbing a rusting metal chair with a faded 1970s floral print cushion, I swung it at the already mostly broken window, smashing out the rotted frame and making as big a hole as I could. Next, I grabbed a moldering mattress, hoping that we didn’t get impaled on a rusty spring as I tossed it out to the window and to the ground. Even when I stuck my head out no one took a shot at me. The air was thick with smoke, and I slipped my shirt up over my nose and mouth to filter out as much of it as possible.

By the time I made it back to my man, I was having a hard time seeing and had to rely on touch to get through the nightmare maze of crap to the busted out window.

My lungs felt like I had inhaled shards of glass, but I ignored the pain and pushed past it like I’d been trained. In that instant, I was thankful for every bit of my father’s harsh discipline, thankful for every ounce of determination he’d given me to do what needed to be done without regard to my own suffering. If I’d had one drop less of willpower, I never would have been able to get Smoke’s heavy body over the ledge.

He landed mostly on the mattress and didn’t give any indication of having felt the drop.

I know he was still breathing because he coughed weakly a couple times, but a numbness was growing inside of me, a whisper of unbelievable loss. Not wanting to jump onto Smoke I tried to aim to his left. One moment I was crouched, the next airborne as I fell. The gunshot that hit me mid-fall took me by surprise, sending fire spreading through my leg. I landed with a harsh scream, the pain excruciating as I grabbed my thigh, knowing that the bullet had hit bone.

A man approached me out of the haze of smoke whirling around in a harsh wind that revealed hints of the landscape around me, like bits of a grey cotton wall torn open. He raised his gun, and I prayed that God would take care of my loved ones as I waited for my death and got ready to meet Smoke in Heaven, promising myself that if he was in Hell I’d find a way to join him.

There were five loud shots, but I didn’t feel anything, then something thumped down near my feet.

It was the shooter, and I struggled to understand what had happened.

My first thought was Smoke, but a quick glance in his direction showed him still passed out. I looked in the other direction and found a man in a skull facemask with dark riding glasses on approaching us. Something about him was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen him before.

He raised his gun in Smoke’s direction, and I thought he was going to shoot him, but another voice yelled from nearby, “Vance! Any sign of ’em?”

Slowly, ever so slowly, he lowered the gun then yelled back while he lowered his facemask, “Hulk, I’ve got ’em! Tell Beach we’re gonna need medical help, lots of it.”

Okay, that was it, my brain officially gave up.

We were safe.

Against all fucking odds, we were safe.

My vision was fading fast, but I strained to reach up and touch Vance’s cheek as he knelt next to me then pulled him down to give him a kiss on the lips. Surprise showed in his dark eyes, but I cupped his cheek and forced myself to say, “Thank you, thank you for finding us. You saved my life. Please, don’t let Smoke die.”

For a moment I swear he looked conflicted, but I could hear people approaching and he nodded. “Take it easy, sweetheart, we’ll do what we can to help him.”

After that, everything became a whirl of people talking too loud, mixing with pain in my leg and anguish over Smoke’s condition, and I fell straight over the edge into darkness.

I sat uncomfortably beside Smoke’s hospital bed waiting for him to decide to rejoin the land of the living, but he continued to sleep on.

Almost every inch of his strong body was bandaged, and where it wasn’t covered in white cloth, scabs and scars were forming. I was currently in a wheelchair, as comfortable as I could be with a fractured thigh bone, a couple dozen stitches, and a bunch of other bullshit including the fact that I fucked up my lower back up when I jumped and fell wrong.

When I woke up, I was still mostly out of it, but the first thing I wanted to know was how Smoke was doing. No one would tell me anything for fear of upsetting me. Just as I was gearing up to rip out my IVs and go to look for him, Julia showed up. At the sight of her, I burst into tears, and she gathered me into her arms, both of us ignoring the nurses telling us to calm down, that it wasn’t good for me to have so much excitement. I learned that Smoke suffered a pretty severe concussion, multiple burns, broken bones in his hand, and various other injuries that she didn’t go into other than to say that he was expected to make a full recovery, but they had no idea when he’d come out of his coma.

When I next surfaced from my deep sleep, I found out they had me hooked up to a morphine pump, and I freaked out then babbled about my mom shooting me up and begging them to take it out of my arm. Everyone in the room stopped moving at once and stared at me. The nurses, doctors, interns, fuckin’ everyone including Beach and Hustler gaped at me with a range of expressions I couldn’t even begin to process. Even though my mom was the one that put that shit in me, I felt ashamed. Like my blood was dirty. After about two seconds of silence Beach had flipped out and started ranting and raving.

Hulk had come over and leaned down real close, eye to eye. The medical staff didn’t stop him because they were busy dealing with Beach, and I stared up into his frosty pale green eyes set off by his smooth, dark skin. “Listen up, Swan. If you ever feel the need to do that shit again, don’t. It will take your soul, change who you are, and destroy the world around you for the feeling of false love. And I will personally hunt you down and put you in
my
version of rehab. Trust me, you don’t want that.”

My mouth, loosened by painkillers, decided to let Hulk know that wouldn’t be necessary, but thanks for the offer. “You are out of your fucking mind. Do I really look like someone who had the desire to do drugs? My mom tried to shove them on me all the time, and I turned her down because I will not ever touch any shit like that. I watched my mother turn into a monster, Hulk, a cruel, screwed up, narcissistic woman who shot her daughter up with heroin in a misguided attempt to save me from the discomfort of being raped. So trust me when I say you can kiss my lily white ass, the only man I answer to is my fiancé, and you aren’t him, so fuck off.”

The last words came out in a shout, and I soon passed out after hitting my pain pump, not giving a shit if it was morphine at that point because I was incoherent with agony.

After that, I had a brief reunion with my parents and sister before the doctors came in and ushered everyone out while they examined me. When I was shot, the bullet grazed my thigh bone and I fractured it when I landed after I jumped out the window, leaving the leg fucked up. Basically, I’d be doing rehab for a while and there was a possibility that I would walk with a limp. I hated to admit that my vanity was pricked by that, but I’d gladly hobble for the rest of my life as long as I could spend it with Smoke. They weren’t ready to let me see him yet, but I made it clear nothing would stop me from getting to his side. The docs gave in, but only as long as they were satisfied with my progress and if I behaved, then adequate arrangements would be made.

The next time I woke, my parents and Beach along with Sarah were there, and everyone was very, very careful to keep calm around me. I would have found Beach’s attempt to be mellow funny if his worry hadn’t been so evident. I’d told them what I remembered and learned that two days prior Cruz had been found dead in a garage with a bullet through the back of the head. With my new information, they figured that whoever Chief was, he probably worried about Cruz talking so he eliminated the threat. The other men I killed had either been Los Diablos members or guys that they hadn’t been able to figure out a connection to yet.

When tears came to Beach’s midnight blue eyes as he thanked me for helping to save Sarah and their unborn child as well as Smoke, I lost it and ended up crying while I hugged Beach, and my parents hugged me, and Sarah just sat there bawling.

Things hadn’t been easy these past few weeks, that was for sure, and I spent a lot of time when I was alone trying to cry away the stress. Sarah and I also spent a lot of time talking about our mother and trying to come to terms with her death. The club had taken over planning her funeral since she really didn’t have any friends or family who would come to a wake if we had one. With that in mind, we decided on a quiet ceremony and burial at a local cemetery since Austin was our new home.

Sarah was blissfully happy with Beach, and her bump was getting bigger by the day, making me think about her future with Beach and my future with Smoke.

Now, a week later as I sat beside Smoke’s bed, I gently stroked the hand that hadn’t been crushed and hummed softly. I was doped up on some pretty good non-addictive painkillers and was content to sit here for the rest of my life until he woke up. The part of my mind that hadn’t dealt with everything I had been through insisted that if I left his side he wouldn’t wake up. Even though I knew it was irrational superstition, I planned on being here as much as possible.

Across the room, Hulk and Hustler sat in all their dark and broody, good-looking glory and pretended to watch TV while I tried to pour my love into Smoke. Things were kind of weird between the club members and me because sometime in the past few days I’d somehow achieved mythical status among the members of Iron Horse. Sarah said they were telling tales about me that made me sound like a cross between a Valkyrie and Rambo. She also said she was pretty sure there were some members who would rather face Smoke than me in a fight.

I was totally flattered and couldn’t help smiling every time I thought about it.