Chapter 28

Do you ever listen to your ex-wife talking and think ‘damn I wish I treated you better so you would shut the fuck up?’

Yeah, me neither.

Coke

I knew for a fact that I wanted to give her everything.

I wanted to get married. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted her to outlive me. I wanted everything. And for her, I’d even be happy with kids.

I’d made some mistakes in my life. A lot of them. Beatrice being one of the major ones.

But, Cora had shown me that she loved me despite my downfalls. She’d been there through everything.

“Yo, you just gonna lay there, or are we going to go back there to figure out what the fuck happened?” Gabe asked.

I grunted and continued to walk across the yard, ignoring the way my car crusher was now a twisted hunk of metal.

Many of the cars surrounding the twisted hunk of metal were in much the same predicament, and the car that used to be Beatrice’s prized possession was now a charred mess with a hole the size of a small person in the door where the bomb had exploded outward.

Oh, and the roof was missing, too.

I’d seen it over by the Ford part of the lot at least eight rows down.

Gabe’s eyes sparkled as he watched me walk gingerly toward his truck.

“I brought the bitch mobile especially for you,” he drawled.

I grimaced and carefully settled myself in the seat.

“Look at you, being all superhero-like. Like the Flash, only a little bit slower and older,” Gabe said.

I flipped him off. “Fuck you.”

“Where did it get you?” he asked.

I lifted my shirt where a piece of metal was embedded in my skin.

“Is that a shifter knob?” he asked, leaning closer to get a better look.

“Yeah,” I said. “From Beatrice’s Beemer, too.”

“At least it looks pretty…”

The reason I knew that it was from Beatrice’s car was due to the sparkly shifter sequins topping it. There was no mistaking who that belonged to.

Tyler, who’d ridden with Gabe over to the yard, got out of the truck and waved. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

I gave him an ‘okay’ sign with my finger and thumb, then sat in the passenger seat of Gabe’s truck dripping blood in his pristine car seat.

“Gonna need to get this cleaned,” I murmured.

He grunted. “I know some people. They’re good at getting blood out of things.”

I didn’t miss that threat.

Nor did I miss the way he glared at me out of the corner of his eye.

“That’s nice,” I said.

The ride to the hospital lasted less than five minutes—twice what’d taken me earlier in Beatrice’s Beemer—and I’d never been as happy as I was to arrive as when we did.

“Did you get a new piercing?”

I looked up to find Johnny standing there, looking at me with humor written all over his face.

I flipped him off, too.

“Did you…”

“Dad!”

“Daddy!”

Gabe’s head whipped around just as mine did, and suddenly Luca and Frankie were standing next to us, explaining something that we couldn’t understand because neither one of them would let the other one talk.

“Stop.” Gabe held up his hand.

Frankie’s lips thinned, but she shut up.

“One at a time, please.”

“Cora’s hurt.”

***

“I think you need to see a doctor,” a female nurse said as I entered Cora’s ER room with Gabe on my heels.

I ignored her, and the pain in my side, and continued walking into the room until I arrived at Cora’s bedside.

She was curled into herself, breathing rapidly, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

I bent over, winced slightly, and whispered into Cora’s ear.

“Baby, it’s okay.” I pushed her hair back. “You’re okay.”

“She’s having a panic attack,” a doctor explained.

I knew that without him confirming it.

“We were going to give her Ativan, but we had to run blood tests first since her pupils were dilated which was conducive with a concussion. We didn’t want to give her anything without knowing if anything else was wrong, which was a good thing we did because she’s pregnant as fuck.”

Someone hit someone, and the doctor grunted in pain.

“Sorry. The patient is pregnant,” the doctor apologized for his language.

“The patient is what?” I repeated.

“The patient is pregnant,” a nurse repeated, shooting the doctor a furious look.

The room went quiet at that, and I looked up to find Gabe, Luca, and Frankie all staring at me in shock.

“What the fuck?” Gabe snarled.

“What do you mean the patient is pregnant?” came a screeching bellow from the room across the hall from mine.

Johnny, who’d followed us all in, turned and watched as Beatrice tried to get out of the bed and rush toward us, but the metal handcuffs stopped her before she could make it half a foot off the bed.

He moved and closed the door on her, effectively muting her screams to a dull roar instead of an intense shriek.

“Dad…I thought you had yourself fixed,” came Frankie’s furiously whispered question.

I hesitated. “I did.”

“Apparently you need to go get that botch job checked out after you get that shifter out of your side,” Gabe drawled.

Though he’d been startled at first, he actually looked sort of ecstatic.

I found myself grinning despite the pain.

“Yeah…I guess I do.”