Maverick (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #6) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,3
his real name.
Jameson was.
Jameson Ravenwood.
I’d heard it once on our wedding day. A hurried and harried affair that began out of necessity and, to me at least, had turned into more.
So much more.
He’d married me to protect me, to let me stay in the U.S. and to have some freedom to come out to the cops, to tell the authorities what the Lancaster family had done to me. How the father and son had enslaved me as well as three other women.
It wasn’t the green card which kept me safe. While I knew Maverick thought that was why I’d gone ahead with the wedding, it wasn’t. He was. With him, I felt safe, and that was a rare and precious thing in my world.
Hope aside, I was pretty sure that, at some point in the future, ICE would track me down and haul me back to Ukraine, married or not, but when he’d asked me to be his wife, a strange calm had overtaken me.
In all honesty, thinking back to that moment, when he’d proposed in the most unromantic setting imaginable, calmed me now.
It helped me breathe.
Helped me turn to the doctor.
Helped me feel like my skin wasn’t too tight for my body.
I turned around slowly, trying to use the time to get myself back on track. The doctors didn’t often talk to me because Stone, a doctor at the hospital but also Steel’s Old Lady, usually did the explaining. Not just to me but to the council too.
These words… Old Lady. Council. They were new to me. Not to my vocabulary, just new to me.
I’d somehow found myself in a whole other subculture within a culture. It was both fascinating and terrifying.
Until now, I hadn’t been scared. Because of Maverick.
Why did he have to go back to the clubhouse?
Someone had targeted the place where the Satan’s Sinners MC lived and worked, someone had bombed it and destroyed it. In the aftermath, the place had been nothing but rubble, more wreckage than shelter, and Maverick had entered the building in his wheelchair, where the roof had collapsed on top of him, then he’d ended up here.
Out of a wheelchair.
So much was going on, so much made no sense.
A woman I’d been imprisoned with, enslaved with, had turned traitor on the Sinners. In the aftermath of the bombing, Tatána’s body had been discovered amid the rubble, and Maverick had been injured and unconscious ever since.
I’d never imagined this was how it would have gone down.
Never could have foreseen him losing his memory.
Even knowing why he’d returned to the damaged clubhouse, I still resented it. Would club business always take precedence? Even above his own safety?
I blinked at the doctor, mad at myself for failing to hear him talking to me. Gulping, I whispered, “I-I’m so sorry, sir, but I—”
He frowned at me a little, and I shrank back at his annoyance. Then he surprised me by asking, “Are you all right?”
Fiddling with my leather cuff, something Stone had given me in the early days so I could hide the slave brand on my wrist, I shook my head. “My husband just woke up. He doesn’t remember me.”
His eyes softened, even if they dropped to the cuff I was still messing with. “I’ve just checked him over.”
“You have?” I rasped disbelievingly—exactly how long had I been out of it? My mind a blur?
“Yes,” he murmured, reaching out, his hand going to my shoulder.
I stared down at it, the free and easy way he’d just moved to touch me…
Was he only trying to comfort me?
Maybe that’s what people did here. Normal people.
Someone was distressed, they reached out to comfort them. But for me, the doctor’s hand was like a bunch of spiders crash-landing on my shoulder.
I stared at the digits edgily, feeling as if each one was an insect that was going to crawl up my neck and into my ear, down my shirt collar and beneath my clothes.
Out of nowhere, my breathing began to grow worse once more, and the doctor, sensing that something wasn’t right, backed off.
Not far, just a step, but his gaze was sharper now.
Meaner?
I didn’t know. My brain was too frazzled to read his expression.
I wasn’t used to being touched anymore. Not by anyone. Maverick could, but he wasn’t just anyone, and that had nothing to do with him being my husband.
He’d been there.
From the start.
In my sick bed, he’d visited me.
When I’d hovered at death’s door, he’d stayed with me.