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I am not too proud to admit that it was kind of hot and that I wasn’t entirely immune to it. Despite said craptastic day.
That said, he was a strange guy with “bad news” written all over him. On a backroad. At night. And I was not getting on a bike with him. No matter how sexy his stupid voice was.
Luckily, he was easily deterred.
Somehow, though, the sound of his bike rumbling away filled me with dread.
Which made absolutely no sense.
You know, until about five minutes later.
When I heard a car pulling up behind me.
I remembered having a fleeting thought of saying something snarky like What is it, National Good Samaritan Day? Or something like that.
Right before the pain started.
CHAPTER THREE
Voss
I’d been the one in an emergency room more than a few times in my life.
It was my first time being the worried person pacing the floors, though.
I didn’t even know the fucking woman.
I should have been back home at the clubhouse, pushing my dog to the side so I could get into the bed too.
But there I was.
Under the stark fluorescent lights, listening to the drone of voices. Someone was crying somewhere. Another person was screaming about not having seen a doctor yet.
There were beeping sounds and announcements over the loudspeaker.
All of it was familiar, yet foreign, hearing it through the ears of someone other than a patient.
“Are you family?” was all that mattered to them when I’d asked how the woman was doing. When I’d said no, she’d given me a shrug and told me that I couldn’t know more then.
So I had nothing to do but pace and replay what had happened after I’d called the cops.
The cop pulled up not three minutes later.
I didn’t know him.
The faces of the beat officers always seemed to be changing. There were a few on the Henchmen payroll. Along with some detectives. But this wasn’t one I think any of us had ever encountered before.
But he was all high off of the power of his badge, demanding I get away from the woman, questioning me like a suspect when I’d been the one to fucking call it in.
Not five minutes later, the ambulance was showing up.
That was the first time I got a good look at her, as they loaded her up on the stretcher and her small frame illuminated by the lights on the police cruiser.
Unfortunately, she was so fucking bloody, bruised, and swollen, that I couldn’t tell you what she looked like. Just that she was small. And someone had taken advantage of that, beating the ever-loving shit out of her.
Fury, familiar, welcome, flooded my system, making my hands curl into fists, my nails biting into my palms.
If there was one thing I hated in life, it was a bully.
And there was no bigger bully than those who picked on people smaller and weaker than them.
Kids.
And women.
I was aware enough of my surroundings despite hearing the very blood rushing through my veins to catch a name.
Sylvie Sullivan.
But then the ambulance doors were closing, the cop was passing me a card in case I ‘remembered anything,’ despite eyeing me like he thought I had battered the woman, despite having no blood on me or torn up knuckles, and everyone was heading out.
I stood there for a few moments, trying to rein in my rage.
Then I got on my bike and rode to the hospital.
I wasn’t going to be able to go home until I knew she was at least conscious and going to recover.
Guilt, a strange, foreign thing—the twisting gut, the nausea rising in my throat—spread, despite knowing that I’d tried to help.
Should I have tried harder?
Should I have at least waited at the end of the road to make sure she got out of there in one piece?
“Fuck,” I hissed, dropping down into a chair, pressing the palms of my hands into my eyes.
Having nothing else to do, I reached for my phone, taking what little information I had, and typing it into my phone.
Sylvie Sullivan.
Sullivan was a common name, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever met a woman named Sylvie before. So I figured it would be relatively easy to locate her.
Sure enough, not a moment later, I was pulling up a social media profile.
And there she was.
I recognized her from her ink, spreading across her chest, down her arms, even on her hands.
In her profile picture, her eyes were down as she raised a cup of coffee to her lips for a sip.
Just like when I’d come across her, her brown hair was up in a bun, her bangs teasing across her forehead.
Pretty.
Really fucking pretty.
Her profile was locked down pretty tight. I couldn’t access any more pictures. But I did see that she worked at some place called Barlowe House.
I was nobody’s investigator, but for some reason, I was typing that into the search bar next.
