Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,17

the bright morning sun found its way through the cracks. Max flopped down on the bed with a moan.

“The fuck,” he muttered.

“What have you given him?” Fern asked, she lifted his eyelids and he reached forward and grabbed her wrist. She swatted him away like he was nothing.

I told her about the antibiotic. The QuikClot.

She nodded once in approval and I could not stop the small bloom of pleasure that nod gave me. I wondered in some dark, small part of my heart what would have been different if she’d nodded at me like that before.

When I needed it.

“Do you know what happened to you?” she asked Max.

The groggy MC president was awake and—for the moment—fully with it. I wouldn’t say he was sharp, but he knew what was happening.

“Shot,” he finally said. “Once in the leg. Another bullet grazed my head.” He turned his head as if to show her the wound and I took a deep breath, sagging against the doorframe. “I think I’ve got a cracked rib,” he said. “Maybe a concussion.”

“Those brothers of yours really tuned you up.”

In his gory face his lips twisted and it was almost breathlessly eerie. A terrible reminder that he might be laid low for the time being but he was still the devil.

“Family,” he said with terrible irony. “What can you do?”

Fern glanced over her shoulder at me.

“I understand the sentiment,” she said.

I took the stone she threw at me as my due. She could insult me all she wanted. As long as she got Max back up on his feet.

“Go lay down before you fall down,” Fern said, watching me over her glasses.

I saluted her, an old mocking gesture from our lives before. The second I did it I regretted it. I owed her a debt of gratitude. There was no room for my shitty teenage behavior.

She turned away, face hard.

“Fern?” I said.

“What?” She was helping Max take off his vest.

“Thank you.”

She didn’t say anything and I could feel Max watching me, his blue gaze sharp. Always too sharp, cutting away little pieces of me that I needed. Pieces of armor that kept me safe. Protected.

I went back into the living room and collapsed onto the love seat. For a moment I wondered what this was going to cost me. What I would have to pay for coming back here.

And could I pay it?

Because I had nothing left. Not one extra thing. It was me and survival. That’s all.

And Jennifer.

I let that thought comfort me. I wrapped myself around it like a hot stone keeping me warm. I had Max and he would help me get Jennifer back and then everything would be right. Everything would be okay.

Sleep came so fast and so hard it felt like falling.

—

I woke up with a start, nearly sliding off the love seat.

Where am I?

The walls and love seat looked totally unfamiliar. Was that a…? It was. A JFK statue where the TV should sit.

Nothing here gave me a clue about where I was.

And then it all came back. The bombs. Lagan.

Max.

I kicked off the blanket Fern must have put over me while I’d been in my coma and a piece of paper fluttered down to the ground.

CALL ME.

I recognized Fern’s handwriting. Its hard lines, its deep downward slashes. She wrote like she didn’t approve of me. That’s how deep this went between us. She could not hide her feelings even in her handwriting.

I got to my feet, wobbly and dizzy with sleep, hunger, and thirst. Beside the door was one of my garbage bags of luggage and I had to hope it was the one with clean underwear in it. With it tossed over my shoulder, I stumbled down the small hallway and found Max in the bed.

What had been an empty bedroom with a bare, queen-size bed, was now a pop-up hospital room.

Max was sound asleep with an IV in his arm, the saline bag hooked over the lamp. His face had been washed, his body cleaned up. He had stitches in his head. The skin was pink and tender around the sutures. His chest was bare, revealing all his tattoos and the Technicolor bruises along his ribs. I lifted the covers off his leg revealing the snowy white bandage, the straight exact lines of the surgical tape. The pink shaved skin at the edge.

Aunt Fern had removed the bullet.

And put in a catheter.

Jesus. Aunt Fern.

Max was lying in a bed made with clean sheets. His black beard sleek and trim.