a long sigh. "What Tweedledee and Tweedledum mean is that until the blueprints have been recovered, goons are going to keep coming for you. Your brother has been messing with some seriously dangerous people who are not nearly as understanding as Delta-Huntley."
I wrinkled my nose. "You're the benchmark for understanding?"
She gave me an amused grin. "Well... we didn't put you in the hospital, did we?"
"Fair point," I mumbled with a wince. My hand moved back to my midsection, like I was subconsciously comforting my baby. How the hell I'd gone from praying I wasn't pregnant to desperately needing my baby to be okay, I had no idea. Near-death experiences tended to provide profound moments of clarity, though.
For me, it was simple. I wanted this baby, no matter what Dylan had to say about it.
"I think Blake’s dead," I said, my head a mess of random thoughts. "The guys that attacked last night told me they’d tortured him to get the information. I doubt they would have just cut him loose after he spilled his guts."
Jasper snickered. "Knowing who he tried to screw over, I’d say they probably literally spilled his guts."
Riley scowled and shot him a death glare. "Shut the fuck up, dickhead. That's Brooklyn's brother."
"Her brother who systematically beat the crap out of her for years," Evan reminded her. "I doubt Brooklyn would be real cut up if that douche was pig chow right now, right, B?"
What was with these guys using nicknames for everyone? Not that I minded. It gave me a small, warm, fuzzy feeling, like I was somehow a part of their crew. B, like D.
"Not really," I admitted, "but it would be nice to know for sure that he's really dead. Because if he's not..." I shuddered, then groaned as the movement made my ribs protest. "I hope he is. But I'm just saying, Dylan is wasting his time. If Blake’s alive he won’t be found."
Jasper and Evan exchanged a look, but it was Riley who replied.
"Sometimes, you just gotta let them get it out of their systems. He still thinks your brother has been raping as well as beating you, so right now he's dealing with some serious anger issues." She gave me a lopsided smile. "You'll get used to it, the alpha male bullshit. Dylan is almost as bad as Beck in that department."
The boys grinned, and Riley rolled her eyes before they could make any smart remarks.
"Dickheads, can you fuck off back to the waiting room? Brooklyn is meant to be resting and shit. You're suffocating us with all this testosterone. Shoo."
Still smirking, they gave sarcastic salutes, filed back out of my hospital room, and closed the door behind themselves, leaving me alone with the girl who—until recently—I’d fully believed Dylan to be in love with.
Maybe that was a conversation we needed to have.
23
As it turned out, Riley Duboise wasn't quite the big, bad bitch I'd made her out to be in my brain. I mean, we were a long way from being friends, but after spending the better part of a day with her hanging out in my hospital room... yeah, she wasn't so bad.
The most important takeaway from my bonding time with Riley? The absolute, unquestionable certainty that her and Dylan were never going to be a thing. She admitted he'd had a crush on her back when her and Beck first got together but that was a thing that’d long since passed.
"Dylan faux-dates," she'd told me when I’d questioned her about all the models and actresses he was constantly photographed with. "He makes public appearances with women he barely knows, girls that the Delta-Huntley PR manager sets him up with. But it's just for show. I don't even think he fucks them at the end of the night."
I'd cringed at that, but deep down it made me weirdly pleased. Did that mean he hadn't been whoring that monster cock out all over town while we were hooking up?
Our conversation shifted onto more neutral topics after that, but an hour or so later it drifted back to Dylan.
Or, more accurately, Dylan and me and how the fuck I'd ended up a homeless, pregnant eighteen-year-old.
"So, a seventeen-year-old virgin when you guys hooked up, huh?" Riley asked with all the tact of a freight train. "How'd that conversation go down? I'm guessing there was alcohol involved."
My cheeks flamed crimson, and I groaned. "There was definitely alcohol involved, and... it just didn't."
She frowned in confusion, sipping a coffee that Jasper had fetched not