Page 53 of Obey

The last time I’d been awake, I was positive I hadn’t been safe. It felt like a very long time since I’d been warm, safe, and secure.

But right now, everything seemed to be okay.

That was weird.

I opened my eyes slowly, glad to realize I could at least do that, and looked around blearily. The light was bright and fuzzy, and for a moment it was hard to see through it. Even when things started to come into focus, I realized that they still weren’t quite right.

I was only seeing through one eye, I thought. One eye was only seeing darkness. I closed my good eye, trying to make sure, and realized that my right eye didn’t see anything. It was open, but there was nothing coming through.

I opened my left eye again, desperate to figure out where I was, and looked around, moving slowly in case it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was. I could see three walls around me—I was definitely in a room—and some nondescript furniture. A chair and a couch across from me, with a small table that had magazines stacked on it.

Where the fuck was I? This wasn’t home.

I reached up slowly toward my right eye, trying to remember what had happened, and found fabric over it. An eye patch or bandage, my brain told me. I didn’t feel like my eye was actually gone, but maybe it was blind.

Why would whoever had me put a patch over a blind eye, though?

I bit my lip, trying desperately to remember how this had come about. Where had I been before I ended up right here? What had happened? I looked down to see a cast on my left leg—the whole leg—and another on my right arm. The skin I could see, was covered in blisters and red as a newborn babe.

Fuck, what had happened to me?

My memory was blank, though, like it had been wiped clean of the events that had brought me here. Hell, could I remember anything? I could remember my room in the clubhouse and my bike. I could remember the faces of my friends.

My name was Knight, I recalled. And I was president of the Banshees. The best MC in Arizona.

That didn’t help me to remember what had happened, though. No matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t bring it back. I couldn’t remember anything specific from the last week or so. Everything was fuzzy and vague.

And it felt like I was missing something really, really important.

Sudden shouts from outside the room broke through my thoughts and I jerked toward them—and in doing so, jerked at the needle in my arm. I looked down, surprised, and saw an IV, which was attached to a drip. Next to that was a machine tracking something with beeps and lines, and the moment I saw it, I knew where I was.

The hospital. I was in the hospital because I’d been hurt. Burns, if my skin was anything to go by, and broken bones. Something wrong with my eye. My head seemed to be working okay, but everything else...

The battle, I remembered. Devil and I beating the shit out of each other. The cops chasing my guys. Bikes crashing, men screaming, guns going off.

Me holding Devil down with the weight of my body while I screamed at him, asking why the hell he did the things he’d done. Asking why he’d fucked everything up so bad.

Devil looking up at me and grinning like he didn’t have a care in the world, and like he’d won everything. Then holding up the pin of a grenade.

Jumping up and running. The explosion.

Oh, fuck.

The door burst open and Frank and Remy sprinted in, their eyes wide and their mouths moving so fast I could barely understand them. Behind them, I saw Gemini and Mandy, both of them looking so excited, so joyous, that I thought something wonderful must have happened. They had someone else with them, a man in a doctor’s coat, and he was trying to quiet them and tell them to calm down. Telling them that it wasn’t going to do me any good for them to be too wound up.

My friends weren’t listening. They were cheering, laughing, and crying, and it occurred to me now that the thing they were so excited about was me having woken up.

They’d thought I wasn’t going to, because I’d been caught in that explosion. I’d been running as fast as I could, praying that I got to some form of shelter before Devil blew himself up and took me with him. I’d known I wasn’t going to make it.

And I’d been looking right at Saraya when the bomb went off.

Saraya.

My eyes darted from one face to the next, cataloging them as quickly as I could and then moving to the next, and then back to the first, as I looked desperately for the one person I didn’t see here.

Frank and Remy were here, but they would have been safe from the explosion, having stayed inside during the battle on my order. I’d wanted them in there collecting everything we needed to get the hell out of there. Gemini was also inside, so of course he was here.

Mandy had been outside with Saraya, but she’d been close enough to the clubhouse to get back inside when things went sideways.