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  Seven or eight, Len thought. “Four, I guess.”

  She glanced down at him over her glasses and gave him a look that very clearly said, yeah, right. Then, with the faintest of gleams in her small blue eyes, she said, “Good! I’ll bring you some Tylenol, then.”

  Fuck. Fuck. Len knew that he could revise his pain report and get the relief he actually needed, but that gleam in Nurse Ratched’s eyes made him stubborn. She didn’t like him. Well, okay. The game was afoot then. He nodded and resigned himself to misery for the duration of her shift. There was a clock directly above the whiteboard. It was nearly six in the evening. Shift change probably at eleven. He could stick it out for another five hours. Christ, he hoped she wasn’t working a double.

  He also noted the date, written on the whiteboard. Two days had passed. What the fuck?

  “Why was I out so long?”

  Mercy stuck a thermometer into a plastic sleeve and then into his mouth. “I’ve called the attending. He’ll be here as soon as he can. He’ll answer all your questions then.”

  When the thermometer beeped, she pulled it out and examined it. Then, with a crease in her brow, she gave him an appraising look, laying her hand on his brow. He closed his eyes at the relief he felt coming from her cool hand.

  She shook her head and clucked her tongue. Now her expression was much softer. “101.7. You want me to ask you about your pain rating again? It’s not a contest. I’m sure you’re very, very tough. But being honest about your pain is about more than what you can handle. It tells us how things are going inside you.”

  He sighed, then winced at the pain from taking the deeper breath. “Eight.”

  With a nod, she patted his hand. Apparently, she had compassion for sick people, even if she had distaste for tattooed bikers. Good thing, her being a nurse and all. “There’s a note on your chart for morphine as needed. I’ll be right back. And I’ll see if I can get an ETA for the attending.”

  ~oOo~

  Before he opened his eyes, he did a status check. The last long while—another two days, maybe?—had been fucking brutal. His fever had been on the rise from that 101.7, and he’d spent the night and the whole following day in a red haze of hot pain and weird thoughts. And then back in surgery. He thought. It was all very blurry. He seemed to remember more of the Horde around. Like a ring of leather ghosts around his bed.

  He felt a little better. Clearer, anyway. And neither blazing hot nor ice cold. But weak as a runt kitten. Even the thought of lifting his head made him tired.

  “Hey, you.”

  He turned his head at the sound of a familiar female voice, and he saw a gorgeous redhead sitting near the bed. Wearing her white coat. He always felt proud to see her in that coat. No reason he should, he could take no credit, but he felt pride nonetheless. She was a club daughter, and she’d done amazing things in the world.

  “Tash.”

  When he’d first gotten to know her, he was hanging around the club, just out of high school. She was, what, ten or eleven? Ten, he thought. Frank’s kid—Frank had been SAA back then. Tasha had run roughshod over all those salty men. Isaac had been maybe fifteen, just starting to step out from behind his old man. There’d been other club kids, but none who hung around as much as Tasha and Isaac. It had been clear to Len that Isaac was there partly as a kind of cover, some bodies between him and his father. It was just Isaac and Big Ike by then—his mom had hung herself when he was twelve, and his older sister had run off. Len had learned all that by listening carefully and paying attention. Just like he’d learned that Tasha’s mom had bailed on her and her dad when she was still in diapers.

  She was a tough little thing, a total tomboy, all scraped knees and matted ponytails. Frank had been a sucker for her and let her have her head. Back in those days, she’d been almost feral.

  And then she’d grown up. And oh, how she’d grown. Tall and willowy, her hair a flaming red. Isaac had snatched her up not long after she was legal. But after a couple of years, he’d gotten bored or something and had fucked her over, putting it all on display for the club to watch—probably to this day the shittiest thing Isaac had done, at least in Len’s memory. He still remembered that final scene in vivid detail.

  And what came after it.

  “You’re going to get me fired, if you croak. Just sayin’.” She grinned and stood. “How’re you feeling?”

  Like a half-decomposed corpse. “Never better, doll. How’m I gonna get you fired?”

  “Not important.” She laid her hand on his forehead. “Oh, that’s better. Looks like you’re through it. I’ll have the nurses call Dr. Ferland.”

  She started to turn away, but Len grabbed her hand, ignoring the yank of pain through his gut. “Wait. Talk to me. What’s goin’ on?”

  “Layman’s terms—they had to take your spleen. The bullet went through it, and at first they tried to save part of it—it’s an important organ to fight infections—but then what they left became infected, so they went back in and took it all. You’re going to spend the rest of your life getting vaccines for all the things your spleen would have protected you against. But otherwise, you’re going to be okay.”

  “Will I ride?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  Relief spiraled through his head. “Now tell me why I could’ve gotten you fired.”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. I was trying to be funny. You’re what I’m worried about.” She pulled her hand from his grasp. “I need to let them know you’re awake and that your fever has broken. You need to rest. And I need to get back down to the ER. I’ll come up and see you later.” She bent over his bed and pressed her soft, full lips to his cheek. She let them linger for a second, and he closed his eyes.

  “Don’t croak, circus freak.”

  “No intention, Doc.”

  She smiled down at him for a second, and then she turned and left his room.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Dr. Westby, I’m not sure what you think I can do. A lot of eyes have looked the other way for you. My eyes have looked the other way for you. Time and again. But this? I’m not sure how you think I can make this go away. The Sheriffs of two counties were in my office this morning.”

  When Randall—or, Tasha, guessed, Dr. Mertier—called her Dr. Westby, things were bad. Normally, she was Tasha, and he was Randall. It hadn’t mattered that he was the Chief Administrator and her boss. They were friends, too. Good friends. In the service of the Horde, she’d leaned hard on that friendship, she knew. Now it seemed that she’d leaned too hard.

  He wasn’t done with his lecture, so she sat primly in the seat across from his wide, walnut desk and listened. She held his eyes—she would not look away—but she was quiet and let him have his say.

  “I’m not sure how you managed it, but I am sure I don’t want to know. Transporting a man in that condition hundreds of miles? It’s insanity. He could have died. You and I both know that he is sicker because of it. Not to mention that his injury is a gunshot wound, and he was removed from the jurisdiction without being interviewed. It exposes the whole hospital. And it’s malpractice.”

  She opened her mouth at that horrid word, the icy creep of fear suddenly darting up her spine, but he held his hand up. He wasn’t finished.

  “Tash, you are a wonderful doctor. The best in the ER. But what you do for that gang of violent fools is too much. It’s just too much. Just between you and me, within these walls? I know full well you’ve altered records. I know you’ve practiced off the books, and I know you’ve taken supplies from the hospital to do it. For years, I’ve known this. I’ve covered your ass, because I don’t want to lose you. What you do when they’re not demanding that you violate your oath and your ethics is worth it to me to try to save you. But not this. I can’t save you from this.”

  She’d known. When Randall had texted her to meet him immediately at the end of her shift, she’d known what it was about, and that it wouldn’t be good. When Isaac had called and asked her to get Len hom
e, she’d known she was crossing into a whole new territory of rule-breaking. But they were her family. She’d tried to push back, insisting that Len was better off getting treated where he was. But the guys didn’t think about safety the way normal people did. Getting into familiar territory was more important to Len than being treated more quickly in a possibly hostile place. She understood, and when Isaac had said, “Tash. He needs this,” she hadn’t had any better argument.

  She could have told him what she risked to do it, and he would have backed off immediately. She understood that for the same reason that she couldn’t tell him. Because she thought like they did, and the Horde thought about risk differently. You took on the risk you needed to take on to help the ones who needed the help. She wasn’t a member, but that mindset had been formed early by her father.

  But hearing the word malpractice made her blood thicken and slow in her veins. She knew it was true. She could lose her license. But she had thought she’d be able to scrape up enough cover, with Randall’s help—and she probably would have been able to, except for that visit from the fucking Sheriffs. The Horde hadn’t been seriously on law enforcement radar for almost as long as Tasha could remember, despite their grimier business dealings. As long as Isaac had the gavel, anyway. As long as Keith Tyler had been Sheriff. She’d assumed that Isaac and Tyler had had an arrangement.

  Even when Signal Bend blew up, about five years earlier, there had been a mysterious, magical, miraculous lack of attention from law—despite the place crawling with news crews for weeks and then that whole stupid movie thing, which Tasha never had understood. She wasn’t in the know about any of that, which was fine. But Isaac had been some kind of wizard at keeping the legal hounds at bay.

  But maybe not so much anymore. One of the Sheriffs in Randall’s office this morning had been Leon Seaver, the new (well, new-ish) Sheriff of Signal Bend’s home county. The other had been George Terrell, Sheriff of the county they were sitting in. And they were asking about a GSW patient being transported across state lines, after he’d been stabilized, but before he’d been adequately treated. And before he’d given a statement.

  The reach of her ability to ask for favors had extended far enough to get Len home, but not far enough to keep all the players quiet in an unfamiliar hospital in a different state.

  Randall was apparently finished, so she took a long, strengthening breath and asked the worst question, “Am I going to lose my license?”

  He folded his hands on the smooth, shining surface of his desk. “You are beloved here, Tash. I honestly don’t know anyone on staff who wouldn’t fall on a sword for you, and in a hospital full of arrogant assholes who think they’re God’s gift”—a wry twist lifted his cheeks—“myself included, that’s unheard of. But this…it’s more than your license at stake. This is criminal, what you’ve done—and what I’ve turned my eye from. I know you did it to help, but…”

  “Randall, I…” Not sure whether she’d meant to beg or apologize or what, she couldn’t finish her thought.

  “Okay. Here’s what I want to try. I have to try to protect the hospital. And we are all very lucky your friend pulled through that infection. I don’t want an investigation, though that would be the proper course. An investigation can’t be kept quiet, and you will lose your license and be brought up on charges—I could be, too. And we could get our asses sued right off—you, me, the hospital.”

  Tasha nodded, feeling bleak. Len would never sue, of course, but that was beside the point. She had roped so many people into all this, simply by trying to help her friends. Her family. She wondered if her own compass weren’t way out of true.

  Randall leaned back, crossing his arms over this thin chest. “So…we keep on as we have been. You do not help the Horde again so long as you are in this hospital’s employ. When your friend, Mr. Wahlberg, is released, you tender your resignation, effective immediately—citing whatever reason you wish. That’s the only way to save your license, Tash. Avoid the investigation. If you’re not here, then even if there’s pressure from the Sheriff, I can cite our lack of resources and the lack of urgency, since you are not on staff any longer.”

  Tasha loved her work. She was an excellent doctor. She cared so much. She’d done three tours with Doctors without Borders, signing up again and again, loving the sense of purpose and value she’d had in her life, even knee-deep in the kind of pain and heartbreak from which nightmares were crafted. The kind of pain and heartbreak that made a person know for a certainty what was important in the world. What mattered. Rules, law—that was just power, without any essential rightness or justness. People mattered—as individuals. Family mattered. You did what you had to do for them.

  But she hadn’t expected to be undone by them.

  ~oOo~

  Later, when she came around the corner toward Len’s room, Isaac was sitting in a chair outside his door.

  He was gorgeous. A twenty-year-old heartbreak had never dampened her appreciation of him. The past five years or so, when the club had been going through so much and had called so often on Tasha’s help, had served to deepen that old ache. Like a wet cold on old bones, the intimacy their connection now had, as she healed them and stood with them during their losses and agonies, sat hard on her heart.

  There was a lot about Isaac that was good. Being with him when Lilli had been so badly hurt, when Show had lost Daisy and his family, when Isaac had been shot, and all the other times a brother or a loved one had been hurt, she’d seen only the Isaac she’d loved. A good man. A strong man. A loyal man.

  Watching him love Lilli would never, Tasha thought, be easy. Not that she wanted him—she didn’t. But once she had wanted him. She had, once, loved him wholeheartedly. But he had not loved her, and coming to that realization had nearly destroyed her. She’d survived because she’d understood that Isaac had been incapable of that kind of love. For years, she’d known it was true, and she’d drawn validation and satisfaction from it.

  But it was clearly not true. He was, in fact, capable of exactly the kind of love she’d needed from him. The kind of love she’d felt for him. He felt that love for Lilli, and though she was not jealous that Lilli had Isaac, she was jealous that Lilli had Isaac’s love.

  Twenty years had passed since he’d broken her heart and humiliated her—and then she’d humiliated herself, causing a huge, dramatic scene right in the Hall. She’d been only twenty—young and impressionable, with little control over her emotions, and unsure of who or what she was or wanted to be. And his cold, public disregard of her had almost undone her. If it hadn’t been for the way the club had closed ranks around her, it might have actually undone her. But they—her family—had held her up until she could stand. Len, in fact, had been instrumental in giving her back some strength.

  She had never, would never, again give someone else the kind of power over her that she’d once given Isaac. She would never again hand herself over the way she had offered the very seed of her happiness to him.

  She could thank Isaac, she supposed, for teaching her the profound depths of danger in making someone else the focus of her understanding of her own life, her own self—teaching her to recognize that happiness was fleeting and always best found within.

  He saw her as she came down the hallway, and he stood. Since he’d been shot, he moved differently. Not stiffly, unless he’d been riding or doing physical work for a long stretch, just differently. Still she knew his body well enough to recognize a change like that.

  “Hey, Tash. They took him for some kind of test.”

  “Okay. You on duty here?” She’d always admired this about the Horde, how they never left a man on his own, unless he wanted it. Sometimes it was about protection—it might, in fact, be about protection now—but always it was about brotherhood.

  “Yeah. Taking my turn. He’s a crabby son of a bitch today, too.”

  She laughed. “And you’re such a delightful patient.”

  With a nod and a grin—the scar on his face that mad
e his grin so lopsided had still been fairly new when they’d first gotten together—he said, “Touché. They gonna let him out of here soon, you think?”

  “Not my call. I’m not his doctor. But I don’t see him going anywhere until he’s healed enough to be sure the danger of infection has passed. Losing a spleen isn’t a minor thing. I’d guess a few more days, maybe a week.” A week before she was out of a job. At the outside. She sat down in the chair next to the one Isaac had been sitting in.

  He sat down again. “Don’t often see you here without your pretty white coat.”

  Staring at an abstract print on the wall, she just nodded. She was off shift—soon to be a permanent situation.

  Then Isaac dropped his voice to a rumble near her ear. “He had our Sheriff in there earlier. When I got here. Real nosy. This one looks like it might be hot. You gettin’ heat, too?”

  This time, she just shook her head. Then Isaac grabbed her chin in his hand and turned her head so that she had to face him. “You be straight, Tash. You in the clear?”

  “I’m fine, Isaac. Worry about Len—and yourself. You’re in some deep water again, that’s obvious.” She could have told him that she was losing her job. Maybe she should have told him that she was losing her job. But she couldn’t. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, so all he would do would be to get angry—at himself, the situation, maybe even at her, for putting herself at risk. And frankly, she couldn’t handle being forced to deal with his anger and to calm him down. That was too intimate a place for them to be.

  She would need to tell him. The club needed to know that they no longer had a friend at County. They needed to know it soon. But first, she needed a little distance, some time to reconcile herself to the situation. So she met his eyes and waited for him to drop the question.

  He did, dropping her chin, too. And they sat together in silence for a minute or two. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. After a quick check, he looked over at her. “I have to take this. Might take some time. Can you hang out, in case they bring him back?”