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Chapter Twenty-Five
Slider and I didn’t make it to Sugar’s.
He came off his bike.
It scared the fucking shit out of me.
He’d just passed out, and I’d had to watch helplessly as his bike skidded down the road on its side, flinging him off into the bushes. I’d gone with him to the hospital and spent most of the day there while they’d tried their best to fix him up. It wasn’t life threatening, but with all the issues he already had, he was weak.
That’s where shit had hit the fan.
Things with Sugar got forced to the side—one of those times that the club needed to be put first.
With a plan put in place, I was confined to the clubhouse. We knew it was coming, but we couldn’t be sure when. The only thing we knew was that when it came, we needed all hands on deck. Turned out, it didn’t matter how many hands we had, how much firepower, or whether our plan was solid. Two days after I’d sat with Slider in the hospital—thankful that I hadn’t watched my brother die that day, grateful that he’d managed to pull through and was strong enough to fight back—we lost him.
I sat in the clubhouse, staring at the wall, the feeling of death filling the room. Soft sobs were the only sound that filled the room as we all gathered together, trying to make sense of what the fuck had happened.
I felt numb.
Losing a brother was never easy, and it had happened all too many times during my time with the club. It was part of our lifestyle, each of us embracing the fact that one day it could be us. None of us ran or cowered. Even when we were scared, we stood tall and we stood together because that was the essence of who we were.
Many of us had come from lives where we’d lost our friends or family, where we’d grown up struggling to find a place in the world. The Brothers by Blood gave us all a family who would stand by each other and face the fires of hell if it meant protecting the people that we cared about.
Whether we were related by blood or not never came into play. It was about earning your place in a family through loyalty and trust. Some people say you can’t choose your family, but they were wrong. I’d chosen mine.
This was fucking it.
The sofa dipped beside me and I looked out of the corner of my eye to see Optimus staring at me, his eyes bloodshot but his face a stern mask. He was our leader, he had to hold strong for us and keep us going. He was the one who would push us forward despite losing an important piece of our puzzle. It must have been a lot of pressure for him to hold on his shoulders, but if there was anyone who could do it, it was him.
“Get out of here,” he said harshly, but with a crack in his voice.
I pulled back, surprised by his words.
His shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “You need her right now. So go to her.”
I stared at him, wondering whether I was so deep in a daze right now that my brain was hearing things that couldn’t be true. The last few days had been full on, I’d barely even had time to breathe as I coordinated with Judge and his boys to make sure everything had run smoothly.
When shit hit the fan, one of Simon’s men had been able to scramble the signal to the car he’d taken Hadley in. It had taken me almost twenty minutes to fight through their defenses and pull the tracking device back online so we could find them. Every second that passed, I’d wondered if it would be too late, if my skills weren’t good enough to rescue Hadley, and if I’d be responsible for Leo losing another person that he loved.
My brain was fried, I was running on autopilot.
“I should be here with you guys,” I croaked. “If I’d found them faster—”
“Cut it out,” Optimus snapped. “It wasn’t your fault. None of us could have stopped him and he wouldn’t have wanted us too. He wanted to go out as a hero, he was scared of rotting away to nothing and losing himself. He got what he wanted.”
I inhaled a shaky breath.
“Harlyn is with her. The both of them are gonna need you,” he said, his face dropping. “I have to be here right now. I can’t support everyone, so I need you to do this for me. And I know it’s what you need, too.”
My throat was tight and constricted. Optimus might be pissed at me, angry at what I’d done and the secrets he knows I’m still hiding, but that wasn’t what was important right now.
“Yeah…okay.”
We both stood at the same time and turned to face each other.
“I might not like you a lot right now, but you’re my brother, and I love your dumb ass,” he growled as we stared at each other. “Go.”
I took a deep breath, patting him on the shoulder as I passed by and headed straight for my bike. He was right, I needed her. This wasn’t just a relationship where she would lean on me and I’d hold her up. No, it worked both ways.
