Relentless (Renegades 4)

o room six, Jax. You’ve got twenty minutes. Not a second longer. We need that room.”

Jax grabbed the hand she used to wag a finger at him and dragged her close for a hug. “Thanks, Mags. You’re the best.”

She hugged him back, then pushed him away. “Go on, get out of here.”

Troy looked back at Giselle. “I don’t want to leave—”

Maggie gave his arm a squeeze. “I’ve got her. I won’t let anyone in until you get back.”

He exhaled. “Come get me if she wakes?”

“You bet.”

Troy gave her a smile of thanks and followed the others into a room nearby, where Wes, the Renegades best stunt driver, closed the glass door behind them. Troy scanned the stoic faces in the room—Jax, Wes, Ryker, and their girls, Lexi, Rubi, and Rachel. Zahara also stepped in. She’d been acting as liaison between the crew and the hospital all night.

Ryker spoke first. “How’s Giselle?”

He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and leaned against the glass wall to the room. His hands were too torn up to shove into his pockets, his arms too bruised and cut to cross. And he couldn’t find a comfortable spot on his back to press against the glass. “Physically, not as bad as she looks. She has a concussion, a few cuts that needed stitches. Mentally, she’s a mess. They had to knock her on her ass with some heavy-duty drugs just to get X-rays.”

“I can only imagine.” Ryker said, then explained to the rest of the group. “She’s claustrophobic and nosocomephobic. One freaks her out bad enough to be problematic, but together they’re obviously—”

“Noso—what?” Zahara asked.

“Fear of hospitals,” Troy explained. “She spent a lot of time in them as a kid. Abuse involved cops. Cops involved custody battles, custody battles involved more beatings. It was an endless cycle that created a horrible fear of hospitals.”

“Sounds like you’ve been through it before,” Rubi said.

He rubbed his eyes. “A few times.”

“It’s amazing she’s done so well in her career with those emotional issues,” Lexi said.

“The woman has a goddamned will of steel.”

“Speaking of her career,” Zahara added, “her manager and her assistant are wearing holes in the waiting room carpet.”

“I know. I’ve been focused on keeping her calm and didn’t want to leave in case she woke and freaked. I’ll have to deal with them soon enough. And he’s just…” Troy shook his head. They didn’t need the details of how hard Chad pushed her, how much stress he caused for Giselle instead of alleviating it for her the way he should. “Never mind.”

“What’s the word on Don?” Jax asked of the engineer who’d been trapped under the rubble. Both caves had collapsed when Don’s exploratory drilling had tapped into a weakened area of the caves’ core structure.

“He’s out of surgery. Stable. They say he’ll be okay.”

Jax exhaled, his shoulders releasing some tension. “Great news.”

“And everyone else has been released,” Zahara added. “Troy and Giselle are the last of the crew here.”

“Good,” Jax said, his expression tense. “Wes and I will pick up the job from here with Z, Duke, and Keaton. We’re going to figure out how this happened so it won’t ever happen again. And I’m going to try to pull Josh on board full-time.”

“Oh, thank God.” Troy exhaled the words. “The guy’s OCD can make me crazy, but I’ll take his crazy to this any day. I know this would never have happened if we’d had Josh running risk assessment.” He ran his hand through his hair. He’d cleaned up in one of the bathrooms and changed into clothes Duke and Keaton had brought him from the hotel. “And we were lucky. It could have been so much worse.”

A knock sounded on the door, then Maggie slid it open, her gaze on Troy. He pushed off the exam table he was leaning against. “Her manager is getting unmanageable. I really don’t want to call security on him.”

Ryker turned, shoulders back, chest out. “I’ll set him straight.”

Troy huffed a tired laugh. “She’s got enough trouble with him as it is.” To the nurse, he said, “I’ll deal with him. Thanks, Maggie.”

Jax, Wes, and Ryker filed out of the room. Lexi hung back and faced Troy. She gripped his forearms and lifted those big blue eyes to his. “Anything you need, and I mean anything, you know that, right? If she’s important to you, she’s important to us. She’s instant family. We take care of each other, and there’s nothing we won’t do for either of you. Ryker and Rachel are staying with us at the beach house. I hope you’ll bring Giselle home to stay there too.”

Troy lived on the bottom floor of Jax and Lexi’s mammoth home on Malibu beach, one of two homes they owned and the one they stayed in on weekends when they weren’t working in downtown LA.