“Hello, Marnie,” a male voice says, which has me whipping around in shock. Especially when I see it’s Porter and Paxton, Pace’s brothers. “It took us a long time to find you. Good job living off the grid, but you forgot thateveryoneis trackable.”
“I’m not the same person I was five years ago,”I chant to myself. “What do you want? I don’t have a clue where Pace is at, which I told you before.”
They’re the sole reasons I had to leave my hometown like a thief in the dark. Their constant harassment wore on me until I was raw, especially since I was dealing with my mom and herdeclining health. They’d come to my workplace, vandalized my car and the house we lived in, and made my life a living hell.
“Oh, we know where Pace is,” Paxton sneers. “The cops found his body, buried in the woods near the park. Seems he met with a little bit of foul play.”
“Which I have no knowledge of,” I retort. Right now, I’m praying that one of the guys realizes I’ve been gone longer than my allotted break time and comes to look for me. Not that Ash or any of his club brothers would begrudge an extra few minutes, but I don’t abuse their kindness. It’s not looking good, and I regret that I didn’t keep up with my martial arts classes because the two of them look so angry, I realize I’m probably not coming out of this encounter unscathed.
Porter leers at me before snidely saying, “Doesn’t matter to us that you have no idea what happened to him. You were the last person who saw him alive, and we’ve decided that you need to join him.”
Seeing the knife in Porter’s hand, I feint left then start running toward my right in an effort to get back inside the bar. The only problem is, Paxton grabs my ponytail and yanks me to a stop. The stench of Paxton’s breath has me gagging. A malicious smile greets me as he leans in and whispers, “I’ll take this as a trophy.” Before my mind catches up to his words, he slices above my ponytail holder and holds my hair up in his hands. My eyes stay glued to the bundle of hair in his hands, and I miss his next downward plunge. As the knife slices through the air toward me, my only thought is that I should’ve told Ash I was interested in him.
Because now he’s never going to know. My body hits the ground, unending pain coursing through me as I see blood pouring fromthe wound in my abdomen. “Fuck,” I whisper as I hear their boots running away.
FOUR
ASH
When the third set of customers comes up to the bar for refills, I look around the crowded bar and don’t see Marnie. “Fuck, she didn’t come back from break yet?” I wonder out loud. “That’s not like her.” Turning to the window that leads into the kitchen, I see her tumbler sitting there, waiting to be filled. However, I don’t see her sitting there giving Bert shit.
“Bert, where the hell is Marnie? She’s late coming back from her break,” I bark out, startling my cook whose hands are positively flying as he puts baskets of wings and fries together.
“What? Hell, she took the fucking trash out for me since Zach was a no-show,” he replies, looking around. “That was… uh, maybe twenty minutes ago or so. Sorry, Ash, but I wasn’t exactly timing her, you know? Got my hands full back here as it is.”
“Psycho!” I bellow. When he gets to the bar, I lean in and say, “Go check by the dumpster. Marnie took the trash out but never came back inside.”
“Got it, brother,” he says, heading toward the kitchen so he can go out the back door.
Satisfied that we’ll find her, I quickly sort out the customers waiting for their drinks. As I take cards for tabs that are being closed, I mentally tell myself that everything’s perfectly fine. Until my phone pings with an incoming text from Psycho.
Psycho: Brother, I had to call 911. It’s bad, Ash, really bad.
Me: WTF? What’s going on?
Psycho: Marnie’s been stabbed and is lying in a pool of her own blood. I suspect the bar’s fixing to close for the night.
Me: Damn straight it is. Is she conscious? Is she still alive?
Right now, I’m regretting not pushing her for a relationship. The problem is I knew there was something in her past that held her hostage, so I didn’t and at this moment, that’s come back to bite me in the ass. Dammit to hell!
Psycho: She’s still alive but her pulse is faint. I’ve got pressure on the wound to help stop the blood and yeah, she’s out of it. Fuck, this isn’t good, Ash.
I’m about to respond when I hear the sirens blaring over the music, which is impressive in a way, since we’ve got a helluva speaker system inside the bar. As customers start to look around trying to figure out what the hell is going on, I see two police officers walk inside and head in my direction.
Despite the cops’ protests, I rode with Marnie in the ambulance while Psycho dealt with the ensuing investigation. While Holly and her grandmother headed to the hospital, the rest of the brothers opted to handle shit at the bar, including making a copy of the security tapes that showed the attack on Marnie, as well as closing it down for the unforeseeable future. It won’t hurt our bottom line too much, and to make sure that Bert and our other waitress don’t lose too much with regard to their wages, Rebel decided to pay them with PTO for the missed shifts. Zach, unfortunately, won’t get that luxury since he opted to no-call/no-show.
“Sucks to be him,” I mutter as I watch what the paramedic is doing to Marnie. At her look, I shrug. “Talking to myself,” I admit. “Is she gonna be okay?”
“I can’t say for sure,” she replies. “She’ll obviously need surgery, so I suspect a lot of that will depend on what the doctors find once they open her up. Her vitals are a lot more stable than they were when we arrived. She seems to be a fighter.”
“She is,” I say, reaching out to brush the stray hairs away from her face. When I see the state of her hair, I have to grind my jaw so I don’t cuss and make some threats that outsiders shouldn’t be privy to. While she’s never acted like a vain woman, she had beautiful hair that went past her shoulders. Not anymore, though, although I suspect she’s going to rock a spiky cut. She’s still unconscious and her discolored pallor is concerning to me but based on the puddle of blood that was at the scene, she lost a lot of it and that’s likely contributing to her gray tinge.
We finally pull into the bay after we arrive at the emergency room with sirens blaring, and I’m grateful to see a team of doctors and nurses waiting for our arrival. I keep out of their way as they unload Marnie and rush her inside, only to have a nurse put her hand up and say, “Follow me.”
Once we’re in the triage area, she gets all of Marnie’s information so she’s in their system, then directs me to a surgical waiting room where she’ll end up after they get done with all of their testing and assessments, telling me that as soon as there’s any news, someone will call down on the red phone that’s on the wall. So, I sit down, my back against the wall and stare at my hands. My blood-soaked hands. Hell, my jeans are also stained, and it guts me to know that the woman I’ve been dancing around for months now is somewhere in this hospital fighting for her life.
My phone chimes with an incoming text, so I pull it out of my pocket and read the screen.
