“No.”
“Who is her next of kin?”
“Me.”
“No, sir, I’m sorry. If your...”
“My old lady,” he said. She did a poor job of keeping her expression neutral although it was clear she was trying.
“If she needs surgery or anything she’s incapable of consenting to, we would need her next of kin to sign the consent forms. Does she have family?” He started to say “Me” again, but realized he was wasting time. They wouldn’t understand or go for it.
“Her mother and grandmother are here.”
“Okay, now about insurance...”
“She was in the Navy, so there’s probably that...but you need to hear me when I say this.” He leaned in close and she pulled back slightly and looked around, like she was making sure there were people near. “I have money, plenty of it. I want this hospital to spare no expense...none, not a dime...when it comes to her care. I will pay for all of it, in cash. I’ll pay up front. Just make sure they give her everything she needs...do you understand?”
“Yes, sir...”
“Mr. Bell?” It was the stone-faced doctor, or nurse. He stuck his head over the top of the cubby and said, “We need to take her to surgery. I need you to sign a consent form.”
“They’re not legally married...” the desk woman started.
“Are you the father of her baby?” the doctor asked.
“Yes.”
“Good enough. Come with me.” Jace didn’t even look back at the woman. He followed the doctor to the nurses’ station and a pile of forms was placed in front of him. As Jace signed, without reading them, the doctor said, “We think the hemorrhaging is coming from a condition called subchorionic hemorrhage.”
“What is that?”
“Sometimes in pregnancy, the placenta becomes slightly dislodged and causes bleeding. If it’s mild, there’s just some spotting. If it’s severe, as in more than thirty percent dislodged, it causes cramping and hemorrhage. She lost a lot of blood already. We’re giving her a transfusion now and will be transfusing her once more during surgery.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“She should be,” the doctor said, “but we won’t likely be able to save the baby. I have to go now. You can wait in the surgical waiting area and I’ll find you when we’re done.”
Two hours later and they still weren’t “done.” His chest hurt and he felt like he was having trouble expanding his lungs and sucking in a breath. His life source was too far away. He needed her, in his arms.
Jace felt his phone vibrating in his pocket and thought about ignoring it but decided any distraction might be nice. He pulled it out and saw that it was Finn. “Hey, Finn, what’s up?”
“How’s Beck?”
“I don’t know. She’s in surgery. What’s going on over there?” Finn told him what he’d overheard between the detective and the crime scene technician. Jace had felt like he was going to throw up since he saw the first signs of blood on Beck’s clothes. Now, he was sure he needed to vomit. While he and Beck were sleeping, someone had painted in human blood on the side of their house...so much blood that if it was only from one person, that person was probably dead. He’d been president of the club for less than two months and everything was already falling apart. “So, what are they going to do?”
“The crime scene people are still here. The detective left. He was going to talk to the people who were here yesterday, Ajei and Rock...he seemed a little, well, suspicious of them, maybe.”
“Really? They seemed like such nice people.”
“Yeah,” Finn said. “I guess you never know. Streak’s on his way back. He’ll be here tonight.”
“Okay, thanks, Finn.”
“No problem, boss. Can you do me a favor? I know you got a lot of other people to worry about first, but if you can, would you send me a text or something, about how Beck’s doing?”
“Of course.” Jace hung up and turned around just as the doctor was coming in the door. Beck’s mother and grandmother and stepfather stood up and they all gathered around the stone-faced doctor. He looked at Jace first and said, “There was nothing we could do to save the fetus. My guess is that it was never viable.” Jace wasn’t sure what the last part meant, but he was sure that his heart felt like it was breaking. He was holding his breath still, waiting to hear about Beck. “We did a D & C...”
“Which is?”
“It’s a procedure, dilation and curettage...the cervix is dilated and expanded and the uterine lining is scraped to remove any abnormal tissues.” Beck’s mother made a strangled little sound. Jace didn’t look at her. He was afraid if he did, he’d think about what she was thinking about...that “abnormal tissue,” or at least part of it, was his child.
“Is she okay?” Jace asked. “Beck...is she going to be okay?”
“Yes. We’ve stopped the bleeding and she’s had two units of blood. Normally a D & C is a same-day procedure, but her hemoglobin and her blood pressure are both still very low, so I’d like to keep her overnight for observation.” It was barely eight o’clock in the morning. Jace knew there were only two ways Beck wouldn’t walk out of there today. One was if she was unconscious and the other if they tied her down. But...he’d let them find that out on their own. He was dying to see her. He had to lay eyes on her and see for himself that she was okay.
“Can I see her?”
“She’s in recovery right now. The nurse will let you know when they get her into her own room.” With that, the doctor left the four of them standing there. Jace felt a hand on his arm and looked down. Beck’s grandmother had her little hand resting on his big arm and when he looked down at her she said:
“Nobody is tougher than our Rebekah.”
Jace smiled at her and nodded. “I know,” he said, his voice cracking.
“I’m sorry about the baby,” she said. With a tear sliding down her face, Beck’s mother said:
“Me too.” Her stepfather nodded. The three of them hugged, then Jace needed to get out. He escaped to the hallway and found his way outside. He walked until he was at least two hundred feet from the hospital. He found a tree and he sat down underneath it, and cried.
Chicago, Two Days Before
“Take me with you, Brandon.” Streak was buttoning his jeans and Taylor was sitting up in bed, watching him. She was naked and even though they’d spent the better part of the last week in bed, fucking, the sight of her naked still made the blood rush south from his brain. He had known her since he was ten years old and even though he’d been all over the world in the past ten years and fucked countless women, he still didn’t crave any of them the way he did her.
“I can’t do that, Taylor.”
“Bullshit. You just don’t want to. At least be a man and admit it.”
He sighed and pulled on his t-shirt. “Okay. I don’t want you to go with me.” He sat on the bed and started putting on his socks. He heard her sniffle and knew she was crying. He hated when she cried. He felt every tear that rolled down her face like a knife in his gut. He turned and reached for her and she pulled away. “Tay, please don’t cry. I hate when you cry. We’ve just beaten this dead horse for so long. You and I can’t be together, not the way you want us to be.”
“Then you don’t get to fuck me anymore.” If he had a dollar for every time she’d said that since they were sixteen, he’d be sitting pretty on an island somewhere with an expensive drink in his hand.
“Okay, baby.”
“And you don’t get to call me baby.”
“Okay.”
“Fuck you!”
He chuckled. “Okay.”
“Stop it! Stop saying okay. I hate that...I hate you!” She threw herself down on the bed and buried her face in her pillow and sobbed. He left her alone and finished putting on his boots. When he stood, she sat up and said, “They wouldn’t have to know. We’d be so far away...”
“Taylor, please listen to me. You need to move on. You need to forget about me
and find a man who can give you what you want and need. That man is not me. I won’t come back here, okay? You’re right. We need to stop this, it only hurts us both.”
She picked up her pillow and threw it at him. It hit him on the side of the face as she screamed, “I hate you!” at the top of her lungs. This was the way it went every time he left. Every time he came home on leave. Every time they spent days in seclusion and he let himself forget, for a minute, that they weren’t living in the real world. He hated this part and he knew they had to stop tearing each other apart this way.
He put his wallet in his back pocket and picked up his keys. He heard something solid hit the back of the bedroom door as he closed it behind him. He kept going, listening to her scream profanities at him as he did. He locked the front door of her apartment on his way out and avoided eye contact with the old lady who lived next door. She was peeking out her door and Tay would be lucky if she didn’t call the cops. He hoped she ran out of steam before that happened. When he got to his bike, he finally sucked in a shaky breath and let it out slowly. He hated hurting her, so fucking bad. He loved her, with his entire heart, but he’d joined the Navy and had gone halfway around the world on a fucking ship to try to get away from her and get her out of his system. That hadn’t worked...every chance he got, he came back home and fucked her. She was like a disease that he was infected with and there was no cure. There was no way to get her out of his system. He’d just have to live with it and hopefully one day his need for her would go dormant...hopefully before it killed him.
* * *
Streak was in Texas when he got Finn’s call. The news about Beck made him sick. Beck was his best friend and if anything happened to her, he’d be lost. Streak and Beck had met on his first deployment. He was assigned to work underneath her command in the infirmary. She was tough on him, but she was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, and he learned a lot from her. Beck didn’t get the kind of credit she should have for her brains, thanks to her looks. She tried hard to downplay them, but that didn’t matter, she was still drop-dead gorgeous.
Of course along the way, Streak also heard all the rumors about her sexual prowess. He didn’t think any less of her. As a matter of fact, his only complaint about it was that she never hit on him. He didn’t understand it. He thought that he was a good-looking guy, and he’d never had a problem getting any woman he wanted. But Beck never showed any sexual interest in him and he’d almost worked up his nerve to ask her why when one day she got really sick. She was in the bathroom of the infirmary, on her knees, puking up everything she’d eaten for the last forty-eight hours. He thought she might have food poisoning and he was going to go hunt down the doctor when she stopped him and said:
“I don’t have food poisoning, numb-nuts, I’m pregnant.” Once she was feeling better she told him about Bruf – no details, just that he was a biker and that she wasn’t sure she was even going to tell him. She swore Streak to secrecy and threatened to cut off his nuts if he told anyone. He believed her, but he wouldn’t have told anyone anyway. He didn’t figure it was anyone’s business. She had leave as soon as they got back and she was planning on having the baby and giving it up before her next deployment. Since Streak was the only person who knew about the baby, he became her confidante and they became good friends. For whatever reason, he started to look at her differently, more like a big sister than the hot, sexy woman he’d seen her as before. That was their only deployment together, but they’d stayed in touch through email and phone calls, and when she called him and told him she had a proposition for him, it couldn’t have come at a better time. He was out of the Navy and he knew he had to get out of Chicago and away from Taylor; he just hadn’t figured out where to go or what to do yet. Beck offered him a golden ticket.
He was pissed off about the other things happening on the property too. Jace was already running into one problem after the other trying to get the permits finalized to build the clubhouse and the shop. Streak was sure that this wasn’t going to help. He had all of that and Taylor running through his mind as he sped down I-40 back toward Arizona. He had a new family now that needed his attention, and with each mile he drove, a new resolve began to build inside of him. The past week was the last time. He wasn’t doing it again. He was tired of lying to his family. He was tired of sneaking around, he was tired of living in terror that his mother would find out...or worse yet, his stepfather. Streak sometimes wished he was the kind of person that could do what he wanted and say the hell with everyone else and what they thought, but he wasn’t like that. He worried about how what he did would affect his loved ones, and lying to his loved ones filled him with guilt. He hated it, and it had to stop. Today was the last day, the last time he had sex with his sister.
7
“So, Tommy, after you left the Highway Club around 2:30 a.m., you came straight home?” That was the third time the detective had asked that question. It would be the third time Tommy said yes...and hoped that was the truth. He still couldn’t remember anything after leaving the bar, and before he went downstairs he had searched his entire room. The clothes and boots he’d worn the night before weren’t there.
“Yes,” he said, trying hard to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Straight home and into bed, where my parents found me when they woke me up to say you were on your way. Now, can I ask you a question, Detective?”
The detective smirked but said, “Sure.”
“What made you even think of us? Is it because we’re those ‘crazy Indians’ down the road and you just assume we’d have something to do with something like this?”
“Tommy!” his mother reprimanded him. Tommy ignored her and kept his eyes on the cop.
“I was told your parents were out there yesterday, so of course I’d want to talk to them. You, Tommy, have brought this much on yourself. You’ve been warned, chased off, arrested...but you still keep going back to that property that you have no claim to.”
“My blood gives me that claim.”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t. We have to abide by the laws of this city and this state...this country. That property has been bought and sold twice in the past decade and before that, it was owned by the state of Arizona. Whatever claim you feel your ‘blood’ has is invalid and has been for over twenty years.”
Tommy opened his mouth again and this time his father said, “Tommy, please. You’re not helping.” The fact that Rock was talking to him like he was his son again and not some murderous stranger surprised Tommy enough to make him keep his mouth shut. The detective looked at his notepad and then said, “You said the last person to see you last night was the bartender at the club, Jessie...what’s her last name?”
“Nez,” Tommy told him. He was mortified that the detective was going to talk to her. She was going to think he was some kind of criminal. The date he’d finally made with her would probably be null and void. “I walked her to her truck and she left. There’s nothing she can tell you about after that.”
The detective nodded but Tommy was sure he would go talk to her anyway. He had to reach out to her first. “I think that’s all for now,” the detective said. “I have all your numbers; if I have any more questions, I’ll call.”
“Thank you, Detective,” his mother said. Tommy rolled his eyes. What was she thanking him for? He wasn’t out interviewing the rich white people who lived only five miles up the road in the other direction. It was racial profiling as far as he was concerned. He managed to continue to keep his mouth shut, however, while his parents showed the detective out. Once he was gone Rock said:
“I’m sorry.”
Tommy stared at his father for a few seconds and then said,
“For?”
“For accusing you. While that detective was talking, I kept running over in my head how sick someone would have to be to do what was done to Jace and Beck, and the person who all of that blood belongs to. You and I might not always see eye to eye, but you’re my son, and I can feel in my heart that the
re is no way my son would do something like that. So, I apologize for my accusations and my emotions getting out of hand.”
“Thank you,” Tommy said. Ajei was looking at her husband like her heart might burst wide open. Tommy waffled between being happy that he had parents who taught him true love was forever, and being like a jealous child. He sometimes felt like they loved each other too much to let him in. “I’m going to go take a shower and then I’ll take over here if you two have things to do today.” He started to walk away and Ajei said:
“We love you, son.”
Tommy stopped. He loved them too, but the words were hard for him. When he was little sometimes he’d lie in his bed at night, looking out the windows at the stars, and all he wanted to hear was his mother’s voice, telling him that she loved him. But most of those nights she wasn’t there. Stiffly he said, “I love you too.”
Once he was upstairs in his room, he sent a text to the number Jessie had put in his phone the night before. “The police are going to call you to ask you some questions about me. I’m sorry, but please know I had nothing to do with what they’re investigating. I can’t wait for Friday night.”
With a sigh and a prayer, he sent it and then he did another sweep of everything in his room, trying to find the clothes and boots. He shook out his blankets and went through all of his drawers...they just weren’t there. What the fuck did he do last night?
* * *
Finn was almost finished repainting the side of the house when he heard the sound of the Harley. It was dark so all he could see was a headlamp until Streak was close to the house. “Hey, why are you painting in the dark?”
“Because the cops didn’t release the ‘crime scene’ until the sun was going down. Beck will be home in the morning. I don’t want her to have to look at this shit again.”
Rise of the Phoenix: Phoenix Skulls Motorcycle Club: (Phoenix Skulls MC Romance Book 1) Page 5
