Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(92)
“What—you think you’re immortal?”
“No, baby. I think I only got so much luck. Gunner says he’s got nine lives, and he goes lookin’ to shave that number down. Maybe I got some extra lives, too. But I’m keepin’ count. Don’t wanna lose track.”
“I don’t want you to lose track, either. Getting shot three times should be a maximum lifetime limit, don’t you think?”
He smiled and drew the tip of his finger over her bottom lip. “You thinkin’ about changin’ your mind? Not too late.”
“The baby?” At his nod, she frowned and pulled her head back, away from his touch. “Do you want me to change my mind?”
With no qualms about his answer, he said, “No. But I’d understand if you did. I’d be on your side about it. The hit yesterday, the lockdown, me gettin’ shot—we’re still in the middle of that trouble, Wills. Don’t let the quiet in here make you think we’re through it.”
“I know we’re not. We’re locked in the clubhouse with angry Russians who won’t let us leave. The guy who died is important. And it was Dirty Rats who did all this, wasn’t it?”
He nodded as he tried to fit this detail about the Russians locking them into their own clubhouse into his understanding of the situation—an understanding made imperfect by his pain-fogged brain.
“So this is all my fault.”
“No. Willa—this is not on you. Smithers would’ve been dead by now regardless, at my hand. So what’s goin’ on now is club warfare. Smithers is the crux of it all. Not you.”
“That’s still me. You wouldn’t have cause to fight with the Rats if not for me.”
He reached out and grabbed her arm, grunting as the move stretched his chest and shoulders. “Stop it right now. Only way this doesn’t come to a head like this is if you and me never meet. Is that what you wish?”
“No.”
“Then shut up about it. We’re together, I wouldn’t have it any other way, and it ain’t your fault Smithers was a f*ckin’ psycho. You didn’t answer my question. Did you change your mind?”
“No. I want this baby. I want you. I’m not afraid of your life. And I think it was too late to change my mind the minute you held your hand out to me and helped me up from the highway.”
No kidding. “Yeah. I know how you feel.” Finally, he could feel the drugs moving through him, pulling back the claws of pain. He sighed and reached for her.
She was too far away. He pushed the thin blanket back and patted the table next to him. “Get up here with me. I’m lonely.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then get up here.”
She did, settling in the crook of his arm, on his good side. It added some hurt to his chest, but the comfort and closeness was worth it, and the pain was backing away. Rad closed his eyes and let tomorrow’s troubles come with the sun.
oOo
Irina Volkov arrived at the Brazen Bulls clubhouse shortly before noon. By then, Rad was up and moving around, more or less. He felt like last week’s roadkill.
In the few hours between the club’s waking and Irina’s entrance, Rad had gotten himself back with the living, though frustratingly unsteady on his feet. With Willa’s assistance, he’d had an awkward and arousing sink bath in the downstairs bathroom, and he was dressed in blood-free clothes and a fresh bandage.
Gunner had cleaned his kutte for him. The ragged hole where the bullet had gone through, just above his road-name flash—now spattered with brown blood—showed the orange of his club t-shirt. Willa’s eyes kept drifting to that hole every time she looked his way. He’d have to patch it soon.
After breakfast, the Bulls had gone into the chapel, and he’d gotten caught up. With the Volkov men in the party room, no one had wanted to say much.
Now he knew that Kirill’s body was no longer in the clubhouse. He was at the Stowe Brothers Funeral Home, a club-friendly mortuary that had helped the Bulls out in the past, being prepared for a trip back to New York. Misha was guarding the body.
Delaney had spoken at length with Irina in the middle of the night. With the Rats still an open issue, he’d agreed to keep the lockdown going and to wait for her arrival. Willa had been wrong that the Russians weren’t letting them leave, and Rad had assumed as much. Delaney would never have allowed anyone, not even Irina Volkov, to keep the Bulls hostage in their own home.
“If she puts Kirill’s death on us, she’s playing it close to the vest,” Delaney had said. “I don’t get the sense that our relationship is blown up. Or she could be coming here to tear the place to the ground. She’s a cool customer, and it’s hard to read her. Either way, it makes sense for us to stay low until we know the Russians’ thinking and have a plan for payback on the Rats.”
The woman who came into the clubhouse, accompanied by only one guard, might not have been recognized as a powerhouse. Barely more than five feet tall, with the kind of figure you’d expect on a woman nearing sixty, she looked at first like somebody’s grandmother. But then you looked closer and saw that her pearl-white hair was short, but stylishly cut, not that puffy style everybody’s grandmother seemed to have, and you saw that she had one of those beautiful aging faces that people called ‘handsome.’