He turns the scalding water off and opens the shower curtain to find that the EMT had left scrubs on the bench, along with a towel. He dries off perfunctorily and pulls the scrubs on over his damp body, sliding his bare feet back into his bloody shoes.
The EMT is waiting outside when Gideon comes out carrying his ruined clothes, so the young guy points to a trash bin. Gideon doesn’t hesitate to push them in as deeply as he can. It’s a strangely intuitive gesture—like the guy has been in this kind of situation before.
“What’s your name?” Gideon asks, his throat so sore that it’s made his voice raspy. Maybe he’d been screaming for longer than he’d thought, or maybe it was those tears he was forcing back at the show of kindness.
“Galen. You?” He points away from the restroom toward a quiet waiting room at the end of the hall. It’s the same style of generic blue walls that had been in Nashville.
“Gideon.”
“I’ll wait with—” Galen begins to say, as he points Gideon toward the end of the couch.
The room smells like sadness and grief…or maybe that’s just him. There’s a commotion somewhere in the hall, and Grayson is just there—like he has materialized out of Gideon’s grief, hauling him into his arms and jamming his nose into Gideon’s neck.
“Ah, I’ll leave you to it, Gideon.” Galen smiles at the obvious affection and waves his goodbye.
“Hey, Galen?” Gideon calls after him as Finn makes it through the door, with Leo close behind. The EMT stops and turns toward him, a subtle question on his face.
“Thanks.”
“Of course.” He waves and heads back toward his vehicle, which is probably still standing open in the loading bay.
Gideon doesn’t spare Galen another thought as he rubs Grayson’s back and clasps Finn around the middle with his other arm. He takes deep breaths of his mates’ scents, even though they’re fraught with fear. They both look terrified and a bit wild. Grayson’s scent is mostly patchouli, and there’s a strange electricity snapping in the air, like the atmosphere right before a storm. Finn’s jaw is clenched, and while he hasn’t been crying yet, he smells like he could start any minute.
“Where are the kittens?” Gideon asks, looking after them down the hall. He catches Leo’s eye while doing so, and the beta’s jaw is clenched hard. He just shakes his head.
Gideon frowns and searches for that intangible place where he feels his mates. If he couldn’t still feel Luca shining brightly, he’d be extremely worried—because Nix has shut his bond down entirely.Why?He hasn’t done that since his combat trial.
Finn holds out his phone while Grayson shakes and growls in his ear.
It’s just a technological reflection of their location—confirmation that the feeling in his gut isn’t that far off. The phone shows Luca’s condition and location. His soulmate is at an unfamiliar address forty minutes away. There’s low-level pain in his lip and his right sinus. Another layer of dread forces itself past the numbness he’s using to keep his rage down.
He taps around on the screen and finds Nix also in the same location, with a pain in his chest. Rowan is moving toward the hospital, but not by road—his bio stats show an elevated heart rate and temperature, but no injury. Fear stops him from checking Jay’s microchip, too, unsure if he could handle it if it had gone dark.
“What the fuck is happening?!” Gideon shoves the phone back into Finn’s hands before he throws it at the wall.
“We don’t know,” Finn says. “I heard Nix once over our link, but now there’s nothing. There’s never been nothing before. Even when he turns it down, I can still…right afterward, Gray freaked out, and then you called.” Finn trails away. “I tried calling them, and the phone connected, but no one was there.”
“Jay?” Grayson asks.
Leo closes the waiting room door quietly and leans his forehead against it, his back to the room, but the words are loud in the silence. “Yeah, tell us about Jay first.”
“We saw the kids, saw some fans out front. Then, when we came out to the car, Rhodes was there waiting.”
“James Rhodes?” Leo asks incredulously, spinning around to lean against the door in shock. “He’s already dead. The police said there were two bodies in the car. How was he there?”
Finn sits heavily on the couch. “What did he want?”
“He wanted us to get him away from the cops and Carnell.” Gideon rubs a hand down his face.
“You told him to go fuck himself, right?” Grayson growls. The enigma is still shaking, and the tips of his fangs are piercing his lush lower lip.
“I didn’t. If he could give me Carnell, then I’d have gotten him a villa in Tahiti. But it didn’t matter—he looked like death.”Before, and certainly after.Like his soul was being used as the battery for a powerful concealment spell. “He said Carnell needed him alive.”
Grayson jerks before looking at Gideon incredulously. Even under his obvious fear, frustration, and anger, he’s come to the same conclusion as Gideon had. “Withers is using Rhodes’s soul?! Fuck.”
“Not anymore, Gray.” Gideon shakes his head. “He took the brunt of the bullet intended—” Gideon shakes his head but continues on a different tack. “Jay took the bullet second-hand, high on the right side. I had to…” He looks down at his hands and expects them to be stained red with blood.
“CPR?” Finn confirms softly as he drops his head into his hands, no doubt running through all the possible damage and the most dire conclusions.
