by Addison Jane
I took a breath.
Fuck.
Maybe my little brother would get his wish after all, because he’d just earned himself a hell of an IOU.
I felt like my heart was going to stop at any second because that was how much adrenaline was pumping through it at that moment. I felt like I was going to be sick.
The stomping of footsteps running up the stairs had me spinning around, gun in my hand, ready to shoot a fucker if someone else came at me. Shotgun appeared in the doorway, his hands gripping the doorframe, totally unfazed by the mess inside the room and the gun I was ready to blow his head off with.
“They found her,” he said urgently. “But we need to hurry ‘cause it’s not looking fucking good.”
KENNEDY
I blinked, trying to fight the darkness that was swarming around me.
Pain shot through my entire body, it felt like I was on fire. I tried to turn myself, to somehow relieve it but another sharpness shot through me. It was so painful my instant reaction was to scream but what came from my mouth was nothing. I was struggling to get the air I needed. Each breath was more painful than the last, harder than the last.
My heart was beginning to race, and I was starting to panic. It was like when you were underwater and all of a sudden you knew you needed air, but you had to really battle to get to the surface. It was that moment of panic where you think maybe you won’t make it. That was how I felt.
Only the smallest amount was getting in, and with the pain that was surging through me every time I tried to get a little more oxygen, I knew even in my fuzzy mind that there was probably some damage to my lung when Crow kicked me.
My body, my arm, my head—I couldn’t tell which way was up. Part of me wished I would pass out again, so I didn’t have to feel the agony I was in. But I knew that if I gave up now, they might not find me. My head was filled with fog, and the darkness was still fighting to pull me back under, but I couldn’t let it.
What about Repo and Kennedy?
What if they couldn’t find me in time?
I couldn’t leave her now, not after everything we’d been through, everything we’d fought through, I couldn’t just give up. I was finally happy, and I fucking deserved to be happy. I refused to let Crow win this. He can’t win this.
I kicked my legs out, slamming them against something, trying to make as much noise as possible. My body swayed, my head swirling. I forced my eyes open, tears building in them due to the pain. Metal bars and walls. I was in a cage. A small cage.
I held my breath and kicked the wall again, the metal noise echoing around me and covering my sobs. God. I didn’t know if I could do it. Every inch of my body felt like it was burning. I felt like I was moving, like the world was swaying—I was swaying.
It wasn’t just me.
I turned my head a little, seeing the seats behind me, and the thick strong metal bars outside. The kind of bars that held up the Ferris wheel.
“Kennedy!” I heard someone call and instantly my heart began to race.
I wanted to scream and yell and tell them I was there, but I was starting to feel lightheaded, and I wasn’t even sure how much longer I would be able to stay awake. Between the pain and the lack of oxygen, I was struggling. Really struggling.
I took one last deep breath as deep as I possibly fucking could even though my lungs screamed at me to stop. I pulled my legs in and kicked, slamming my heels against the door, forcing it to rattle, and the loud metallic sound filled the air. The cage swayed back and forth, moving my body with it, making my head spin and my stomach churn as I hoped it wouldn’t be too much and throw me out.
“Kennedy! Is that you?”
Tears streamed down my face, and I sobbed loudly, it was the only sound I could make.
The pain was becoming too much, but I could hear movement now, I could hear voices.
“Kennedy, just stay with me, I’m coming.” It was Shake. “Holy fuck.”
I couldn’t see anything. I just knew he was coming, and that he was there or that he would be soon. Which meant Repo would be there too. My body began to relax a little, I stopped fighting. They were my family now.
I’d fought for so long for me and Brooklyn and for our future. But I didn’t have to now because I had them, and they would fight for me.
I closed my eyes.
They were here now.
I didn’t have to fight anymore.
REPO
I came to a sudden stop, a handful of my brothers crowded around urgently talking and pointing upward. I followed their gaze and looked up to see Shake scaling a fucking fifty-foot Ferris wheel. Crush was right behind him. The two of them looking like some kind of fucking balancing act in the circus.
“What the…”
“Shake saw the cage up there swinging back and forth, and he said he was sure he could hear Kennedy crying,” Auron explained, his eyes glued to Shake.
“We were going to turn it on, but he’s jammed like a crowbar in the mechanism, and we don’t want to risk Kennedy if we pull it out and something goes wrong,” Digger explained before turning to one of his boys. “You guys, search around us for a tarp, some rope, anything that we might possibly need if he gets up there and finds he isn’t going to be able to carry her down.”
My body carried me toward the large metal frame. “Repo!” I ignored Shotgun’s calls for me to stop. If someone was going to be up there with her, it was going to fucking be me. I trusted my brothers with my life. With her life? In a fucking second. But I would never forgive myself if I just stood back and watched my brothers rescue my woman.
Hell fucking no.
I tucked the gun in the back of my jeans and wrapped my hands around the cold metal, pulling myself to the ladder that ran up the center of the structure. Crush and Shake were walking out toward the cage from the center, and I kept an eye on them as I climbed.
This was it, though.
This was the proof about our family and what we would do for each other.
It’s my fucking old lady in there. And did they wait for a fucking fire engine or something to come? No. They started fucking climbing this beast of a thing. No fucking ropes or harnesses or nothing. They didn’t care.
That was family.
That was what family did for fucking family.
I looked over seeing that Shake had reached the cage. He leaned forward, putting his face against the bars which were meant to keep people in so they didn’t fall out when they got too excited. “Kennedy?” I heard him call out. “Kennedy, wake up!”
I climbed faster reaching the center and looking back to find Shotgun climbing right up behind me, while the boys on the ground ran around gathering anything they could find that they thought might help.
I could hear sirens in the distance, I knew it wouldn’t be long until they were here, but it could be too long.
“The cage is fucking padlocked!” Shake called out in frustration, tugging at the door. He looked in again, pressing his face right up against the cage. “She’s breathing, but it’s shallow.”
“Repo!” I stopped my climb and looked down for a second. Almost every brother was there, the girls too, including Brooklyn who was cuddled between Meyah and Dakota.
Myth was scaling the Ferris wheel behind me, a small sledgehammer in his hand, the kind they use to help put the pegs in the ground for the tents. “We can use it on the lock,” he called up, and I nodded before carrying on toward Shake and Crush.
We were thirty to forty feet off the ground, the carriage that Kennedy was in about two-thirds of the way to the top.
The boys below were setting out a tarp. It was old and cream colored, something they used at the fair to protect from the elements—sun or rain. Everyone was gathering around it, holding an edge as if we were circus performers, and they were our safety net in case someone fell. Because if we slipped and hit the ground, the chances of us coming out of this alive were slim to none.
Crush stood to the side as Myth and I raced towar
d the carriage trying to hold onto the large metal bars that ran in all directions and angles. They were slippery and some were large which made it hard to wrap your hands around and get a good grip.
“Get out of the way,” Myth ordered, and Shake stepped back letting him close to the lock on the cage. He eyed it for a second making sure he had a good grip and steady footing before he pulled it back over his head and brought it down on the lock.
When it didn’t break, he tried again.
And fucking again.
At that stage, it felt like it had been hours but literally only seconds had passed.
My anxiety was high. What the fuck were we going to do if we couldn’t get her out of there? Fuck that. We would.
“I got it,” Myth cried, tugging out the broken lock and tossing it to the ground. “Look out,” he called, dropping the hammer after it. I rushed forward tearing open the tiny Ferris wheel cage and carefully climbing inside. There wasn’t much space, so I had to duck my head and place one foot on either side of Kennedy to get right inside. I couldn’t see very well in the darkness, so by just looking at her, I was trying not to focus on the fact I couldn’t see her breathing where she was hidden in the shadows.
My brothers crowded the door as I crouched down over my old lady and pressed my hand to her chest hoping and fucking praying to feel her take a breath. It was like the world froze in that moment as if every other sound was mute, and there was nothing but us. I needed her to be okay. I needed her to be okay for me and for Brooklyn, who I knew would never make it out the other side of this if she lost Kennedy.
“Come on, pretty girl,” I whispered, staring at her fucking beautiful face which looked unusually peaceful.
Then I felt it. The small, sharp, short intake of breath which sounded strained. Blood was forming in the corner of her mouth which instantly made me want to walk back over to where Crow’s body was and kill him all over again.
“She’s struggling to breathe, and there’s blood coming from her mouth,” I called over my shoulder as I stroked her face. “I don’t know if it’s from an injury or…”
I felt sick saying it.
“Or she has blood in her lungs,” Shake finished. “Fuck! We need to get her down, now.”
I looked down at my leather cut, expecting to see her hands holding the edge of it like she would always do. It comforted her when she couldn’t wrap her arms around me, and honestly, it comforted me too.
In that moment, though, it made me think of something else. I stood up and leaned out to the boys. “We put our colors around her, tie ropes through the arms and lower her down.”
Shake and Myth were already removing their leather cuts while Crush was racing to get to a lower level so they could throw up the ropes that they had. I knew the leather would hold her. Hopefully the ropes were strong enough too.
I stripped off my cut and cringed as I lifted up the top half of her body to slide it under. She was so limp, so unresponsive. Like she was dead. But not fucking yet.
The boys handed me their colors, and I maneuvered the three so they were holding her torso and hips. Her legs could hang free, but this way, she was less likely to slip through. We just had to get her to the ground.
I’d just finished tying the ropes when she started convulsing. She was trying to fight for air, her eyes shot open, the panic that she couldn’t breathe was in full effect. “Kennedy, stop! Slow down,” I tried to calm her. “Just look at me. I know it’s hard to breathe, but you need to calm down, or it’s going to make it worse.”
“She’s going into shock,” Myth stressed, immediately diving in the shaky cage to help me get her out. But I froze.
I’ll never forget the look in her eyes.
That moment when she knew, she fucking knew, that it could be the last moment she saw me. It was fear, it was sadness, it was regret.
It was hell.
Then she went still.
REPO
SIX WEEKS LATER
“Aren’t you meant to be at school?” I asked as Brooklyn stomped through the open roller door. I was leaning against the car chatting with Crush about a leak I’d found.
She dumped her backpack on the ground dramatically and huffed out an angry breath.
I frowned. “If you’re gonna throw a tantrum, take that shit back outside ‘cause I thought you were eighteen years old, not eighteen fucking months.”
The relationship between Brooklyn and me had gotten even tighter since shit hit the fan. She was straight with me about what she was feeling and how things were going, and I told her when she was being a fucking brat and helped her figure out her problems.
“I don’t want to be in school anymore,” she growled, obviously fighting the urge to cry.
“Kids weren’t that nice on your first day?” Crush asked, screwing up his nose when he caught sight of the time on the wall across the workshop. “Or, uh… your first hour?”
Yup.
She hadn’t even lasted an hour at school, and it was a few blocks from here so it had probably taken her twenty minutes to walk back which meant she had probably clocked a whole thirty minutes of school time.
She pursed her lips for a second and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“They say shit because of you living at the clubhouse?” I asked, already knowing what the answer was. I’d dropped her off this morning, and she’d been fine, but I’d also seen the looks the other kids were giving her as she climbed out of my old truck.
She avoided looking at me. A lot of shit had changed in the past couple of months. Where they were from, Brooklyn being Brooklyn, meant that she was one of the cool kids. She did well in school, but she was also gorgeous and a social butterfly.
It didn’t matter where she came from because she was just a person that everyone had gotten to know and love.
Now, she was suddenly starting new, and the judgments were already being thrown around. I just thought that she would deal with them a lot easier than she was.
Turned out, she was feeling them hard.
I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling it back from my face. “Look, can you brave it for the rest of the day? And I’ll round up some of the boys, and we’ll come down and pick you up after school, scare some of those assholes straight.”
Her eyes brightened a little bit. We both knew the formula. She was the new kid—they wanted to test her boundaries. And if they weren’t careful, they were going to test her too far, and they were going to end up with a fucking broken nose. We just needed to make a show that would scare the assholes straight and earn her a few extra cool points.
And I happened to know that Huntsman and a handful of guys were riding in this morning from Vegas to do a look-through of how the new club was progressing and talk opening dates. It was exciting but stressful times for both our clubs.
With another business opening, we were looking at more security, more staff, more hands on deck, and more things that could possibly go wrong. But we were also looking at more money. Twice the money if things went well.
“So, now I have to walk all the way back?” Brooklyn huffed, snatching her backpack off the ground like the pouty teenager that I’d come to know and in a strange way, adore.
Crush chuckled and nodded to the Skyline behind us. It had all the modifications for a street racing car, the entire thing made to look almost identical to Paul Walker’s infamous silver and blue ride from the second Fast and the Furious movie. “Get in, I’ll give you ride back to school. I need to check to see what the gauges on this thing are saying to see if we can find the leak.”
Brooklyn’s face was suddenly brighter. “Really?” I stepped to the side as she rushed forward and pulled open the passenger door, slipping inside.
I grabbed it in my hand before she could pull it shut and ducked my head inside. “Behave for the rest of the day. Don’t do anything stupid,” I warned her, hitting her with a warning glare.
She sunk back into the racing style seats and nodded. “I will k
eep my hands and opinions to myself.”
I snorted, knowing that if she was pushed far enough, that promise was going right out the window, but I let it go.
My phone began vibrating in my pocket, and I dug around for it as Crush walked around to the driver’s side.
“Precious cargo, man,” I called, walking backward to get out of the way and to go somewhere a little quieter to answer the call. The car started with a roar, almost rivaling that of my Harley, and I jogged back into the clubhouse, just catching sight of the number and rolling my eyes before I put it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Tell her to get her ass back to school,” Kennedy demanded down the phone.
“Pretty girl, we got Brooklyn the bracelet in case something happened,” I laughed, shaking my head as I walked outside, heading for my bike. “Not so that you could stalk her through the app on your cell.”
Not only was it Brook’s first day, and the important shit to do with the club, it was also Kennedy’s last appointment at the hospital.
The girl was a fighter, but I already knew that.
She just proved it to me tenfold.
“Stop and just let her be a teenager,” I ordered, knowing she was probably rolling her eyes at me in that moment.
Well, at least I thought she would be. But she still surprised me every day.
“You’re gonna make a great dad, you know.” I actually felt my heart stop. “I mean one day, not right now.”
“Holy fucking Christ.”
“Did you die just a little bit right then?” she teased, her laughter filling the line.
“I need to go and take a couple of shots,” I told her honestly. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
KENNEDY
I couldn’t help but giggle when he hung up. I didn’t mean to scare him like that, but it was a thought that suddenly came to me. Repo would make an amazing father. The way he was with Brooklyn, even as a teen, showed just how much patience he had and how strict but understanding he could be.
