Vaughn nodded. “But if he doesn’t chill this shit out, I’m gonna break his fucking jaw.”
Yeah. I got that.
The last year, Jasper had gotten worse. More controlling. More tight-fisted. More invested in every single thing we did.
I got it.
I did.
But he wasn’t making friends, and his attitude was grating on the friends we did have.
“Fine.”
In the room where Emersyn lay on a flat surface that was more a table than a bed, I planted myself near the door. The unnatural stillness aggravated. Not two hours earlier, she was moving in those silks above the stage and freaking me the fuck out with those plunges and climbs.
Fuck. Seeing them in videos was one thing. She took my goddamn breath away in person, and I hadn’t missed the moment she’d locked eyes on me. There’d been desire there. The same desire that flickered in her hotel room.
Better to nip that shit in the bud. Still, I couldn’t get over how amazing she’d been up there, and now? Seeing her like this? Pale? Bruised? And lying helpless on that table? Doc better give us some goddamn answers.
“How many breaks?” Jasper demanded.
“Easily three or four,” Doc explained. “Look…” He had the images up on a screen. “I’m not an expert, but I can read these well enough and I got a friend looking at them right now…”
I glared at him, but Doc just rolled his eyes.
“You can trust him.”
“We don’t trust anyone, Doc,” Jasper told him in a cold voice. “You had to earn it too.”
“Pretty sure that shit was the other way around, kid, but whatever helps you sleep at night. Now look…”
Then he walked us through a patchwork of injuries she’d sustained. It was like she’d broken or cracked nearly every bone in her body. Worse, there was soft tissue bruising. Have to do an MRI to get more explicit information, but he didn’t have that equipment.
“Why the fuck is she naked?” Vaughn demanded, and I ripped my gaze from the screen to where she lay. There were blankets up to her chin, but I hadn’t seen her dance leotard or pants lying off to the side before until Vaughn held the black mesh outfit fisted in his hand.
“Because I had to do a full exam.”
“If you—” Jasper started, and it was Doc who glared this time.
“You finish that sentence, kid, you better do it with a bullet to my brain, because I’ve beaten men to death for less charges. She’s a fucking child. Not to mention an abused one. She’s barely got tits.”
She had plenty of tits.
“What she does have are bruises over three quarters of her torso. How the hell she performed like that, I don’t know. But she’s got cracked ribs, that had to be impeding her breathing. She’s broken every single one of her toes, some of them multiple times. She’s had broken fingers. A broken wrist. Twice on the right. Old healed fractures to her arms and both legs.”
My gut curdled with every single word.
“Someone is beating her.”
The fucker in the trunk.
“And you better make sure he doesn’t lay a finger on her again.”
Oh, Doc didn’t have to worry about that. I was going to cut every single one of his fingers off.
Jasper flexed his hands, his whole expression blank and his eyes icy. I knew that look. Nothing good came from that look. But I couldn’t argue with it either. I glanced from him, back to Emersyn, then back again.
“You’ll have to tell him,” I warned him.
A single nod. “She goes back with us.”
“What about her head?” Vaughn asked, the belligerence in his voice noticeably absent.
“Concussion most likely. Contusion from where she hit the stone, looks like she caught a corner. I’ll do a couple of stitches, but I’m not seeing swelling yet. Need to get her to wake up and check her cognitive functions, but she’s probably wiped, poor thing.”
The sympathy in his rough voice was hard to miss.
“Gonna put her on an IV and get some fluid into her and do a couple of other tests. Then I’ll get you some scripts. You taking her to the clubhouse?”
All three of us nodded at once. No way I could justify sending her back. That was a lot of damage for one asshole. Not to mention all those other assholes letting it happen.
“All right, get out then while I do this. Give me an hour.” Doc turned his back on us, and I moved back into the hall after one more look at her. Vaughn didn’t