So I do. I push the needle through, and he breathes out hard.
I work the stitches even and close, the same as I’ve practiced a hundred times on fake skin in the lab.
My thumb braces against the heat of his skin. Up close, he’s older than me by a good stretch, maybe ten years.
I keep waiting for the part where I’m afraid of him. It doesn’t come.
“Who hurt you?” I ask.
Again, he doesn’t answer, but I don’t expect him to.
Instead, he puts his hand over mine and squeezes. Gently. And then he lets go, never taking his eyes off me.
The spot he touched goes on humming long after his hand is gone.
I tie off the last stitch and sit back on my heels, and that’s when his focus starts to drift, draining out of him while I’m looking right at him.
“Hey. Hey, stay with me. What’s your name?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Okay. No name, then.” I press a folded pad of gauze over the laceration and tape it down.
His head is already tipping toward his shoulder.
Shoot. He doesn’t want me calling 911, but I can’t just leave him here.
“You can’t ride home,” I say. “Do you hear me? That bike isn’t going anywhere, and neither are you, not on your own.”
He doesn’t argue. “Okay. I need a ride.”
That actually surprises me. I had about fifty rebuttals ready.
He gets an arm under himself and pushes. I get my shoulder up into his armpit and put my whole body into the lift, all one hundred and ten pounds of me against all of him, and somehow, between the two of us, he comes up off the asphalt.
We don’t manage it with any grace. He’s massive, and I’m a short girl in a sundress.
The twenty feet is more like controlled falling than walking. But we make it with his arm slung over my shoulders, and my knees buckling under him. I get the passenger door open. I half lift, half pour him into the seat. His head lolls against the headrest, and within seconds, he’s passed out.
I stand in the open door with his blood drying on my forearms.
I shut the door.
Then I get in, and I drive him to the only place a man like him could possibly belong—the Hellborn Kings’ clubhouse.
CHAPTER 2
VIPER
Pain dragsme up out of the dark. A hot line pulses along my ribs, pulling tight every time there’s movement.
It takes me a second to figure out what’s happening. I’m in a car.
My eyes fly open.
Where the fuck am I?
There’s a seatbelt across my chest, and my knees are jammed into a dashboard.