Aidan stood and went to the door, eased it shut and leaned back against it. His movements had an air of the official about them, like he’d drawn a shade on the mundane little conversations.
Mercy sat up straighter against the elevated head of his bed.
“When Merc gets discharged,” Aidan said. “What’s waiting for us back home?”
Translation: how much shit were they going to be walking into?
Ghost sighed. “I don’t think this is the place for that conversation.”
Aidan glanced toward Maggie, and then Ava. “Well if we don’t have it now, Ava might get back to Knoxville and start blowing people’s faces off at random.”
Ava bit her lip, not sure if she wanted to laugh or bury her face in her palms and burst into tears.
Everyone glanced at her, with those flat, impossible to read expressions all the boys slipped on when official club business came up.
Ghost said, “Larsen and his crew are totally wiped out. Now we’ve just got Stephens, Fielding, and that FBI dick to contend with.”
“Will you kill Stephens?” Ava asked, shocking not only herself, but everyone else, judging by their looks. “I’m not some stupid outsider,” she defended. “I know how things work.”
Ghost gave her a truly frustrated look. “I don’t want to kill him, no. I want to discredit him.”
“We’ve got the drugs,” Tango said. “That would get him and his cousin.”
“The money ties to the Carpathians,” Rottie said.
“And my recommendation letter,” Ava said. “Don’t forget that.”
Ghost sat back in his chair, scratching at the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll come up with something. We’ve got the ammo; now it’s just about delivering it.”
Everyone went out for lunch. Maggie tried to pull Ava along with them, but she refused. She hadn’t had a moment alone with Mercy since he’d awakened. She needed one desperately.
“How are you feeling?” she asked as she settled into the chair beside his shoulder.
His hair looked limp and dull in the light of the overhead tubes, his complexion still waxy and pale, the shadows beneath his eyes still prominent. It was amazing, Ava reflected, how devastating to the body the art of healing was.
“Well,” he said, with a faint ghost of his usual smile. “I’ve learned it gets real old real fast to be asked how I feel.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He grew serious, his gaze latching onto her face. “Not when I’m the bastard who threw you off a moving–”
She shook her head. “You had to. I know that.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“Mercy, nothing about the last few weeks has been right.”
His brows lifted. “Nothing.”
Too late, she realized what she’d said. She reached for his hand on the bed with her good one, curled her fingers through his. “That’s not what I meant,” she said.
But his face was still too-serious. “Would you have married me if we weren’t running for our lives?”
The question stung, maybe more than it should have. “You know I would have.”
He studied her a long moment, eyes touching every curve and corner of her face, tracing her brows and the line of her lips. There was a wall up between them. She could feel it, the way it draped against her skin, and neither of them knew the magic pressure point that would send it tumbling. So much trauma lay between them now, past and present, that they’d faced alone and survived together.
“It hasn’t hit you yet, has it?” he said finally, closing his fingers over hers. “What you did out there on the highway. You’re still in shock.
