“No.” Her voice shakes once, then goes hard. “You saved me from them, Shady.”
I swallow.
Her eyes hold mine.
“Thank you. But I can’t handle much more right now.”
Then she turns away from me and climbs into the SUV without looking back.
Chapter 5
Lady
By the time we get back to Vice Ink, I hate every hand that reaches for me.
The SUV stops behind the old church, and the second the door opens, men crowd the space like leather walls. Diablo’s men. Shady’s brothers. Guns still hot, faces still hard, voices low and careful like I’m made of cracked glass instead of rage.
“Easy,” Gville says, reaching for my elbow.
I look at his hand.
He pulls it back like I might bite.
I might.
“I can walk,” I say.
My voice comes out rough from cold air, smoke, and not screaming when I had every right to. My throat hurts. My wrists throb. My knees feel like cheap glitter after rain, but I put one boot on the pavement, then the other, because if one more man carries me today, I’m going to start swinging.
Shady gets out on the other side.
I feel him before I look. That is the stupid part. After everything, my body still knows exactly where he is. That quietviolence he wears like a second cut. He is bleeding through his shirt again. Because men like Shady think pain is a suggestion and medical care is something that happens to weaker people.
He starts toward me.
I lift my hand.
He stops.
That should not hurt as much as it does.
“Lady,” he says.
The way he says my name makes my chest ache, and I hate him for it. I hate him for standing there with blood on him and that ruin in his ice-blue eyes like he gets to be broken too. I hate that some weak, scared part of me wants to crawl into his cut and let him make the whole world smaller.
That part of me can shut the hell up.
“You don’t get to touch me right now,” I say.
His jaw tightens.
He nods once.
No fight. No smartass answer. No rough little baby to make my knees forget my brain.
That might be worse.
The back door to Vice Ink opens, and Darling comes running out with Diablo right behind her. She is bruised, bandaged, and still beautiful in that soft, stubborn way that makes me want to wrap the world in barbed wire so it stops touching her. She hits me hard enough to hurt, arms around my neck, face in my hair, shaking like she’s the one who just got dragged out of a flower freezer.
