Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(91)
She got the bullet without doing too much additional injury, and she determined with some degree of confidence that it hadn’t damaged any bone. Then she stitched him up and let Griffin and Mo make him comfortable while she checked on Slick and Becker.
Griffin had been a great assistant. He knew more than he thought he did. So did she, for that matter.
Becker had road rash, and it wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t the horrific kind of injury that it could have been. In the ER, she’d seen cases where all the skin and tissue had been abraded completely away, down to the bone, or torn away in long, flapping strips. Becker’s arm looked like ground meat and would likely scar, but it would heal. Joanna had cleaned it up and done a good, detailed job. Willa had to pluck out only a few small—and painful—bits of debris she’d missed. Then she bandaged him and gave him some antibiotics and the choice to get Percocet and leave off the Jack Daniels or get Tylenol and keep drinking. He chose Jack. She was not surprised.
Slick had a long gouge along the side of his head, about the width of a finger—or a bullet. It was bloody, but in the scheme of the night, it was the least of the injuries. He complained of a headache. She didn’t see signs of concussion or fracture, so she cleaned up him up. She couldn’t suture the wound, but his blond hair was short enough that she managed to get it bandaged. He chose Percocet.
And then she was done and exhausted.
It wasn’t until then, when she was cleaning up the last of her medical mess, that she realized there were strange men in the clubhouse. Three large men, silent and angry, in dress pants and filthy, bloody dress shirts. They sat at the bar, staring down into their drinks.
Simon came up and stood at her side. “Russians,” he said. “We lost Kirill. His body’s in D’s office. Things are tense, to say the least.”
“Kirill?”
“Their boss.” Simon shook his head briskly and seemed to realize that he shouldn’t have been talking to her about that. “You did good work again, Doc.”
“You need to stop calling me that, Simon. I’m not.”
“To us, you are. You did good.”
She turned and considered Rad’s sleeping body, still so pale. God, she hoped she’d done well. She hoped she’d done enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rad came out of his dream with a start and grunted as his clenching muscles activated all the pains ravaging his body simultaneously.
The dream had been nothing—just a collection of images from the day spliced together randomly, and flashing by quickly, as if a schizophrenic on mushrooms had been in the editing booth. The bright beams of bike headlights sliding in behind them. Standing in the barn in Nebraska watching Kirill climb up from the gun bunker. Riding in the back of the box truck, the pounding agony jolting through his body with every bounce of the speeding truck, keeping him conscious and sapping his will. Astride his Dyna, headed home, letting the infinite, eternal Plains landscape lull him into ride hypnosis. Willa’s sleeping body as he got up that morning, the cover sliding to reveal one round breast, its perfect, barely-pink nipple tightening against a sudden chill. Kirill’s body lying next to him in the truck, his unseeing eyes wide, a hole in his forehead.
Kirill was dead. Killed in Bulls trouble. Kirill, son of the head of the Volkov brotherhood, and her second in command. If Irina blamed the club, they were all in deep shit.
He blinked and tried to see. When he couldn’t see much, he nearly panicked. Then his eyes focused on the glow of the neon Harley sign over the bar, and he understood that he was in the clubhouse, and it was simply dark.
With clarity coming on him, he knew, too, that he was hardly alone—he could hear and sense bodies sleeping around him. And he was on the pool table. His forty-year-old back, which had taken some abuse of its own, was none too happy about its location. But that ache was the least of his pains.
Right. Remembering how he’d gotten where he was, he lifted his head to verify—and then dropped it back down when his shoulder caught fire. But he’d seen enough to know that Willa was sleeping at his side. Keeping his head on the pillow, he turned it so he could see her. She was sitting on a bar stool, folded over onto the pool table, with her crossed arms pillowing her head.
His beautiful woman. His healing angel.
He lifted his right arm—the one that he could lift—and set his hand on her head. She reacted at once, with a little flinch before she opened her eyes. When she saw him looking, she smiled.
“Hey. How do you feel?”
“Like I got shot.”
She laughed lightly and caught his hand, bringing it to her mouth, where she kissed the center of his palm. Despite his racking pain and weariness, and his worry about the blowback they faced, his cock twitched at that gossamer touch.
“I’ve got Percocet for you for pain. Can you sit up a little to swallow them?”
Sitting up sounded like torture, but water and pain pills sounded like heaven. So he gritted his teeth until he could lean on his good arm and get the pills down. He drank about half the bottle of water before Willa took it away.
When he was settled again, she said, “Delaney has the slug. He said you keep them.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
He started to shrug and then thought better of doing that to his shoulder. “Three times now, somebody’s put a bullet in me, tryin’ to take me out. And here I am.”