Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 264(@200wpm)___ 211(@250wpm)___ 176(@300wpm)
Run.
What Jill hadn’t expected—what she hadn’t counted on in her fucked-up, narcissistic haze—was that Kyle would run to Duke. I knew where Kyle had been the whole time. I had watched from the shadows, knowing she was safe, to an extent.
If I had known she was contracting for the military, though, I would have put a stop to it immediately because look where she had ended up.
I crumpled the letter in my fist and shoved it into my pocket before shifting my focus back to the hospital bed beside me. Kyle lay unmoving, her face pale against the sterile white sheets. The slow, steady rise and fall of her chest was the only reassurance I had.
She had been in a medically induced coma for two days now. The drugs had been stopped hours ago, but still, she hadn’t woken up. Her leg was broken in two places, three broken ribs, and internal bleeding that had been stabilized but was still a fucking risk.
The doctors had debated keeping her under longer, but the psychiatrist had warned against it. Kyle wasn’t the type to do well in a coma. She needed too much control, too much discipline. The longer she was out, the worse the psychological toll would be when she woke up.
If she woke up.
I clenched my fists.
Duke, Jagger, and I had been sitting in silence, waiting, watching her the whole time.
She had twitched a few times since they’d stopped the drugs, murmured something indistinct, but her eyes never opened. The scans showed no brain trauma, but my gut twisted with what-ifs. What if she didn’t wake up? What if she came back different? What if she didn’t come back at all?
I was about to get up—about to find the doctor and shake some goddamn answers out of him—when I heard it. A rattle of breath, followed by a groan.
I turned fast and held my breath when I saw that her eyes were open. Not only that, but they were focused on me.
I want to say I held it together. That I stayed the man I prided myself on being—the man who didn’t take shit, who didn’t hesitate to put a bullet between the eyes of the ones who deserved it. But I didn’t.
My legs gave out, and before I knew it, I was on the floor—a fucking mess. Curled up, shaking, sobbing like a damn fool, but none of it mattered. Not the way I looked, not the way my body betrayed me, not for one goddamn second. Because my baby was awake. She was alive. And she was looking right at me.
JAGGER
Seeing her pass out after turning toward us was something I would never forget. It hadn’t been dramatic—no gasp, no frantic moments of realization. She had simply looked in our direction, her eyes rolling back before she gave in to what she’d been fighting since she’d been injured. She stayed that way through every test, through the hospital transfer, through every update from the doctors.
I had braced myself for the worst. Hearing the extent of her injuries wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t great either. The internal bleeding had been stabilized, but I had seen a man bleed out a week after an injury like that. The doctors had been wrong before, so I wasn’t taking any fucking chances.
Preacher had stayed behind while Duke and I grabbed something to eat, but when we returned, something had changed. The man who had looked broken for so long, who had carried the weight of the past like a chain around his neck, now had a fire burning in his eyes.
Preacher was a complicated man—fiercely loyal, level-headed, calculated—but he was also a slow burner. I had watched him shake hands with men he later slit the throats of, had seen him joke with a trafficker, light his cigarette for him, and then snap his neck the second the guy looked away. And now, that same fire, that same cold, calculated rage, burned behind his eyes. If Jill hadn’t already been dead, I would have been counting the minutes until she was.
Duke had told me what was in the letter, and at first, I hadn’t understood—how could something so sloppily written, so obviously manipulative, have hit its mark? But then I thought about it. About Kyle at seventeen. A girl who had been abused for years, who had just found her mother’s body blown apart in front of her. That conniving bitch had known exactly what she was doing. And she had won.
For a while.
Because now Kyle was awake, and we weren’t done yet.
It was a couple hours since Kyle had opened her eyes, and although she was awake, she hadn’t spoken yet.
I finally asked the one question I had been avoiding—the one I had been too damn scared to say out loud because the answer could be worse than anything I had ever faced before. Duke and I had been sitting outside, cradling cups of that vile sludge they called coffee, both of us lost in our own heads, when the words finally slipped out of my mouth.