ChapterTwo
Mark
Iwas pissed. In fact, pissed didn’t even begin to cover it, and if I hadn’t been feeling pain in every single inch of my body, I’d open up the dictionary app with a thesaurus on my phone so I could look up a more appropriate word.
After my last comment to Layla, everyone had started yelling, but then Brett Townsend, the one I was always so sure was the calmest in the family, had lost his mind and swung, hitting me in the stomach and knocking the air out of me. Thankfully Layla had been in the huddle of women watching us by that point, otherwise, I’d have been arrested by my colleagues for either murder or attempted murder for putting her at risk of being hit.
Of course, my brothers had taken it personally and jumped in to push the Townsends away and make some hits of their own while I’d gulped in as much oxygen as possible before I was taken down again. This time, it hadn’t been by one of the adults. No, it’d been the kids, like rabid little heathens, who’d done it. Apparently, insanity was instilled in that family either in utero or in the first years of their lives.
“Honey, let me clean up some of those bites,” Mom said, coming back into the living room where I was lying on the couch with another baggie of ice in her hands. “I can’t believe they broke the skin. What were those kids thinking?”
Glancing at a bite near my elbow, I scowled at the size of it. “That wasn’t from one of the kids. That was from Jack.”
Mom gasped, looking even more horrified. “Her dad bit you? But he’s so nice normally.”
Yeah, but he ‘normally’ hadn’t just discovered that his only daughter had been married for four years after a quickie wedding in Vegas. Oh, and that it was to the guy responsible for her leaving town for that same period of time, meaning the guy in question had hurt her so much that she’d practically run away from her family.
“In his defense, he didn’t want to risk hurting one of the kids, so he went for whatever area he could get to.”
Picking up the First Aid kit that my brother had kindly left next to the couch before he’d gone to the store to get more Neosporin, Mom sat on the coffee table and watched me as she chewed on her lower lip. The guilt that’d been eating away at me for four long years made it feel like I had acid in my throat—although that could still be possible given how hard Brett had hit my stomach—and I had to turn away so I couldn’t see her face.
Finally, she sighed, and I heard the sound of the kit being opened. “I’ve only got the wipes to clean you. If we patch you up now, I’ll take you to the doctor in the morning to see if you need antibiotics and shots.”
“Shots?”
“The doctor’s the best person to tell us if that’s necessary,” she explained quickly. I was cool with tattoos. In fact, I found them quite relaxing, but shots and piercings? After the singular piercing I’d tried to go through with in my ear when I was seventeen, I could raise merry hell, even at twenty-seven, if someone came toward me with a syringe. “Like, what if they have rabies or tetanus? You might even need a distemper vaccination.”
I didn’t have a clue what that even was.
“I doubt I need to be vaccinated, Mom.”
“Well, we’re going to make sure. Now, hold still while I start cleaning out the scratches and bites.”
Staring up at the ceiling and wondering how I’d managed to get scuff marks on it, I did as I was told as she went through wipe after wipe, cleaning out whatever cut, graze, and bite she could find. Once she was done, she stood up, and I glanced out of the corner of my eye as she frowned at my feet. My shoes were off, and I was fairly sure I’d put clean socks on this morning, so I lifted my head to say something just as she yanked up the ankle of my jeans and gasped.
“Who the hell managed to bite you through denim?”
That I couldn’t answer, I hadn’t even felt it, but as I raised my head to see where she was staring, sure as shit, there were red teeth marks that were already bruised.
“Looks like a small jaw,” I mused. “My bets are on one of Cole’s kids.”
Echo and Louis were little savages. I kind of admired that about them, though.
She pursed her lips and jiggled her head. “Probably. No matter how often Ebru tells him to quit putting the mattresses on the stairs for them to toboggan down, he keeps doing it. God only knows what damage has been done to their brain cells with all the hits to the walls.”
“They take after their father,” my brother, Luke, said from where he was coming in through my front door. “After watching Jack in action today, I won’t ever say the true insanity skipped a generation with him from Hurst. Did you know I had to pull him off because he was biting your arm?”
Raising it so he could see the newly cleaned out cuts, I hummed. “Yup, I found that one almost at the beginning.”
“Damn,” Luke whistled, just as our other brother, Adam, opened the door and slammed it behind him once he was inside.
“I’d get to the doctor to see about vaccinations,” Adam growled as he stomped over next to Mom. “Most likely rabies.”
“I suggested distemper, too,” Mom added as she dabbed at my ankle before lifting the other leg of my pants to check it.
Adam looked at my arm thoughtfully. “Were you wormed recently?”
“He doesn’t need a doctor, he needs a veterinarian,” Luke muttered, sitting on the coffee table.