RUBI - Part Two

RUBI - PART TWO

The drive to the hospital was horrendous. Cam silent and brooding behind the wheel while Mateo lost his mind in the passenger seat. Me in the back, covered in Embry's blood.

I still had no shoes on. It dawned on me too late that Mateo didn't either.

At the hospital, Cam drew up outside the entrance.

Mateo bolted before the car stopped.

Cam turned to me. "I've got him. Park the motor and I'll find you something to wear."

He legged it before I could argue.

I slid behind the wheel and found somewhere to park. Then I waited all of six seconds before I headed inside anyway.

Rhys met me at the door—he'd gone with Em in the chopper, abandoning the fast-response car to the other paramedic. "Joe's on his way. Come with me, I'll find you a scrub top and somewhere to wait."

"Is he okay?"

Rhys didn't answer. He led me to a side room and left me there. A few minutes later, Cam and Mateo joined me.

Mats stared at my blood-soaked T-shirt, hands on his head, face so broken a piece of me died that I'd never get back. "I don't understand."

Cam wrapped an arm around him. "Sit down. Take a breath. He's gonna need you in one piece when they call you back."

"What if he's dead?"

"He's not dead."

Mateo swung his gaze back to me. "He was. If you hadn't been there?—"

"You'd have figured it out." My voice was flat as I cut him off, devoid of the barbed emotions coursing through me. "You were there when Locke taught us how do to that."

Mateo shook his head and fell into a nearby chair.

I sank into the one beside him, my own head in my hands, pulse still racing so fast I felt sick to my stomach, and I felt guilty for the nausea, knowing it was nothing compared to what Em was living through.

Or dying through.

Fuck.

The base of my skull began to throb. I hadn't had a hardcore migraine in months, but my stress levels were sky high, a state of affairs I'd learned was my biggest trigger.

My eye began to water. I rubbed at it, thankful that Cam's attention was trained on Mats. Shitting hell, I did not need this right now.

"He said he was going to miss me," Mateo said suddenly. "Before he went upstairs. It made no fucking sense. Do you think he knew he was gonna die?"

"He's not dying," Cam snapped.

My skull throbbed. Cam didn't know that. He wasn't there. This time or last time, he'd never seen Embry dead on the ground.

Mateo had.

Twice.

Even if Em survived this— don't even think it —that shit had to leave some damage behind. Scars far worse than the macabre mess my friend's face already bore.

My eye socket discovered its own electrical frequency, buzzing up a storm as a thunder-fucking headache bore down on me, and I crumpled in its wake. This was the problem with recovery. It left me unprepared for the days when the wheels came off. As nausea kicked the ever-loving shit out of me, it was hard to recall that there'd been a time when I'd faced this bastard down several times a week.

"Fuck this." Mateo surged from his seat and stormed to the door.

I flailed to catch him. Missed, but a taller dude than me stepped up to the plate and Mateo barrelled into the broad chest of Locke Halliwell.

Locke wasn't the kind of dude who stopped a brother doing what he wanted. He let Mateo pass, read the room, and followed him.

I heaved a sigh and stayed my arse where it was. Locke had daddy vibes for life and one look at Cam told me he was as close to losing his shit as I was.

Maybe not his dinner, though.

My migraine-ravaged belly gave an ominous lurch, and it was my turn to bolt from the room. I found a bog that smelled like bleached death and lost the pizza I'd scoffed at Mateo's place. At the legit fucking house he and Em seemed so scared of believing was really theirs. Ever since Cam had bullied Em into buying it, I'd given myself a pass on wondering why , but as I tossed my guts in a public toilet, the possibilities tumbled in my distressed brain, a mess of horrible things that made the pain in my head expand to epic proportions I wasn't equipped to deal with.

I washed my mouth out and escaped the toilet, drifting down the corridor again, blearily uncertain of where I'd come from, lost, like I always felt in the midst of an apocalyptic migraine.

Riv . The longing in my chest almost doubled me over. I braced a hand on a beige wall and sucked in a steadying breath. Nash . If Locke was here, that meant Orla was, and where those two dragons went, Lord Nashie was never far behind.

Daddy kink, yo.

Couldn't blame him.

Didn't know why I was thinking about that now.

"Rubi?"

My head jerked up. Skylar Buchanan stood in front of me, dressed in scrubs, tattooed arms folded across his lean chest. His baseline expression when it came to me was top tier irritation, but there was something else too, a reluctant concern I recognised from another time, in another hospital. I was cresting the peak of Mount Migraine, safe in the knowledge that the work I'd done on myself in the past year had flattened the ascent. But as I stared at him and he stared at me, it felt the same as it had two years ago when I'd gripped his hand and begged him to fucking kill me—anything to stop the goddamn pain.

This wasn't the same. I knew that. But I was fuzzy right now. Scattered, and stress was a bitch.

"Do you know where Mateo went?"

I blinked. "What?"

Skylar came closer. "The doctor needs to talk to him. Can you come and sit with Embry for a bit?"

God, please no. "Yeah."

Skylar was closer to Alexei in size than the rest of us, but there'd always been something immensely strong about him. Compelling, when he wasn't too angry with the world to be himself. It was the weirdest thing that I loved that he hated me. That he despised me and everything I stood for with the club, and still found it in himself to be so fucking good.

He fused a hand to the small of my back and steered me through the belly of the A&E department. I'd been here before, course I had. With River. With Nash when his uncle had died on the road. Did this walk feel ominous? Couldn't tell. All I knew for certain was that I'd kill for some milk of the poppy right now.

And I missed my dragon.

My fire-breathing O'Brian dragon.

Skylar slipped ahead of me and through a set of double doors.

I misjudged them and they swung back, hitting me in the face. The impact woke me up, centring my brain on the quiet, urgent bustle of the RESUS department. This ain't where they brought Riv . Or maybe it was, and by the time I got to see him, he hadn't been dying anymore.

Either way, this was the part I didn't recognise, and I found myself reaching for Skylar. "Where is he?"

"This way."

We moved around an empty bed and a nurse station. For the few seconds that took, I saw nothing that I wasn't prepared for, and the gravity of the moment faded. Then we entered the real meat of the room and my heart plummeted into my empty guts.

I thought he'd be knocked out. High as a fucking kite on every drug under the sun. Asleep, like he had been so often this summer, letting nature protect him from whatever the fuck was going on inside his damaged body.

Oxygen.

IVs.

Whatever.

But Embry wasn't asleep. He was awake and the agony in his face as his gaze locked on me almost drove me to my knees.

I'd been dragging my feet, weighed down by my own pain. But the throbbing in my skull evaporated and I closed the distance between us in two strides. "Em? I'm here, brother."

I clasped his hand, noting that the deathly chill I'd found him with on the bathroom floor was still fucking there. That his fingers were still limp.

His eyes, though. I wasn't ready for how present they were. I wasn't ready for the horrible pain in his voice as he tried to speak around the agony twisting his face.

"Lili?"

"She's with Juana." I squeezed Em's hand and stroked his messy hair back from his face. "Riv took her."

"Mateo?"

"Taking a fury walk round the car park. He's okay, though. Daddy Locke has him."

Embry licked his lips, sudden tension flooding him, his entire body tight with pain. "I can't..."

"You don't need to. Everyone you care about is safe. Just focus on you. Just keep breathing, yeah? You scared the Dothraki out of me earlier, you little shit."

Skylar reached Embry's other side in time to catch the gist of my enviable bedside manner. He wore gloves and did something to one of the many contraptions wired into Embry's arms. "More pain relief going in. You should feel it pretty fast, and you might spin out a bit, but it'll settle."

Embry slow-blinked. "I'm gonna puke."

"No, you're not." Skylar gripped his other hand. "It's just the morphine. Close your eyes, breathe, and focus on Rubi's voice."

That was my cue, and it wasn't often I found myself short of words, but it was the devil's work that my gift of the gab failed me when I needed it most.

Pure nonsense fell out of me. I told him all kinds of shite. About me. About River. About the new tattoo I wanted on the palm of my hand.

Skylar pulled a face. "That's never gonna heal."

"It will," I protested with more confidence than I felt. "I'm gonna use it as an excuse to take a fucking holiday."

"Where?"

"Where what?"

Skylar kept his gaze on Embry, tracking every roll and flutter of his eyes. "Where are you going to go on this holiday?"

"Uh. Home?"

"That sounds terrible."

"Depends who I'm with, don't it?"

"You should get on a plane." Skylar spared me the briefest of glances. "Unless you're on the most wanted list. Get away from this place and be someone else for a while."

"Like who I am just fine, thanks."

"Some where else then. That's what this life was supposed to be about, wasn't it? Seeing the world from your hogs?"

"I see a flaw in your plane theory there then, mate."

Skylar gave me a dry smirk. Then he was called away, leaving me as alone with Embry as I could be in the room of life and death.

Still clutching Embry's hand, I let out a slow exhale.

He squeezed my fingers. "Okay?"

"Me? Oh yeah. Love having my existence eviscerated by Nurse Grump."

"You know it's the club he hates...not the people. Like River."

Embry's abrupt lucidity distracted me from correcting the record to show that River and Skylar were nothing alike. That if they were, Riv wouldn't have spent the last ten years lost in his emotions while Skylar had spent them hiding from his. Sure, he ripped us a new one whenever we invaded his life, but he didn't mean it. If he did, Skylar Buchanan would be long gone.

Like I expected Em to be after his morphine top-up. "How are you doing down there?"

Embry held my gaze for a reassuring moment before his eyes rolled a little. "High as a motherfucker."

"Best place for you."

"They're going to cut me open again."

"How do you know?"

Em had no answer that he could articulate, and after a while, he faded out. With him gone, the thump in my temple returned, but it was distant now, on its way back to the hell pit it came from, taking the tightness in my neck and shoulder with it.

"Here." Skylar appeared at my elbow and dropped two pills into my free hand. "Paracetamol. If you need something stronger, we'll have to triage you."

"I'm all right."

"It's okay if you're not. We can help you."

"Focus on Em. He thinks he's going to need more surgery. That true?"

Skylar shrugged. "I'm not a doctor, but the one looking after him is the best we have. Wait for him to talk to Mateo, eh?"

Waiting was all I had right now.

I stayed by Em's side until Mateo came back with the mythical doctor.

Tall dude with strong arms, kind eyes, and a neat silver fox beard. Recognition flooded me instantly.

Him too as he tipped me a nod in greeting. "We've met before."

"We have," I agreed. "You had my fella in a few months back. Carbon monoxide."

"That's the one. How's he doing?"

"All good. No lasting effects except a new boiler."

The doctor... Ramsey? Maybe? —nodded and turned his attention to Embry, falling into a quiet conversation with Skylar.

I moved aside for Mateo.

He eyed the pills in my hand. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." I snapped my palm shut. "Don't worry about me. You need anything?"

Bewilderment clouded Mateo's face. "I'm supposed to take Lili to art club in a few hours."

"I'll do it."

"Can you pick her up from school in the afternoon? I don't want to pile more shit on Decoy."

"Done. She can come back to my place and help me paint the bedroom at the back."

Mateo nodded, absorbing it all, before his ability to focus on anything that wasn't Embry evaporated, and it was time for me to go.

I said my goodbyes and stepped out, wincing at the wrench in my heart. Leaving them was hard. A ripped open wound that all the drugs in the world couldn't fix. It hurt more than the lingering ache in my head, and I wandered the A&E department, lost all over again, until I felt the comfort of a brother come up behind me.

Nash .

He had this scent about him these days. Fruity and rich. Feminine. I'd never tell him— lies —but he smelled of Orla and sex and I was happy for him. Also, being around River so much, it wasn't hard to imagine I reeked of engine oil, rage, and sherbet dib dabs.

"Come on you." Nash hauled me into a hug. "Let's get some air."

He towed me outside and offered me a zoot.

I waved it off and swallowed the pills in my clammy hand instead, dry-swallowing the little beasts until Mother Nash passed me the taste of my childhood in a can of warm Lilt. "Thank you, my lord."

"You okay?"

"No. You?"

"Eh." Nash scrunched his cute face, an AirPod jammed in one ear, it's sibling likely lost to the road, like the other eighty-four pairs he almost owned. "I've had better reasons to stay up all night."

"Any word from Teddy and the Folkster?"

"Nope."

"You worried?"

"Nope."

I checked his face for signs of deception. Nash was honest to the bone but taking Cam's president gig had changed our dynamic when it came to club business. There was shit he couldn't tell me even if he wanted to, and I didn't like it almost as much as I hated knowing too much. So that was me, ladles and jelly-spoons. The perpetually unsatisfied court jester.

"Do you think they'll operate?"

I snapped back to reality. "Hmm? What?"

"Cam said they might have to. Did you speak to the doctor?"

"Me? No." Fuck, I hadn't really talked to anyone. Despite being by Em's side for the witching hours, I'd walked out of RESUS no wiser than when I'd walked in.

I told Nash as much.

He didn't judge. Just filled me in.

Bowel obstruction, likely caused by the mess of the original injury. Adhesions. Didn't know that term, but I lacked the energy for a nightmare inducing Google session.

"You know the worst bit?" Nash sparked a cigarette that I happened to know was Locke's brand, not his. "This has been going on for months, slowing killing him, and those fuckers at the other hospital missed it because they never bothered to look."

"Or he didn't let them look." I played Devil's advocate. "Em's not the easiest patient."

Nash huffed, still fuming, a state of mind that he so rarely claimed. "It pisses me off that this had to happen for people to get their shit together."

"They didn't get their shit together. Different hospital, remember?"

"Rubes, he was starving to death."

Fresh nausea rocked me. "Don't say that."

Nash shrugged, pursing his lips in a pout I'd have made fun of all day long if we weren't huddled outside another fucking hospital. As it was, silence fell over us for a little while. Then my conversation—if you could call it that—with Skylar came back to me. "You ever think about going on holiday again?"

Nash had switched his cigarette for the vape he sometimes used for no reason whatsoever when he was actively smoking a hundred fags a day.

He blew life's greatest fraud into my face. "After the great strip search of Ibiza 2012? Hell no. But at least we made it all the way there without getting banned from EasyJet."

"Looking at you, O'Brian," I deadpanned as our fearless leader approached from the A&E entrance.

Cam frowned. "The fuck are you talking about?"

"That time you decked three Essex boys in the departure lounge at Cardiff airport."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

Cam raided Nash's pockets for cigarettes. Changed his mind and stole the vape. "This thing is a pile of shite."

"Give it back then," Nash said mildly.

"Or you could yeet it at the moon," I suggested.

Saint appeared from literally nowhere and swiped the vape from Cam's hand. Confiscated it without divulging if it was to save Cam from popcorn lung, or the planet from the toxic landfill.

"You ever been on a plane?" I wondered aloud for no reason whatsoever.

Saint hawk-eyed me. Then slowly shook his head in an answer that should've made sense. Of course he hadn't been on a plane. Ibiza carnage aside, none of us OGs had been anywhere that mattered since we'd left Kilkenny a thousand years ago.

Huh. Maybe Skylar had a point.

I rubbed my temples. Felt Cam's concern and pushed off the concrete bollard I'd parked my arse on, noting the daylight creeping into our mutual brood. "I need a car." I held out my hand for Cam's keys. "Gotta take little miss to art club."

"She might not want to go," Nash said.

"Then I'll take her somewhere else. Or make pancakes or some shit. Whatever. That's where I need to be—I promised Mats."

"You ain't driving anywhere," Cam growled. "Not with that fucking migraine."

Done with this shitshow of a night, I rounded on him, sudden and irrational fury bubbling up my throat, words I'd regret forming on my tongue as a Jaguar SUV pulled into the hospital car park, the most unlikely driver ever behind the wheel.

Seriously. River and flash cars were as compatible as Cam and a vape. Like tomatoes and bananas. Fuck that shit. But as the car purred to a stop beside us and the love of my life hopped out, I conceded that it was the most beautiful sight I'd seen since I'd woken up beside him forever and a day ago.

River rounded the car and pulled me into the kind of embrace I'd dreamed of for so many years. Warm. Loving. Real. He'd been awake as long as I had, but the energy buzzing beneath his warm, inked skin was everything I needed. The light in his molten brown eyes.

"Everything's gonna be all right, boo."

It wasn't, not for a good while, and my heart still ached for my fallen brother, but with my sunshine River by my side, a piece of me would always be okay.