Mustang said, “There’s pizza on the table over there. I’ll be back in a bit.” He left through the door that Julie knew led out of this maze, as she’d come in that way, and left that way to go meet Lawrence.
“I’ll get the food. Stay here.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said, and he didn’t look good. His face bore a resemblance to wet cement, and she hurried across the room to the table, picked up the whole box of pizza, and took it back to him.
“Let’s eat.”
They did, and Julie had barely finished her second piece when Frogger came into the room. She got to her feet, still chewing pepperoni and cheese, shock and fear flowing through her.
“We’re going back to Julie’s,” he said, looking between them. “I’ll stay with you, and we’ll have someone at the hospital too.” He met Lucas’s eye, though he hadn’t stood up from the couch. “Can you ride, Lover Boy?”
“I don’t think so. I need some pain meds.”
“I’ll get Fire to take you in the sidecar. I’m going to need you to call Mav and tell him we’re coming back so he can pull his eagles and moles back. I don’t need trouble tonight.”
“Fine.” Lucas held out his hand. “Give me the phone. I’ll make the call.”
Frogger glared Lucas up and then down, finally nodding to someone Julie couldn’t see. A moment later five bikers entered the room, and she only recognized Mustang.
“I’m sending a couple of guys to fix your front door,” Frogger said. “And Fire will hook the sidecar to his motorcycle. We’ll ride as soon as you make the call and get your jackets.”
Julie nodded. She wasn’t thrilled to have an outlaw biker escort back to Forbidden Lake, nor living in her house.
“Mav,” Lucas said. “Yeah, we have to come into town.”
Julie barely glanced at him, but Frogger seemed to be fixated on him. Even if there was some code between the bikers, she wouldn’t know it.
“Tonight. They’re bringing us back. I’m staying with Julie, since I can’t go back to Vice’s.” He cut his eyes to Frogger. “President wanted you to know.”
Julie wanted to run down the hall to retrieve her jacket, but Lucas was having his longest conversation ever. “No,” he said. “I’m not coming back. Frogger just wanted you to know we had to come into town so you’d pull back on the defenses.” He lowered the phone from his mouth. “How many?”
“Five,” Frogger said.
“Five,” Lucas said. “An hour. We haven’t left quite yet.” He started nodding, and Julie wished he could communicate with his club president telepathically. “Great.” He hung up and handed the phone back to Frogger. “He said he’d pull everyone back.”
“Good job.” Frogger looked at the phone and then at Lucas. “Let’s ride.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lucas hoped Maverick had gotten the message that Lucas intended to give. No, he wasn’t coming back—to the Breathers club. They needed to end this. Tonight. So while he’d told Frogger that Maverick was pulling back his people, he wasn’t.
Hopefully, he was calling the cops right now. Here in Williamsburg, and in Forbidden Lake. They needed all the reinforcements they could get.
“Go get your jackets,” Frogger said, and Lucas reached for the couch behind him. Even if he wasn’t one step away from passing out, he would’ve played up the injured bit. They needed to buy as much time as possible, so Maverick could get his guys into position.
“I’ll go get them,” Julie said, practically bounding away from him.
“I need to use the bathroom too,” he said, following her at a much slower pace. He wished he could just tell her to slow down a little bit. The timing needed to be just right, as the first team going to fix Julie’s window would go without being intercepted.
He limped after Julie, who waited for him at the corner. “Play it cool,” he whispered to her. “But we can’t leave here for about ten minutes.”
“What? Why?”
“Mav’s moving some people,” he said. “We need to give him the exact right amount of time.” He refused to look over his shoulder, but he slowed down with every step he took. “Pretend like I can barely walk. Help me.”
Julie immediately laced her arm through his, and they took one painstaking step at a time back to the room. “I’ll go to the bathroom first,” she said.
He nodded, and she continued down the hall while he went into the bedroom that felt so much like a prison cell. But if he could do this, if he could somehow get them outside at the right time, maybe no one would get hurt tonight.
Julie returned a few minutes later, and she wore panic in her eyes.
“What?” he asked, handing her the leather jacket she’d brought with her.
“Frogger is standing down at the end of the hall, glaring.”
“You’ll be okay here?” Lucas wanted to peek out the door, but that would look like they were planning something.
“I’ll have to be.”
Lucas placed a kiss on her forehead and headed for the door. He didn’t look right as he left the room, instead focusing on the bathroom just a door down. He already had his jacket on, so Frogger wouldn’t think he’d done nothing.
He did use the bathroom, but then he waited, counting all the way to sixty before washing his hands. As he turned off the water, a fist pounded on the door. “We need to go, Lover Boy.”
“Coming,” he said, but he took another few moments to dry thoroughly between each finger. When he opened the door, Frogger stood there glaring, and Julie waited in the doorway behind him.
“I’m coming,” he said. “Jeez. It’s an hour-long ride, and I can’t exactly use my right arm right now.” He pushed past Frogger. “You guys haven’t given me any pain meds all day. I’m dying here.”
“I’ll get you some on the way out.”
“Thank you.” Lucas followed Frogger down the hall, feeling a bit like a giant as he stood several inches taller than the other man. Frogger detoured into another room once they’d reached the main room, returning a moment later with the pain pills.
Lucas swallowed them dry and nodded to Frogger. He reached for Julie’s hand, and then he started praying. If there was ever a time he needed help from on high, it was right now.
Nothing eventful happened on the journey out of the center of the hospital. Lucas stumbled once, just to keep up the act of not feeling well. Julie steadied him, and Frogger just looked over his shoulder.
Fire met them near the exit. The only reason Lucas knew it was almost the exit was because the air was definitely chillier than further inside the building—and his heart was sprinting in his chest.
“There you are,” he said, clearly not pleased. “I’ve been waiting forever.”
“You should try being locked in a room all dang day,” Julie said with plenty of venom in her tone. “With nothing to eat, by the way. And this guy snores.” She hooked her thumb toward Lucas, and he wasn’t sure if he should laugh or feel offended.
Fire laughed and put his arm around Lucas’s shoulders as if they were old friends. “Good to know Lover Boy has some flaws.”
“Why are you calling him that?” Julie asked.
“He didn’t tell you?” Fire laughed. “Maybe you guys were busy in that room….”
“Shut up,” Lucas said. He braced himself as Fire laughed again, dropped his arm, and headed for the doors. He expected a bomb to go off, though there was no way for Bomber to have ridden all the way from Forbidden Lake and gotten set up in only fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty, tops.
Neither Fire nor Frogger looked around as they left the building, and they went up the stairs just outside the exit. After one flight up, which seemed to take Lucas way too long, they detoured to another set of stairs that went down.
Lucas began to sweat as they climbed down to the very bottom level of the parking garage, where only a handful of motorcycles waited.
“I’ll get the sidecar,” Fire said, and he veered right. Lucas looked all around, wishing he�
�d known to send the cops down to the lower level. Was there an exit down here too? Or would they have to go back to street level to get out?
His heart pounded much too hard, especially when Frogger said, “We can get going.”
“No,” Julie said, pure terror in her voice. “I’m not going without Lucas.”
Frogger gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well, climb on at least.”
Lucas really didn’t like watching Julie climb onto the back of some other man’s motorcycle. He hated watching her wrap her arms around Frogger’s back. A growl started way down deep in his gut, and he clenched his fists as he stared at Julie and Frogger.
Fire yelled something unintelligible, and Lucas spun that way. But the rival biker just came around the corner, muttering under his breath as he lugged the sidecar. “This thing is a death trap. Honestly, you’d be better off riding behind me.”
“I don’t think I can,” Lucas said.
Fire got the sidecar fitted to the motorcycle and said, “Get in.”
He felt like a fool—and a sardine to boot, as he had to squeeze himself into the tiny sidecar. His ribs hurt more than trying to hold himself on a bike, but he knew he couldn’t make the hour-long ride without support. And he wasn’t going to curl his arms around Fire’s back, that was for dang sure.
He refused to look at Julie, because he felt the relationship he’d built with her cracking right down the middle. He wasn’t even sure why, only that he was the cause of so much turmoil in her life. Turmoil he knew she didn’t want.
“Police,” someone yelled, and a sigh of relief moved through Lucas. A moment later, Frogger yelled something, and the next thing Lucas knew, he’d taken off on his bike—with Julie on the back of it.
“No!” Lucas yelled at the same time Fire did. He’d started to climb onto his bike too, but he wasn’t all the way on yet. He leapt off and grabbed something from along the wall, and it didn’t take Lucas long to realize he’d picked up a gun.
A gun.
Pure horror gripped Lucas’s heart at the same time gunfire rang out. “Julie!” he screamed as he launched himself out of the sidecar. He didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire, and he couldn’t have police officers getting hurt.
He jumped onto Fire’s motorcycle, twisted the key, and gunned the engine. The police officers yelled something, but listening to human words was beyond his comprehension at this time.
His only sight was on Fire, and getting him to stop firing. He yelled from somewhere primal inside him and wrenched the bike to the left, putting himself between Fire and the forming line of police officers.
The bike skidded. Fire didn’t seem to care that his line of sight was now compromised. The wall was getting very close, very fast.
Lucas gunned the engine, thinking this was it. Now or never.
They are not coming back into your town, he thought just before he used every ounce of strength he had to leap from the bike as it continued toward Fire.
A moment later, the gunfire ceased. A horrifying moment of silence ensued, right before a thunderous crash of metal and leather into cement.
Lucas rolled until he came to a rest, his chest heaving with how difficult it was to breathe. Seemingly a moment later, two officers had guns pointed at his face. “Stay down,” one commanded.
“I’m the good guy,” Lucas wheezed. “Where’s Julie?”
Neither of them answered, and Lucas turned his head, hoping and praying to see her there. He couldn’t see her. He had to find her. If there was anything he needed to do, it was make sure Julie was okay.
“There’s a guy on the fifth floor,” he said. “His name is Lawrence Paige, and he’s been held captive here for six months.”
“Lawrence Paige?” an officer repeated.
Sirens filled the sky, but Lucas managed to nod. “Lawrence Paige.” He looked for Julie again, but he couldn’t see her. “Is Julie okay?”
Pain ripped down his side, and he cried out. “I’m with Maverick Malone. You have to find Julie Paige.”
Men yelled, and he caught sight of at least a dozen black-clad men carrying weapons as they stormed into the hospital.
Things would be okay now. If he could just keep breathing. Find Julie.
“Julie,” he said again, even as blackness started to creep into his vision.
“Hey, man,” someone said, and Lucas saw a friendlier face hovering above him. “I’m Scott, a paramedic, and I’m going to help you. Can you tell me your name?”
“Scott,” Lucas murmured. The man’s face blurred, and Jordan’s replaced it. His mouth moved, but Lucas couldn’t hear him. He just needed to close his eyes. Just a little bit. Just for a moment.
He did, and it was so hard to open them again.
So he didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Julie shook all the way back to Forbidden Lake. Not because of the cold. Not because she was on the back of a motorcycle—because she wasn’t.
No, she rode in the back of an ambulance with her brother and a paramedic, who insisted on checking both of them every ten minutes. They were taken to the real hospital, and no one would tell her where Lucas was.
She was okay, and she didn’t need her heart rate monitored. Her leg hurt like nothing she’d felt before, and she refused to look at it. Her pulse skyrocketed every time she thought of running into someone she knew at the hospital. She would, she knew that already. She knew doctors and nurses in the emergency department, and if the third floor found out she was in the hospital….
She didn’t even want to think about what kind of chaos would ensue. She should pull out her phone and call Melinda. In that moment, she realized she’d lost the phone at some point.
Probably when Frogger had laid the bike down, her screams echoing through every particle of her being. The pain had come after that, after she’d scraped half of her body along the dirty cement, the weight of the bike trapping her leg between the seat and the ground.
Frogger had leapt from the bike before it had come to a complete stop, but she’d heard him snarling and swearing as the police wrestled him to the ground. He spat things at her, at Lucas, who she still hadn’t seen and didn’t know where he was.
“You’re not walking in,” the paramedic said. “So don’t even try. Either one of you.”
“But I’m fine,” Lawrence said. “I literally walked out on my own.”
“Don’t argue.”
Julie leaned her head back as the ambulance made a turn, letting her eyes drift closed. She just wanted this day to end. It seemed impossible that it was the same day, as several lifetimes had surely passed.
She stayed put as the ambulance came to a stop. She waited for the paramedic to get out before her, and she let him pull the stretcher out of the ambulance with her attached to it. Pure humiliation filled her as he pushed her into the emergency room.
A couple of nurses met them, and she let Lawrence do all the talking. For some inexplicable reason, tears filled her eyes. A complete sense of safety filled her now that she was back in Forbidden Lake, back where someone could take care of her, back where she had somewhere safe and soft to go.
Before the emergency doors closed, she heard sirens, and her pulse spiked again. Her tears fell faster, and the nurse peered at her with pure concern in her eyes. “What hurts?” she asked, walking alongside the stretcher.
Her pants had already been ruined, but they cut them further up her leg—all the way to the hip—and Julie just wanted everyone to leave her alone so she could have a good, long cry.
“Call Mom and Dad,” she said to Lawrence, hiccuping with the words. He paused outside the bay where she was wheeled, and a doctor came in.
“Let’s get this cleaned up,” he said, and Julie knew she was about to feel even more pain. Cleaning a wound wasn’t a pleasant experience, and Julie braced herself and took a few quick puffs of breath.
Then she looked at her leg.
Her skin didn’t exist anymore, and her head swam as she took in th
e mangled muscle on her calf and thigh.
Thankfully, she passed out before the doctor even laid a hand on her.
“I’m fine, Mom,” she said, maybe a little surlier than necessary. If there was someone who’d cried more than Julie over the past three days, it was Julie’s mother.
Julie had never been more grateful for her parents in her life. With Lawrence back, the family had been reunited, and as soon as Julie was deemed well enough to leave the hospital, they’d all been there for her. Charlie had brought her hamburgers when the nurses told her she could only have liquids. Lawrence had sat with her through the night when she couldn’t bear to be alone. Her mother had cried with her as Julie told the story.
The television in the corner of the room kept her up-to-date with everything that had happened, both in Forbidden Lake and Williamsburg, and her house had once again been a police scene, complete with the yellow tape.
The bikers that had left before the authorities had arrived in Williamsburg had been met by Forbidden Lake police at her house, when they’d shown up to fix her window. And the window was still broken.
Which was why she was hobbling up the front steps of her childhood home. She was considering selling her house, as she wasn’t sure she could go back there at this point. She didn’t have a phone, and she hadn’t heard from Lucas.
She knew he was in the hospital, because Melinda had come by to tell her. But she wouldn’t say how he was doing, or where he was, and Julie hadn’t been able to bring herself to go searching for him.
Part of her wondered if maybe she should just include him as part of what she was going to put behind her.
Her heart wailed for a moment, and then a sharp pain shot through her leg, reminding her of everything that had happened in that defunct hospital in Williamsburg. The pain must’ve shown on her face, because her mother said, “Charlie,” and her younger brother steadied her for the last couple of steps.
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