Chapter Three
The room smelled like antiseptic and something else…depression, if that had an odor. Like it held the fears and desperation of all its prior occupants.
An annoying and repetitive bleep sounding from a screen somewhere above his head had him wanting to hurl the damn thing through a window. It was connected to one the many tubes or wires flowing from his body like he was in some kind of Sci-Fi movie. One of his legs was propped on a stack of pillows and his left arm rested in a sling. Either he was in a hospital, or he’d been kidnapped by aliens and was now their human test subject.
Hospital seemed the most likely answer. Fuck. He hated hospitals. Hated being laid up. Hated being weak. And he sure as hell felt weak now. Weak and fatigued, like he could sleep for the next month. How many people had died in this hospital room? In this very bed? Probably a fair number. He shuddered.
This wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in this room. Snippets of perky nurses, poking and prodding, and pain, lots of pain, ran through his mind like a broken movie reel. But it was all hazy. Pieces of a large puzzle that didn’t seem to connect in any logical way.
Pain still existed, but sat mostly in the background of his mind. A dull aching in his leg, head, face, side, and arm. The strangest sensation came from his throat. It was sore and felt like some kind of tube or something was shoved in his windpipe. Snake opened and closed his lips a few times, ran his bone-dry tongue over the roof of his mouth and tried to speak. No words came out, but his mouth was empty. No tube there.
He turned his head and a pulling sensation in his neck had him lifting a hand to his throat. There it was. A tube coming from the front of his neck, but it was short and didn’t seem to be connected to anything. Jesus. He was a fuckin’ mess.
“Well, what a difference a day makes.”
A tiny woman stood in the open doorway, a bright smile on her face. Her statement implied that she’d seen him before, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember her being in his room. Not that she was overly memorable. Dressed in baggy scrubs and short white lab coat with her caramel-colored hair in a high ponytail, she looked like every other hospital employee who’d been in and out of his room.
She strode into the room with all the confidence of someone who owned the place. “I’m Amanda from the Physical Therapy department. And you are Mr. Gould, correct?”
Gould? The name did not ring a bell. Why the hell would she think his name was Gould?
He tried to ask her, but again, no words came out. Just as he was about to shake his head, she spoke again.
“Nick Gould?”
Right.
Nick Gould. Nick was correct, though it had been nearly two decades since anyone referred to him by that name. But Gould? It came to him as he stared at the physical therapist. At least he’d had the wherewithal to avoid his real name when they’d asked. He didn’t have a clue which hospital he was in and until the events that led him to be in such a sorry fucking state became clear, a pseudonym was the smart move.
He nodded.
“Okay if I call you Nick? Or would you prefer Mr. Gould?”
Snake. Call me Snake.
The name and the position as president of the Grimm Brothers Motorcycle Club came with a healthy dose of respect and fear. But if he didn’t trust his actual last name, there was no way in hell he’d use his club name until he was certain it was safe.
He tried to say Nick was fine, but once again, no sound. With a frown, he just nodded.
“Okay, Nick, I’m here because it’s time to try to get you up and moving a bit. You’ve been laying here, flat on your back for about three weeks.”
Three weeks? Holy shit. Had anyone from the club been by? Was anyone from the No Prisoners staking out the hospital, waiting for a chance to finish him off? The last thing he remembered before the stark white walls of his hospital room was Jester’s giant fists slamming into his face over and over. Not that he could blame the man. He’d have done the same if someone threatened what was his.
“You likely won’t remember anything from those weeks. At first, you were intubated and sedated, then the docs put in a tracheostomy tube.”
He raised an eyebrow. Intubated? Tracheostomy? He wasn’t any kind of idiot, but hospital speak didn’t exactly roll off his tongue.
The girl chuckled. “Sorry. I tend to forget to use laymen’s terms. Hazard of working in a hospital for the past six years. Anyway, from what I’ve read in your chart, you had extensive swelling and damage to your airway from the, uh, well, from the assault and injuries to your face. Your breathing was severely compromised to the point where you needed a tube through your mouth and down your throat to allow air to pass to your lungs. That’s only sustainable for so long, so after about ten days that was switched over to a trach. The physicians cut a hole in your throat and passed the tube that way. You’ve been on steroids the past few weeks as well to decrease the swelling. Just this morning you were fully weaned off the ventilator, which is the machine that was breathing for you, and you are doing remarkably well with just a little bit of oxygen.”
Christ, that was a lot to take in. Three weeks of lying in a hospital bed beyond vulnerable? Shit, Snake hadn’t been vulnerable to anything since he was a teenager. It didn’t sit well.
“I know it’s a lot to take in. I’m sure I won’t be the only one to fill you in, so don’t feel like you need to remember all the details right now. Anyway, the tube in your throat is why you can’t speak at the moment. If you continue to breathe well on your own, a speech therapist will come by and put what we call a speaking valve over the end of the trach. It allows you to speak through the tube and start managing your air through your mouth and nose again. Then it will be fully capped off and eventually removed entirely. You’ll be surprised how fast the hole closes up once the tube is removed. For now, there should be…” She looked around the room then zeroed in on the rolling bedside table. “Ah, yep that’s what I was looking for.”
With a triumphant grin, she held up a notebook sized dry erase board and a black marker. “Have you used this yet?”
He nodded. Events of the day were starting to come back to him. The woman who’d been in earlier asking for his name, he’d used it to let her know he was Nick Gould. At least he had some way to communicate. First order of business was to find out if he was in the hospital closest to home. If so, he needed out and fast before his enemies found him. He reached for the white board and she handed it over without hesitation.
Where am I? Hopefully she’d be able to read his chicken scratch.
As he wrote, she moved next to the head of his bed and read over his shoulder. The faint scent of something…flowery—fuck if he knew what kind of flower—wafted from her direction. It was kind of nice. Feminine. Big contrast to the scent of booze, cigarettes, and weed he was used to from club whores. With her standing so close, he was able to get a better look at her. She was beautiful, with a makeup-free face full of smooth skin, pretty brown eyes, and soft lips. There was a freshness about her that he had no experience with and he found himself strangely drawn to it. Shit, he must have hit his head pretty damn hard.
She furrowed her brow as she read. “In the hospital.”
Thank you, Madame Obvious. With a roll of his eyes, he scribbled some more. Name?
“Name? Oh, name of the hospital? It’s Lake View Community Hospital.” She stared at him like she couldn’t figure out why he was asking. Like maybe she was concerned for his brain function.
State?
“You don’t know the state? Um…” The look in her eye morphed from puzzlement to genuine concern.
Christ, now she was going to think the injury to his brain was worse than it actually was.
“We’re in Idaho.”
Idaho? What the fuck? Idaho had to be a good ten plus hours from Arizona. How the fuck had he gotten to Idaho? Try as he might, nothing came to him. He had to find out. So much was on the line. His life, his club, the lives of his brothers.
Who brought me here? he wrote on the board.
She—what was her name? Oh yeah, Amanda—remained next to his head, reading over his shoulder as he scrawled on the board, but he could sense her growing desire to end the chit chat and get on with her reason for being there. He didn’t give a fuck about her plans. They’d get to her agenda as soon as he made some sense out of this clusterfuck.
“All I know is what I’ve read in your chart. You were found at the bottom of a ravine off interstate fifteen. No identification and barely breathing from what I’ve heard. Beaten pretty bad and with multiple bullet wounds. If the bug-eyed look you just gave me is any indication, you aren’t from around here. There’s this guy who lives up in the mountains. He’s kinda famous around here. He’s a prepper. You know? The kind of guy who is preparing for nuclear disaster. Bomb shelter, food storage to last for years, that kind of thing. Anyway, he’s a paranoid guy and was apparently watching out his window with a pair of binoculars when he saw some guys dump something down the ravine then shoot at it. He called it in immediately. Saved by a Good Samaritan.”
Snake barely heard the majority of her monologue. The words melded together after she mentioned the ravine. Choppy memories assaulted him, out of order, but telling just the same. Casper. The motherfucker. The man Snake had depended on for years. His brother. His VP. His right arm. They’d been through hell together and emerged at the top of the MC food chain.
Well, Snake had been at the very top. Casper number two. Apparently, that wasn’t high enough in the pecking order for the traitor. The traitor who grew up somewhere in Idaho. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together.
The Grimm Brothers had a prospect with a nasty drug habit who ended up using what he was supposed to be selling for the club. Snake had found out the prospect had a sister. Sweet and innocent school teacher named Emily. The club had blackmailed Emily into infiltrating a rival club for information with threats of killing her brother. The whole thing blew up in his fucking face when Emily fell for Jester, the sergeant at arms of the rival club, and ended up helping them instead of hurting them. In retaliation, Snake kidnapped her. Her old man was a giant fucker and when he rescued her, he’d beaten the shit out of Snake. He, and whichever bastards he’d been able to convince to go along with his plan, must have driven him far out of state, tossed his body, filled it with bullets, and left him for the vultures.
White hot rage heated his gut and traveled through his veins. His entire life had been spent working and fighting for that President’s patch. Shit he did in the name of his club was not to be taken lightly. He demanded respect and loyalty from each and every one of his brothers. Fuck with him and a man would pay.
“Whoa, easy there, big guy. Hear that crazy beeping? You need to calm down a bit. Your heart rate is through the roof and your oxygen level is dropping. I’m just going to turn up your oxygen a bit.”
She reached beyond the bed and turned a dial on the wall. The action made her lab coat rise up and stretched her baggy scrub pants taut across her ass. And what an ass it was. Why the hell would any woman want to dress in clothes that looked like a sack? Especially when they hid what Amanda’s were hiding. Women who hung around the club liked to make their assets plainly visible. Tiny, ass-hugging shorts, tops that gave a clear impression of the size and bounce of the breasts they cradled as well as molded to flat stomachs.
No flirty peek-a-boo games. No need to guess what a chick was packing. See a rack you like? Go for it. Her ass too flat? Pass her by. Simple.
The beeping on the monitor slowed to a steady pace once again and Amanda looked down at him with a smirk on her face. “No more of that, mister, or your nurse is going to come in here and spank us both.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, her face turned a bright shade of pink. Most likely she hadn’t meant to be so informal with him.
“Sorry, that wasn’t—”
He couldn’t help it. Her embarrassment over using the word spank was hilarious. If she had any idea the level of vulgar profanity that was just everyday language around the club, she wouldn’t think twice about making a spanking joke. Of course, now he was imagining his handprint across the ass he’d just been ogling. Nice and pink, maybe the same color as her flushed face. He let out a soundless laugh, his body shaking. A shot of pain through his side reminded him that he was still in pretty rough shape.
One of her perfect light brown eyebrows arched. “Ah, so that’s the kind of patient you’re gonna be. Good to know I can joke around. Okay, let’s get started. I’m going to do a quick check of your motion and strength then we’ll try to get you sitting at the edge of the bed. Ultimate goal is getting you out of bed and in the chair for an hour or so, but we’ll see how your body responds to being upright first. Good?”
He nodded. What the hell else could he do? He was at her mercy. He almost laughed again. At a woman’s mercy. What the fuck happened to his life? Three weeks ago he’d been stretched out on a bed at the clubhouse while some club whore—who the hell knew what her name was—choked down his cock until he came. He had been at nobody’s fucking mercy. Especially not a goddamned woman. They were at his mercy. Always. As was every member of his club.
As soon as he got his shit together he’d be reminding Casper of that fact. Slowly and painfully.