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Mountain then rolled his head to the other side and found Amber leaning up against the wall. Smiling at the sight of his woman shifted south when he saw tears running down her face. What the hell was going on? She had been on shift, but it wasn’t like the woman hadn’t seen a trauma in her life before.
“I can’t do this anymore. This isn’t a life I want to live in.” Amber tossed on her jacket and strapped her purse across her chest.
“Amber?” Mountain tried to call out as she pushed through the room’s door and he watched her leave.
“Let me the fuck up.” Mountain moved his hands and tried pushing up from the gurney, only to be flanked by the Lukes.
Nova snatched his hand making him uneven and flop back to the bed as his other elbow buckled from Red shoving down his shoulder. Both of them now holding him, making him question how much he’d been drugged. Or they had eaten their Wheaties that morning because he couldn’t move.
Only he needed to go after Amber. She was leaving him.
She didn’t want this life, fine, he wouldn’t be part of the gun running. Mountain only did it to be protection for his brothers, but she was more important. She had become his life and the future he wanted. Helping women, going on those runs would be fine. The guns were a distraction he’d signed on for because he knew the danger, but did not fear it. Even now, his fear wasn’t from ripping out Red’s stitches, but losing the woman he loved over bullshit. Things that didn’t matter.
“Let her go. She just helped save your life. She’ll be back.” Roadkill tried to calm him down.
The words were as useless as her trying to hold him back, only he was as weak as Spot had been when he first found her mewing around the back of the diner in the middle of nowhere. Starving, unable to fight back and finally accepting the large hand around her wasn’t a danger. Instead, the warm pocket had soothed the kitten enough she’d popped her head out half way through the ride back to Turnabout to see what all the fuss was. At first, he’d wanted to tuck her back in, but she took to the road so well, he made sure to take her for a ride at least three times a week when he first brought her home.
Even now, there were times if he left his cut hanging on the chair in his room he’d find her balled up in the inner pocket on days when she wanted more than her hammock to take in the view. Why were his thoughts circling around Spot when they should be focused on Amber? Because things he loved were going to need him. Amber needed him. What had he looked like coming in? When Maisie showed up, she froze for a moment. Something she hadn’t done on the road when she was helping strangers. People, ones she didn’t care for, she could help without thought.
Mountain strained again, but he barely could push at them. She loved him. That is why she ran and that is what he needed to get across to her. Had he even said the words? That he loved her? Talked about living together, being a family, hell kids of their own even, but not love. The basic, simple first steps in a relationship. The foundation he needed to make her his for more than a night. Now, he wasn’t even sure where his bike was, let alone how he could chase after her. She wasn’t just down the street at the house so close to the clinic she could walk to work.
“You’re going to have to stay here for a few days. This gunshot is nothing to fuck around with.” Red handed Roadkill a syringe. “Give this to him.”
“Here?” he questioned holding up his hand trying to block the woman he’d seen stab a guy through his jeans and realized she had zero fucks to give Mountain when it came to carrying out Red’s order. “Wait! Give me a second.” He didn’t want to be knocked out. Pain be damned, he needed to get his shit together and figure out what the hell happened.
“Yes, here,” Red explained. “You were DOA and I need to monitor your heart for at least a day. Sorry, the bed’s not the best, but your physical comfort is secondary to my mental.”
“Dead? I died?” Mountain questioned because he had no memory of his life flashing in front of his eyes.
The ground he remembered. His bloody hand and Callum’s turkey on the fridge. Not his life. He couldn’t have died because calling out for his Nightingale would have been his last thought. Needing to see the soft way she took him in as her hands played in his beard.
“You lost blood, that’s all,” Red said. “And your heart stopped for a bit. Freaky then Roadkill kept it pumping until I could jolt it awake.”
“Nightingale saw that?” he questioned trying to put himself in her place, only to have a tightening in his chest and his fists to ball. Pain was surging along his neck as he ground his teeth. Why did she have to see it?
“You wouldn’t be alive if she weren’t here,” Red assured him. “I needed the extra hands. She may not see it now, but I did.”
“How many days?” Mountain asked. “And can someone go after her and drag her back?”
“You want her that way?” Roadkill asked.
“No,” he said shaking his head. “But—”
Roadkill squeezed his hand in hers. “I wasn’t part of this life,” she began. “It came at me fast, faster than it has Nightingale, but she answers to her nickname. She stood crying and trying to find ways to get you to a hospital safely. The only thing she didn’t do was buckle under completely and roll in ball. Not yet. Maybe when she gets home, but not yet. And that tells me something.”
“What?” he asked praying Roadkill would say the woman was about to whip around and come back. Bring her lips to his and kiss away his pain. Stay with him past the point of being healed and actually build a life with him. Instead, the words she spoke shattered his heart into a million pieces because he knew Amber, the way she processed and looked at problems. What Roadkill saw as hope he saw as the end of their future, where his world had finally stopped spinning.
“She needs a minute to step back, that’s all.” A rush of fire followed by cold ran along his arm. “Now, Mountain you’re going to go back to sleep.”
His head lightened and sleep took him out of the physical pain as blackness surrounded him until the dreams came. Nightmarish ones where the bullet didn’t hit him, instead it stole his family. Not the one thousands of miles away, but the one he’d found on the road.
