“Lucy?”
Her eyes shifted toward his voice.
Laura collapsed into Ben’s arms. Rook backed against the wall, suddenly too large for the room. Mason removed his bandana and gripped it between both hands.
Lucy’s lips moved again.
A nurse moistened them.
The sound that followed was small, damaged, and almost swallowed by the machines.
“Ro…sie.”
Eli made no sound.
He placed one hand over the teddy bear and the other over his sister’s fingers.
“That’s her,” he whispered. “I bought her for you.”
Technically, Lucy had not awakened in the way movies portray it. She did not sit up. She did not recognize everyone. She drifted in and out of awareness, frightened and confused.
But she had spoken the bear’s name.
A name Eli had repeated beside her bed every day since bringing Rosie into the room.
The club brothers moved into the hallway because the family needed space. Thirty men stood beneath fluorescent lights, leather shoulders pressed against painted walls.
