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With that, he cleared out.
Leaving just Cato, Levee, and Eddie with me, since Alaric and Donovan were off doing a small pick-up of specialty guns we had for a collector client.
“Are you cooking at midnight?” Cato asked, making me realize the house was steadily filling up with scents.
“Look, in my family, when someone is going through some shit, you cook for ‘em. Even if it’s midnight,” Eddie explained.
It was guilt that had me finally climbing off the couch I’d been sitting on since I left the clinic.
A part of me was glad for the pain as it sliced through my side, reminding me that I’d missed my pain pill dose. But the perk of physical pain was it dulled the emotional type for a bit. It was why I fought so much back when Ama first left town.
“Hey, there he is!” Eddie said, tone almost comically kind. “How are you holding up, big guy?” he asked.
And that was just so fucking… dad-like, that I felt a smile tug at my lips.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, taking a bottle of water that he passed to me.
“Gotta hydrate, man. Even if you’re sad. Honeys don’t like ashy guys,” he told me. “So are you feeling spicy, salty, sweet? I got it all, man,” he said, waving his arms around the kitchen.
I wasn’t hungry.
But I reached for a brownie because it meant something to me that Eddie gave a shit, that he went out of his way to show that. I wasn’t going to be an asshole that dismissed that.
So for the next few hours, I hung out with the guys, trying to put on a brave face, making them think I was doing alright.
But then I got the call.
“Who is it?” Eddie asked when I reached for my phone, squinting at the unknown number.
“No idea,” I said, but wasn’t surprised. A lot of contacts of mine reached out to me on burner phones. “Hello?” I asked, answering.
“Yeah, this is Seeley,” I said, brows furrowing at the professional-sounding voice.
All I heard after that was the hospital’s name.
And that I was “Amaranta Stone’s emergency contact.”
“What’s going on?” Cato asked, running after me as I turned and made my way through the house.
“Ama’s in the hospital,” I said, grabbing my keys, and rushing out.
“Yo, you can’t ride your bike with your side fucked up like that,” Cato insisted.
“Watch me.”
“Let me grab the keys to the SUV. It will take one minute,” he insisted as I jumped on my bike.
I didn’t have one minute.
Not if Ama was hurt.
The drive back to our old neck of the woods felt like it took hours. And all I could think of, save for worry about her condition if someone was calling for her, was the fact that she still had me saved as her emergency contact.
She’d done that when her gran really took a turn for the worse the year before she passed. Because she knew if something happened to her, there was almost no way her gran could get to the hospital.
“I’d want you there anyway,” she’d insisted.
And since I had a fake I.D. That claimed I was twenty-one, we figured it would work out. I had her as my contact as well. Though, after joining up with the MC, I had to put Huck, McCoy, and Che instead, for reasons of practicality.
