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“Yeah, it just really hurts.”
“No shit,” he chuckles. “You got stabbed right through the chest and suffered a collapsed lung. That wasn’t supposed to be a walk through the fucking park.”
Rolling my eyes, I rest my hand over his chest, feeling the steady thrum of his heart. “How long have I been out?”
“On and off for two days,” he tells me, making my eyes widen. “I think the mix of anesthesia from surgery and your overall exhaustion have kept you out longer than expected, but on the plus side, it’s given your body a chance to start healing.”
“How bad was it?”
“It was bad, babe,” he states. “Real fucking bad.”
Shit.
The bed dips on my other side, and I roll onto my back to find Easton sitting on the edge. His soft gaze lingers on my face as he reaches toward the medications left haphazardly on the bedside table. “Here,” he says, grabbing the painkillers and pouring a few into the palm of his hand as I sit up.
I quickly take them, hoping like hell they work fast. “Where are we?” I ask after swallowing the little pills, taking a look around and not recognizing the small home.
“One of Zade’s safe houses. We all have a few scattered across the country, but this one was the closest,” he tells me before grabbing the array of pills on the bedside table and dumping them into my lap. He gives me a rundown of what I need to take and why, but something tells me he’ll be keeping me right on schedule.
“Is the safe house really necessary?” I ask, meeting his stare and trying to figure out just how dire this situation has become.
“Oh yeah,” Sawyer says, walking into the cramped bedroom and dropping down into the armchair across the room. “Empire is out for blood. They’re coming for us no matter what we do or say. We just slaughtered The Circle, we committed treason against our own, betrayed our vows, and broke some of our most sacred laws. It’s a fucking manhunt, babe. A fucking war, and there’s nowhere for us to run, nowhere to hide.”
Shivers sail down my spine as I hold his stare. “So what now?”
“Now . . . I don’t fucking know. It’s in Zade’s hands now. He’s making the call,” he says. “All I know is that we’re not doing shit until you’re healed enough. If we need to run, we need to know that you’re going to be alright. So I suppose for now, all you need to do is sit in that fucking bed and get better.”
I roll my eyes, not liking the idea of just sitting back and doing nothing. “You know, I’m still really angry with you guys,” I remind them. “You should have told me that you were coming for me. You let me fear for my life.”
Easton shakes his head, his hand dropping to my thigh. “To be honest, there was a good chance that we weren’t going to see you again. You could have died in there. You almost fucking did, but what Dalton told you at the hospital still stands. We did what we had to do to protect you, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, willing the painkillers to work faster. “How is that protecting me?”
“Despite what you think, The Circle wasn’t just made up of a bunch of old, random rich dudes. They were trained by their fathers, just as Sawyer was trained by his. A man who stands at the top of our organization can’t be foolish. He needs to be switched on, and if you walked into the tomb knowing you were about to be freed, they would have sniffed out the deceit a mile away,” he tells me. “Your fear needed to be real. They needed to see the terror in your eyes, the raw despair in your tone as you screamed. I know it sucked, and fuck, Pretty, if there were anything we could have done to be able to spare you that fear, we would have, but it needed to be this way.”
I bow my head, tears welling in my eyes at the horrific memories that haunt me from that tomb. It’s never going to be okay, but for now, I can at least understand why they did it. “Okay,” I whisper, reaching out and taking his hand. “I can accept that.”
Dalton lets out a heavy sigh of relief and hooks his arm over my shoulder before carefully pulling me into his side and pressing a kiss to my temple. “Thank fuck for that.”
“Thank you, though,” I murmur. “What you did . . . that couldn’t have been an easy decision to make, and I don’t take it lightly. I know what this means for you all and the positions you’ve now put yourselves in. Fighting for your lives . . . that was never a part of the deal, and the fact that you’re still here, willing to put yourselves on the line to protect me—”
