Lazarus (The Henchmen MC 7)

In a way, maybe it was better I got out before I got in too deep.

Too late, my heart said.

My brain had no valid argument to that.

Because it was absolutely too late.

I was pretty sure I was falling for Lazarus.

And, if the pain I felt as I let myself into my apartment was anything to go by- it was absolutely, positively excruciating.ELEVENLazarus"You need to get your head in the game," Edison warned, watching me hit the call button for the fifth time in a row. Worry was a coil in my stomach ready to spring with even the slightest provocation.

I told her I would call.

And maybe if she was sleeping or in the shower, I could understand if she missed the first two or three calls.

But four or five?

Every nerve ending in my body was firing off sparks, telling me something wasn't right.

Still in the beginning stages of a detox, she would have been half out of her mind with the need of some way to distract herself. She would have been waiting for the call that I told her was coming.

The call went to the robotic voicemail, making my stomach clench hard enough to make me wince, convinced there was only one good reason she wouldn't pick up. And that, oh, that was not good.

She wasn't in the apartment.

And the only feasible reason I could come up with for that would be she couldn't take it alone, it was too soon to expect her to be able to not backslide. It had been different with me. I had been up and down so much. I had been beaten and gutted and used as a pawn. I had been detoxed and hopped up on Subs. I had been arrested. I had years of trial and error before I was finally strong enough to be able to do it all on my own.

She didn't have that.

She didn't even have that long of a history.

Six months? She was a baby addict.

I had thought, wrongly as it turned out, that that worked in her favor. Maybe if she had only been in the lifestyle for half a year, then she wasn't so entrenched in the habits. Once the actual drugs were out of her system and the hard phase of the body withdrawal was over, I thought she would just... adjust.

Stupid.

So fucking stupid.

I knew better.

I hadn't even brought her to a goddamn meeting.

Selfish. I had been selfish.

I had held her as she suffered. I had listened to her talk about her mom, her dad, her sister. I had listened to her prattle on about her childhood and her failed attempt at college. I watched her interact with my friends like it was the most natural thing in the world to be around bikers. She saw me fight and didn't flinch away from my touch.

Then, well, the sex.

Fucking out of the world sex.

I should have been focusing less on how much I wanted to taste her pussy, feel it wrap around my cock and squeeze as she came, and more on how she was actually handling everything.

"She's not answering," I barked back at Edison who was pulling the overnight shift with me.

We had reached the drop about three hours before, Reign, Cash, Wolf, Repo, and Duke greeting the Polish mafia like old friends and being pulled inside their clubhouse to, we imagined, drink and party and hand over the money.

I had momentarily felt a swell of hope at the idea that maybe they were going to get it all over with and we could head home the same night. No one wanted to be on the road. Everyone wanted to be home with their women if they had them. If they didn't, they just wanted to be home, not on fucking guard because we all knew that any ally could turn enemy in a blink.

Which had me and Edison standing outside the small guesthouse that was really hardly any bigger than the average pool house, late at night- all the others inside and passed out. The night before had caught up with them before they could really get crazy with the Polish guys.

But we were told to stay.

And because Reign didn't want to spit on someone's hospitality, never knowing what affront might send any particular organization into a crazy spiral, he had agreed.

They had bunkered down.

Edison and I were given huge mugs of coffee and left to guard the rest of them while they slept. We would get relieved at around four in the morning by Duke and Cyrus so we could catch an hour or two before we hit the road.

Until then, we were on our own.

And there was literally nothing for me to do but listen to the night sounds, watch the darkness for any threats, and fucking obsess about how bad things could get for her before I got back to her.