by Anne Malcom
The entire room looked at Lucky. Gaped at him.
As did Gage. Because the motherfucker was right. Lauren was his fucking lighthouse.
“All right, I’m callin’ Nicholas Sparks and tellin’ him he’s outta the job, because you’re gonna be killing the romance world if you keep talkin’ about fucking lighthouses,” Brock said.
But he stopped talking about lighthouses.
Because Amy burst into the room, and the look on her face had every single man standing and drawing their pieces.
“You don’t need them,” she said, eyes on the guns, her voice quiet, shaking. “But Gage….”
She didn’t finish speaking before Gage sprinted past her and into the silent living room.
As silent as a fucking tomb.
Which it was.
Since in the middle of it, Lily was doing CPR on Lauren’s fucking prone body.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything, sir, since you’re not family.”
Gage’s fists tightened beside him and his skin crawled with the need for a fix. The need for blood. Violence. His mind craved something, anything to take the edge off.
“I’m afraid I’m gonna have to rip one of your fuckin’ arms off if you don’t tell me exactly what I need to know in the next thirty seconds,” Gage bit out, voice even, words a promise.
He wouldn’t fuckin’ hesitate to put the doctor through the glass doors directly in front of them. The only thing giving him pause, keeping the little fuck alive, was the possible fact that Lauren might need the doctor.
The fuck in the white coat paled and tried to step back, eyes darting around for the security they’d taken care of on arrival. They’d done this shit before. Too many fucking times.
“Not so fast, Doc,” Brock said, grinning as he stood behind the doctor, hindering his escape. His grin was more a baring of teeth, the rest of his brothers taut and wired, Gage expected out of concern for another woman wrapped up in this shit. A woman his wife had become close with, and the fucker would rip the stars from the sky if they were just a smidge too bright for Amy. So he was about to do anything he could to make sure she wouldn’t be burying her new friend.
That they wouldn’t be burying Gage’s woman.
His insides coiled and shredded with the mere thought of that. The paralyzing terror that came with the thought of having to stand while another precious thing in his world—the last he’d ever had—was covered with dirt.
No, it was simple. He wouldn’t be standing if that happened.
He’d be burying the person responsible.
He’d be covered in their blood and pain.
Then he’d plunge a needle into his vein, pump so much junk into his blood that it wrenched him down into the grave.
He wouldn’t survive losing her.
That much was certain.
Which was the rest of the reason that Brock wasn’t letting the doctor go anywhere. Why both Bull and Cade flanked Gage, Ranger and Lucky close by. Because every single brother knew what Gage was capable of. Knew how unhinged he was in the best of circumstances.
This was not the best of circumstances. This was the worst of them.
So they knew Gage might very well burn this fucking building to the ground if shit went any further south.
But was there any further south than Hell?
Gage didn’t think so.
His brothers were there to make sure the doctor gave them answers.
But they were also there to lock Gage down if he uttered a death sentence.
“I’d start thinking of us as family right about now,” Brock continued, clapping the doctor on the shoulder. “Since we really look out for our family. Personally, I make sure my slightly unhinged brother doesn’t rip the arms off doctors I consider family. Doctors who tell me shit, that is.”
The man’s cheeks reddened with panic, his previously sterile and detached demeanor dissipating in the face of his possible demise. His throat trembled as he struggled to swallow.
“Ms. Garden is currently in a coma,” he said, voice slow.
Gage’s heartbeat slowed right along with it, his entire body beginning to shake.
“Easy, brother,” Bull said from behind him, likely preparing to hold him back if he decided it was time the doctor retired.
Gage barely heard him, his effort going toward staying lucid, to holding on to the slim hope that the world wasn’t going to take the last chance of his survival away from him. He was teetering on the edge of true insanity. The doctor didn’t know it, but he held Gage’s life—and his own—in his hands.
“Her liver and kidneys had begun shutting down,” he continued. “At this stage, we’re working toward stopping it. But we’re not sure what’s causing it, so we’re tentative to use any drugs to counteract her organ shutdown…”
“How the fuck can you not know what’s causing it?” Gage demanded. “You’re fucking doctors. That’s your job.” His voice was low. Controlled. Calm.
On the outside, at least.
The closing of the ranks around him told him his brothers recognized the tone. The one Gage used when he was shutting down his humanity to prepare himself to paint the world with his pain.
With blood.
Death.
“I’m trying to do my job,” the doctor said. “We’re doing everything we can with the information at hand. At this stage, we need to run more tests. Need to see if her lifestyle—”
“She’s thirty years old, healthy, doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke. Doesn’t even fuckin’ drink soda,” Gage interrupted before the doctor could say something that might get him killed before he could save Lauren. And he fucking would save Lauren. There was no other choice. No other option.
Gage forced his hands to stay at his sides when they itched to grab the lapels of that coat, shake him until he got the answer he wanted. “There is no natural fucking reason for her to be lying in that bed. So you find the unnatural one. You save her, you might save yourself too.”
And on that, he turned and walked out. Before he could do something he wouldn’t regret, but that might get him killed.
And he still had a reason for inhaling and exhaling.
For now.
Gage’s death threats had been real enough to get him into the ICU, where Lauren was currently attached to numerous machines.
Keeping her alive.
His entire vibrant, beautiful and broken world was being kept alive by fucking machines.
His knees gave out beside her bed. He collapsed to his knees, his arms outstretched over the mattress, clutching her hand.
It was cold.
Like his blood.
Like his soul.
He stayed kneeling for a long time. Mostly because he couldn’t physically make his body obey, his mind keeping him down with images of Lauren’s body decaying underneath the dirt.
“Never in my life asked you for anything,” he said to the room. “And you’ve only given me things in order to take them away. To punish me for every single one of my sins. Maybe I deserve it, but she doesn’t. No way in fuck, if you exist—which I highly doubt—would you let her wither away like this. It’s not fucking worthy of her. She deserves life. Maybe not one with me, but I don’t care. With everything you’ve taken away from me, I deserve that much. Her. And you’re going to give me her. Because if you do exist, and I lose her, I’ll do what even the Devil didn’t manage to do. I’ll reach up there and fucking lay waste to the heavens.”
That was where he was at that moment.
So fucking helpless he was taking to praying to and threatening an absent God.
Because that was all he could do.
Pray.
Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred seconds passed until someone answered that prayer.
Or the threat.
Gage was thinking it was the latter.
That was why no one’s prayers got answered.
Because they weren’t brazen enough to threaten God.
And threa
ts—promises—were what got shit done.
“Gage?” a soft voice asked.
He jerked to look at the familiar blonde doctor who’d worked on a number of the Sons family. Saved most of them.
She was well regarded.
By Jagger most recently.
Gage stood immediately from where he’d been on his knees.
She didn’t comment on that.
“Well?” he barked.
She didn’t flinch at his violent tone.
She’d worked with them for years. She was used to it.
She didn’t answer, merely moved around Gage, pulling a vial and syringe from her hand and checking Lauren’s vitals before she injected the syringe into the IV.
It killed Gage to wait. Be silent.
He wanted to shake the fucking doctor, despite what she’d done for the club, despite the fact that she was a good woman. That didn’t mean shit if she couldn’t save Lauren.
The world didn’t mean shit if they couldn’t save Lauren.
She watched the screen where Lauren’s vitals had been sitting dangerously low. Just above dead, actually. Gage knew the numbers by heart. They were etched into his insides. He’d been watching them for about twenty-seven thousand seconds, after all.
And then they moved. Which was what he’d been terrified of.
But they moved.
But not down, not pushing him into the ground where the Devil could fully embrace him instead of just sinking his claws into his soul.
They moved up.
He exhaled.
Fully and completely.
Sarah, the doctor, did too.
She faced Gage. “It wasn’t making sense that Lauren’s organs were shutting down without any obvious illness,” she said, clutching his woman’s hand with a kindness absent from most in the profession. Detachment was what most doctors worked with; it was needed because, like Gage, they saw too much death to get attached.
“My colleagues focused on finding the illness, because that’s how they work, within the rules.” She paused. “But I know the club, so I had an inkling that it wasn’t an illness. And they don’t work within the rules, so I took a chance that what was killing Lauren didn’t either.”
Gage flinched. The words were spoken with the upmost kindness, but they cut surer and truer than any knife Gage had sunk into his skin.
“Lauren has been poisoned with small doses of Taydoxilne,” Sarah continued, eyes on the machines. “I couldn’t say for how long, but enough time to slowly eat away at her immune system without her noticing.”
“Taydoxilne?” he repeated.
She nodded, still holding Lauren’s hand. “It’s a new drug, originally created for weight loss, if you could believe it. It was heralded as a miracle because it was a powder that was completely tasteless when dissolved in water and melted off the pounds.” She shook her head. “But trials showed that in patients who didn’t lose weight, it began to literally eat away at their immune system and organs. So slowly it wouldn’t have been noticeable had they not been monitored. Obviously the trial was stopped and the drug discontinued.” She frowned. “So I’m not sure how someone got a hold of it to give it to Lauren.” She looked to Gage. “I’m sure you’ll be finding that out.”
The words underneath the ones she spoke were very clear.
“I’m sure you’ll be making them pay.”
He nodded once, violently, unable to speak.
If his mind weren’t paralyzed by the sight in front of him, he might’ve been impressed with the doctor, what hid underneath her professional exterior, something Jagger had obviously seen.
But Gage didn’t care about shit right then.
Nothing except the woman in the hospital bed with the slowly climbing vitals.
“I can’t say how long she’s been exposed. At least a month, maybe more.” She gave Gage a hard look. “But it’s not something anyone could have caught, not something a big biker could’ve noticed, unless he had a PhD and was getting weekly blood tests,” she said, as if she knew Gage was resting the blame firmly where it belonged, on his shoulders.
Because Lauren didn’t live a life where she was slowly poisoned. Gage lived a life where the only thing he loved would be slowly taken away from him though.
“We’re lucky Lily was there to administer CPR, that Lauren’s strong.” Sarah smiled.
“She’s going to be okay,” Gage managed to grind out. It wasn’t a question. It couldn’t be a question.
Sarah’s eyes met his. “I’ve given her the same drug used to help the patients in the trials. They all made full recoveries, though they weren’t exposed to as much as Lauren, so she might take a little longer, considering she experienced almost complete organ failure. But yes, she’ll be okay.”
Gage’s heart started beating again. For the first time in ninety-nine thousand, one hundred and two seconds.
Eighteen
“Poison?” Cade repeated, his voice holding only the slightest hint of surprise. And with Cade, the fact that there was even a slight ripple in his iron demeanor meant he was shocked.
Gage nodded once, sharply, pain coming with the movement. Because for as long as he didn’t see Lauren’s open, awake, and alert eyes, everything hurt. Every fucking heartbeat. Sarah said she was going to recover fully, but he didn’t believe words. He couldn’t, because they were too good to be true. Getting her back when he’d tasted the world without her.
So he would only believe this bitterness was temporary when he heard her voice, saw that light behind her eyes. Because anything less than that would be giving in to hope. And Gage knew hope was deadly.
It had taken everything in him to leave the hospital, despite the fact that her family—who had arrived moments after Sarah had left, Anna leading the fray and giving him a fierce hug—and the women were there, looking out for her. He wanted to be there so she could look out for him. So she could fucking save him by opening her eyes.
But someone had put her in that bed. Someone had thrust him into another level of Hell, one deeper than he ever knew existed.
And that someone had to die.
Which was why he was sitting in church, battling not to tear his fucking skin apart and hoping he’d get to be tearing someone else apart before Lauren put him back together by opening her eyes.
“Fuck,” Cade said in response to Gage’s nod.
They’d never dealt with this before. All the violence against them had been tangible, something horrible, brutal, but not something fucking invisible, something running through his woman’s veins. They couldn’t beat it out of anyone.
There was muttering around the table.
“Woman’s weapon,” Bull grunted.
Gage’s eyes snapped to him. “What?”
“Poison. It’s a woman’s weapon. Mia would likely have somethin’ to say about me bein’ sexist sayin’ that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Men use their fists, use weapons where they can see the damage. The blood. Because men are animals. We’re out for blood. Women, on the other hand, are out for pain. And they don’t need blood, because that’s too simple, too obvious, too easy to wipe away. Women like to destroy from the inside out, fight with something that men don’t know what to do with.”
Silence hung in the air.
Gage burst out of his chair.
Cade’s eyes followed him. “You know who did this?”
“Oh I know who fucking did this,” he seethed. “Me.”
Tapping on the keyboard was razors inside Gage’s skull.
“Jade Masters dropped off the face of the earth approximately two and a half months ago,” Wire said, crushing a can in his fist as he finished it. It joined the graveyard of energy drinks that the fucker lived on.
“Soon as I left LA,” Gage clipped. “Soon as I scraped that bitch.”
More tapping. “Looks like it,” Wire agreed.
“Fuck!”
Wire didn’t flinch, even though he was so full of caffeine every second that him not
having a heart attack was a surprise.
“Should’ve fuckin’ realized the bitch wasn’t gonna let it be that,” he said, consumed with fury at himself. “Didn’t think she’d be that crazy.”
“The thing with women, especially scorned women, is that they’re always that crazy,” Wire replied, not moving his eyes from the screens around him.
“You gonna tell me where I can find her?” Gage demanded, his palms burning with the need for blood. To fucking bleed the bitch dry. Didn’t matter that she was a woman. She’d stopped being a fucking person the second she made the decision to even think about taking Lauren from him.
Wire frowned at the screen. “Normally I’d be able to do so in a matter of seconds, but this bitch is good at hiding her tracks. Crazy ones normally are.” He glanced at Gage. “You should know that better than anyone.”
The door to Wire’s cave opened.
Cade locked eyes with Gage, and the look on his president’s face made his heart stutter.
“She’s awake.”
And as much as his body cried out for blood, for death, something fought harder than his demons.
Lauren.
Life.
Lauren
Waking up in a hospital for the second time in a month was not great.
Especially since I woke up feeling like a bus had hit me and I had to comfort my hysterical mother into some semblance of calm, which my grandmother did by demanding she “get your shit together and try not to make your daughter want to lapse into a coma again just to escape your bullshit.”
It was safe to say my mother and grandmother didn’t exactly get along.
Because my father had chosen my mother carefully. So she was the exact opposite of my grandmother. Sensible. Ordered. Logical. Everything I pretended to be.
Hence me not calling her or my father when my house had burned down. Because it caused worry they didn’t need. And I wasn’t ready to show my mother who I really was.
