Her cheek felt warm. Annoyingly so.
Before her mind woke up, she felt the stiffness of her body.
Her neck hurt. Her back hurt. Her ass hurt.
Her chest hurt, a void threatening to swallow her whole—
Lynn opened her eyes and closed off that thought. Sunlight slipped in through grime-stained high windows, bathing the garage in an odd grayish light. A stubborn ray of sunlight was aiming right for her face. She was curled under a worn out, stained blanket she normally used to cover the bikes. She flexed her hands, the cracked vinyl of the backseat they had unbolted from an old Chevy bit into her palms. Sitting up felt like fighting water, every muscle protesting the movement.
Then came the numbness.
The air felt heavy, hot like any summer day. But Lynn was so cold. It spread everywhere. A frost so deep, it reached even the darkest corners of her mind, locking thoughts and memories behind blocks of ice.
Lynn tried to focus on her surroundings. The garage was exactly as she left it yesterday. There was the frame of the Harley she’d been taking parts off. Her tools stacked on her worktable. Her overalls hung from a hook on the wall.
But also… there was his shirt on the back of a chair, the one she accidentally used as a rag one time. His posters of vintage bikes and rock bands on the wall. His toolbox she claimed for herself.
Hugging her knees, Lynn clamped her teeth, then started swaying back and forth softly. Fuck, there was so much of him around. She had avoided going upstairs, but here was no better.
What will she do now? The whole apartment was under his name. She will be kicked out soon, since there was no way she could pay for it on her own. The tools, the clothes, the furniture. Everything was bought by him. What right did she have to take anything?
The walls were closing in. Her breath quickened. Dark spots danced at the edges of her vision.
A loud noise. Blood pooling on the floor. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything but stare—
Something glinted and caught her eye like a lighthouse guiding her in the dark. Her wrench had fallen from the toolbox. Like in a trance, Lynn stood up, knelt on the floor, picked it up. The familiar weight settled on her like an anchor.
Work. She had to find work.
The smell of cheap antiseptic didn’t fully cover the copper tang of dried blood.
Kavagh sat in a rigid plastic chair at St. Jude Community Hospital, resisting the urge to bark an order for his more skittish brothers to stop fucking pacing. He understood the need for movement, but the friction of their boots against the linoleum was wearing his nerves raw.
The waiting room was packed. Bikers stood bandaged, bruised, some still bleeding from open cuts, while a handful of elders huddled in the opposite corner, whispering frantic prayers into their rosaries.
In a far corner, a lone man in a khaki uniform sat nursing two foam cups of cheap machine coffee. He caught Kavagh’s eye through the steam, then gave a sharp, barely perceptible nod toward the exit.
Kavagh wanted to tell him to fuck off.
He waved a dismissive hand at the questioning, defensive looks his brothers flashed him, signaling them to stay put. He stepped out into the heavy, humid air of the parking lot, accepting one of the steaming foam cups as the heavy hospital doors hissed shut behind them.
“Miller,” Kavagh said, his voice a low gravel.
“How bad?” the cop asked, not looking at him.
Kavagh pursed his lips. “Two dead. Three heavily wounded.” He took a slow breath, letting the mask slip just a fraction. Only because this was Miller—the man who pestered him about unpaid tickets but never poked his nose into club business—he added, “The one in critical is Fritz.”
The cop let out a string of curses. “There hasn’t been a shooting so close to town since—”
“Yes.” Kavagh cut him off. “But we didn’t start it. You know we’ll never risk the town like that.”
Miller threw him a sympathetic look, one Kavagh despised. Because it only meant a shovel was about to hit dirt.
“Someone bypassed us,” Miller said quietly. “They reported the gunfire straight to Central instead of the local dispatch. The state boys are going to inherit this, Kavagh. I can’t hold them off when they decide to send someone down here.”
A practiced, freezing stillness enveloped Kavagh, his eyes focused far away on the distant road. His mind already shifting gears—calculating timelines, assessing defensive perimeters, planning for the inevitable lockdown. Miller let him sit on it a few seconds.
“The boat stunt from last month was clever,” Miller muttered, tossing his empty cup into a rusted oil drum. “It kept the boys busy, out of my hide and yours. Maybe you could pull something similar off?”
“It’s what caused all of this. Why the Eastsiders—”
Miller held up a hand to stop him. “Wait. Don’t tell me. As of now, don’t tell me anything they could ask me about under oath.”
Kavagh’s lips twitched at that. “Because you’re such a bad liar, Doug?”
He grunted in response, then pivoted and walked to his car. “She’ll make it,” he said, a heavy shorthand for a farewell, before swinging the door open.
When Kavagh stepped back inside the lobby, the low-frequency murmur of the club had turned into a frantic huddle. The brothers were crowding around a sharp, short figure standing at the entrance of the intensive care unit.
“Clear off, you idiots. And give me room. You know I’m only talking to him,” Holly was snapping, posture straight and voice full of authority.
She spotted him over the wall of leather. “Come in,” she commanded, jerking her chin and walking through the double doors without another word.
“She’s stable for now.” Inside here, Holly was Dr. Gomez, and alone with her, Kavagh was just Ivan.
The sight of Fritz laying on a hospital bed made his chest tighten. The hum of the machines hooked to her seemed to scream failure and loss. Ivan almost lost his shit right then and there, a red haze starting to cloud his vision.
I’ll kill every single one of them if she dies.
Holly stepped into his line of sight, deliberately removing it from the bed. “Stop that,” she said, nodding to his clenched fists. “punching a wall won’t fix it, Ivan.” She never flinched at this displays anymore. Less of all when it came to the boy she’d patched up since the worst of his injuries only came from scraped knees.
He forced his hands to open, flexed them slowly, then buried them the pockets of his leather jacket.
“Just give it to me straight, Holly. No doctor shit.”
“She was shot in the gut, Ivan,” Holly said plainly, grabbing a clean towel to wipe off sweat from Fritz’s brow. “An inch to the right and it would’ve torn her main artery open. If that happened, she’d have died in that table at the Fang before the ambulance even cleared the parking lot. Packing the wound kept her alive long enough to get here, but the bullet still tore her insides to pieces.”
She pointed a firm finger at the clear plastic tubes running from Fritz’s side into a drainage bag on the floor.
“I spent three hours cutting her open, stopping the internal bleeding, and sewing her stomach and intestines back together. The leaks are patched. The stitches are holding. But when the gut gets ripped open like that, poison spills into the body. Her system went through absolute hell, she lost half her blood, and her body is in deep shock.”
Holly stepped closer, her eyes boring into his.
“I have her on a machine to breathe for her, and I’m pumping her full of every antibiotic this hospital owns.”
Holly softened her tone, “But the medical part is done, Ivan. There is nothing left for me to cut or stitch, and no more medicine I can give her. The next twelve to twenty-four hours are crucial. Her body either fights off the infection and the shock, or her organs start shutting down one by one.”
“It’s entirely up to her now. All we can do is watch her and pray.”
Ivan could only think about how prayers never seemed to do much for people like them.