Savior (27 page)

"That'd be nice," I agreed with a wry smile.

"I said enough!" Breaker's voice roared and all eyes turned to see Breaker wrangling a furious, rabid Paine off of a bloodied, mangled version of D. For a second, I was worried he'd beaten him to death, until I saw the telltale rise and fall of the unconscious man's chest and felt like I could finally take a breath of my own.

"Paine," I heard myself say. It wasn't loud, barely more than a whisper, but Paine's head snapped up toward me and all the tension drained from his body. Breaker, seeing he was no longer needed, released Paine who looked down at his hands almost... helplessly, like he couldn't believe what he had just done. There was a lot of blood. On his hands, his arms, his shirt, his face. I was fairly certain that not a drop of it was his.

"Get him cleaned up," Enzo called to, I assumed, Breaker. "We'll get her to the car." Trick and the remaining Third Street guys looked at Enzo who shook his head at them. "You're all fucking dead to me, traitors. Handle your own shit; see how long you last." With that, he turned out the door and disappeared.

When I turned back to Sawyer and Shoot, they both opened their arms. At my drawn-together brows, Shoot smiled disarmingly. "Pick one."

"Pick one for what?"

"To carry you, peaches, of course," he said and I felt myself smiling a little.

I looked between them, both having matching masks of masculine certainty that I was, for sure, going to pick them. It was almost as if they might have had some kind of bet on the outcome. I turned to Tig instead. "If you have an arm, I still have two legs," I said and he gave me a soft smile, putting an arm around my hips, low to avoid contact with any sore spots. I leaned into his side slightly and started walking, each step a tiny stab to my side and center and by the time we got into sight of the cars, I could feel the tears stinging at my eyes, begging to be released.

"Come on, honey," Enzo said, holding one of the car doors open. If I wasn't mistaken, I would put money on it being Shooter's car.

"No. I'm waiting for Paine,"I objected, moving out of Tig's hold and wobbling over to lean against Paine's Challenger.

"The sooner we get you..." Sawyer started, but I cut him off.

"No. I can wait five more minutes."

"Babe..."

"Alright darlin'," Shoot said, moving to lean on the car beside me, looking off in the direction of the warehouse. "If there's anything I know about women, and I know a lot," he said with a devilish little smirk followed by what would normally be an absurd wink, but on Shoot it was charming and sexy. Oh, yeah, I bet he was quite the dog before Amelia leashed him in. "It's that there's no use arguing with you."

"Just 'yes' us to death and then do whatever the hell you wanted in the first place?" I mused.

"Eh, I think you've had enough kidnapping for the night. Though my trunk is rather spacious, you know."

I smiled, shaking my head, and turning back toward the warehouse. Out of a street on the side, I could see the outline of two giant men coming out of the shadows.

"Did he change?" I mused, meaning to only think it, but I had said it out loud.

Paine's eyes were on mine as they crossed the street, his white shirt replaced with a black one, his hands, arms, and face wiped clean of blood.

"Babygirl," he said as he got up close to me.

And, well, that was all it took.

I leaned forward, face-planting into his chest and letting out a really ugly, really pathetic-sounding sob. His arms closed around me slowly, gently, like I might break or crumble beneath his strength.

"Shh, baby," he murmured into the hair at the side of my head. "It's alright. I got you."

And, well, him being all sweet just made me cry harder.

After what was what I could only imagine an embarrassing amount of time later, I finally pulled it together, sniffling hard. I pulled back and Paine wiped my cheeks for me. "Got that out for now so we can go get you looked at?" he asked, the words at once sweet and a tiny bit teasing. Which I needed to stop the seemingly endless pool of tears inside me.

I nodded, pulling back. "Yeah."

I turned self-consciously back toward the group, giving them a small smile. "Thanks guys for ah... getting me out of there. You especially," I said, turning to Enzo who was looking the slightest bit uncomfortable.

"Darlin' anytime you need a knight in..." Shoot started, but was stopped when Breaker slapped him hard on the back of the neck with an eye roll.

"Go get all stitched up, doll. We'll all see you on Sunday," Breaker said, slapping Paine on the shoulder as he and Shoot moved to take off in their respective cars.

"Smart move with the pin, babe," Sawyer said as his men moved to their cars as well.

"I
knew
he was still looking into me."

"Good thing too," Sawyer agreed. "I'll check in with you after you're all pretty again," he said with a teasing smirk before swinging into his SUV and taking off.

"Enz," Paine said, his focus still on me, like he was afraid to look away. "You and me, we're having a talk. Soon."

"Yeah, man. I'm around."

"Come on, babygirl, get in the car," Paine urged, leading me to the passenger and helping me inside.

We drove to the hospital in absolute, ear-splitting silence.

And, of course, that gave my mind plenty of time to race and wonder and worry.

Why wasn't he talking to me?

Why wasn't he even looking at me when we stopped at the red lights?

Was this too much too soon for us?

Was it over?

Yeah, the little voice who narrated my worst fears, she was a pessimist by nature.

So by the time we parked outside the emergency room and Paine got out of the car, walking around the hood to open the door for me, yeah, that voice had pretty much convinced me that he was going to drop me, say he was going for coffee or something like that, and never come back.

"Elsie, come on."

I sighed hard, steeling myself for what I thought was the inevitable outcome, and got out of the car.

Eighteen

Paine

"You need to fuckin' pull it together," Breaker demanded as we watched the rest of the group move out, Tig's giant tree-limb of an arm around Elsie as she hobbled out. She was hurting. She was hurting and that fact made me want to turn back around and rip mother fucking D's head clear off his shoulders.

"Did you
see
her?" I demanded, fists clenching down at my sides.

"Saw her. Saw my own woman with her face busted too so I know how you're feeling. But she doesn't need you raging out. She needs you to get your shit together, clean up, and take care of her. She ain't from this life. She's gonna be a mess when the adrenaline wears off and everything settles in, becomes real."

You looked at Break and you saw muscle, you saw the beard, you saw the ice blue eyes. No one immediately thought upon seeing him that he was wise, but he was. He'd led a rough life, living on the streets, eking out a living with his fists, dealing with all kinds of scumbags. The streets aged men and women beyond their years.

"Alright," I said, un-clenching my fists and releasing a breath that I had been holding so long that the fresh air I pulled in burned my lungs.

"There's a gas station with an outside entrance to the bathroom down the block. Go and clean up. I'll grab you a shirt and meet you there."

So that was what we did.

Then we made our way back to my girl.

The walk wasn't long, but it was long enough to give a man time to think.

Like think about the fact that Elsie was just held at gunpoint by her sister who had somehow managed to overthrow Enzo and get hold of the Third Street loyalty. And, well, the bitch was cooking meth.
Meth.
Christ. On top of that, she had a busted face, raw arms and hands, and damage to her torso: busted ribs or maybe just some nasty bruising. It also didn't escape me that Enzo had been the one to diffuse things, saving Elsie, trying to get her off the ground. That meant something. Then him telling the Third Street guys that they were dead to him, yeah, that meant something too. And that 'something' needed some clarification as soon as fucking possible.

But first, Elsie.

I had barely come to a stop in front of her before her forehead landed in my chest and a wrecked-sounding sob tore from her, making a stabbing feeling sear through my gut. I let all the other shit fall away and held her until she worked through the first round of grief. First. I had watched my mom, sisters, and aunts enough in my life to know that, with women, their sadness came on them in waves. Days, weeks, months, years. Another wave could always come crashing. I had no doubt that Elsie was going to have more to go through in her near future.

When I finally got her into the car and turned it over, the other thoughts came flooding back. I knew I needed to stay in the moment and give Elsie whatever she needed, but I couldn't fight the other things from crowding out everything else.

I got her shuffled into a room and sat in the chair beside the bed, waiting for the doctor. She went for an x-ray of her ribs which weren't broken, just a little bruised. Her face would heal in its own time and I made a mental note to pick up more of the tattoo cover-up cream. Her hands and arms took the longest, a nurse painstakingly pulling clumps of dirt and gravel out of the dozens of blood-crusted cuts. Then she had medicine smeared on and her hands and arms wrapped up in gauze up to her elbows. She got a script for pain meds and instructions on treating her wounds at home. All said and done, she had gotten off relatively easy. But if you tried to tell that to the seemingly bottomless pit of rage inside me, nah. All I could see was her gorgeous face with a nasty bruise, a cut on her perfect lips, gauze all up and down her arms. All I could see was that some mother fucker put his hands on what was mine.

It didn't matter that D would likely be eating through a tube for the next year. It didn't matter that his face would never look the same again.

It wasn't enough.

But then again, even if he had paid with his life, it never would have felt like enough.

Because who I was really pissed at was myself. That shouldn't have been able to happen on my watch. My people did not get busted up. It didn't matter that I was out of the gang and had been for a long time, you didn't fuck with what was mine and that was how it was. But I had been too fucking wrapped up in spending time with her, getting to know her mind and her body that I hadn't done the most basic things to keep her safe. Like give her my God damn cell phone number. Instead of calling or texting me, she'd needed to drop a fucking pin and hope to hell that Barrett was paying attention. I hadn't given her mace or a self-defense key chain or taser like I had given my mom and sisters. I hadn't done shit.

She was sitting on a hospital bed all bruised and battered with tear-stained cheeks and sad eyes because I dropped the ball. I had to live with that. And when she got some sleep, some food, some time to think things through, she would start to see that I didn't protect her. Then she would look at me differently. And I would have to learn to live with that too.

The door opened and a middle-aged, graying, detective with a hangover of a waistline walked in, pen and pad already in his hands. I didn't have to ask for identification to know who he was.

"Collings," I said, giving him a jerk of my head as his younger partner walked in behind him.

"Paine," he said back, giving me a nod. "We have a couple questions for you, Miss. Bay," he said, addressing Elsie, his face softening.

"Sure," she said, giving him a small smile and avoiding looking at me.

"Can you describe the man who attacked you today?" he asked.

I felt myself tense. If she described him too well and he showed up in the hospital later and Collings clocked the cuts on my knuckles, yeah, things wouldn't go too well for me. But that was a problem for later. I sure as fuck wasn't going to ask her to lie to the police.

Elsie shrugged a little. "Tall, but not super tall. A couple inches taller than me. I'm five-nine," she clarified as Collings nodded and wrote in his notepad. "Really built. Like... he had to have been using steroids to get muscles like that. He had on basketball shorts and a wifebeater. Nothing really distinctive about his features. Sorry..."

She was being evasive. She wasn't outright lying, but she wasn't giving the full truth either.

"Ethnicity?" Collings asked.

"African American," she supplied.

"Can you give us a plate number or partial plate number? Make or model of the car?"

"I didn't get a plate number. My back was to the car and then I was... unconscious. And I'm great with new cars, but I don't know anything about older cars. It was older. Very squared, tan or gold... old enough that there was no release hatch in the trunk."

"Okay," Collings said and I could see him mentally writing off the case. There wasn't enough to go on and we all knew it. True, Shane's security footage might eventually surface and then maybe D would be caught and sent away. But it was a long shot. It was something I needed to discuss with Elsie when she had a chance to process things; what did she want to do with the information? Did she want D in jail? Did she just want to let things stand? He wasn't a threat to her anymore, but if she needed him behind bars to feel safe, I would make that happen for her.

"Put your hand on me
one
more time!" I heard a loud, booming, commanding voice outside the door demand.

Don't tell me how I knew for sure who it was. Maybe it was the way Elsie stiffened, looking at once relieved, worried, and angry. Maybe it was the authoritative way he spoke, as if he wasn't used to anyone telling him what to do. Maybe it was just the most obvious explanation.

Edward Bay had somehow gotten wind of his daughter being in the hospital.

Not more than a couple seconds later, the door burst open, making the rookie cop stiffen and put his hand over his weapon. Collings simply slowly put away his notebook and pen and nodded at Elsie. "We'll be in contact, Miss. Bay, if we hear anything." He nodded his head at Edward Bay as he passed. As he turned out the door, he caught my eye and gave me a look that I swear to fuck said he understood the situation and was leaving it up to me. Such was the way Collings, a twenty-something year member of the NBPD, handled business: let the streets handle their own shit until he absolutely needed to step in. He was clean. He didn't take bribes, but he understood the power balance in our town and he had no intentions of fucking with it.