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I sat there for hours on Saturday afternoon, just chatting with Sadie. It wasn’t something we ever did before, but right now, it felt right.
“Everything is taken care of, and I promise you, I’ll protect everything you’ve built up over the years with my life if I have to.”
She went through too much for me and everyone else to let it all fall apart while she was healing.
“All I need you to do, hell, all any of us needs you to do, is get better and wake up. I can do it without you, Sadie, you taught me well enough that I’m confident I can do it without you. But, goddammit, I don’t want to.”
She was my mother, sure, but she was also my favorite sparring partner. “Who else will drink too much with me while we discuss business? Who else is gonna piss me off just for shits and giggles?”
As Maisie was fond of saying, fighting was our love language.
I didn’t know what the fuck that meant, but it sounded right to me.
“If you don’t wake up in the next week, I’m turning Lucky Lopez into a country and western bar with live music.”
I laughed to myself, thinking of all the fights we’d had during the planning stage for Bullets & Beer. “I’m not talking about hipsters buying thirty-dollar cocktails either. I’m talking hay on the floor mixed with peanut shells and line dancing. Fucking line dancing, Sadie.”
I held her hand in mine for a long time, willing her to wake up before I pressed a kiss to the back of her hand and left the hospital.
There was still work to be done. And a shooter to find and make him regret the day his sorry ass was born.
Chapter Ten
Mo
“Am I dying? I’m totally fucking dying.” The words came out rough and creaky. My throat was dry, and my head was spinning like someone stuck me in the dryer while I was sleeping. I felt like shit. Every little move, even blinking, had me fighting the urge to puke.
“This is how it ends,” I told myself in a slightly overly dramatic fashion.
Seriously, I felt like death warmed over, so sick to my stomach that I was stuck lying in my own sweat, which was fucking gross. My left arm shot out and patted the empty side of the bed for my phone. When I found it, my hand wrapped around it, and I commanded my arm to move as slowly as humanly possible until it was straight over my head. A quick swipe of my thumb revealed that my shift started in about two hours.
Or my shift would have started in two hours if I was well enough to make it to Midnight Mass today. Which I wasn’t. That meant I needed to call Jasper to let him know I wouldn’t be coming in today. He was the last person I wanted to talk to, not only because he always had a way of changing my mind when I tried to take a day off work, but the last time I saw him, he was flirting with Addison fucking Beck.
“Big girl panties, Mo.”
My eyes closed, and I nodded. If I wanted the day off, I had to call Jasper. He was my boss, not my friend or my lover. At best, he was an associate, and I owed him the courtesy of calling in sick with enough time for him to replace me.
He already replaced you, the snarky bitch inside my head told me all too happily. An image of Jasper cozying up to Addison Beck at Lucky Lopez flashed before my eyes.
Whatever. I willed my body to sit up, and when it did, the triumph I felt was a little over the top. My legs shook as I made my way to the bathroom, to the toilet where I’d spent too much of the past few days and once more emptied my already empty stomach. But the cool blue tile floor felt good against my overheated skin, so damn cool that I curled up beside the toilet and dozed off.
My phone buzzing in the bedroom pulled me from what only turned out to be a ten-minute nap, and I hauled myself off the floor with a grunt and staggered back to my bed. It was time to call Jasper.
“You can do this, Mo. You’ve done a hell of a lot more than making a simple call.”
With that thought, I saw Jasper’s scowling face and listened with anticipation as the phone rang and rang. And rang.
“Hello,” I managed to grunt when I hit the answer icon.
“What is it, Mo?”
I sighed and rolled my eyes because I knew he couldn’t see me. “I can’t come in today. Not feeling well.”
The line was silent for a solid minute before Jasper’s deep voice sounded. “What’s wrong?”
