Instead, it’s the other men. Lorenzo, Ivan, and the rest of them, in a circle around Hannah’s body. They lean in around her, like they’re going to touch her, and I lunge forward, feral and furious.
“Don’t you fucking dare!” I scream, already swinging, ready to beat them back with my bare hands if I have to.
But just like when I went to touch Hannah, my hands go right through them.
They all start laughing, and the sound is grating and cruel. For a split second, the alley blurs and almost looks like the house they kept us in. Lorenzo’s face shifts between being his own and being Julian’s. Hannah is both young and grown up, but always bleeding.
It’s so fucking much.
It’s overwhelming, and my heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest. The cruel laughter gets louder and louder, and when I look down at Hannah, her mouth is moving, but I don’t have a hope of understanding what she’s saying. I can’t hear her over the laughter and the heavy thud of my own heart.
I put my hands over my ears, feeling so fucking helpless. Hannah is dying, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t touch the men who hurt her. I can’t do anything.
I can never fucking do anything.
My eyes snap open, a strangled sound getting caught in my throat.
I’m in my bedroom, lying on my back in bed. My body is drenched in sweat, and my cheeks hurt from how hard I’ve been clenching my jaw. Just like in the dream, my heart is pounding so hard that my chest aches, and I can hear the sound in my own head, drowning out almost everything else.
Immediately, strong arms tighten around me. There’s a second where I feel like I should fight against the hold before I realize that I know those arms.
They’re strong, thick, and covered in tattoos. They definitely belong to Knox.
When I turn my head to the right, there he is, curled up in bed facing me. He’s not asleep, and he quirks a little smile at me when I look at him.
I can’t return it just yet, but the relief that floods me is like a balm after the horror of that nightmare.
Someone shifts on my other side, and I know it’s Priest, still in the bed where he was when I fell asleep.
Gage and Ash are in the room too, Ash sitting cross legged on the floor, fiddling with something in his lap, and Gage in the desk chair, looking at something on his phone.
Even the dog is there, curled up at the foot of the bed with his head resting on my ankle. That can’t be comfortable, but Jack Sparrow looks like he’s happy to just be there with all of us.
It hits me all over again that I’m not alone. Not with this or with anything else, and gradually that starts to calm me down. My heart rate slows, and some of the tension starts to bleed out of my body.
Gage catches my eye, looking up from whatever he was reading.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice pitched low to be soft and soothing or whatever. It actually does help.
He doesn’t press me for information or ask what I was dreaming about, and I like that. No one in this room is a stranger to nightmares. Probably not even Dog, who lived his life in an alley by a dumpster before he attached himself to me and became my unofficially adopted pet.
“Yes,” I tell Gage. “I’m okay.”
My voice comes out raspy and hoarse, and my answer probably isn’t even a little bit convincing, but I don’t want to get into it. I don’t want to try to describe the shit I saw in my dream, because then I’ll have to relive it all over again.
I just want to put it behind me, so I take a deep breath and try to let it all go.
“What time is it?” I ask. The light from the windows is all golden, but it doesn’t feel like I was out for that long. Probably because nightmares aren’t fucking restful at all.
“After four,” Gage replies. “You were out for most of the day.”
“Fuck.” I reach up and rub at my face. “I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”
“You needed it,” Priest says. He’s close enough that his lips tickle the skin of my neck, and he slides one hand down my side.
“I know, but we have shit to do,” I tell him. “I’m not going to fuck over Julian in my sleep.”
Knox snorts at that. “That’s what you have us for, little fox. We did research while you were knocked out.”
“We?” Ash asks, looking up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Is that your new nickname for me?”
Knox rolls his eyes. “Fine. Gage and Ash did research. I sharpened my knives. You know, just in case.”
It hits me once again that they’re on board with my plan and want to help me every step of the way. It’s like a mantra that repeats in my head, helping to beat back the pain and grief and nightmares.
I’m not alone.
I’m not alone.
I’m not alone.
“Sharpening knives definitely counts as a useful activity,” I tell Knox, who grins at me. Then I shift my attention to Gage and Ash. “What did you find out?”
“Some interesting things about our friend Julian,” Gage says, and the word friend is laced with so much hate that I can almost taste it. “His main business, on the illegal end anyway, is trafficking cocaine. Detroit’s a hot city for it, and Julian controls a decent-sized chunk of the traffic here.”
“Explains a lot about what he probably would have wanted to use our club for,” Ash says. “If we’d gone through with the whole ‘holy matrimony’ bit with Knox and his sister.”
“Fucking disgusting,” Knox mutters, pulling me closer like I’m some kind of balm against the thought of marrying Natalie Maduro. And honestly, I’m fine with that. I hated the thought of him being with that witch even more than he did.
“I’m just saying. If he’s dealing out cocaine to smaller gangs and the mid-level dealers, then the club would have been perfect for smuggling things through.”
“Or laundering money for him,” Priest chimes in. “It had a lot of benefits.”
“For him,” I say. “Not so many for you guys.”
But we’ve already been down the path of why they were willing to do it in the first place, and I know we don’t need to rehash it, so I move on. “What do we need to know now?” I ask them.
“Where he’s getting his supply,” Gage says. “Who he’s buying from. And who he’s selling to. If we can fuck up both sides of his business, that’ll make the whole thing grind to a halt.”
“How do we do that?” I’ve done some meddling in people’s businesses before, but I’ve never tried to bring a whole operation down like this. Usually I was just there to kill a guy and then move on.
“We have to follow his money,” Priest tells me, and I can still feel his lips moving against my skin. “It’s the best way to track it down. Money never lies, and it’ll help us learn more.”
“There’s another thing,” Ash adds. “Julian’s apparently been trying to level up.”
“As a drug dealer?” I ask, sitting up enough to see him better.