"If Bex isn't involved," he says, holding up a hand before I can say anything, "and Preacher's sniffing around the hospital... then she's in danger."
That makes me straighten.
"She'd tell me if something was wrong."
"Maybe," Angel says.
Or maybe she wouldn't. Is what he doesn't say. The thought creeps in without permission.
Angel exhales slowly, adding, "We have to look at every option right now."
He looks me dead in the eye as he says, "We protect our own."
Always have.
Always will.
"Stick together," he adds. "Figure this shit out before someone else does. Before things get worse."
Then he asks the only question that matters. "Are you with me?"
The answer comes easily. Automatic.
"I'm always with you, brother."
Angel nods once. But as he walks away, my mind drifts back to the road Bex just drove down. I wonder about what she keeps saying and all the things she isn't. And now I worry that someone else might be watching her, too.
CHAPTER 10
BEX - IN THE MIDDLE
The smell of blood stays with me as I finally step out the trauma bay. That metallic, antiseptic-scrubbed version that lingers after everything is over. After the doctors stop shouting and the machines go quiet and the room settles into that hollow stillness that means someone didn’t make it. I brace both hands on the nurses’ station for a second and close my eyes.
Rough shift doesn’t even begin to cover it. Three back-to-back trauma calls. Two stabilized.
One… not.
The one we lost was a biker.
You can tell immediately when they roll them in. If the cut he was wearing and the club ink wasn’t enough… The ER waiting room filling up with Devil’s Ride brothers tells me exactly what this is.
He came in with two gunshot wounds to the chest and one to the abdomen. Whoever did it wasn’t aiming to scare him. They were aiming to end him.
The doctor and I worked on him for almost two hours. Two hours of compressions, suction, blood bags, shouted instructions. Two hours of refusing to give up.
But… he died anyway.
Another club brother is gone due to the violence of this life.
I walk down the hall and keep my head down, I don’t have it in me to look at the eyes in that waiting room right now. I pull my hair back into a loose knot and grab my bag from the locker room.
My hands are still shaking. Part adrenaline. Part exhaustion.
But what I am feeling most right now is the quiet kind of grief thatsettles into your bones without you ever being able to name it, after too many nights like this. It just stays with you, layers of grief for the ones you can’t save.
I push through the staff exit and step into the cool morning air and immediately stop.
It feels like I walked out into the middle of something I don’t fully understand yet. To my right a group of brothers wearing Devils Ride cuts, with not so concealed weapons. They are all staring to my left, I track what they are looking at and instantly regret it. Five men are on motorcycles wearing black cuts with deep red stitching and a wolf's skull with a serpent coiled beneath it. There's a menacing aura coming off of the group, but it’s the man at the front of them that makes my skin crawl. With long oily dark hair, and a scar over one of his eyes… he looks every bit his reputation.