Inked

by Drew Elyse

  “Lee, the lights,” Kate’s voice said softly. There was a shuffle and footsteps, and then the brightness that was glaring even behind my eyelids flicked off.

  Trying again, I looked into the room, letting my head lull to the side where I’d heard her. There, looking ragged as he straightened toward me in a chair, was Liam.

  He stared at me while I attempted to come up with something witty to say to diffuse the explosion I saw waiting to happen behind his eyes. With the splitting headache that still plagued me, all I managed to get was, “What’s up?”

  His head dropped and the heels of his palms pressed against his eyes. We both stayed that way for a long time before Kate came back to his side.

  “I told a nurse you’re awake, so they’ll have someone in to check on you in a minute,” she informed me, her voice even. I figured it was as much for Liam’s sake as mine.

  She sat on the arm of his chair, snaking an arm around his back. Seeing that, even in the state I was in, felt good. Liam had been the one supporting her since their relationship started, being her strength while she dealt with her past. Knowing she could offer the same was nice, even if I wished we all weren’t here—myself especially.

  With her touch, Liam brought his attention back up to me. “Are you okay?”

  No. Not at all.

  “Been better,” I replied, rasping through my sore throat. I needed water.

  Catching that, he leaned over and grabbed an untouched water bottle from the window sill. He came in close, helping me support my head when I floundered trying to lift it myself.

  “We should wait for the nurse,” Kate chimed in, carefully. “They might not want her to have any yet.”

  “Don’t care,” Liam shot back. There was an edge to his voice I wasn’t used to. He was usually the easy-going one.

  With his hand supporting my head almost entirely, he helped me take small sips of the water. It hurt to move that way, even with his help, but the water felt so good I didn’t care. When I was done, I turned my head away a bit and he understood. Carefully, he lowered me back onto the pillows and I did my best to disguise my wince from the way my body protested. If the way his jaw tightened was any indication, I didn’t quite cover it.

  “What time is it?” I rasped.

  Only brooding silence came from Liam, so Kate spoke up. “Just after five.”

  It’d been around midnight when I’d gotten home and…

  I tensed, that fear taking hold of me again. Flashes of what happened started to creep up, and I worried the water was going to come back up. Distantly, I could feel the trembling, but I couldn’t stop it.

  “Fuck,” I heard Liam mutter, but it was only under that other voice that kept repeating himself.

  A hand grabbed mine and I cried out.

  I focused on it, trying to get away, and stopped.

  It was the tattoos. I knew those. Recognized Carson’s work anywhere. Forcing aside the panic, I looked up into Liam’s ravaged face.

  Liam, my friend. He wouldn’t hurt me.

  I squeezed back with what strength I could muster, needing to feel that this was real, not some pain-induced illusion.

  “I’m right here, Jess,” Liam promised. “You’re good. And you got half a fucking MC out there making sure you’re gonna stay that way. Whoever the fuck did this, he won’t get anywhere near you again. And when we find him, he’s going to wish he’d never laid a finger on you.”

  Maybe it was selfish, but I breathed easier knowing that. It wasn’t a surprise the club knew. Liam was my emergency contact, had been since Carson retired and started traveling more. But the fact that Kate was at his side meant someone was watching Owen. Since Owen’s uncle was a patched-in Disciple, it was almost certainly someone in the club handling that task. Liam also would not have hesitated to call Sketch and fill him in. And that was all it would take for them to all mobilize.

  I may not have been an old lady or blood, but the Disciples saw me as part of the family anyway, and they were a family you did not fuck with.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of Liam’s “when we find him” as if he were part of the club and involved in their brand of justice, but I didn’t have the energy to tackle that now. I just let the knowledge that I wasn’t alone comfort me, for however long it would.

  The nurse had come and gone, followed closely by the doctor who laid it all out for me.

  Three broken ribs, five stitches in my left cheek, seven in a gash that opened up on my leg, a sprained ankle, a torn ligament in my wrist, a concussion, and a shit ton of bruising. Luckily, there was no evidence of anything more severe internally, which meant I didn’t have to stay cooped up in the hospital. There was just a whole host of symptoms I had to watch for, any of which were grounds to come immediately back in, as well as sternly stressed instructions for how to care for the injuries I had.

  “I don’t like it,” Liam groused after she left, explaining she’d get my discharge underway and someone would be in to handle that in a while.

  Feeling at least a bit better since my nurse, a brusque but nice guy named Jim, gave me another dose of painkillers, I shook my head at him. “There’s nothing they can do here but let me rest. I’d rather not get that bill from my insurance just to sleep on this awful thing.” I jabbed at the joke of a mattress beneath me with my good arm.

  Kate had left to go fill in the apparent army of people waiting for an update, leaving me to deal with him and his unwavering bad mood myself.

  “Liam—”

  “Don’t,” he warned, firm but not harsh. “I get it. This is you coping right now, but I can’t make jokes. I don’t have that in me. When I got that call that you were being brought in, that you weren’t responsive…” He shook his head.

  We both let that hang there. He knew I understood how afraid he’d been, but also that it couldn’t touch what I’d been feeling, what I was still feeling if I let the lid lift on the little box I’d shove those emotions into for now.

  The tension was broken by a knock at the door, followed by a man stepping through. A man I recognized, even though he now donned a police uniform.

  It was the Texan from Jackson’s apartment.

  “Ms. Holland, I hate to bother you. I’m Officer Andrews, I was wondering if you were up to answering some questions about what happened last night.”

  I wasn’t, as in really, really wasn’t. But I knew I’d have to eventually. Even as he stood there patiently waiting, he didn’t seem to recognize me, not that I would have made much of an impression on him.

  “Um, yeah. Sure.”

  Liam grabbed my hand. “You sure? It can wait if you need to.”

  I nodded at him. “Just don’t go?”

  He didn’t respond, even though it’d come out as a question. He just held my hand while Officer Andrews came in and stood near the foot of the bed. He started by explaining that one of my neighbors had called 911 when they heard me screaming, going quickly over what had transpired, including verifying that the officers at the scene had broken in at my request.

  “We can stop at any time, ma’am,” he assured me, and I wondered if it was already obvious how much this was wearing on me. “But I would like if we could start by you telling me what all you can remember about what happened.”

  I sighed. I figured that would be the way of this, but answering a slew of questions seemed a lot easier. I could still keep it all compartmentalized that way. This, telling the whole story, was going to require opening it all up.

  Even though that sounded terrible, I sucked it up and did it. I told him everything from leaving the bar, to the issue with the door, leaving the light off, every detail I could remember. I recounted every word I remembered him saying, and tried to make that strange, desperate edge to his speech clear. Through it all, Liam held on to me, giving me an anchor. I felt his hand flex again and again as he heard what happened, but he kept it together.

  Officer Andrews interjected just a few times for clarifications, but mostly let m
e talk. When I finally caught up to the officers entering my apartment, he nodded solemnly. “Thank you. I know that wasn’t easy, but every detail can help us figure out who did this.”

  I didn’t say anything. Without a direct question to answer, I wasn’t sure I could after that. But instead of jumping in searching for more, he set the pad he was taking notes on down.

  “I don’t want to scare you more than I know this already has, but I have some concerns about what you’re describing.”

  My throat got tight. Luckily, Liam asked the question for me, “What does that mean?”

  When he answered, he kept his attention on me. “For one thing, our officers on scene didn’t notice anything missing. We’ll need you to take a closer look to see if anything was taken, but the obvious items—TV, purse, computer—were all accounted for and in plain sight. Between that and his comments about watching for your car, I’m led to believe that this wasn’t something random like a robbery that you interrupted.”

  Bile crept up my throat. He was right.

  “You shouldn’t be here. I was watching. Your car didn’t come. I would have seen it.”

  He would have seen it. But in the apartment lot, he couldn’t have known which apartment someone was headed to when they parked.

  Unless he already knew.

  “Have you experienced anything out of the ordinary before this occurred? Notes or calls you don’t know the source of? Someone around frequently that made you uncomfortable? Anything like that?”

  Suddenly it all came back, all of the moments when it felt like there were eyes on me. All those times I’d looked over my shoulder, or out the shop windows. All the times I told myself I was being crazy.

  But what if I wasn’t?

  What if someone had actually been there the whole time?

  And I understood where he was going with this.

  “I would have seen it.”

  Because he’d been watching, and not just last night.

  Chapter Seven

  Jess

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  I sighed as Kate tried to cut in with a warning, “Lee.”

  “Gypsy, no,” he responded to her. “I’m not letting her go back to that apartment.”

  Nothing like being a fully grown adult and have people talk about you like you were a child.

  “Excuse me, did you just say you wouldn’t let me?” I snapped.

  My discharge was in process, Jim the nurse, due back any time with the news that I was free to go. I still felt like death warmed over, but there was no denying the power of the drugs they had me on. They gave me the relief I needed to not simply go along with Liam’s proclamations about what was going to happen now.

  According to him, I was going to leave with him and Kate, and go up to stay with them—though he didn’t technically live there. Kate lived in a big ass farmhouse that belonged to the Disciples, along with the club president and his wife, Doc, and some nights Daz—Kate’s late husband’s brother—and his woman, Avery, when they weren’t at her house. I was opposed to this plan for several reasons. Partly, I knew I’d already bought the club being involved, but I didn’t need to be staying on club property getting mother-henned to death by all of them the whole time. Partly because even if it was just Kate’s house, I’d still be getting that same treatment from at least her and Liam. But mostly, there was a reason that I knew Liam hadn’t considered.

  “What about Owen?”

  “What about him?” Liam shot back. This wasn’t disregard for his girlfriend’s son. Not at all. Liam loved Owen as much as his mother. This was him focusing too much on my predicament to see the full picture.

  “I know I haven’t looked in a mirror yet, but I can guess it isn’t pretty. How exactly do you plan on explaining that to a six-year-old in a way that won’t scare the shit out of him?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that right away. I could see him running through potential ones, though I knew already there were no good ones to be had. It wasn’t even like we could lie and say I was in an accident, not when it had been a car accident that he and Kate were also in that took his father from them. He was too old now to just accept some brush off of just saying I got hurt without explanation. And telling him any form of the truth was too much.

  “Fine,” Liam finally spoke again. “You’ll stay with me at my place.”

  As if I hadn’t already thought of that.

  “Am I going to be staying there alone?”

  “Of course not.” His vehemence made it clear he’d completely missed my point with that one. I wasn’t fishing to be watched out for.

  Even if I wasn’t sure I was up to being alone.

  “You’ve got one bedroom, a couch that is not good for sleeping on, and Owen still factors, unless you’re going to be seeing a lot less of each other.” I purposefully looked to Kate, not to get her to fight my side, but as a reminder for Liam.

  He turned to look at her, too. If I could see his face from my angle, I’d guess it would be apologetic. “We’ll be fine. You come first right now.”

  “A. I don’t want you to do that. B. I know you don’t want to either. And C. It’s not fair to Owen if you go from being around all the time to all but disappearing.”

  He rubbed at his face, clearly losing patience with me. “Fine. Then you stay with Sketch. He already fought me on this.”

  “Are you forgetting they have kids, too?”

  Liam, who was usually one of the most relaxed people I knew, actually growled in frustration. “Carson, then.”

  “Nope. Not happening. I love the man, but he and Jean have four cats and I’m allergic. I don’t even go in that house if I can avoid it.”

  “Park,” Liam listed off next.

  Parker—or Park—was one of the artists at Sailor’s Grave, the newest member of the team. He didn’t know the whole story, but that was actually my doing. He’d been heavily into graffiti, and I’d seen some of his work not long after I started working for Carson and pointed it out. From there, Carson had gone on a one-man mission to find the artist behind it. What he found was a street kid who needed an outlet. Carson gave him a new one in tattooing.

  Like everyone that stuck around at Sailor’s Grave, he’d become part of the family. However, he still mostly kept to himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t like everyone, just that he was used to being more isolated and that was his comfort zone. Since I flat out refused to let him be off in the corner by himself, I knew him better than most. Even to the tune of actually having been to his apartment, something I wasn’t sure any of our other coworkers had.

  “Are you just offering up other people’s places now?”

  “No. He went in to the shop this morning and you weren’t there. He called you, then Sketch when you didn’t answer because he said you’d told him you’d be in. When he heard, he dropped everything and came down here. He offered up his place on his own.”

  I paused, actually mulling that over.

  Park had a two bedroom. He’d told me he had initially planned to get a roommate, but he got a great reputation for his work faster than he thought. He hadn’t needed help paying the rent, and he was used to being by himself. Instead, that second room had been covered in tarps so he could paint in there without wrecking anything. I felt bad at the prospect of taking that away from him, but then I thought about going back to my own apartment, about trying to sleep there knowing he knew I was there, that he had somehow gotten in.

  “Okay, I’ll stay with him.”

  For a moment, I thought Liam was going to get pissy about the fact that I would stay with Park, but not him. Another boon of that scenario was that Park had a lot of shit in his past he didn’t want to talk about, so he respected other people’s privacy. Liam was a great guy that only ever wanted to support people that mattered to him, but since he was open about most everything, his support didn’t involve silence. Even just when I’d been pissy about Jackson in the months we’d flirted and whatever, Liam had been
all over my case about talking about what was wrong.

  This, what happened, I didn’t want to talk about. I’d done that as much as I was willing with Officer Andrews only because I wanted the fucker caught if there was any chance of that. With that part out of the way, I was done talking about it. Or thinking about it if I could manage it.

  Though the way everything hurt if I so much as shifted, I figured that last part was a long shot. Even if I was lucky enough to not have scars from any of this, the physical reminders would at least be around for a while.

  Liam had sent Park in once I’d agreed to stay with him. Luckily, like I’d hoped, he hadn’t said much. After surprising me by coming in, getting close enough to cup my good cheek, and lightly kissing my head, he’d just sat down and waited with me.

  “I don’t have to stay with you, you know,” I offered.

  “If you’d tried to go back to your own place, I’d have shown up and camped out on your couch indefinitely,” he replied blandly.

  “Instead, I’ll be on yours.” I tried to make the deflection from the fact that I knew I couldn’t be back in my own apartment sound like a joke. Even as we waited there, Kate was corralling Ember—and I’m sure more of the Savage Disciples women—into going to my place and packing up what I’d need. I hadn’t even tried suggesting I’d do it myself, because I really wasn’t sure I was capable.

  If Park noticed, though I wasn’t sure how he couldn’t, he didn’t let on. He just said, “No, I will be. You need to heal. You take the bed. We’ll sort out a bed for the second room when you’re a little more mobile.”

  I didn’t comment on the fact that it sounded like he was planning on having me around for quite a while with that. “I can’t take your bed.”

  “I’ve slept through worse than being on a couch. Besides, I got a comfortable one. I fall asleep on it all the time.”

  It wasn’t something he gave away openly, but I knew that Park had either been homeless or nearly so. I could imagine he’d definitely slept in worse conditions. That didn’t make me feel any better about taking his bed, or the deflection there at the end that was painfully obvious to someone that’d been throwing around a few of her own today.