"How the fuck can you even say that?" she snarled, dragging her hand away from mine. "How can you even think that when, tonight, I'd have been there if it wasn't for Laura making a last minute appointment and me fitting her in?"
"Because I'll kill to keep you safe, and I'll die before I let anything happen to you."
"This isn't some romance novel, Cruz. This is real life. We bleed. We die. We cease to exist. This isn't Snow White. I'm not going to get hit up in a shooting only to wait for you to kiss me to wake me up.
"Once I'm gone, I'm gone, and I've—"
"You think I don't know that?" I snarled back. "What? You reckon that I believe we're living in some kind of fairy tale? No, Indy, I don't think that. I know reality bites, but I'd prefer for reality to bite with you at my fucking side than with you back in New Orleans and me stuck up here, wishing I was with you, and you wishing you were with me.
“Separated because you're too chicken shit to realize that we don't choose our time. We don't get to select an expiration date, Indy.
"One thing I've learned along the way, is that it's our day to die when someone else chooses it."
"Didn't think you believed in God," she muttered.
"I don't. I believe in something though. I have to. Or it'd be too fucking depressing to wake up every morning and think that humans are behind all the shit that goes down on a daily basis.
"It's nicer to think that someone, something, some entity, be it a God or fate or fucking... whatever... to be behind it."
"Bullshit. Never heard of free will? Every human does exactly what they want to do because they want to do it. Simple as that."
"Yeah, well, you choose to think that and I can think differently. But all I'm saying is that, whether you're right or I am, I don't want to live in this fucked up world without you."
Her eyes met mine. "You're crazy to say that. You barely know me."
I laughed. "Wow, you're full of bullshit today. I think you should be grateful that I'm not in full working order, because if I was, your ass would be bright pink for that outright lie."
Her mouth pursed into a tight rosette. "I don't need to listen to this shit."
"No, you don't, and yet you're still here. Hovering, not walking away because you and I both know that what we have is something special. Maybe we can't put words to it, maybe we shouldn't, not yet, so we won't, not until both of us are ready, but I'm telling you, waking up to this cluster fuck was a damn sight more bearable knowing that you were here, waiting on me to open my eyes."
My words had her gulping, and she rasped, "You say that like I get to be at your side. Like I can stand with you. But I've got a pussy, Cruz, so there's always shit you're going to keep from me. You're always going to keep things separate because that's how the club works.
“How does that seem fair? When you demand everything from me, my submission, my trust, my heart, and all without me knowing what kind of danger you're dragging me into?" She shook her head. "I need to get out of here. I need to get some sleep."
Knowing I was losing her, I rasped, "Indy, I won't order you to do anything, not like this, not with what's at stake, but I'm telling you, if you run... I will find you."
Her gaze caught mine. "Guess we'll have to see if you're good for your word, then, won't we?"
My nostrils flared at the challenge, and just when she started to move the curtain aside, someone, or something, blocked her.
I'd admit, my heart started racing at the prospect of her running off. Goddamn oxygen tanks and patches and tubes on my body aside, I'd be going after her whether she fucking liked it or not.
But I didn't have to.
Nyx was there.
Had he been listening?
He stared down at his sister, his face smoke-covered, black and shiny with sweat and ash, and even as he hauled her into his arms, holding her tightly, I feared the worst.
Demonstrative wasn't exactly a word I'd use to describe Indy on the regular. With her brother, even less so. That Nyx was hugging her had my stomach twisting and I started coughing, unable to stop myself as Indy ground out, "What's happening, Nyx? What's happening?"
"It's a fucking miracle," he rumbled, "but somehow, the old bastard is going to live."
She sagged in his arms, and though the words comforted the pair of them, I didn't understand. Who was the 'old bastard?'
I'd have asked if I wasn't too busy coughing up my fucking guts, but, also, I was too goddamn grateful.
Whatever, or whoever, Nyx referred to, it made her shoulders drop with defeat.
For the moment, she'd stay put.
But I had no way of knowing how long that moment would last, which meant I needed to get my ass out of this bed. Stat.
Eighteen
Lodestar
"Care to share?"
I squinted at Mav, then rolled my eyes when I saw him and Ghost sitting together on his wheelchair.
He wasn't so dirty which made sense, because I knew he'd been upstairs in the attic working on something that he hadn't seen fit to key me in on—and if I sounded pissed, that was because I was.
I hated being kept in the dark.
Sure, I kept him in the dark about plenty of shit, but Mav didn't work that way.
Usually.
Which meant it was family-oriented, which meant he didn't consider me family.
Surprise, surprise, that hurt.
Stupid of me, sure, but it did, and I couldn't help my feelings.
So, if I was pouting a little as I watched a dirt-streaked Ghost sleeping on his lap, tucked into him like she was a little girl sitting on her grandma's knee—if that grandma just happened to weigh two hundred pounds of muscle soaking wet and looked like a walking Adonis, that is.
It was only fair that Maverick didn't have any siblings, because if he did, there'd be some weird incest shit going down.
Maverick was that beautiful.
Once upon a time, I'd owned a piece of that beauty. His smile had shone for me. But we were too similar, too alike. You couldn't have two alphas in a relationship, not without going to war all the fucking time, and with our day job, we didn't need the battles to be going down in the few hours we had to ourselves.
So we'd split, and to this day, I wasn't sure if that was the worst decision I'd ever made in my life or the bravest.
Maverick would have kept me safe.
I knew that, and I'd known it before I'd even seen him with Ghost.
It was a sweet kind of torture watching them together. One that made me happy for him, even as I mourned what I'd never have.
"I know I’m pretty," he said, wading into my thoughts, "but I did ask you a question."
"You did? Mustn't have heard it."
He snorted. "I call bullshit."
"You can call it whatever you want," I told him sweetly, humming at his annoyed grunt. "If you ask again, nicely, I might answer though."
That had him rolling his eyes, which, in turn, had me hiding a smile.
"There a reason they found you in the back yard?"
I winced, realizing that I'd been flung from the roof and into the yard beyond.
Shit.
No wonder my back was hurting.
"Did I damage my back?"
"No. Broken leg, though. Bruised hip. Couple of fractures on your ribs."
"Jesus, I was lucky."
"We're taught how to land," he disregarded, "but I wanna know how you had someplace to land from. I mean, it's not like we were doing parachute maneuvers, Star."
I bit my lip at his statement, not the words, but at his label for me.
Lodestar was like my real name now. I responded to it much quicker than I did the one I'd been given at birth, but he'd always abbreviated it, and it always tightened the binds between us when he did.
Whether he knew it or not.
With that one comment, he was reminding us both of what we'd been through together, of the friendship we'd had that had lasted for over a decade, of the animosity between u
s when we fought, of the times we'd fucked, of the times we'd made love.
Whenever he called me Star, he was twisting us back in time, and he didn't even know it.
But then, his regrets were different than mine.
I'd never really gotten over him before I'd been crash-landed into hell. Mav had fallen for Dominic, and when I said fallen, I meant worse than I had tonight.
Mav had come out of that relationship a thousand times more devastated than the mere injuries of a broken leg, ribs, and bruised hips.
I'd thought Nic had broken him all over.
From what I'd heard at the clubhouse, he had.
Until Ghost.
"Is she okay?” I asked, meaning it, caring about her when I cared about few people in this world. I cared that she was well because he needed her to be, and I needed that, because I loved him. But I wasn't good for him, and she was. This little mouse who'd earned her own nickname because of the damage done to her voice when she was held captive by a bunch of sociopathic gazillionaires.
This tiny woman who, somehow, held a brick shithouse’s sanity in her grasp.
"She's fine. Thank fuck," he rasped, peering down at her with a loving smile on his face.
It hurt, but it was good to see too.
I wanted this for him.
I wanted him to be happy.
He deserved it.
Me, not so much.
"I'm glad. No broken bones?"
"No. They were outside, all the Old Ladies were, but—" He shook his head. "I've never seen anything like it on home soil. Was more bang than blast, but still set fire to a ton of shit. Figure that’s the seventies’ building code to blame though.”
Because I could tell he was being cautious on purpose—either to piss me off or because he didn't know the full truth—I muttered, "I'll tell you what I know if you tell me what you know."
His smirk was my first clue to the fact that I'd fallen hook, line, and sinker for his bullshit.
Those goddamn eyes of his.
Jesus.
He should wear sunglasses to protect womanhood of all ages.
Prick.
“First off, where’s Katina?”
“With Lily and Link.” His eyes softened a touch at me though. It always seemed to surprise him that I cared for the kid like she were my own. Which, to me, she was. "Why were you on the roof?" he repeated his earlier question, and I got it.
In the middle of a party neither of us had been bothered about attending, why the hell had I decided to go on the roof? I pursed my lips, deciding not to prevaricate.
"Intel."
"What kind of intel?"
"You know I have a lot of chatter streaming in at all times."
In this instance, it came from an unlikely source. That fucker, aCooooig.
Seeing a photo of Cruz head for the house of a known FBI agent had started me down the rabbit hole, especially after I knew what he'd witnessed me do. Then, I'd done some digging, and what I'd discovered saved his ass from me, because he'd covered up more murders for the club than Ted Bundy, but along the way, I'd learned Rex was using him as a 'double agent.'
Of course, I'd only figured that out thanks to the bug I had in his office and the tracking device on his phone.
Sure as hell couldn't tell Mav that, now could I?
Anyway, looking into Cruz had led me to his mother, who'd led me to what I'd been looking for since I'd taken back my freedom.
The New World Sparrows.
NWS.
AKA, bunch of fuckers.
"I do, and I'm going to be hella pissed if you heard chatter that indicated there was about to be a strike on the compound."
Jarred from my thoughts, I shrugged. "Chatter can be meaningless. I'm sure your brothers would have just loved me if I'd told you to cancel the fucking party because of some bullshit I might have heard on channels that aren't exactly reliable."
He pursed his lips in disapproval. "Since when don't you share intel that might be pertinent, Lodestar?"
I winced. “Ouch. I’m Lodestar again?"
"Yeah. You let my people down. We could have prevented all this."
Maybe he was right, maybe he wasn't.
There was no way of knowing.
"I was up there to protect the clubhouse. You know I'm better than most of the guys in the club with a rifle. I'm worth ten of your best shooter."
"What with Lancaster and then the shit with Dog, Jesus, Lodestar, how the fuck do you think the brothers will trust you if you keep pulling stunts like this?
"I get that you're working to your own rules, and I understand that you have plans that don't include the club and you're keeping them to yourself, but we brought you in, we sheltered you, and housed you, and we did so with no questions asked.
"How the fuck do you repay that? By getting news we're under threat and not saying a word."
Anger hit me, because I knew he was right, but, he was making out that I had a say in anything that went down around me.
"Look, I get why you're mad, but you're acting as if I took Katina and lit out of the place before the attack happened. I did nothing to save my ass over yours, and you know that's true because Katina was tucked up in bed, Mav." I refused to plead with him, but I was definitely speaking with more diplomacy than he was used to with me. "I heard that there might be a hit. I never imagined there'd be a goddamn bomb. I thought if I sat on the roof, made a nest, I'd find out if the chatter was BS.
"These lines aren't accurate," I urged him to believe. Christ, nothing about the New World Sparrows was. "Last week, they said that Kennedy was fucking alive and walking around at a Presidential rally, for fuck's sake.
"I was acting on gut instinct and thought that my being there was a preventative measure in a worst case scenario."
The stubborn set of his jaw told me he didn't want to listen, and his hands moved down to grab the wheels so he could drag his ass out of the ER cubicle.
But, as he did, Ghost murmured, "Maverick, she did what she thought was right."
His jaw tensed, and he peered down at her with such a softness in his gaze that tears pricked my eyes.
He'd never looked at me like that, though, and in all honesty, I'd never wanted him to.
I wasn't soft.
I was hard.
And that was before what had gone down in fucking Tel Aviv.
I cleared my throat and rasped, "I really did, Mav. I'd never want to hurt you or the MC. You have to know that."
His nostrils flared, but he spat, "I want to know everything. What you heard online, what you saw, what went down."
I winced. "I didn't see much. There was another gun there for sure, and I might have hit him, but the bomb struck after I took my shot.
"It was a quiet night aside from the noise of the party. Out of nowhere, this biker appeared, and I thought he might be the threat until I heard one of the Old Ladies just below me say who it was."
"Stone," Ghost uttered softly. "She identified him first of all."
I shrugged which had the pounding in my head starting up for real. "It could be, I don't really remember."
"If Ghost says it was Stone, then it was Stone." His eyes were mean as he peered at me, telling me, silently, that her word meant more to him than mine did.
I scowled at that. "Since when did you become such a prick?"
"Since my home just got bombed, and half my fucking MC looks like they've been in a fistfight with Smokey the goddamn Bear."
I hissed under my breath, because I couldn't exactly argue with that, could I?
So, hunching my shoulders, which did interesting things to my back as it pulled on my hip, which stung. Badly. And when I said badly, well, I'd been through so much in my life that I had a very high tolerance to pain.
Torture did that to a girl. So when I said this ached, it did.
Shit.
Hissing again, I winced as I processed the pain, letting it flow out of me, before, in a low and raspy voice, I said, "After I heard Bear'
s name, I saw a laser light on his chest before it drifted over to his bike.
“I followed the sights and took my shot, but the next thing I knew, the place was lit up like a goddamn firework."
Ghost whispered, "How is he still alive?"
My eyes widened at that. "Jesus. He is?"
Mav's mouth was tight as he nodded. "He is. Just. Lost some limbs, but he's alive."
"Fuck, it's like being back in Baghdad."
The shadows in his eyes told me he agreed even if he didn't say a word.
"Was there a Prospect on the gate?" Ghost asked, her face tilting up as she asked Maverick.
"There should have been. I'd have to ask Sin who though."
"I didn’t hear the gates open," I denied, "so maybe the gates were open already?”
“So someone let in the other shooter and didn’t close the gates for them to make their escape?"
"You own most of the terrain around you, but there's no way of securing that much territory," I countered. "You and I both know that, especially when it boils down to a sniper. Maybe they snuck onto your land.”
"Would have to be a damn good sniper at that," he reasoned. "I know Whistler wouldn't do it, Eagle Eyes is still injured after that cluster fuck with the Italians, and that other guy, I can't remember his name, but their sharpshooter who almost took out Steel… he's no more."
I shook my head. "That's just it, they're the illegal snipers we know, Mav, but this goes so much deeper."
He frowned at me. "Explain."
I licked my lips. "You'll think I'm crazy." Hell, I'd think I was crazy too but I'd lived it. I'd been living this for years. This insanity was my reality, and it was why I trusted no one.
Because when the authorities were the ones who'd made you a sex slave. When people high up in the ranks, who vowed to keep the men and women in their command safe, sold you out?
Who the fuck could you trust?
But Maverick was right.
He'd sheltered me and Katina without much need for recompense, nothing outside of information and that was how we rolled anyway. I hadn't paid for food or lodging or electricity since I'd arrived at the compound, and I wouldn't until I left.
They'd kept me and Katina safe, when I’d brought danger to their door.
Cruz : A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 5) Page 25
