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I watched them cut open my woman.
Save her life.
Eventually, she was settled into a room. In intensive care.
At that point, Sarah, the club’s unofficial doctor, who worked at this hospital, took over for the doctor who was shit scared of me.
Sarah was not shit scared. Sarah respected the club. Sarah took a lot of fucking risks for us. Because she grew up in Garnett. She’d benefitted directly from the club.
And because she’d been in love with Jagger for a long time. She wasn’t bitter about him and Caroline... She was happy for them. She was a better person than all of us fucking scoundrels.
“How you holding up?” she asked, staring at me while she walked over to Kate.
“Will be better when you tell me that Kate is gonna make a full recovery.”
It was the first time I’d spoken in a while. How long had she been in surgery? I couldn’t say. A lifetime, at least.
Sarah didn’t answer me at first. She reached down to squeeze Kate’s hand in a gesture of tenderness that was not unlike her.
Her blue eyes found mine. “She had internal bleeding which we managed to stop.” She glanced to the chart in her hands. “Three broken ribs. Collapsed lung. Ruptured spleen. Her eye socket is fractured. And her windpipe is severely bruised.”
Every item on the list of Kate’s injuries was a bullet through my skin. Through my flesh, my bones. Each one fucking ripped me apart.
My eyes found Kate’s neck where the skin was shades of red, purple and black. Where he had strangled her. Where he had tried to take the life from her.
I remembered when those had been my hands. When I couldn’t fucking come without teasing death out of women—Kate included. Kate especially. My stomach roiled in disgust.
“I know it sounds like a lot.” Sarah spoke gently. “And it is. She’s incredibly lucky to be alive. But I can tell you that she is going to heal. It may take some time, but she’ll heal.”
Sarah was not one to lie to me. I understood that. She might’ve been kind, but she didn’t bullshit.
So I knew she was telling the truth. But looking at Kate, so pale except for the black and purple of the bruises covering her face, the machines she was attached to, the breathing tube down her throat… I found it really fucking hard to believe her.
“When will she wake up?”
I needed to see her eyes. Needed to watch her inhale and exhale under her own power. Nothing else would make me believe. Nothing else would bring me back from the edge. Only Kate could do that.
Sarah sighed. “I can’t tell you that. It may be tomorrow. It may be a week from now. She’s undergone serious trauma. And her body will do a lot of healing while she’s unconscious.”
She glanced down to Kate and then back to me. “With her windpipe how it is, she’ll need to rest it for at least a week before she even attempts to speak.” There was a loaded pause while Sarah’s eyes roamed over Kate. “And we have to wait until she wakes up to assess the damage. She should be able to speak fully in time, but I can’t make any guarantees.”
Her voice. I might never hear her fucking voice again.
Right then, I tried to call it up in my mind. And for the fucking life of me, I couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like. I couldn’t hear shit above the dull roar in my ears. The pumping of blood through my body. The need to get the fuck out of the room and pull the skin off the man who did this.
But I stayed still. Completely still. I held on to Kate’s pale, limp hand. It was my anchor.
“Was she…?” my voice broke. I sucked in a breath. I was stronger than this. And I deserved this fucking information. This was my fault after all. I deserved to feel every ounce of pain that came with these words. “Was she raped?” I asked evenly.
The handful of seconds between my question and Sarah’s response were some of the longest and most terrifying of my life.
“No.” It took a while for Sarah’s words to cross the chasm I found myself in. To descend into the hole of self-hatred I was residing in.
“We don’t have any physical injuries to suggest sexual assault,” she expanded.
I didn’t sag in relief. Not even a little. No injuries did not mean that he hadn’t touched her. That he hadn’t raped her.
At some point, Sarah had crossed the room and was squeezing my shoulder. “She’s going to be okay. She’s strong. A lot of people wouldn’t have survived this. But she did. She survived, Swiss.” She spoke firmly, as if she sensed that the words needed to be heavy to sink through the layers of panic and bloodlust in my system.
