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I started to sit up, but Johnny shoved me back down. “Just stay there, fucker. You have no idea how fucking heavy you are.”
“He can’t be that heavy. He looks like he’s lost a ton of weight,” Libby pointed out.
“That’ll happen in prison,” I muttered, ignoring Johnny as I pushed into a sitting position. “Fuck, what happened?”
“You passed out in the driveway,” Johnny grunted. “Jason should have let your ass hit the ground.”
I winced as my elbow pinched when I bent it. A needle protruded from my vein, leading to a bag hanging on a hook beside the bed. That explained why I was feeling better. I wasn’t going to pass out anymore, but the pins and needles under the skin were getting worse. I needed something soon.
“You were severely dehydrated,” Johnny snapped. “You could have fucking said something.”
My eyes flicked to Libby again. She was watching me like I was going to croak at any moment. “Nice to see that you’ll visit me when I’m about to die,” I teased.
“Well, I would have visited sooner, but all the men in my life like to keep secrets from me.”
“As I recall, you kept a hell of a lot from all of us.”
“Touché,” she said with a grin. “Do you want something to eat?”
The last fucking thing I wanted was food, but if it got her away from me for a few minutes, I’d take it. “Bread,” I muttered.
She shoved Johnny out of the way and sat down beside me, wrapping her arms around my neck. Her hair tickled my face as she whispered in my ear, “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
“You don’t get scared,” I grumbled.
When she pulled back, for just a second I saw the vulnerability in her eyes. “Everyone gets scared of something.”
Her thumb brushed the scruff of my jaw as she stood and walked away from me. As much as I respected Libby, she was a reminder of the events that led me here to begin with. She stood proudly beside Rafe, and for that, she would never truly be on our side.
“Now that she’s gone, what’s really going on?”
“I need a hit,” I admitted quietly.
“You want me to help you get fucked up?” he snarled. “Is that really all you fucking care about right now?”
“I didn’t ask for this,” I snapped, staring at him intently. “Why don’t you ask Rafe why the fuck he allowed Baz to shoot me up.”
He swore under his breath as he turned from me, pacing the room. “I didn’t know.”
“I haven’t been using,” I confessed. “Not since you came that first time.”
Johnny took off his cowboy hat, running his fingers through his long hair in frustration. “Heroin?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It couldn’t have been just heroin. It didn’t mellow me out. It fucked with my head and made everything so much more intense. I felt like I was burning from the inside out.”
“And now?”
Fuck, I hated talking about this shit, admitting that I couldn’t do what I needed to do without a little help. “I don’t need a lot. I just…need to take the edge off.”
“What you need is to stay here and get that shit out of your system.”
My head snapped up and anger washed over me. “No. There’s no fucking way I’m sitting it out while that kid is out there. It’s my fault he’s gone.”
“How do you figure? You didn’t get him into this shit. Rico did.”
“They were off the grid until I came along,” I snapped. “I started watching over them. I went with Rico to that meet. I should have known what he was up to and done something about it.”
None of it actually made any sense, and I knew that. But my job was to protect people, and even next door to the two of them, I still managed to fail. I would never be able to look Sky in the eyes again if I didn’t do everything possible to save her son.
