Fourteen
Eoghan
The second I could,I moved away from my nest, packed up, and hurried the fuck out of the apartment building whose roof I’d hijacked for my own purposes.
No one saw me, but then, this wasn’t my first rodeo. As I slipped into my car, my heart pounded like I was tripping.
My phone pinged, and I saw the address of the makeshift ER Conor sent me, set it on my GPS, and got the fuck out of dodge.
I made the twenty-minute journey in ten, and by the time I was pulling up outside a Points’ owned warehouse, I didn’t give a fuck about my car—I left the doors open as I slammed out of it, racing toward the entrance. The guards saw me, lowering their weapons once they recognized me, and let me in.
The space was dark and empty, except for the middle of the room that looked like a hospital.
Plastic had been secured to the ceilings and floor, creating a sealed off interior that was sterile. Inside, it was like any other hospital you might find, there were two beds, and monitors and machinery that made the space as equipped as a clinic.
We had two doctors on call, a few surgeons, and that we had them all here at once told me how fucked up things were.
There were so many people buzzing around the space that I couldn’t even see who was on which bed.
My throat felt thick as a hand clapped me on the shoulder. I turned, ready to snarl, then I saw it was Brennan. There was hell in his eyes, and I knew he always took these things to heart. I mean, we all did, but he’d set himself up as our guardian a long time ago, and that Declan had been injured on his watch would be fucking with his head worse than it was with mine.
I was only one set of eyes, but I should have had their backs—should have done better. It didn’t matter that I’d been focused on stopping the tidal wave of soldiers heading my brothers’ way. I hadn’t seen the bastards who’d hit Dec and Jensen before it was too fucking late.
“He’ll be okay.”
I said it more for him than for me.
His tight jaw said he wasn’t so sure, but he muttered, “They asked us to leave them. To go inside the office.”
“You making them nervous?” I tried to joke, even as my throat worked, and I could feel my own horror starting to choke me.
It was insane, but at that moment, I wanted Inessa. I didn’t want her tainted with this side of our lives, but fuck, like a pussy, she’d make me feel better, and to be frank, I couldn’t feel worse.
“Yeah, they say I scare the nurses,” Brennan groused, but I let him drag me away and toward a side office in the warehouse.
We had four buildings for this express purpose, but for security reasons, we never left the equipment in them for long, interchanging them so that our enemies couldn’t compromise our gear. Finn’s place had a makeshift clinic, but these were for when war visited our doorsteps and major injuries required more than a quick stitch.
As we made it toward the side office, I heard the squeal of wheels outside and turned to Brennan. “Da?”
He shook his head. “We haven’t told him.”
My eyes widened. “The fuck? He’ll go insane.”
“He’ll go even crazier if Declan doesn’t pull through, and if the staff are terrified of me, then what the fuck are they going to be when Da’s breathing down their necks?”
I grimaced because he was right. “Aidan?”
“Maybe.”
But it wasn’t Aidan limping in, it was a horde of women.
Aela, Inessa, and Amaryllis.
Inessa veered toward me, running so fast that she slammed into me, her arms coming around me as she squeezed me tight.
“You’re okay,” she breathed, and fuck if I didn’t feel better with her in my arms. “Conor didn’t say,” she sobbed. “He just told Finn someone was down.”
I squeezed her back. “Declan.” I could hear the tears in my voice. “I don’t know how he’s doing. They’re working on both of them now.”