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If only I could allow myself the right to close my eyes. Only I didn’t. I kept them on hers.
“After…they just…they left.” The weeping intensified but then slowed again as her eyes drifted shut. I glanced at the paramedic who was dealing with her IV.
“The sedative is hitting her now,” she assured me. “Don’t worry, Mr. O’Connell, she will be in good hands.”
The paramedic was with the company.
“Thank you,” I said, then pressed a kiss to my mother’s forehead before slipping out and closing the doors.
Ezra walked up to stand with me as the ambulances pulled away. Security worked with the sheriff and the police. It was after eight in the morning and my eyes were pure grit at the moment.
Dad was dead. I didn’t even know how to process that information. He wasn’t waiting somewhere for a phone call. He wouldn’t be giving me shit about not doing something for Mom. He wasgone.
It was my fault he was gone.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out.
The messages on the screen were numerous, but it was Hellspawn’s name that leapt out at me.
Hellspawn:
Ms. Stephanie…
CHAPTER6
EMERSYN
The silence in the clubhouse proved almost suffocating. It had taken a while to persuade anyone to sleep. I started with Mickey, coaxing him into my bed after he showered off the blood. His movements had been sluggish and he wasn’t all there. Still, he let me tease him to sleep with slow strokes of his hair. After, I moved to Liam, who crashed in Rome’s room, silent and grieving.
Jasper was next; like everyone else, he hadn’t wanted to sleep. However, he was still healing and a little pushiness, along with curling up with him, got him to sleep. Freddie had zero interest in me persuading him, though. He finally drifted off in the room where I’d been watching over Mom.
Vaughn and Rome were both rough, but they were also both asleep—finally. Thankfully, I hadn’t had to persuade them. They crashed on the big sofa in our suite, so I’d just left them both tucked in before retreating to check on Mom.
I didn’t even know what time it was. It seemed years since our night out at the club. Once Jasper got us back to the clubhouse, we learned about Mickey and his sister. Then word trickled in about the other attacks.
Vaughn and Rome had been at the hospital when we got there. Kellan arrived with Milo. The blood on Kellan’s collar and the smell of smoke and char filled the air.
“You should be sleeping,” Kellan said as I slipped into the kitchen. He and Milo were drinking coffee, their conversation breaking off at my entrance.
“So should you,” I scolded, going to him when he held out an arm. He’d showered and changed, even though the burnt scent seemed permanently lodged in my nostrils. The curl of his arm around me pulled me in tight.
The squeeze bordered right on the edge of too much, but I leaned into him and let him pull me onto his lap. My hip protested when it impacted gently, but I ignored it. There was a cut there. I’d washed it out in the shower before the hospital. Freddie had found some liquid band-aid and helped close it up for me.
I could survive a cut.
Across the table, Milo watched us with dark, brooding eyes and I held out a hand to him. “I’m fine, Ivy,” he said, his voice as gruff as his gaze. But when I curled my fingers at him and flattened them again, he sighed. “So stubborn.”
Just a flicker of a grin before he slid his hand over mine, squeezing gently.
“You’re not fine,” I said, then cleared my throat at the emotion punching through. Exhaustion weighed on all of us. “None of you are.”
The ambushes had left such deep, lasting marks. I had no idea how we were going to move past all of this, just knew that I needed to be there for them. I couldn’t bring back Ms. Stephanie or Jonathon or all those people at the shop…
“I need to call the hospital in a little while,” I said softly. “I need to check on Lauren.” The only other survivor from the tattoo shop had passed in the time we’d waited for news of the surgery.
Milo’s knuckles were bloody and raw. He’d hit the wall more than once earlier.
“And I need to clean these up…” I twisted to press a kiss to Kellan’s jaw. His eyes were so tired, the twin shards of deep blue were almost glassy. “You need to sleep.”
