Cora nodded and smiled at me. “He needs to be here regardless, and so do you.”
It was uncanny how she always seemed to see everything. “I’m here.” I said it begrudgingly.
“Yeah. But you had to think about it first. You belong here, Royal. Don’t doubt it.”
But I did—doubt it, that is. I just didn’t know how I fit. “Things just felt off and a little strained after I had to take Asa in. I wasn’t really sure how to handle that, and making friends has never been all that easy for me.”
Most girls didn’t like me or didn’t trust me and boys only wanted to pretend to be my friend in the hopes it would lead to more. Aside from my tight bond with my mom, my relationship with Dom and his sisters, and now Saint, I had lived a pretty solitary life.
“Shit happens. What happened with Asa wasn’t your fault and we all know that.” She gave me a very pointed look, her brown eye hard and her blue eye sharp. “Do you?”
I wanted to tell her everything felt like it was my fault. It felt like all I could do anymore was make mistake after mistake. I never got the chance, though, because panic crossed her pretty face and in a heartbeat she was up out of the chair and darting across the waiting room to where the bathrooms were located. Rome’s deep voice rumbled with a litany of swearwords as his mom scolded him, which he blatantly ignored as he followed his tiny fiancée into the ladies’ room. He ignored the nurse that called out to him as well, which had all the guys gathered around laughing.
I was pondering Cora’s words about fault when her now-vacant seat was filled with a much bigger, masculine body. Whenever I was within touching distance of him, all my senses seemed to go into overload. He draped one of his long arms across the back of my chair and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“You okay?” His voice was softer than usual and way too close to my ear. I gulped a little and nodded.
It was the fact he asked, the fact that I think he really cared whether I was okay or not, that overshadowed all the red flags he liked to wave in my face warning me away from him.
“Yeah. I’m glad I came up with you. It’s nice to see this.”
“See what?”
I waved a hand vaguely around the room indicating where Salem and Rowdy were cuddled together, where Nash had wrapped Saint up in his arms and was holding her, where Rome had disappeared after Cora, and even where the older Archers were sitting huddled together.
“Happiness. Togetherness. Unity. It was just me and my mom when I was growing up and she jumped from man to man always looking for something she couldn’t seem to find. It’s pretty cool to see couples that actually want to be together. Stability is kind of a foreign concept to me.”
He kicked his long legs up like mine were and adopted a similar pose. I shivered a little when his side pressed along my own. He grinned at me when he noticed my reaction.
“You can have all the stability you want when you stop looking for trouble.”
He was probably right, although trouble sounded like so much more fun right now, and what I wanted and what I needed were absolutely not the same thing.
I didn’t reply; instead I tried really hard not to move as I felt the tips of his fingers start to play with the end of my long ponytail where it hung over the back of the chair. I don’t think he was even aware that he was doing it. That is, until I glanced at him and noticed the golden glow shining out of his eyes. This was not a guy that ever did anything without being very aware of the effect it was having on the people around him. He wasn’t just trouble, he was potent and more dangerous than most of the stuff I saw on the streets every day.
At some point the monotony of waiting for endless hours long into the night, the quiet murmur of voices, the squeak of rubber shoes on the linoleum floor, all worked together to lull me to sleep. One minute I was thinking about how odd my night had turned out. About how when I felt my absolute worst there was this remarkable foundation of wonderful people to catch me. I wasn’t used to having any kind of safety net aside from Dom, and I had to admit it was really nice to have a soft landing instead of a brutal crash for once in my life.
But of course, like everything in my world lately, drifting off into a little catnap couldn’t just be easy and rejuvenating. As soon as the darkness descended, it was there. The day everything changed forever.
I heard the gunshots. Heard the cops that had been on the scene before us shouting. Heard the people in the neighborhood chattering next to the dilapidated building that had been converted into a monster meth lab. I heard the sirens. I heard my radio squawk that there were several officers down. It was a bad situation all around, but Dom and I were trained. It was our job to go into bad situations and make them better.
I heard Dom telling me we should go into the alley and I blindly agreed. I heard his boots rattle on the metal as he found a fire escape and started to climb up. I told him I was right behind him, we always had each other’s back. Dom barked at me to stay put, to cover him from the group. We had no idea how many shooters there were, had no idea if the building was clear or not, but again, we were trained and this was our job.
I had my gun out. I was watching, staring hard at the space above Dom’s head, making sure no one could get the drop on him. There were more shots fired, I had no idea if they were our guys or the bad guys, and I didn’t care as long as my partner was okay. I heard Dom make a noise as he reached the top of the fire escape. I could swear I heard every single snowflake that was falling that night as it hit the dirty ground around my booted feet.
I heard Dom call an all-clear, saw him move to go through a shattered window, and then I heard it … nothing more than a whisper. A faint sound of a can or some other piece of trash rolling on the asphalt. I moved my attention away from Dom for a split second, half of a heartbeat, not even a full blink, and then hell was unleashed.
A kid, a boy that was barely out of puberty, popped up over the edge of the roof, opened fire from his higher position, and hit Dom. He took two shots in the vest, one ripped through his arm. The force and surprise sent him stumbling backward until he hit the waist-high railing of the fire escape and started to tumble over it. One last bullet had caught him just right in the side, but it was the fall that did the most damage.
Then all I could hear was screaming, my own and Dom’s as he fell. I returned fire, caught the kid dead center in his chest. It didn’t matter. I thought Dom was dead and I couldn’t stop screaming.
I woke up with a jerk. I was covered in a light sheen of sweat and noticeably shaking. Luckily this time I wasn’t making any noise and no one seemed to notice my disheveled state, mostly because Ayden and Jet had arrived and everyone was gathered around saying hello. I watched as Asa pulled his strikingly beautiful little sister into a warm embrace.
And then it was like Shaw and the baby knew, like her and Rule’s baby boy had been waiting for just the right minute to make his grand entrance into the world. He seemed to know the exact moment that his whole family was there to meet him because it wasn’t until the entire gang was present that Reyer Remington Archer made his debut.
I had to say it was the best thing that had ever been waiting for me on the end of the nightmarish visions of that horrible night, and I would forever be grateful I was allowed to be part of it.
About two weeks after the night at the hospital, I walked into the Bar full of trepidation. Rome had called and asked me to come in an hour early because he wanted to talk to me about something. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out if I had screwed something up or done something wrong, but his grave tone was more serious than usual and it made my long-honed self-preservation instincts kick in. If he was