I Fled After Catching My Boyfriend With My Best Friend and Stepbrother, Only to Take a Bullet for a Biker Who Swore I Belonged Under His Protection novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Under His Protection

Hank staples the wound under Laney's direction, she learns her savings are gone and she is suspended over the video, and Boone vows she belongs under his protection on her own terms.

Hank irrigated the wound with a squeeze bottle of saline while I told him exactly where to aim it.

"Slower," I said. "You're flushing blood back in."

"I did this in a tent in Kandahar," Hank said.

"Then you should be good at slower."

Boone stood against the office wall with his arms crossed.

He had not stopped looking at me since I lay down.

The bartender brought in a bottle of whiskey and a bag of ice and set both on the desk.

"For the nurse," he said.

"I'll take the ice," I said. "The whiskey is for you, Hank. Your hands are shaking."

"They are not."

"They are a little."

Hank looked at his hands.

Boone made a sound in his chest that might have been a laugh.

"Okay," I said. "Antibiotic ointment, then a pressure dressing, then wrap it. Do you have a suture kit?"

"I have a stapler," Hank said.

"That works. Clean entry, clean exit. Two staples on each side, no more."

He picked up the stapler and looked at me over his glasses.

"This will hurt," he said.

"Everything has hurt for an hour," I said. "Do it."

The first staple went in, and I grabbed the arm of the couch.

Boone crossed the room in two steps and took my good hand.

I had not asked him to.

His hand was huge and warm and rough across the palm.

I squeezed it hard enough to feel his bones shift.

He didn't pull away.

"Breathe out when he fires," he said, low.

"I know how to breathe," I said through my teeth.

"I know you do. Do it anyway."

The second staple went in.

I breathed out.

When Hank finished, the arm was wrapped to the shoulder and I was dizzy and cold and shaking.

Boone pulled a leather jacket off a hook and laid it over me.

It was far too big.

It smelled like him.

"I should go to the ER," I said. "The wound needs imaging, and I want a tetanus shot."

"Hank will get you a shot," Boone said.

"That's not the same thing."

"A gunshot goes in the report," he said. "Police come. They ask who shot at whom. Whoever sent that car learns your name and where you work."

"They already know where I work."

"You don't know that."

"You don't know that they don't."

He looked at me.

For the first time I saw something other than control on his face.

"I don't," he said. "That's the problem."

I closed my eyes.

My phone was in my back pocket, and I dug it out with my good hand.

The screen was cracked across one corner.

It had forty-one unread messages, forty of them from the hospital group chat.

I opened the one on top, which wasn't from the group.

It was my supervisor, in a private message, sent twenty minutes ago.

She wrote: "Laney, I'm so sorry. HR has seen the video. You're suspended without pay pending a conduct review. Please don't come in tomorrow."

I read it three times.

I had pulled double shifts for four years.

I had never been late once.

I had never even been written up.

"What?" Boone said.

"I've been suspended," I said. "For a video of me finding my boyfriend in bed with my best friend. Which someone else filmed."

His jaw tightened.

"Someone filmed it?"

"My stepbrother."

He said nothing for a moment.

Then he said, evenly, "Tell me about your stepbrother."

"Later," I said.

I opened my banking app, because I needed one thing in my life to still be normal.

The screen loaded slowly.

Checking: $212.

Savings: $0.00.

I stared at it.

My savings had been thirty-eight thousand dollars at breakfast.

It was the house fund.

I had been saving it for five years, and Trent had handled the transfers because he was good with money.

The last transaction was from this afternoon.

It said: Transfer to external account, $38,000.

I laughed.

It came out wrong, a cracked little laugh with no air in it.

Hank stopped packing his bag.

Boone took the phone out of my hand, read the screen and put it face down on the desk.

"Is that all your money?" he asked.

"It's the part with my name on it," I said.

He pulled a chair next to the couch and sat down so we were eye to eye.

"Listen to me, Laney Dorsett," he said. "You took a bullet meant for me. I don't owe a debt like that lightly."

"I didn't do it for a debt."

"I know. That's why I owe it."

"I'll be fine," I said. "I'll sleep on a friend's couch."

"The friend who set you up?"

I didn't answer.

"You don't have anyone to go to tonight," he said. "I'm not being cruel. I'm counting."

He was right, and I hated that he was right.

"Here is what I'm offering," he said. "A room at the clubhouse. A door that locks from your side. My men on the lot. Nobody puts a hand on you without going through me."

"That sounds like a cage."

"It has a gate," he said. "You can walk out of it any time you want, and I'll hold the door."

"Why?"

"Because from tonight you belong under my protection," Boone said. "That's not a request. It's a vow. What you do with it is your choice."

I looked at him for a long time.

He did not look away.

I said, "Two nights."

"Two nights," he said.

"And I keep my job, my money and my own say in everything."

"You'll have all three."

"And if you give me orders, I leave."

For the first time that night, Boone smiled, a slow, crooked thing.

"Then I'll have to learn to ask," he said.

He stood and offered me his hand.

I took it, and he pulled me up carefully, one hand under my good elbow.

The room spun, and I leaned against his chest.

He didn't move.

Outside the office, the bar had gone quiet again.

Through the door I heard the bartender say, to nobody, "That's the girl who took the bullet."

And somebody else answered, "She's his now."

I opened my mouth to say I belonged to no one.

Boone's hand tightened under my arm.

"Not tonight," he said quietly. "Tonight just let me get you out of here."

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