It had been a long time since I last prayed.

I suppose it would have been natural for me to have lost faith in God after Sasha and the children had died. But that’s not why I stopped praying.

I stopped praying because there was nothing for me to pray for. After leaving Russia behind, I had nobody to pray for happiness with, nobody to ask God to look over... nobody to ask God to protect. To save.

I squeezed my fingers tighter. The overlaid fingers almost turning blue from the force of my hands pressing together, veins pronounced in my arms, head pounding from the thickness of my blood churning in my veins as I pressed every ounce of will in my body in the hopes that my prayer would be heard. That if my will was strong enough, if it made my voice just that little bit louder... that it might be heard.

Don’t take her. Don’t take another one. Not this one.

The words were like a vicious cycle in my head as I was torn between the past and the present.

Images of Sasha and the children were throwing themselves at me, the memories of their funeral, of their unidentifiable bodies in that small satin coffin overlaying where Anna lay in the hospital ICU bed. It was like a superficial weight on my chest that made the simple effort to breathe almost unbearable.

I could barely stand to look at her, but at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

No matter which brother or woman told me to go home and rest, there was no one who could move me from that hospital chair. I was barely functioning, and it had taken a lot of coaxing just to get me to change my shirt. My other one had been covered in Anna’s blood, and so were my arms.

Kay had been patient with me, though, using a wipe to clean the blood away from my skin. But my arms itched like it was still there, reminding me how it was still under my nails and in the cracks Kay had missed. My woman’s blood.

Guilt churned at me. Guilt telling me that I should never have had that party. I should never have let my guard down, that this was my punishment for doing so.

I knew it sounded unreasonable, but sitting in the same place for over twenty hours, not moving, not speaking, barely functioning as my woman was in a hospital bed she might possibly not wake up from had me bordering on self-destruction.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I prayed to whatever God would listen. How many doctors or nurses had checked her over and over again to see if her condition had changed.

Each time they reassured me that she would wake up. That she would be fine.

It didn’t stop the horrible pit growing in my stomach, though.

“Coffee,” Hunter said, appearing beside me.

He held out a Styrofoam cup of the steaming hot liquid, but my eyes cataloged only the tired expression of his face and the fact he was wearing the same T-shirt he wore to the party.

He gestured one of the cups of coffee to me. I sat back into the cushioned hospital seat, feeling my stiff muscles ache in protest and my spine almost creak as it straightened for the first time in hours, and reached for the cup.

I paused midway, though, my eyes locking onto that tiny little crack of blood hidden underneath my nail. My slight freeze was barely a millisecond, though, and if Hunter noticed it, he didn’t say anything as I lifted the cup.

Hunter dropped into the seat next to me, both of our massive sizes seeming to take up the small chairs with ease. It felt surreal, noticing that tiny detail, wondering how I could be so big when right now I felt so impossibly small.

“Why are you here?” were the first words out of my mouth. They sounded a lot harsher through my hoarse throat than I had intended, but Hunter was supposed to be at the clubhouse with everybody else. Only Kay, who had jumped into action to stop Anna’s bleeding in the clubroom, came with me, and Lamb showed up a little while later.

Hunter didn’t take any offense to my tone. Instead, he just gave a soft shrug, his eyes moving from me to look at the cross pinned on the far wall. His green eyes crinkled underneath the heavy fur of his brow.

“Figured you could use the company. Lamb’s a good brother, but we both know comfort isn’t his strong suit,” Hunter answered.

I nodded, accepting it. He was right; Lamb had your back and was the best V.P. I knew, but he wasn’t the cuddly type.

“Pipe’s going to be alright, by the way.” Hunter said, filling the empty air with news I hadn’t even thought to ask for. Some president I am. “Got a grade 2 concussion so we’re going to have to watch him for a few days, but he’s otherwise fine.”

I nodded, wishing part of me could feel even a microgram of relief at the fact our newest recruit was alright after having his head smashed against a wall repeatedly and left to drown in his own blood before we found him moments after all hell had broken loose. He had been brought in the same ambulance as Anna.

At the mere mention of her name in my thoughts, I found my head drifting up to her bedside. Hunter’s eyes followed, and his reassuring expression sank.

“How is she?” Hunter asked, moving to brush a strand of Anna’s ice-blonde hair out of her face. She didn’t stir.

She looked almost like a porcelain doll, laid in a white bed, her makeup gone from her face, the color drained out of her skin, and hair soft and flat against her bed pillow. The Anna I knew was loud, feisty, and wore the color red like it was the blood of her fallen enemies. She was passion and fire and everything explosive. This Anna wasn’t.

Even when sleeping, Anna had always looked like she could bite my balls off at any second for looking at her, but this Anna... she looked simple... plain.

I hated it.

“She looks like a stranger,” I whispered, the confession cracking my voice ever so slightly.

Hunter flinched at my words, his green eyes tightening hard under his torn expression. Empathy resonated through him, and I remembered that only months ago, he had been looking at his own wife this way. Mallory had overdosed on a drug that had only been milligrams from slipping her into a coma. It had been touch and go for a week, but she pulled through. Hunter, on the other hand, had been a despairing wreck for months afterward.

“It’s not your fault, Wolf,” he interrupted my thinking space.

I looked up, surprised to be caught red-handed.

Hunter gave me a sympathetic smile. “I can see the guilt.” He shrugged. “I saw it every day in the mirror for months after Mallory was hurt.” He sat his untouched coffee on the side of the table. “I abandoned her when she needed me most. That was on me. But this”—he gestured to Anna’s prone form—“isn’t on you. It’s not your fault.”

I shook my head, dropping my gaze to look down into the hot cup of coffee. “I shouldn’t have held that fucking party,” I growled, my hands threatening to crush the cup in my hands and spill coffee everywhere.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Hunter growled, catching my attention. “They would have gotten to us one way or the other. If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else.”

A churning silence brooded between us, the heat of my coffee bleeding through the crap Styrofoam and the cheap cup sleeve and into the skin of my hands—the hands that had beaten and bloodied anybody I saw worthy of it and anybody I deemed a threat. I was a reckoning. Death and destruction all within one body.

And it only took one woman to tear me down.

“I wish it weren’t her,” I breathed the words like a lodged stone in my throat suddenly coming free. “I wish it were someone else.” I felt like a dick for saying it. Wishing that on anybody else was horrific, but I wasn’t lying.

“I know,” Hunter just said softly, his green eyes lingering on Anna’s face. “I know.”

Our silence ended with a harsh knock at the door.

On instinct, my head swung toward the bed, daring to believe that a loud noise might wake her.

She didn’t move.

Instead, Lamb stood in the doorway, his eyes reading too much into my movement but his face remaining as stagnant as always. He didn’t look at Anna, not once, as his eyes refused to move from mine. “Wolf,” he said, his voice holding a tone I had heard many times. “We need to talk.”

I didn’t like what came after.