Chapter Ninety-Six

Dane woke to the telltale smell of a hospital. He remembered being brought in with a gunshot wound to his thigh. The same thigh that had been shot before, and bitten by a dog. And then shot again. He recalled the trip in the ambulance, but things kind of faded out from there.

His leg should be hurting, but the pain was numbed by whatever was dripping into the IV attached to his arm.

“Hello there,” a smiling nurse greeted him as she stepped into the room. She took care of business first—checking the bag and the monitors he was hooked up to. “How’s the pain?”

“Bearable.”

“The doctor will be in shortly. Do you know what happened?”

“Not after I got to the hospital.”

“Your femoral artery was nicked. You were losing a lot of blood. You had to have an operation to repair it.”

He winced, and not just from the bright sun filtering through the windows. “How bad is it?”

“The doctor will be in to discuss it with you.”

Dane sure didn’t like the frown on her lips when she turned toward the door. But the sound of grumbling from the hallway distracted him. He would recognize Angel’s bossy voice anywhere, since it was the usual tone she used with him.

“We are his family, and we want to see him. We heard he was awake. You said we only had to wait until he woke up.”

“Please let them in before her head explodes,” Dane whispered to the nurse by his bed. She nodded and went out to intervene.

One by one, Garrett, Sam, Angel, and Colton piled into the small room. His gaze remained on the door, waiting for the missing member of their team. But she didn’t come into the room.

“Where’s Lena?” he asked.

“I told you he was going to notice,” Angel said with an eye roll as she smacked Garrett in the arm.

Lena wasn’t there?

Where the hell was she?