Judge (Shady Valley Henchmen 1)

I mean, I hadn’t been completely bullshitting them.

I was absolutely feeling it.

And by “it,” I meant every single injury on my aching body.

The SUV just chugging along on relatively decent roads was making my back slam pretty consistently on the seat, making my shoulder and ribs scream.

The migraine was still a dull ache behind my eyes.

My eye hurt.

My nose hurt.

And all the swelling from all the trauma had created a sort of throbbing discomfort all over my face.

I really did just want my bed. With my abundance of pillows, my half a dozen blankets, some ice packs, and a big bowl of ice cream.

“Still can’t believe those fuckers couldn’t find shit,” Conor said, grumbling in the passenger seat.

By ‘those fuckers,’ he meant the police. Who, admittedly, didn’t seem to be too worried about my case as a whole.

The guy I’d spoken to had been nice enough, but seemed completely overworked and drowning.

And, somehow, I didn’t think he was going to bend over backward and burn the midnight oil over an isolated incident that didn’t leave me raped or dead in that alley.

Bigger fish to fry and all that.

“Probably fucking looked us up and figured this was a Family problem,” Conor said, shaking his head.

There was a chance that was a factor.

Back home, we would never really think to call the police when there was an issue. Not even that time The Bog had been robbed by an employee.

If we called them, they would focus on the organized crime factor instead of what was really going on.

It was just easier for my brothers to handle their own stuff in their own way.

So if the Vegas police got wind of my brothers being involved in organized crime, they might have just figured it was easier to wash their hands of it, not to waste their precious time on possible mafia nonsense.

Maybe I would have been angry if I was a citizen of Las Vegas.

But since my life was several hours away in a somewhat crime-filled, but sleepy, familiar, safe town, I wasn’t that worried about it.

The attacker would stay in Vegas.

And I would be safe at home.

“Sorry,” Cillian said when he hit a bump in the road that had me gasping as my ribs jiggled.

“How long will the ribs feel like this?”

“Four or six weeks,” Conor told me. “But it will get a little bit better after the first week or so. You won’t be slinging any liquor in the near future, but you should be able to sit down without being in agony.”

If any of my brothers knew how an injury might feel, it was Conor, who’d broken damn near every bone in his body at least once.

“We are going to keep you out of pain,” Cillian assured me.

“I already called Dr. Price,” Eoin supplied. “He said he will do a house call to check you over and get you a script.”

“Since the fucking hospital barely gave you enough to get you home with,” Conor added. “So worried about drug-seeking. We could buy our own fucking drugs if that was the route we wanted to take.”

“Is it just me, or has Conor gone from charmingly grumpy to ‘You youths better stay off my lawn!’ crotchety lately?” Rian asked, making a snort escape me.

Cillian, sensing the tension in the car growing, reached over to turn up the music, drowning out everything but my thoughts.

And where did they go?

To Jass, of course.

His deep, sexy voice on the phone. Those dirty things he said. The things he wanted me to do. The way his voice got more and more ragged until he cursed out his release just after I found my own.

It was more than just that, though.

It was the unexpected gentleness he’d reached for me with in that alley, the sweet reassurances he fed me as we waited for the ambulance, the way he came with me, then stayed with me. Even though he hadn’t been let in the back with me.

He shouldn’t have been able to be so kind, so soft. That wasn’t how bikers were. And while I didn’t really know him personally, I knew Judge’s reputation before he went to prison.

He’d been hard and cold and ruthless.

Men like that just didn’t do all the warm and sweet and soft stuff.

Even my own brothers, while they could be kind and understanding, were never really sweet or soft with me.

Cillian came the closest, and likely only because he was like a father to me.

My mind was still on Jass as we finally drove into town, moving through the suburb area, then past the two apartment buildings, and, finally toward our much smaller neighborhood full of newer, larger homes.

Some of the locals referred to the area as “Millionaire’s Row.” And, honestly, for good reason.

It was a dead-end street with only seven houses, each of them well over four thousand square feet, and each custom-made.