Page 63 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Cass stayed awake just long enough for her family to crowd into the room, touching her arms, expressing their gladness that she’d pulled through surgery.

By the time her mother got weepy, Cass’s face had become twisted with pain, and the nurse came to shoo everyone out and hit the morphine pump.

When she turned to Shep, her smile sympathetic but her gaze flicking between the two of them like what the hell is this grown ass man doing with this young thing?

, and offered to bring him a recliner to sleep in, Toly stuck his head in the doorway, double-fisting paper coffee cups, and said, “Come out here a minute.”

Shep didn’t want to do any such thing.

But Cass was asleep.

And he could tell, by the serious tilt of Toly’s head, that this was important. That he’d want to hear what he had to say.

“Yeah, that’d be good,” he told the nurse, got unsteadily to his feet, and walked out into the hall.

Toly offered one of the cups, the heat seeping through the paper immediately comforting against his palm, and gestured down the hall with the other, where Walsh and Devin waited in an alcove.

Yeah. This was business. This was business he was going to want in on.

The coffee was black, shitty, and hot enough to burn his tongue; it did a decent job waking him up on the long walk down the hall. He’d nabbed maybe an hour of sleep slumped over Cass’s bed, and now he was more tired than before, and had a crick in his neck.

“Fox called,” Toly said, quietly. “All they found were some shell casings and footprints.”

Shep nodded and slurped down more coffee. “I figured. You know this was the Tres Diablos, right?”

Toly said, “Yeah, most likely.”

“We shoulda wiped them off the face of the fucking earth a week ago,” he said, bitterly, and a passing nurse did a double-take, brows raised.

Toly cleared his throat pointedly.

When they reached the alcove, Devin turned to them with a close-mouthed, but warm smile. He reached out to grip Shep’s bicep, and Shep didn’t shake him off. It felt nice, actually. Reminded him of Mav’s firm, masculine touch, the sort of comradely squeeze that his own father had never offered.

“How you doing, son?” he asked.

Don’t call me son . That was what Shep had said…God, was it only yesterday? Maybe two days ago. It had to be nearing five in the morning at this point. In the three years that he’d known Cass, he’d developed a slow-simmering hatred of this man.

He was too tired to find any trace of it inside himself now. He shrugged, and drained off the last of his coffee, and said, “You know.”

Devin’s smile quirked, wry. “Yeah,” he said, softly, “I know.” He squeezed Shep’s arm again and let his hand fall away.

Walsh didn’t offer a smile, warm, wry, or otherwise. Somehow, his face had taken on a new layer of sternness.

There was a door behind him, and he reached back to press the handle without looking. Walked backward into a room with a tilt of his head that invited them to follow.

It was a supply closet: metal shelves loaded with folded scrubs, boxes of paper masks, and gloves. A window with a pulled-down shade offered watery light, blue and eerie on the side of Walsh’s face as he folded his arms and faced off from them in the close confines between shelves.

He said, “Maverick went back to the clubhouse. Cops showed up while you were in with Cass, and Mav handled them like a pro—but they’ll come back later, they said.”

“Mav’s friendly with the chief of police up here.”

“That’s what he said. The chief is going to do the walk-around of the clubhouse personally, so that’s why Mav headed back.” Walsh tipped his head. “Fox and the boys are headed back to the city to get confirmation that this was the Tres Diablos.”

“It was,” Shep said, and knew it in his bones.

“That guy, the guy at the meeting…” He took a long blink and was in the back room at Hauser’s again, one of those beefy security thugs squaring off from him, glaring.

“Mav said—shit, Mav told them to stay away from Cass, and he pointed at me, and he said, ‘That’s her man.’”

Walsh nodded. “It would have been a lot easier to wait until you were back in the city and target her at school. They were pissed at you. They wanted to do it tonight, on home turf, to hurt you.”

Mission fucking accomplished.

“Now.” Devin laid a hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t do anything to provoke him.” It wasn’t a question, exactly.

“When they started talking shit—” Shep began, guilt boiling up in his throat like heartburn. He’d charged forward, aggressive, hand balled up and ready for a swing. He’d started it. Blackmon was paying the assholes, yeah, but Shep had shown weakness in front of them. Helped to hone their plan.

Toly interrupted him. “No. He didn’t provoke them. They walked in that room with chips on their shoulders. They never had any intention of honoring their word.”

Shep had been a Lean Dog for more than a decade, but was pierced straight through, a painful shot under his ribs, by the sudden knowledge that he’d become a part of a family . One that would offer him support instead of blame.

Devin, his hand still on Shep’s shoulder, said, “You don’t need to do anything but stay right here. That’s your place, and no one will think less of you.”

It wasn’t excitement, but something dark that echoed it that built in his stomach, a hard knot. “But you’re going after them.”

Devin nodded. In the calm voice of a parent, or a patient schoolteacher, he said, “Yes. There’s going to be consequences for what happened tonight.”

“I want in,” Shep said. There was nothing else to say.

Devin nodded. “Good lad.”

Then logic caught up to him. “But Maverick…” He didn’t want to cause a scene, for anyone to get arrested, to get shit stirred back up after the post-Abacus peace.

“This isn’t up to Maverick,” Walsh said, with a note of finality. “It’s Devin’s op.” He nodded toward his father. “His and the Foxes.”

“If there’s any blowback, I’ll take it,” Devin said. “Not you, and not the club.”

Shep had drunk his coffee too fast; his head was starting to buzz. He reached up to massage at his temples and said, “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“And you don’t have to.” Devin grinned, teeth flashing white in the blue-dawn dimness of the room. “It’s my treat. Consider it a wedding present.”

~*~

Cass’s chest felt very, very warm. It was pleasant at first, like a heated blanket, or that initial moment of slipping down into a hot tub.

But then it was too warm. And then it was burning.

And then it was pain, an ugly pulse of it, lightning zings branching off from the main source and crackling across her ribs and down her right arm.

Sensation filtered back in slowly: the feel of scratchy fabric against her bare skin, a cool draft coming from overhead, the scent of industrial-strength cleaner.

She heard beeps, and murmuring voices. There was a sense of light, a fluttering: her eyes trying to open.

An unfamiliar, but friendly female voice said, “Cassandra, are you waking up? How’s your pain, honey? Can you hear me?”

Lifting her eyelids was a conscious struggle, and even that hurt her chest. Oh, God, it was on fire.

And the pressure was incredible, like someone had dropped a stack of cinderblocks on her.

She blinked, and a kindly round face came into view; blue scrubs with little cats on them.

A nurse. And the pain was mounting, mounting, mounting…

She opened her mouth to say terrible , and a high-pitched whining noise came out instead.

“Okay, gotcha,” the nurse said, and reached for something out of sight.

“Cass?” That was Mum’s voice. High, panicked. “Oh, darling, are you okay, oh…”

“She’s okay.” Shep! That was Shep! “She’s hurting. She needs another morphine hit.”

As he said it, the pain began to dull. She was warm again. Soft. Floating.

“Just a half-dose this time, sweetie,” the nurse said, and patted the back of her hand. When she stepped back, Mum took her place, a strange halo of light around her head. Everything was fuzzy; sound seemed to come down the length of a tunnel.

“Darling.” Emily laid a careful hand on her arm and leaned into her face. “My precious girl, I’m so sorry.”

“Mum…s’okay.” Cass wanted to lift her other hand to clasp her mother’s but her arm didn’t want to cooperate.

Shep appeared behind Emily, his expression tense like it had been the day in the precinct. The day she’d propositioned him, and he’d taken her home and delivered. The face of a man about to do something .

This time, she knew, it wouldn’t involve rolling around and rucking up the sheets, laughing at each other between kisses.

Even through the glitter and glow of the morphine, worry pulsed cold in the place where the pain had been.

She lifted her hand—she tried to—she focused on it—and it raised up a few inches. “Shep.” Her mouth was dry, and her lips heavy, and she couldn’t say what she wanted to: Mum, I love you, but please, I need Shep, I need to talk to my husband.

They seemed to understand, though.

Emily drew back, wiping at her tears, expression morose when Shep touched her shoulder and guided her gently back. She went, though: stepped out of sight. And Shep crowded in close at the head of the bed.

Maybe it was the morphine, but she swore his fingertips struck sparks along her forehead as he swept her hair back off her face and tucked it behind her ear. His eyes were terribly soft and red-rimmed, but he didn’t smile.

She tried to wet her lips, but her tongue was leathery and thick in her mouth.

She tried to find the right words, but the morphine was spinning her thoughts out slow and stringy like saltwater taffy.

When she blinked, the dark was lovely, and her eyelids were so heavy…

but no. No . She had to say…had to tell him…

“You’re…leaving,” she croaked, and it wasn’t a question, because she could see it all over his face, in every loved line and groove of it.

His throat bobbed, and a muscle in his cheek twitched. “I’m not leaving leaving. I just have to do something. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“No…Shep…”

He leaned in and kissed her forehead. Her temple.

The stubble along his jaw tickled like sandpaper on her cheek when he put his lips against her ear.

“I have to go get them. I have to , baby. The guys who did this, I have to go.” He swallowed, and his throat clicked, and up close like this, heads touching, she heard hear the almost-sob that he choked down forcefully.

“You don’t.”

He took a harsh breath, and it was warm on the way back out, all down the neck of her gown. “I do. I really do. I don’t wanna go, and I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I need to do this.”

He didn’t need to in a practical sense, she knew.

Her dad, Fox, Tenny, Reese—those were the guys who handled situations like this.

Shep needed to go for his own reasons; because he felt as though he’d failed her, and he wanted blood on his hands.

Someone had shot his old lady, and he wanted to hold the axe when it swung.

She closed her eyes, because she knew there was nothing she could offer that would dissuade him. Something warm and wet slipped down her face, and she realized she was crying.

Shep drew back, and his thumbs swiped the tears from her cheeks, gentle passes, again and again. “Hey, you asleep? Look at me.”

She struggled to open her eyes, and he was right there in front of her, familiar, and wanted, always wanted, and finally hers , and she had no idea if, once he walked out the door, she’d ever see him again.

He’d never looked more serious. “Listen to me,” he said, softly, “I’m coming back. I promise. You’ve got Raven and your mom here, and Walsh is gonna stick around for a bit. You’ll be safe, and they’ll keep you updated. But I gotta do this, kiddo. You know I do.”

“I know.” It came out a whimper.

He cupped her cheeks and leaned in to kiss her dry mouth, and then her forehead again, lingering there, inhaling deeply. “I love you.”

“Love you.”

The morphine dragged her under before she got the chance to watch him walk away.