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RUBY
She listened to the beeping of the hospital equipment and focused on Roman’s face. It was easier than looking at his battered body and the tubes and wires that wound around and under the hospital gown.
His face looked mostly the same.
The hospital lights made his skin look swallow — or maybe that was the blood he’d lost in the shooting at the cemetery during the Orlovs’ funeral — but otherwise he might just have been sleeping.
She took a drink of cold bitter coffee from the paper cup that had become like an extension of her arm. She wouldn’t even have that if it wasn’t for Mat (she’d learned his full name was Matvey).
Ruby had no money. It was something she hadn’t thought too much about when she’d been living in the cocoon of Roman’s loft. There, she hadn’t needed money. Roman had provided her shelter, her food, her clothes.
And it wasn’t like she’d been able to go anywhere.
Then the shootout had happened — the media was calling it the Red Funeral, an apparent homage to something that had happened inGame of Thrones— and Ruby had been thrust out of her cocoon and into the real world.
Without Roman, because Roman had been on the verge of death since the ambulance had brought him to the hospital and straight into surgery.
It hadn’t taken long for Ruby to realize just how vulnerable she was without him. Mat had brought her to the hospital — Max, also shot, was in another room down the hall — and had been paying for her food and coffee ever since.
She sighed and turned her thoughts to Olivia. She hadn’t talked to her daughter since the day before the funeral five days earlier, not because she hadn’t tried, but because Adam hadn’t been answering Ruby’s calls.
She’d mentioned it to her dad and Brooke, and Brooke had gone to the school only to report that Olivia was nowhere in sight — no Adam dropping her off and picking her up. When Ruby called the station and asked for Officer Hale, saying it was his ex-wife with news about their daughter, she was told he was on indefinite leave.
Finally, her dad and Brooke had gone to Adam’s apartment together. After banging on his door for nearly five minutes, a neighbor had appeared and told them she hadn’t seen Olivia or Adam in days.
A dark thread of fear had been tightening around Ruby’s throat ever since. What was going on? Where was Adam and where had he taken their daughter?
Had he seen the news about Roman (it was everywhere —bratva boss and son critically wounded in apparent Mob hit) and decided it was his best chance of getting out from under Roman’s control?
Five days… They could be anywhere.
She stifled the urge to scream. She’d never felt so alone. She wouldn’t allow Brooke or her dad to come to the hospital. She knew how much they hated that Ruby was still involved with Roman, and besides, Roman’s room was under heavy guard by both the police and his own men, who stared at each other like they didn’t know if looks could kill but they were willing to give it a try.
This wasn’t a world for her dad and Brooke, especially after what had happened to Ruby’s mother. That Ruby was increasingly comfortable in it — that she felt safe with men like Roman and Max and Mat — was something she didn’t want to think too hard about.
She looked up as the door to Roman’s hospital room opened. A couple seconds later, Max shuffled in, pulling an IV pole behind him.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
She’d given up on getting him to stay in bed. He’d insisted on coming to check on Roman ever since he’d woken up after his own surgery the day after the shooting.
“I’ve been right as rain since I woke up,” he grumbled, lowering himself to the chair on the other side of Roman’s bed.
He’d been saying the same thing for days and Ruby was pretty sure he would have checked himself out against the doctor’s recommendation if it hadn’t been for Roman.
His loyalty to Roman seemed inviolable and he was more free to come and go as a patient of the hospital than as a guest.
“You took a bullet to the spleen,” Ruby reminded him. “And one to the lungs too.”
His blond hair was dull, his blue eyes shadowed with smudges. He wasn’t at all her type, but he was still an attractive man, and not for the first time, Ruby wondered why he didn’t have a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
Not one she’d seen anyway.
He shrugged. “They took them out.”
She laughed in spite of the seriousness of the situation. Alpha-male bullshit seemed to be part and parcel of Roman’s world. Ruby had gotten glimpses behind the curtain, knew that the men were human, that they bled like everyone else, so it was still a little surreal to observe their machismo.
