Unwilling Protector (Steel Vipers MC)

The door cracks and slams the back of the wall as Jack breaks in. I see it out of the corner of my eye, but that just makes me kick Lenny harder. I don’t want to give Lenny a chance to hurt Jack.

Jack comes over and grabs me by the shoulders, making me stop.

“I think you permanently ruined him, Midnight. You can stop,” he says, almost sounding like he’s laughing.

“Good. Men like him should never procreate,” I mutter.

“Are you okay, baby?”

I look up at Jack and nod, adrenaline starting to ease, and I can feel my body start to tremble as reaction settles in. “I’m okay,” I tell him, still holding my knife, gripping it tightly in my hand.

“Call an ambulance,” Lenny whines, sitting up. “You bitch! I’ll kill you—”

Lenny doesn’t get a chance to say anything else because Jack slams his fist into his face. Turns out, Lenny can’t take a hit. He’s knocked out. Completely out of it.

Chapter 19

Drew

Two Weeks Later

“There? How does that feel?” Millie asks my brother as I come into the room. I stand by the door watching them. I can’t see because my brother’s back is turned to me, but it appears she’s just got done helping him shower and is buttoning his shirt while he sits in a chair. His hair is damp, but even from just looking at his back, I can tell his hands are trembling. Guilt hits me again as I go over in my head how close I came to losing him. I don’t know what happened to Lenny, but I know how G and his club operates just from my conversations with G. I’m pretty sure he’s not breathing anymore—or if he is, he won’t be long. I guess I should feel guilty over that, but I can’t seem to find it in me. He almost took my brother from me. If he’s dead, I’m not going to lose sleep. G told me that he and his brothers know how to watch their backs and do what they need to do. I’m just going to have faith in that.

“Better than I should let it,” G says, his voice tender. Until this moment, I’ve never heard him sound like that with anyone but me. He likes Millie. My brother isn’t the type to let himself care about anyone. Other than me, I can count the number of times on one hand—with fingers left over—that he’s cared about anyone of the opposite sex. There was a girl when he was a teenager. She died in a car accident and that made him go quiet. In fact, my brother doesn’t speak very much at all. He said that’s why the men in his club named him Ghost. The next time he showed feelings for a woman, he lost out on her to the club’s president.

“I’m going to miss you,” Millie responds. Even from here, I can tell her voice is sad.

“Is that how you treat all your patients, Millie?” G asks, his voice hardening.

“You know better than to ask me that,” she says, stepping away from him.

“Then, you need to stop treating me differently,” he mutters.

I’m feeling guilty for eavesdropping, so I decide to make myself known before this gets more emotional.

I knock on the door to the room acting like I just got here. “Hey, big brother,” I call out, sounding overly cheerful.

“Hey, meanness,” G says, turning to look at me. Millie blushes and looks down.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Just me trying to figure out what wall to stare at next,” he jokes.

“Nothing, I was just finishing helping Gary shower. I’ll uh… send a nurse’s aide with ice,” she says, but doesn’t really look at my brother.

“That’s best,” he says, and I frown at him. My brother is an idiot. Millie’s blush intensifies. Then, she all but runs out of the room, giving me a tight smile.

“Are you being dumb, brother-o-mine?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. Where’s your shadow?” he asks. I could push it and ask him more, but I know from experience that it wouldn’t go anywhere other than piss him off—so, I let it go.

“Jack is downstairs talking to Ride. For some reason, they feel they need to rent a U-Haul for all my crap. I mean, I don’t have that much. I don’t get it.”

“They’re tying up loose ends,” he says, and I look at him.

“I see,” I mumble.

“Yeah, you do, but we don’t talk about it, right?”

“I think since it concerns me and the man I’m going to marry, I should be able to talk about it, G.”

“You’d be wrong.”

“Fine, then you should give Millie some slack. She’s really sweet on you.” I shrug. “She’s good people.”

“She is. That’s exactly why she deserves someone better than a man who can’t even walk without help or hold his damn fork steady enough to feed himself.”