This was the thing about other people and me. I saw them just fine, all those obvious ways they didn’t mean to express themselves but were helpless to avoid. The knowledge of them even lingered, catalogued and filed away in my head for future reference.
But I didn’t care.
I made Stella over at the diner nervous. Whenever I grabbed a bite with some brothers, which wasn’t often, she sent a male server to the table and always stayed behind the counter, probably ready to call the cops. Cressida asked me once when we went for lunch if it bothered me, and it honestly hadn’t occurred to me to care.
Why the fuck would I care what Stella thought?
Honest as hell, I didn’t care what happened to her—if she lived or died—so why would I care how she perceived me?
Human beings and their many interactions were like math to me. I was a hell of a mathematician, but it wasn’t like the numbers fucking moved me.
It was my job to take notes as I read people. To be deadly accurate in my assessment so that I could be, frequently, deadly in dealing with them.
Only a few people actually existed in relation to me.
Zeus.
His family.
King and Cress, now their infant son, Prince.
Most of the brothers I gave more than a passing shit about, but only Nova, Bat, Axe-Man, Kodiak, and Blade could draw me into any kinda real conversation.
So I cared about this girl dying in the mud not because she was a human being and I inherently owed her some kind of empathy. I cared because we were linked together by the few bonds I had. Bea, Axe-Man, the entire club I owed my second life to.
“Don’t fuckin’ die,” I ordered her.
A faint, wet rattle of her breath was my only answer.
The rumble of the truck crunching over frozen ground grew louder behind me. I collected Cleo carefully in my arms so I was ready for Kodiak when he came to a dirt-flying, drifting stop a few feet from me.
He flipped down the truck bed, took one look at me, and extended his arms. “Give ’er to me. You drive.”
“I can handle it,” I told him, cocking my head as I studied the agitated way he bounced on his feet.
“You can handle it,” Kodiak agreed, already reaching for her, carefully pulling her into his arms. “But you’re too close to death, and you don’t believe in shit. I’m gonna hold her, and I’m gonna pray for her.”
My eyebrows cut into my hairline, but I didn’t argue. We were wasting time. Instead, I gestured for him to get in the bed of the truck, then closed the flap.
“Amelia,” Kodiak called.
“Leavin’ her for the cops,” I shouted out the window over the roar of the engine as I gunned for the street. “Gotta leave those dumb fucks some kinda crime scene.”
I drove like a bat out of hell to the nearest hospital, but it was a twenty-minute journey, and I doubted Cleo Axelsen had twenty minutes to spare. Over the harsh rasp of the overtaxed engine, I could hear the murmur of Kodiak chanting in his native tongue the entire drive before we pulled to a screeching halt in the emergency bay of St. Katherine’s Hospital.
The only miracle I’d ever been forced to believe in was Bea’s love, but when the hospital staff flooded out to get Cleo into surgery and found her still, somehow, breathing, I felt a stirring of faith as I stared at Kodiak covered in her blood in the truck bed reluctantly handing her over. There was sweat on his brow and a feverish gleam to his pitch-dark gaze, strands of his long hair glued to his face.
When he tipped it up to me, catching my eye as they sped away with Cleo on a gurney, his expression was fierce as a warrior set out to conquer.
“We’re gonna slaughter this motherfucker,” he said coldly.
I arched a brow at him as I reached out to help him down from the bed, feeling a comradery I was rarely moved by. When he lashed out to grab me forearm to forearm, I tugged him closer and let the monster within me peek out in a feral grin.
“I call fuckin’ dibs.”
Bea
The entire waiting room of St. Katherine’s was filled, not for the first time, with The Fallen MC and their people. A murder of ravens clad in leather instead of feathers had descended on the orange chairs and cold linoleum floor, inactive with acute grief.
Cleo was still in surgery after six hours, and the doctors had stopped coming to check in with Axe-Man. He sat alone on a chair against the back wall, thick thighs spread, big hands covering his entire bearded face so we wouldn’t see him weep.
A grown man, a cold man, weeping for his daughter.