Page 149 of Reaper and Ruin

The tiny thumping heartbeat of our baby.

X elbowed Levi. “You gonna cry?”

I waited for Levi to come back with a smart-ass response, but his voice was choked and gruff when he replied, “There’s a good chance I might. Fucking hell. Listen to that.”

“Is it weird if I make this my ringtone?” X grinned and took out his phone. “Too late, I’m doing it.”

I had to hold in a laugh at that. I glanced over at Whip, knowing this had to be painful for him. He was the only one out of the four of us who had done this before. He had to be remembering the times he’d sat in a seat at his wife’s side and listened to his child’s heartbeat. Only to lose them before they’d even truly begun to live.

“Are you okay?” I reached for him, and his fingers gripped mine tightly. “It’s totally fine if you’re not.”

But he smiled over at me. “I feel more at peace today than I have any day since I lost them.” He leaned over the armrest of his chair and brought my fingers up to his lips to kiss. “Thank you.”

I didn’t know what exactly he was thanking me for, but all I cared about was that he was happy.

I really hoped that somewhere in the hospital, Nyah was getting the same sort of news. “Willa? My friend, Nyah, would have been brought in a few minutes before our ambulances gothere. She went ahead with her partner, Dax. Do you know where they are? Can I see her?”

Willa frowned and pulled a device from a pocket on the ultrasound cart. “How do you spell her name?”

I spelled it out, and she typed it in, but the frown didn’t lift from between her eyebrows. “There’s nobody here by that name.”

I squinted at her. “Are you sure? They were right ahead of us.”

But Willa shook her head. “We’ve only had two ambulances in so far today. Yours and the one Wyatt came in. Maybe they took your friend to a different hospital.”

That didn’t sound right. “Is that something they commonly do?”

“No, not unless her injuries were life-threatening.”

Worry trickled down my spine, but I was fairly confident Nyah had been in decent shape. She’d been walking and talking. She was probably dehydrated and would need to be treated for her miscarriage. But none of that should have equaled an emergency.

Levi squeezed my leg. “She’ll be okay, wherever they’ve taken her. She has Dax with her.” He grinned. “I don’t think he’s going to be letting her out of his sight ever again.”

I smiled at that too, remembering the way she’d flung herself at him and how he’d melted around her. His relief that she was alive and the love he had for her so evident in the way he’d scooped her right off her feet and cradled her close like she was the most precious thing in the world to him.

Levi was right. Dax was never going to let her go again. Francine was dead. Nyah was safe, and so was I. I guessed we both no longer had jobs at Clean Sweep, but that seemed insignificant in the scheme of things.

Jobs would come and go. But I had a lot more than a job waiting for me outside these hospital doors. I gazed around at my men. “Take me home.”

44

VIOLET

The clubhouse erupted in cheers when the four of us limped our way through the doors. My ankle had swollen up to grapefruit size, courtesy of the fall I’d taken into Francine’s pit of hell. Whip was on crutches, completely unable to put weight on his bad leg.

Fang stood at the front of the crowd, holding his youngest daughter in one arm. But that didn’t stop him from striding forward and wrapping his other arm around my head and holding me tight. The hug was almost more of a headlock and felt so naturally brotherly that it made me laugh into his shirt.

“You’re hurt,” he complained.

“Sprained ankle. Nothing more.” Though that wasn’t quite true. I pulled out of his embrace and looked up at him. “I know you suddenly gained a niece and nephew just recently, but I was wondering if you maybe wanted one more?”

His eyes widened. “What does that mean? You…you’re…”

“Pregnant,” I filled in for him.

His mouth opened and closed a few times, and then his gaze slid to Levi. “You knocked my little sister up?”

“Hey now, why are we assuming Levi did? Could have been me.” X folded his arms across his chest.