Shiver (Unbreakable Bonds 1)

Lucas turned to find Snow already kneeling beside Andrei, gently rolling the man onto his back to check his injuries with quick, efficient hands. Andrei’s face was so swollen he was hardly recognizable and his body was covered in cuts and ugly bruises. As Snow touched him, a soft moan slipped past his parted lips and his breathing quickened under the pain, but he didn’t stir otherwise.

“Go get the van. We’ll load him inside and Snow will take him to the hospital,” Lucas ordered as he knelt on the other side of Andrei near his head. He gently ran his hand through Andrei’s blood-matted hair, wishing there was some way he could take away the pain. But there wasn’t. That was Snow’s job.

His eyes lifted slightly to stare across at Chris Green’s limp form. There was one way that he could feel better. Something within his reach that would help to ease the guilt.

“You don’t have to do this,” Snow murmured. Lucas glanced back to find his friend’s eyes were still locked on his patient. But then Snow always seemed to be good at guessing what Lucas was thinking. “You can just hand him over to the cops and we walk away.”

There would be no walking away. Chris would give up all kinds of information on Lucas and his companions. They’d get dragged through court and it would be ugly. There could even be limited jail time involved. Snow could lose his license. But sadly, that wasn’t even the first or main thought dancing through Lucas’s head.

“What if it was me on this floor right now and that man was responsible?”

Snow looked up at Lucas then, the smile sliding across his lips was a twisted thing filled with gleeful malice. “He’d be awake and screaming as he watched me pull one organ after another out of his body. It would make Hannibal Lecter cringe.” The smile melted away and he gave a little shrug before returning his full attention to Andrei. “But we both know I have questionable impulse control issues. Not the best role model.”

True.

“How bad is he?” Lucas demanded, preferring to change the subject than go into Snow’s impulses. His mind was made up about Green and he knew that Rowe wasn’t going to push him on it. No, Snow was just trying to save his soul and he appreciated his friend’s somewhat half-hearted effort. Lucas had no interest in doing the right thing or being a good guy in this instance. He wanted only to protect what was his. And in that moment, Andrei belonged to him.

“Hard to tell. I’ll take him to St. E South,” he said, using the locals’ name for closest hospital to their current location. “Make sure he’s stabilized there before transferring him to U.C., where I can keep a better eye on him.”

Some small knot in Lucas’s chest eased. Once out of the emergency room, Andrei would no longer be Snow’s patient but the man was going to pull every string and work every angle to make sure that he was able to have a hand in every minute of the man’s recovery.

“Thank you,” Lucas whispered, letting his eyes drift shut. It was nearly over.Chapter 22Andrei sat on his couch, staring at the wall, weighing whether the aches and pains that filled his frame had finally grown bad enough to send him from his comfortable position in search of those damned painkillers, which he’d stupidly left on his bedside table in the next room. He was overdue for a pill. Should have taken it almost an hour ago, but it had taken him nearly that long to get comfortable on the couch and now he didn’t want to get up again.

Tipping his head to the right, he looked through a part in the black-out curtains over the large window in his living room. The sun had set less than an hour ago and night was falling fast over the city, clasping her in a chilly embrace. His time in the hospital followed by a week of being trapped in his apartment due to his reduced mobility had left Andrei feeling restless and disconnected from the world. Everything just felt off.

He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, held it, and then slowly released it through narrowly parted lips. Three weeks. Three fucking weeks since he’d last seen Lucas and he still couldn’t get the asshole out of his head.

After Snow had taken him to the hospital, he’d spent the better part of the first week unconscious, hooked up to more machines than he thought they could fit into a room. Each time he’d surfaced through all the meds, Lucas had been sitting at his bedside, looking ragged and exhausted. The man didn’t talk much. He just sat there, smiling weakly and holding Andrei’s hand as if it were the only place in the world that he wanted to be.