“Take your hand off the door,” Keltan gritted out, voice promising menace. Violence.
Dwayne didn’t blink at the gaze that promised the same. “Take your hands off Lucy, give her to me and you got a deal.”
Keltan’s arms tightened, which I would have struggled against had I not been gritting my teeth to stop myself crying like a little girl from the pain radiating up my arm and towards my shoulder.
“Her arm is broken,” Keltan said quietly. But not gently. No, his accent became so pronounced that his words almost melted together from pure fury. “She needs a hospital, and I swear to everything I hold dear, including the woman in my arms, I’ll shoot you dead if you don’t take your hand off that door,” Keltan promised.
Dwayne’s resolve hardened, but then he glanced at my arm. “Fuck,” he muttered, his voice tight, face cloaked in anger and concern. He reached out to brush a wayward hair from my face with tenderness that starkly juxtaposed the anger on his face. “You need a hospital, Lu, and I need to kill whoever put you there.”
He hesitated a second before giving Keltan one last glare and me a look before leaving.
I hissed out an annoyed breath. Keltan didn’t hesitate in opening the door and depositing me in so quickly and gently, the motion seemed supernatural. Then again, so did the pain in my arm.
I’d been hurt before. In a multitude of ways that had snapped pieces of my soul. It was excruciating, that pain. But when it was on the inside, you knew you had two choices: live with it, or give in to it.
The physical pain of a broken bone was a little harder to live with.
I noted with a detached sense of irony that it was the same wrist that Gray broke all those years before. The same soul too, but that was a different story.
Keltan fastened my seat belt, and I let out a little moan of pain as his bicep brushed my wrist.
His jaw tightened and the click resounded in the cab of the truck, somehow louder than the chaos just outside.
And the chaos on the inside too.
“Sorry, baby,” he murmured, the hardness of his voice a memory. He cupped my jaw for a moment, the rough calluses of his palms scratching my cheek, not unpleasantly. Then he was gone and the door slammed shut with such force it shook the cab and jostled me in my seat.
I let out a louder noise considering no one could hear me as Keltan was rounding the truck in record time.
He’d flown out of the park the moment his ass hit the seat, managing to do it at a dizzying speed while not hitting a human or any bits of burning wreckage.
Impressive. Then again, I guessed he had enough experience navigating vehicles through burning wreckage.
We screeched out of the parking lot and onto the street leading into Hope.
“Doctor is the other way,” I said tightly, trying to distract myself by listening idly to the sirens in the background.
That meant Luke. Luke would protect Rosie. Though all the men in the club would die before they let harm come to her, or Luke come within four feet of her.
Keltan’s knuckles strained as he clutched the steering wheel. “Not goin’ to a doctor. You need a hospital. Closest one is Hope. Still too fuckin’ far.” His accent was so thick in his fury that I could barely understand him.
“I don’t need a hospital,” I argued slowly, measuring breaths against the pain. ‘The doctor here is equipped to deal with broken bones.”
I had experience. Not just my own. Lucky had snapped his own wrist when he decided to karate chop a plank of wood to win a bet with Gage. He’d been a lot tougher than me and had whined when I dragged him to the doctor, saying he wasn’t going to lose the bet and had an entire other hand to win with.
Then he’d cut the cast off two weeks early because it was hampering him from “living his life and fucking bitches.”
That was before Bex, of course. Now she was his life. No other woman existed for him.
Keltan glanced sideways at me, eyes blank before focusing back on the road. “Baby, your fuckin’ bone is almost protruding through your skin. You’re going to a fuckin’ hospital. And you’re movin’ to a fuckin’ city that has one in closer vicinity.”
I rolled my eyes, irritation serving as a great painkiller. “Yes, because I’ll surely get blown up by a car bomb more than once in my life.”
His chocolate eyes were almost black. “You’re not goin’ to be in this danger. Ever. Again.”
Wrong.
I was in the car with him.
And that was danger in itself.
Rosie: Are you okay? Someone said your arm is broken. I’m coming to the hospital. Right now. I just have to kill my brother first. And the deputy sheriff.