my annual day of redemption.” He curled his arm across my back and over my hip.
“Pretty sure bad guys don’t care about redemption. But thank you…again.” I gripped his arm as I tried to be fast. He probably had somewhere to be and I was holding him up with my pathetic inability to descend some stairs.
“You’re welcome. Can I ask what happened?” We finally made it to the next landing.
My lungs worked overtime as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other. “You can.” I focused on keeping my feet under me. My vision was fading in and out as the pressure built in my chest.
We descended a few stairs in silence. He chuckled after a minute. “What happened?”
“A jackhole and a table,” I answered.
His arm jerked around my back. I pitched forward slightly under the movement. He righted me before my body had a chance to follow through. “A man hurt you?”
I shrugged. “Not precisely. He was trying to grab my best friend. I bumped her out of the way. I just missed the table he slammed into me.” I swallowed heavily. My throat felt like the desert. “I’ll be okay.” I patted the arm I was gripping. “You don’t want to waste your redemption day on me. You won’t get enough points.”
He mumbled something against my head that I missed.
As the next turn for the following landing came, I knew I needed to get flat. As soon as humanly possible. And as far from this hellhole I could manage before I passed out.
“Do you have a phone, by chance?” I asked him, my entire being focused on the stairs.
“Need to call someone?” It sounded like he was smiling as he said it.
I couldn’t spare the movement to check. I just nodded. “I need to call a friend to come pick me up.”
“A boyfriend?” he asked as he eased me against the wall.
I smiled as my eyelids dipped. “He’s a guy, but I can’t lose him, so we’re just family.”
His brows dropped as his mouth hardened again. “He shouldn’t have left your side. If you were mine, you wouldn’t be out of my sight.”
I blinked a few times. Decided to ignore his last statement. I shrugged. “Boys are a lot of work.”
His face brightened momentarily as he chuckled again. “Pretty sure you meant to say girls are work.”
I snorted softly. “Not into the ladies, but yeah. They are too. Men are weird. Women are crazy. I’d rather be with weird than crazy. Ready for that number yet, Thor?” I rested my overheated head against the cool wall.
I felt his chuckle deep inside my chest. “Definitely not a god, sweets. Real or imagined. Yeah, give it to me.”
I gave him Dom’s number as my brain gave one small, sickly slide to the side.
“Shit,” he said as he caught my shoulders before I took a header down the stone steps. “You really should be in a bed.” He pressed my body between his and the wall. The shock of the heat from him in startling contrast to the cold wall cleared my mind for the briefest moment.
I smiled blindly. “Only if it’s yours or mine.” An unwelcome thought exploded through my fuzzy head. My nose wrinkled. “Don’t let him find me.”
The ‘please’ got lost as my mind went dark.
Chapter 3 – Ryker
Ten minutes ago
I slammed through the doors of the stairwell. Fucking doctors. If they would just make up their minds and stick to a single course of action, maybe Corrie wouldn’t be stuck in this life-sucking hellhole.
I jerked to a halt just inside the stairwell, snarled at the person sitting on the steps. If she was here to get some kind of story, I was going to toss her down the stairs and spit on her mangled corpse as I walked out into the night.
Fucking doctors. Fucking reporters. Someone was going to die. It might as well be her.
She was in the ugliest clothes I’ve ever seen. She was shaking like a leaf, trembling on the stairs, her fist shoved into her mouth. Haunted eyes wide.
Not a reporter then.
“Willow? Is that you?” A hard male voice asked from a couple floors above. He sounded like an asshole used to getting his way. I couldn’t fault him for that. But I could fault him for being a fucking doctor in this fucking hospital right now.
The pallid woman looked up at me, her mossy green eyes clouded with pain and terror. She shook her head.
I imagined that’s what Corrie