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I try to call Julian again, but the call drops, just like before.

“FUCK!” I’m so fucking pissed. I didn’t get the chance to call Rina or my guards at home. I should go there to check in and make sure everything is okay and that my family stays put until I say otherwise.

“Sir,” Leo says as he walks into my office. “It’s Spider. I got a call, but now I can’t call out again.”

“I know. What about Spider?”

Leo’s face is grim. “It’s not good, boss. We need to go to the hospital.”

I didn’t like putting my second in an ambulance and sending him to the regular hospital, but with no way to communicate to our teams, I didn’t have a choice.

With a nod, I run with Leo to the car.

The hospital is busy when we storm our way through the ambulance bay, and a nurse points down the hall.

Even if I don’t own this facility, they know me.

I rush down to Spider’s room and stop short at the doorway.

Christ.

My man is on a breathing tube, has wires coming out of his arms, and looks like he’s already dead.

“They bled him,” the doctor next to me says quietly. “The cuts don’t look as bad as they are. It was surgical precision. He lost a lot of blood, and although we’ve given him transfusions, I don’t know if he’s going to bounce back from this.”

“If he doesn’t bounce back,” I reply, my voice hard and full of gravel, “you’ll be bouncing off the street from my penthouse.”

I look over at the other man.

“Make it happen.”

Forty-Five

RINA

Ifell asleep for about two hours by the pool, but otherwise, I was too keyed up to really get much rest last night, waiting to hear from Carson. But with the dawn of a new day, things seem to be calm.

Charlie went to school, after I had a team meeting with Bacon and Clyde, and although the phones are still sporadic at best, the guys hadn’t been given any direction to keep us on lockdown, so we thought that it would be safe for Charlie to be at school. He’s as protected there as he is here.

I’ve decided that until Carson either comes home or is able to call, I’m going to stay close to the house and get some work done here today. I know we have a housekeeping team that comes in once a week to help Mildred with the deep cleaning, but I need to organize the stuff that finally arrived from Portland and choose what I’ll keep and what will be donated.

Now that the house out west is empty, there’s really no reason to keep it, so I’ll probably look for a real estate agent and put it up for sale. Despite all the conflicting feelings I had when we came to Vegas, this feels like home again.

Because we’re all together, as a family.

Charlie loves his newly discovered aunts and uncles, and now that I have them all in my life again, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

I have sisters. It’s really the best.

So, I decide to start in the garage, where the many boxes are waiting for me to sift through, starting with toys and kitchenware.

“We had way more crap than I realized,” I mutter as I try to decide if I really need every single picture that Charlie ever drew for me.

My phone rings, surprising me, and hoping that it’s Carson, I yank it out of my back pocket and then deflate when I see that it’s the school.

At least the phones are back up.

“Hello?”