It had taken everything in him to leave the hospital, despite the fact that her family—who had arrived moments after Sarah had left, Anna leading the fray and giving him a fierce hug—and the women were there, looking out for her. He wanted to be there so she could look out for him. So she could fucking save him by opening her eyes.
But someone had put her in that bed. Someone had thrust him into another level of Hell, one deeper than he ever knew existed.
And that someone had to die.
Which was why he was sitting in church, battling not to tear his fucking skin apart and hoping he’d get to be tearing someone else apart before Lauren put him back together by opening her eyes.
“Fuck,” Cade said in response to Gage’s nod.
They’d never dealt with this before. All the violence against them had been tangible, something horrible, brutal, but not something fucking invisible, something running through his woman’s veins. They couldn’t beat it out of anyone.
There was muttering around the table.
“Woman’s weapon,” Bull grunted.
Gage’s eyes snapped to him. “What?”
“Poison. It’s a woman’s weapon. Mia would likely have somethin’ to say about me bein’ sexist sayin’ that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Men use their fists, use weapons where they can see the damage. The blood. Because men are animals. We’re out for blood. Women, on the other hand, are out for pain. And they don’t need blood, because that’s too simple, too obvious, too easy to wipe away. Women like to destroy from the inside out, fight with something that men don’t know what to do with.”
Silence hung in the air.
Gage burst out of his chair.
Cade’s eyes followed him. “You know who did this?”
“Oh I know who fucking did this,” he seethed. “Me.”
Tapping on the keyboard was razors inside Gage’s skull.
“Jade Masters dropped off the face of the earth approximately two and a half months ago,” Wire said, crushing a can in his fist as he finished it. It joined the graveyard of energy drinks that the fucker lived on.
“Soon as I left LA,” Gage clipped. “Soon as I scraped that bitch.”
More tapping. “Looks like it,” Wire agreed.
“Fuck!”
Wire didn’t flinch, even though he was so full of caffeine every second that him not having a heart attack was a surprise.
“Should’ve fuckin’ realized the bitch wasn’t gonna let it be that,” he said, consumed with fury at himself. “Didn’t think she’d be that crazy.”
“The thing with women, especially scorned women, is that they’re always that crazy,” Wire replied, not moving his eyes from the screens around him.
“You gonna tell me where I can find her?” Gage demanded, his palms burning with the need for blood. To fucking bleed the bitch dry. Didn’t matter that she was a woman. She’d stopped being a fucking person the second she made the decision to even think about taking Lauren from him.
Wire frowned at the screen. “Normally I’d be able to do so in a matter of seconds, but this bitch is good at hiding her tracks. Crazy ones normally are.” He glanced at Gage. “You should know that better than anyone.”
The door to Wire’s cave opened.
Cade locked eyes with Gage, and the look on his president’s face made his heart stutter.
“She’s awake.”
And as much as his body cried out for blood, for death, something fought harder than his demons.
Lauren.
Life.
Lauren
Waking up in a hospital for the second time in a month was not great.
Especially since I woke up feeling like a bus had hit me and I had to comfort my hysterical mother into some semblance of calm, which my grandmother did by demanding she “get your shit together and try not to make your daughter want to lapse into a coma again just to escape your bullshit.”
It was safe to say my mother and grandmother didn’t exactly get along.
Because my father had chosen my mother carefully. So she was the exact opposite of my grandmother. Sensible. Ordered. Logical. Everything I pretended to be.
Hence me not calling her or my father when my house had burned down. Because it caused worry they didn’t need. And I wasn’t ready to show my mother who I really was.
We’d called my grandmother, and after making explicitly sure I was okay, she told me it was a good excuse to redecorate.
It took a lot to rattle her.
And after properly looking at her after she yelled at my mother, she looked rattled.
She was still expertly put together, down to her leopard-print heels, but she was coming apart at the seams behind her eyes.
My father stood at my grandmother’s words, likely to start an argument, but someone entered the room and snatched away the oxygen.
My inferno.
He didn’t even glance at my family who all gaped at him—well, apart from Grandma, who did a finger wave—in utter shock.
Sure, he was shocking at the best of times. With his sheer expanse, his cut, his scars, his muscles.