The Henchmen MC: Renny Part 14

No.

I built bombs.

And when there were times that I couldn't work at the place Hailstorm had set up for me, like back when I blew Lex's place to kingdom come and didn't want anyone to know I was in on it. And like right then.

Because if Hailstorm knew I was there, they would know why, and then the calvary would come to stop me.

And f.u.c.k that.

I wasn't poor little heartbroken Janie. I was mother f.u.c.king Jstorm and someone was coming after half of the people I held near and dear and that s.h.i.t would never fly.

I was not going to be that girl. I wasn't going to break. I wasn't going to sit around and woe-is-me and wring my hands and bemoan how unfair the world was.

I was going to right the wrongs.

I was going to make them pay for thinking we were weak, that we would lie down and take the f.u.c.king, that we weren't going to fight back.

Because, for all the fanfare, for all the carefully plotted attacks, Little Ricky's organization wasn't as bulletproof as he thought it was. At least not to me, not to someone h.e.l.lbent on finding them.

Little Ricky himself, who was every bit as gigantic as Alex had said, was still in Long Island. Because just like he was power and money hungry, he was a coward. He sent others to do his dirty work.

I would leave him be.

First, because a vindictive part of me wanted him to suffer, wanted him to know what it felt like to lose his organization, to worry for his own life, for a while.

Second, because The Henchmen would never forgive me for stealing the chance for them to get their vengeance.

I was just thinning the herd, culling the sheep.

They would get to land the final, devastating blow.

I opened the door, the joints whining from disuse, and made my way down, flicking on the battery-powered lights, and closing the door.

I wasn't a fan of small, dark, underground s.p.a.ces, but when it came to things as dangerous as the ingredients in a good bomb, it was safety-wise to be as far underground as possible, to prevent any collateral damage if something went wrong.

But nothing was going to go wrong.

I could build a bomb in my sleep I had been tinkering at it for so long.

They always underestimate in shows and movies how long it takes to make a bomb. They sit a guy at a table, have him throw some pipes together and sprinkle some powder inside them and they're done.

Truth be told, it was a long, tedious, painstaking process that you needed to get absolutely perfect or you had a bomb that didn't detonate or only detonated partially. You only got one chance to create the impact you wanted so you needed to do it right.

So while I was impatient and I wanted to get things handled, I took a deep breath, I compiled all the working parts from the stopwatch to the ammonium nitrate, I sat down at the table, and I slowly set to work.

Hours later, I sat back, rolling the tension out of my neck and shoulders. It was probably the longest I had gone without sick to my stomach worry about Wolf since the bullets ripped into his body.

Even remembering it, even just having the quick flash move across my mind, I had to get up and move, I had to try to take slow, deep breaths.

Nothing had ever compared to that moment.

I had lived through a lot, a sickening, disgusting lot in my time with Lex, but Wolf had been the one to finally show me a good side of life again. He had helped me sleep. He had brought me back to life. And to stand beside him, a smile still on my face because he was home finally, and hear the bullets break out, to feel him push me behind his solid form, to watch as he went down, as the blood bloomed from the holes in his body, as he slowly slipped unconscious...

I had felt gutted.

I had felt like someone had reached into my chest and ripped my heart out of my ribcage.

I had felt like my world had crashed down around me.

I had felt truly and utterly devastated.

I didn't even understand the meaning of that word until that moment.

I just... lost it.

And I didn't stop losing it for a long time.

h.e.l.l, I was pretty sure I was still a little lost.

But at least I wasn't useless anymore. Wolf wasn't the kind of man who would have wanted me at his bedside, tending to him like a baby. He would have much preferred I was getting s.h.i.t done, getting justice, protecting his people. What was left of them.

I didn't even want to think about having to tell him what had happened since he was shot- how many men he would have to mourn while he recovered.

But if I could at least help eliminate the threat, I hoped it would mean he would take it easy and give his body time to heal. If he woke up while things were still crazy and up in the air, I could see him ripping out his IVs and trying to take off on a one-man mission to put an end to it all, likely making himself worse in the process.

I carefully boxed it up and made my way back to the car, keeping the gloves on even as I drove one town over where the idiots had luckily rented a very secluded three bedroom home on a cul-de-sac. Technically, there were two neighbors, but they were bank-owned and vacant. They didn't want to be seen. And, luckily for me, that meant I wouldn't be either when I parked on the street behind and cut through the woods, the night falling giving me perfect cover with my dark hoodie as I made my way across the backyard and toward the Bilco doors and greased the joints before pulling them open and slipping unseen inside.

It wasn't the kind of bas.e.m.e.nt you wanted to be in. Me, I never really liked being in any bas.e.m.e.nts, but this one was dirt-floored and spider-infested with old, forgotten rusted hoes and rakes leaning on the walls beside festering buckets of lord-knew what. Well, one smelled strongly of gasoline so, hey, that worked in my favor. Who the h.e.l.l left buckets of gasoline laying about? That was just asking for an explosion.

A floor above me, I could hear the sc.r.a.pe of a chair, the thump of footsteps, and the m.u.f.fled, low register of male voices talking.

My heart was a frantic, sickening thing, lodged up near my throat as I set the bomb down in the most central location then went back to drag the bucket of gasoline over as well, carefully pouring it on the floor as I set the timer then as quickly as I could while being silent as possible, I made my way back out, closed the doors, and booked it.

The timer was set for thirty minutes and I wanted to be back at the hospital like nothing happened by then. It was a believable alibi. The staff knew I pretty much never left and certainly never for extended periods of time. They would see me walking back up onto the floor with a vending machine coffee and a.s.sume they just happened to miss me walking past a couple minutes before.

On that note, I got my coffee that I desperately needed. Adrenaline drained, I was feeling the lack of sleep. Four days strong. I was going to need to crash, nightmares be d.a.m.ned. My body would only take so much.

I slipped Digger's keys into his pocket and went to move past him. But he snagged my arm. "What'd you do?"

"You'll know in about ten minutes. Tell Lo that I don't appreciate being left out of the loop."

With that, I pulled away, closed the door, and took my first deep breath in over an hour.

I kicked out of my shoes, took a long pull of my coffee, then put it down and climbed into bed with Wolf.

I really wasn't supposed to. There were rules.

But those rules flew out the window when they saw exactly the kind of fit I was capable of.

No one even mentioned it anymore.

Wolf was colder unconscious than he usually was. In bed at any other time, he was like a furnace; I barely ever needed a blanket. But in that hospital bed, he was almost cool to the touch, something I found unnerving no matter how many nights I curled up with him and felt it. So I kicked up the covers and pulled them up to my shoulders as I nestled my face into his neck, breathing in a smell that wasn't his own because it was all hospital soap and sanitizer and plastic and wrong.

But it was still Wolf.

He was still mine.

Even if he didn't feel and smell like himself.

Even if he didn't even know I was there.

I felt the tears well up at that and the hopeless feeling it brought with it, but fought them off until exhaustion finally took a hold of me.

"You smell like bombs."

I had been teeter-tottering between sleep and awake for what had to have been twenty minutes, my body knowing it needed more sleep, but my brain saying it was better not to risk a nightmare by allowing that.

But at those words, at those four, beautiful words coming from a rough, horse voice that was so, so incredibly familiar, I jolted fully awake, shooting upward, not realizing that by doing so, I had slammed my hand into Wolf's stomach until he let out a grunt.

Another sound that was genuinely music to my ears.

As soon as I looked down and I saw those amazing, beautiful honey eyes on me, well, I lost it again.

I thought I had sobbed hard when they first brought him in and, well, pretty much every single night that followed, but none of that even came close. Apparently relieved crying was even more uncontrollable than sad crying.

"Shh," he said as I planted my face into his chest to m.u.f.fle the noise.

But I couldn't. I couldn't stop and I couldn't be quiet and I didn't even try until I felt the last of the tears slip out, until I felt bone dry inside. Then and only then did I wipe my eyes, press up, and look at him again.

"How long?" he asked, hand moving almost comically slow off the bed to touch the side of my face. He must have been weak. He had been wasting away little by little every day.

I swallowed hard, knowing there was no way to sugarcoat the truth. "About nine weeks."

"Nine?" he growled, trying to push up, but I scooted back and placed my hands on his shoulder, pressing him back.

"You still have st.i.tches," I warned him. "No moving until the doctor looks you over."

"f.u.c.k the doctor," he hissed. "Details, Janie."

"Can you at least get..."

"Details," he ground out and, well, I didn't blame him. I would have felt the same way after waking up and realizing that much time was gone.

"Alright, um. We got you here. You went into surgery. Reign and all the guys came back from their pointless trips. Then, ah..."

"Janie..." his voice had warning and I looked up into his eyes and saw the need to know there.

"Reign, Cash, Repo, Duke, and Renny are okay. The rest..." I trailed off, shaking my head.

"f.u.c.k. Mother f.u.c.kers. Who?"

I exhaled hard. "They just figured it out a couple days ago thanks to a mix of Penny and the Gra.s.sis. It's the Abruzzo family. No," I hissed, pushing him back down again. "I smell like bombs, remember?" I said, voice low in case there was any chance of someone overhearing. "Reign and Lo conspired to keep me out of the loop because, apparently, I'm so d.a.m.n fragile."

"Lost weight," he observed, pinching my upper arm.

"So did you," I countered. "h.e.l.l of a diet, multiple gunshot wounds and major head trauma."

"Missed me," he said, reaching up to touch the swollen mess that my eyes must have been.

"Of course I f.u.c.king missed you, you idiot," I said, smiling. "I haven't been able to sleep right in nine weeks. You don't smell like you and you're cold and," I swallowed as another sob rose up in my throat. So much for thinking I was done. "And I didn't know if you were going to wake back up."

"I'm up," he said, shrugging one of his ma.s.sive shoulders.

I felt myself smile at that- big, goofy. Because he wouldn't say something sappy like 'I would never leave you' or 'I'll always come back to you'. Because he was a realist. He couldn't make those promises.

"Malcolm is going to be so happy to see you," I smiled. "He's been holding up and being all stalwart, but I know he's been worried. He's been staying at the compound. No, wait," I said when he went to shoot up again. "It's okay. They were at Hailstorm for a long time while they redid the compound. New fences and security and walls and this really nifty DARPA gla.s.s room. It's practically impenetrable now. He's as safe as can be. Reign would never bring the kids back if he didn't believe that. You know that."

"He okay?"

"He's... Reign," I offered, knowing he understood. Reign was a lot of things, but above all- he was a man of his people. It didn't matter what went down, he held it together for all of them.

"Hey, Janie, we just want to check... oh!" the nurse started, stopping halfway across the room.

"He woke up," I supplied stupidly, unable to stop the big grin splitting my face.

"I can see that," she said, giving me just as big a smile back. I think the staff, after a while, started to lose hope. Not that I blamed them. It seemed hopeless. And they felt bad for me because I couldn't resign myself to the seemingly inevitable.

She was happy for me.

"Let me just go call for the doctor and tell him the good news. He is going to want to look you over."

She left with that and I turned back to Wolf. "Don't worry. I've been doing most of the... looking over. None of those nurses were going to get to wash you up."

"Washed me up, huh?" he asked, eyes getting a little heated.

"Oh, no you don't," I laughed, shaking my head at him. "You don't want the doctor coming in here to you with a hard-on, do you?"

"f.u.c.k the doctor," was his very typical response and I laughed. G.o.d, it felt so good to laugh again. And not the kind of laugh I gave to friends who told a joke or Malc when he tried to lighten the mood- a laugh followed by a bone-deep guilt for feeling even the tiniest bit happy when Wolf's fate was unknown. It was a full, guilt-free laugh. "Didn't know I was gone," he said, his hand sliding to the back of my neck, pulling me forward. "Missed you anyway."

And with that, he pulled me close and sealed his lips to mine.

I wanted to be soft and gentle and keep him from getting too worked up. But the second I felt him beneath me, lips claiming mine again, there was no restraint. I kissed him with every second of uncertainty, every shed tear, every knot my stomach had been twisted in, every bit of fear and defeat and frustration and what was at the root of all those feelings- the seemingly bottomless pool of love I had for him.

"Alright, alright," a voice said from behind us, making me jump, but Wolf held me for a second more, giving me soft for a bit before pulling back. And when he did, my lips felt swollen, sensitive. I pressed them together and turned to see the doctor standing there, smile understanding, eyes as kind as I remembered them. "So, look who finally put his wife out of her misery," he said, coming closer as I slowly climbed off the bed, feeling my heart fly up in my chest when Wolf reached for my hand, held onto it, and gave it a rea.s.suring squeeze. "That is quite the woman you have there. Thought half the staff was going to quit that first week," he added, looking at Wolf's monitors. "Do you have any pain anywhere?"

A minute or two later, still in the middle of a barrage of questions, the door flew open and there was Lo. "Jstorm, I swear on all that is holy, if I didn't love you so much I would... oh my G.o.d," she stopped, her jaw going slack, her eyes going wide.