Never Trust the Living (Battle Crows MC Book 7) Page 7

  “A little mishap, my ass,” the man said. “I’m not sure getting jumped by someone outside your Airbnb is a ‘mishap.’ If it is, I’ll eat my shoe.”

  That’s when the man turned and I saw his nametag.

  The dude that’d called me earlier. Gary Stegan.

  “I’m an RN,” he said. “And this is the worst I’ve ever seen anything on a lady in quite a while. I’ve been a nurse for going on thirteen years now. She has lacerations on almost every part of her body. Her head was literally the only thing that didn’t sustain any damage. The rest of her, on the other hand…”

  My stomach sank.

  “What do you mean she was jumped outside her place?” I asked carefully. “By who?”

  “Whom,” the nurse corrected me. “And as of right now, the man is still at large. Though, not for long, by the looks of you.”

  No, not for fuckin’ long at all.

  “What happened?” I asked with a deadly calm that denoted control. Control that I certainly did not have.

  Dory sat up, and I couldn’t stop myself from helping her into a sitting position.

  She hissed when I caught her arm, then pulled away gingerly.

  I looked at the bruises on her arm and cursed.

  “Dory…” I whispered, sick to my stomach at the bruising.

  Both of her wrists had bruises in the shape of hands.

  I would fuckin’ murder a motherfucker…

  “I don’t know who did it or why,” she admitted. “What I can say is that I’ve been very careful about where I look for a place to stay. And who I’ve been drawing attention from. I…”

  She trailed off, and I knew what she needed to say but didn’t.

  “Because you’re pregnant,” I finished for her. “You wanted to be safe for the baby.”

  The baby.

  My baby.

  Holy shit, I was going to be a father.

  A terrible one, but a father, nonetheless.

  Maybe I can be a better father than I’ve been a husband…

  CHAPTER 11

  I like long, romantic walks through haunted houses.

  -Dory to Bram

  DORY

  I heard the sound of pipes, and I knew that my day was about to go to shit. Or more shit than it’d already turned into.

  Why?

  Because I knew those pipes.

  I’d been hearing them come home to me for ten years.

  I dreaded and craved the sound of those pipes for so long that at times, I felt like I’d been doing it forever.

  It was a masochistic thing that I did to myself—listen for them.

  Because that would mean he was home, even if he wanted nothing to do with me.

  I pretended to be asleep when he walked through the doors of my hospital room.

  But the sound of his voice had been like a knife straight to my soul.

  My eyes popped open, and for a second, at the sight of him, I couldn’t breathe.

  God.

  In the weeks that I hadn’t seen him, he’d somehow gotten even more beautiful.

  How was that even fair at all?

  His eyes had deep, dark circles under them, denoting a lack of sleep just like me.

  But I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he hadn’t been sleeping because I’d been gone.

  No.

  Likely, he hadn’t been sleeping because of some other matter. One I’d been trying really hard not to think about.

  Cough, cough. Mimi. Cough.

  It took him weeks to find me.

  I supposed it was the divorce papers coming out of Accident, Florida that caused him to finally find me.

  I knew it was a possibility. Slim, but possible.

  Still, even though I’d told myself to not be so stupid all the time, I had this lingering hope that he might try to find me.

  But never in a million gazillion years would I have suspected he’d actually come.

  Maybe he’s hand delivering the divorce papers so he can get it over with faster. I mean, you did see him with Mimi the day before you left. Maybe they want to get married, and he can’t because bigamy is illegal in Texas.

  “All of it is mostly bluster,” the nurse, Gary, said. “She should be just fine in a day or two. But I don’t want you to leave her alone, just in case that man decides to come back.”

  I could’ve cursed him.

  In the long hours I’d spent there by myself today, waiting for the OB to come down and give me an ultrasound to make sure our baby was okay, I’d gotten to know him.

  And he knew my entire story—most of it because I was on a little bit of pain meds, and pain meds made me say and do stupid stuff. Like give out my life story to a stranger.

  Luckily, I hadn’t spouted out my entire life story.

  Just the majority of it.

  “I—”

  Bram’s phone rang, and he frowned hard at me.

  “Answer it,” I urged when it rang three times. “It could be something important.”

  It could be Mimi wanting to know where you are.

  He placed the phone to his ear and said, “Yeah?”

  I watched as emotion after emotion played out over his face. Sadness. Anger. Grief. Then rage.

  “What kind of papers again?” he asked, sounding in control, but most definitely not.

  I’d seen Bram mad over the years.

  His sister’s subsequent capture and imprisonment, for a year, being the one thing that’d set him off the most.

  But whatever he was hearing…

  Oh, god.

  Papers.

  Was he just now getting divorce papers?

  Those should’ve been delivered two days ago!

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t been home to check. They were just sitting in the driveway waiting for me to return?” He closed his eyes and then, “Burn them.”

  Burn them.

  Certainly he couldn’t be talking about…

  Bram hung up the phone, turned off the ringer, then slid the phone into his pocket.

  “You know,” he drawled. “If you wanted to shred my heart, there wasn’t a better way to do it.”

  “On that note,” Gary said. “I’ll go check on the OB.”

  Gary left, and I looked at Bram like he’d grown a second head.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

  “Divorce papers,” he said. “Though I guess I can see how I would deserve it. I haven’t treated you well at all.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t.

  He hadn’t treated me very well.

  In fact, he’d treated me quite poorly.

  But I’d kind of ruined his life.

  I can see why he felt like he’d been trapped.

  Trapped animals always lashed out.

  Something came over his face, and before he could put voice to it, a frazzled looking older man rolled into the room. Along with Gary and an ultrasound machine.

  “If your estimations are correct,” the doctor said without preamble, “then we should be able to do this over the belly and not transvaginally.”

  I blinked as the doctor rolled over, flipped my shirt up, then said, “Lie back.”

  I did, mostly because he was already squirting on the goo that would allow the ultrasound to see the baby better.

  Gary hit the lights, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe.

  Because my baby was on the screen.

  “Holy shit,” Bram breathed.

  I looked over at him to see him absolutely transfixed with the screen. Our baby.

  He looked like he’d been punched straight in the solar plexus.

  As if he’d just been given a glimpse of the best thing in the world.

  Then he moved that gaze from the screen to my face and caught me staring at him.

  I looked away, but not fast enough. Not fast enough not to see the look of pure joy in his eyes.

  I swallowed hard past the lump in my throat, then watched the screen.

  For all of two seconds.

  The doctor ripped the monitor off my belly, then said, “Looks just fine. You’re free to go whenever.”

  Then, without another word, he tossed the wand back onto the computer and made his goodbyes without another word.

  He even left the goo on my belly.

  I was about to reach for my own wipes to get it off when Bram moved, catching three paper towels from the dispenser and coming my way.

  I held my breath as he gently wiped it clean as Gary the nurse started to chuckle.

  “Now you know how awesome our OB is,” he said sarcastically.

  I snorted. “He’s not terrible, I guess. I mean, at least he didn’t give us a bunch of bullshit. I would’ve liked to look at the baby some more, though.”

  Because I’d just found out about said baby this morning.

  After I’d thrown up for the fifth time and realized that something was definitely wrong with me.

  You didn’t just have a stomach flu that lasted ten days, and only at three in the morning.

  “If you say so.” Gary chuckled, his eyes taking in the man I was studiously ignoring as he wiped me clean. Something he used to do after we’d had sex. Though, that wiping clean was much more intimate than what he was doing now. “Since you’re in good hands here, I’ll go get your discharge paperwork ready. You can head out once I get your John Hancock.”

  Then he was gone, leaving me with Bram who was now staring at my belly as if it held the secrets of life.

  “You okay?” I asked, pushing his hand away as gently as I could.

  He swallowed hard and nodded before he rocked my world.

  “Give me another chance,” Bram said into the silence. “Give me one more chance.”

 
I looked down at the covers that were once again covering my belly.

  “If you weren’t here for the papers… why are you here?” I asked cautiously, remembering the earlier phone conversation before the doctor had all but blown his way inside my hospital room.

  He looked like I’d just hit him in the chest.

  “I’m here because I missed you.”

  I blinked.

  That thought had never occurred to me.

  “You… what?” I asked, unsure what to say.

  Or how to react.

  What did that even mean?

  Then anger replaced the confusion.

  I didn’t want him to be here just because of the baby. I didn’t want pity from him. I could do this on my own.

  “Bram, do you know why I don’t like cilantro?” I asked quietly.

  Our very last fight had started because of cilantro.

  We’d been out to eat, and he’d thought the cilantro wasn’t a big deal.

  I, on the other hand, did.

  He frowned hard, and I could see that he couldn’t even remember why I was asking that question.

  Most likely, he didn’t even realize that I was gone until he didn’t have any clean laundry.

  Which means, he probably didn’t remember the fight that had sparked me to leave.

  “I know you don’t like it but…” He hesitated.

  “But you don’t know why I make such a big deal about it,” I found myself finishing his sentence.

  His shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “Fourteen percent of the world population can’t eat cilantro because there’s an olfactory gene called OR6A2.”

  I could tell he was confused, but I kept going. “OR6A2 is responsible for detecting aldehydes. There are aldehydes in cilantro. Long story short, cilantro is sometimes used to make soap. When I eat cilantro, my brain automatically tells me that it tastes like soap.”

  Bram opened his mouth and closed it.

  “Meaning, every time I get cilantro in my stupid Chipotle rice, it tastes like I grated up a bar of soap in it. Would you like to eat something that tastes like soap?” I asked.

  Bram’s shoulders slumped impossibly further.

  “That night, we got into a fight about it because they added it to my order when I explicitly mentioned to have plain white rice. I wasn’t being difficult. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch. I wasn’t being a ‘Karen’ like you accused me of being. I was trying to enjoy what I was eating. And when you threw a fit because I wouldn’t eat my meal that you refused to have them send back, you reminded me of my brother.”

  His mouth fell open in shock then.

  “What?” His voice had raised in pitch.

  That’d been one very hard truth I’d had to share with Bram when we got married: Amon.

  Amon was by far my worst torturer.

  But some of my scars went so deep that I could never show them to Bram and him not see me as weak.

  But there were some things that I had to tell him. There were also some things that Bram knew on his own. Like the night that he’d offered me an alibi.

  The way that Amon had snuck out the previous night the verdict had been handed down and let me know in no uncertain terms that no matter what, he would find a way to make my life a living hell.

  “My brother used to add it to my food for fun,” I said softly. “So when I say that I can’t eat it, I can’t. I eat it, I’ll throw up. Ask me how I know.”

  His eyes looked even more tortured when he said, “How do you know?”

  “Because he did it often, just to watch me get sick. Every time. Have you ever been so hungry that you eat something, knowing it’ll make you sick, yet eating it anyway?” I asked quietly. “I was diagnosed with ARFID—avoidance/restrictive food intake disorder. Pretty much, sometimes I just can’t eat. Can’t make myself eat. Because of things that he did to me in the past. One of those being tampering with my food and making me suspicious of almost everything.” I hesitated. “The fact that I can even go somewhere where I allow someone else to prepare my food is an amazing feat, according to my therapist.”

  “You’re in therapy?” he asked quietly.

  I shrugged. “It was either that or…”

  I didn’t finish.

  I didn’t have to.

  “Dory…” he whispered, choking on the word. “No.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t done it yet.”

  Yet.

  Yet being the very operative word.

  That’s when I saw the change come over him.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting, but him moving in and wrapping me in a hug so tight that I couldn’t breathe? That was downright surprising.

  “One more time,” he said softly into my hair. “That’s all I’m asking for, is one more time.”

  I looked over at him sharply, feeling the weight of those words in my chest.

  “What if this time you hurt me like you’ve hurt me all the other times?” I asked.

  What if this time, you actually break me?

  He shook his head fiercely. “I’m all in. I won’t do that to you again.”

  Would he?

  Would he not?

  I guess only time would tell.

  But my answer didn’t come to me in some sudden epiphany of ‘you should give him a shot.’

  No, it came with the fluttering of the life in my belly.

  The very first time that I for sure, felt the baby move.

  The very first time that his father was around at the same exact time.

  I gasped and pressed my hand to my belly, my eyes going wide.

  And there it was again, a sudden fluttering sensation.

  A sign that I needed and wasn’t about to deny.

  “What is it?” Bram gasped, moving forward and catching me by the elbows.

  His eyes were intense, and the way his hands felt on my skin…

  “The baby,” I whispered, feeling tears start to form in my eyes.

  “What about her?” he rushed, his eyes now super intense, as if he could fix whatever it was making my world wrong by the feel of his body alone.

  He couldn’t.

  But I knew for a fact that Bram had a will of steel. If he wanted something fixed, he’d fix it.

  Even if it was inhumanly possible.

  “No.” I shook my head, trying to soothe the fear I could see creeping into his eyes. Fear for a baby I’d at first been afraid that he didn’t want. “It… there’s nothing wrong with her. There’s just… I felt her move.”

  Her.

  CHAPTER 12

  Just FYI, with a 100% certainty, you will experience shitting your pants outside of childhood.

  -Secret of life

  BRAM

  “Don’t get too close,” she whispered. “I have demons inside of me that my brother put there.”

  I tilted my head to look at her and said the one thing that I could in that moment. “You can get as close as you want to me. My soul’s been living in hell for a while now. Your demons can come play with mine. Or I can straight up take them from you if you want.”

  She looked startled for a long moment before saying, “Because of my brother?”

  I shrugged. “Because of a few things. But your brother’s definitely part of the reason.”

  She looked sick to her stomach for a few seconds, and I hated seeing that look on her face.

  “The last eighteen weeks.” I shook my head. “I never want to experience that again. Not ever.”

  She didn’t look convinced. In fact, when she pulled out of my hold and leaned away from me, I felt my heart break a little more.

  She looked so far from convinced that I had a feeling I had a very long road ahead of me. Our relationship wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  Not to mention, there’d been divorce papers that she’d had drawn up.

  She wanted this relationship to end.

  And I had a feeling the only thing saving me right now was the fact that she was carrying my baby.

  “When were you going to tell me?” I asked carefully as I sat on the edge of her bed.

  “Tell you about the divorce?” she asked. “I sent you papers. I figured that was about as good as telling you.”

  Her attitude. God, I wanted to kiss it out of her.

  “No,” I said. “The baby. When were you going to tell me about the baby?”

  She looked at me sharply, as if I’d just said the wrong words.

  “I just learned about it,” she grumbled. “I would’ve told you once I had my head wrapped around it.”