The sound of drums grows louder, and I know it isn’t coming from the bar outside of my office door. Bar. Office. I’m in Camelot and these drums are mine alone. What did I do? Drink a bottle of battery acid and wash it down with some Vicodin?
I wonder if that was before or after the fight. Must have gotten into a fight with how my back stings right between the shoulder blades. I haven’t had to hit anything in a while, but it’s a familiar ache. I never liked a fight like Knox does and I don’t need it like Aiden, rather I was always the level-headed one, keeping my cool when the others acted like children. When they were children and impetuous and hating of everything and of one another. I taught them how to hate everyone else and how to love just us and now the glue holding our bond is broken. Now I am the hated one.
My hand fumbles across my desk as I reach out blindly. I crumple paper in my fist, knock over a tray of pens and crack my wrist on the underside of my computer monitor. I growl under my breath and exhale, keeping my eyes shut as I surrender to the sleep and sickness that’s coming for me. My right hand lies splayed on the oak while my forehead rests on my left forearm. Convulsively catching air, I’m surprised when all at once my fingers find a hard, smooth surface: the glass bottle I was searching for. Taking it, I drag myself into a seated position so I can drink and when my eyes open, I look up to the sight of my brother.
The bottle in his hand is identical to mine, yet when he takes a swig his eyes are focused where mine can make out little more than the outline of his broad shape. Hazy yellow-orange light seeps in through window slats and I can see particles of dust dancing in the pattern of intermittent beams. The ceiling lights are off and I wonder how long he’s been standing there, watching me in the dark.
“Bleak,” I hack, clearing my throat into my fist before taking a long, deep drink.
My head spins and I sink back into my black leather armchair as the awesome force of the alcohol sings like a train through me. I watch my brother watch me for some time and as I wait for him to speak, I smooth my fingers over the chair’s arm, its warmth disrupted by the chill of the nailheads. My hand, still trembling from the booze, moves in a way that is compulsive and maddening, even to me. It’s the effect of his eyes. Cool and grey and unsettling.
I remember when Marguerite brought him to the house, I both hated him for his indifference and liked him for his indifference to the one the rest of them called mother. Mother. As if it’s some sacred term. She convinced them of her love and they were so happily convinced of what I, to this day, still coin a manipulation in its acutest form. When she died she left me her favorite reading chair because I asked for it, knowing that I would plant it here in the office of our strip club to spite her. I wonder if she knew it too. She always knew.
“Aiden,” I bark.
Expressionless, he takes another sip from the bottle in his hand. It’s unmarked and clear, somehow an apt reflection of his own countenance. He’s so pale, eyes the color of clear water, white hair cropped short, skin the opposite end of the spectrum from my own tarred hide. The twins might be identical but he looks nothing like his brother. He is pure ice where Clifton is only warmth, but I’m glad that it’s him and not Clifton here now.
“I need you to do something for me. For us.”
“I talked to Marcel. Got information on where the EMTs took the Russians. I’ll hit them first then double back and find the woman who can ID you. Marcel said it was a blonde. She had a pregnant sister and both of them got in the ambulance. You got any other information for me? Any connection between her and the Russians?”
I shake my head as my fingers clench around the slim bottleneck. I see Aiden’s beating me to the bottom. Can’t let that happen. “No. I barely even remember the chick.” Said she was an EMT though, and a medical student. I don’t know why I don’t tell him that. “I don’t think she had a connection to the Russians.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Aiden sets his empty bottle down on top of a tin file cabinet and a ringing fills my ears even after the echo fades. “I’ll find them eventually.” The guy probably gets a kick out of the challenge. He snatches his sling off of the small, padded chair directly across from me and loops it over his shoulders. Three guns hang from it, one with a silencer attachment. This isn’t his first rodeo and a headcount of four doesn’t make much of an addition to the tally in his ledger where he’s already sporting a lot of red.
“Aiden,” I say as he turns. He pauses with his hand on the knob, ice eyes flat, dead. “I have one more for you.”
“Who?”
“Mer.”
Aiden doesn’t speak for a long moment and I am left wondering what he’s thinking because there is absolutely no change to his expression. No registering shock, no eager alacrity, no disappointment. There is no change whatsoever.
“Okay.” He nods once, then disappears through the door while I go back to drowning in whiskey – one twenty proof. A race to the bottom against my better self, he and I both lose.
Plumeria
It’s been two days, but I can’t get out of going to see a doctor forever. Not with Knox breathing down my neck. The kid is more vigilant than a parent. Seconds are all I get out of his sight, but I don’t mind. The idiota is starting to grow on me in ways no one ever has. I feel bound to him and I feel that he is bound to me because of our shared experience, our twisted childhoods, our like injuries, our hands that are both broken and mended and more capable of forming fists than anything else. But we’re learning other ways. Ways of affection.
My feet hang off of the end of the cushy, brown examination table, kicking absently. They are engulfed by his sweatpants which, with the giant blue tee shirt I’m wearing, make me feel like a ten year old. My fingers crinkle the paper lining the table and I’m itchy all over, and cold and hot and uncomfortable and I wonder if I really am sick or if I’m just sick with a visceral dread. My gut drops to the bottom of my oversized pants when the door opens and a short, Filipina lady walks in, eyes glued to a clipboard. So it’s dread then.
“Well,” Doc starts, smiling up at me in a curt, professional, me-importa-un-carajo sort of way that makes me respect her. “You don’t have any STDs or blood borne illnesses.”
“That’s something at least.”
She nods. “It is. Now take off your clothes and lie down on the table. You can keep that robe on and drape the blanket over your knees,” she says, pointing to the piece of cardboard on the bed next to me and the one beneath it. “I’ll be back in two minutes.” Two minutes later, I’m sitting up on the edge of the table, ass pressed against the cool synthetic bench seat. Doc wraps a blue thing around my upper arm, pumps it up for a while, then lets it slowly deflate.
“Your blood pressure looks good. One ten over seventy.” She snorts out a laugh. “And at forty three beats per minute, you’ve got the resting heart rate of a sea turtle. Nothing scares you, does it?” she says, and I assume that the question is rhetorical as she slips her small hands into a set of latex gloves and urges me onto my back. She prods around my boobs and armpits and I wonder what she’s searching for because it hurts like hell.
“You’re holding your breath,” she says, “I’m hardly touching you. It hurts?”
“Like a mother fucker.” I exhale the breath as she withdraws her hands.
Frowning she asks me to sit up, then pulls the tie holding my robe together. She draws it down the length of my arms. “This was supposed to just be a pelvic exam, but I think I’ll need to give you the works. Let’s go for an MRI. No, don’t get up,” she says, when I make to slide off of the table and follow her to the door, “I’m getting a chair.”
“Jesus, Doc, I don’t need a wheelchair.”
“You do what I tell you, or I’ll inject you with a dose of pneumonia.”
“Just what I need right now.”
She carts me back and forth from exam room to exam room. I get the full Monty – complete radiology kit, physical and a pap that’s gentler than
any sex I’ve ever had. She prattles off the results and asks me if I’ll tell Knox. No, but I ask her if she will. When the grey door opens, Knox steps through on Doc’s heels. He towers over her and I’m shocked at the reminder of just how big he is. He fills up most of the doorway and I feel competing flashes of warmth and ice when he looks at me. He’s going to be so disappointed…
“You can take a seat here,” Doc says. Knox ignores her and with a single kick-switch, he hops onto the table next to me. His hip is wedged against mine and he ducks his face until he’s able to plant a sloppy kiss on the corner of my mouth. He tucks me under his arm and pulls me close and I remember that he hasn’t been checked out yet. He made sure I went first.
Rolling her eyes, Doc flips open her clipboard. “Nevermind.”
“What’s the prognosis?” he growls, his mouth still pressed against my ear. He slides his hand into the opening along my back and wraps his hand around my hip roughly, drawing me close enough to him that pain ripples up my left thigh. “Sorry,” he murmurs, though I didn’t say anything. He combs my hair behind my ear and straightens. “Leanna?”
The Doc called Leanna pushes her hair over her shoulder and shakes her head, looking very composed in her straight, white coat. “I have some news on Mer’s current and past health conditions that she wanted you to be aware of.”
“She did, did she?” He tugs on my hand, but I don’t look at him. Eventually, he draws back. Keeping my hand on his lap, he clenches my fingers but there is a breath of space between our bodies. “Tell me.”
“As you might have guessed, she has two fractured ribs, which may be life threatening should she so much as lift a grocery bag. The wound on her thigh was unfortunately infected so I’ve razed out the infected skin and stitched her back together. Unfortunately, the scarring may be,” she pauses and I swear vermillion break out across her cheeks. “Substantial,” she finishes. “She will have to have plastic surgery to remove the scars fully. Currently the scar tissue spells a word. Spade,” she whispers, voice wrought with disbelief.
She shakes her head quickly and rubs her rounded nose. “I’m sorry.” Back to business. “Plumeria also has a severely bruised cheekbone and a muscle in her back has been torn. Once she’s well enough to walk, I’m prescribing physical therapy for that. You’re also going to have to go the route of the Lord and abstain from sex for the next four weeks.”
Doc shuts her clipboard and holds it to her breast. “She has some minor tearing of the vaginal walls. I gave her an ultrasound to make sure there weren’t any more serious concerns and luckily there aren’t, but it was as I was giving her the exam that I noticed she’s had Tubal Ligation, or a Tubectomy. She wanted me to let you know that she can’t have children.”
Silence stretches between us like a rubber band, about to pop. Then Knox clears his throat. “Leave us.” Another momentary pause follows before Leanna’s white sneakers disappear from my peripheral view.
I hear the door open, but before it closes, Leanna softly says, “I am sorry that this happened to you, Plumeria.”
I nod, the door shuts and Knox’s hand touches my knee through the mint-colored crepe paper. It’s big and flat, spanning my thigh. He squeezes. “Why did you want Leanna to tell me?”
“Because I thought you should know,” I mutter.
He talks over me. “Why did you want Leanna to tell me?”
I suck in a breath so deep I start to feel dizzy. “Because I didn’t want to be the one to drive you away.”
“Why would that drive me away?”
I hesitate, hating the sincerity in his tone because I know it means that he isn’t listening. Glancing up at him, I hack out, “Because I’m ruined. I mean, for Christ’s sake, why do you think my tubes are tied?”
His eyebrows knit together and I find myself getting sucked into his eyes, framed by the straight ridge of his brow. “Tell me.”
I scoff. “I was a girl in the cartel. My dad and Loredo sold my virginity when I was twelve, and the guy paid for the surgery. After I healed up he came to do the nasty, but I fought back. Broke the guy’s nose. When Loredo found out what happened to one of his best customers, he threw me into the pits and after, when I was on the ground bleeding, he told me that I could either get in line or stay in the pits forever. I chose the pits.”
I sigh and clench the bench seat as hard as I can. It doesn’t help. My arms are still shaking. “You walk the straight and narrow. I’ve been a dead girl walking since I was four and Loredo came to my house and murdered my mom and sister. This shit is too messy and I’ve already got you wrapped up too deep. You’re better off just cutting your losses and…”
Knox places his palm over my mouth and kisses the other side of his hand. I pull in a breath through my nose and taste him in the scent. Eucalyptus, musk. Raw masculine perfection. “You deserve happiness and so long as you’re mine, that’s what you’ll get.”
“But what do you deserve?” I whisper, pulling back from his hand and gripping it fiercely between my two.
One edge of his mouth cocks up into a charmed smile. “I’d like to try to deserve you.” His fingers brush across my cheek and I lean into their pressure. “You’ve been through more than a human could bear and have survived. But I don’t want you to just survive anymore. I want you to live.”
The muscles in my back give and I drop forward onto his chest, not caring that it hurts when I bury my face in his shoulder or press myself as close to him as space will allow, and then closer. My muscles burn and there’s an aching in my thigh where another man wrote his name in my skin. And Knox is still here. He shouldn’t be. He should be dead because of me.
“You don’t care about kids?”
“Do I seem like the diapers type?”
I laugh a little bit and feel him open up beneath me. He slides his arms around me gently and pulls me onto his lap. He presses his mouth to my neck. “And no offense, but you definitely don’t seem like the diapers type.”
“I scare kids.”
“Hell, you scare me.”
That makes me laugh outright. “Callate.”
He kisses me again and breathes into my hair. “You’re the only one I want to take care of.”
“I want to take care of you too.” I sweep my lips over his and he inhales deeply.
His eyes are closed and his back teeth clench and nestled on his lap, I feel the instant his cock hardens. “This is going to be a long month.”
I smile, truly hoping that for the next four weeks, a lack of sex will be our biggest problem.
Aiden
The corridors are long and crowded, so I don’t blend in. At six-six, two hundred sixty pounds with skin as white as my hair, I don’t expect to. That’s fine. I don’t need to blend in now. Yet.
My Ruger shifts subtly between my shoulder blades, suppressor and booster attachments dropping the tip of the barrel to my lower back. The Ruger’s a heavier weapon, but my Walther’s too long to wear under my leather coat. Even so, I may be carrying, but I don’t bank on killing all five of them today. I don’t even know who or where two of them are. The sisters I haven’t got names on, but the Russians were easy.
Rooms four sixty eight and four sixty nine. Gavriil and Timur Popov. Brothers. High up in the Russian mafia as far as I know. Heard of a Popov leading the circus this side of the Atlantic a few years back. Not sure who the heads are these days though, this side or the other.
The Popov brothers were just moved to Westfield’s West Wing from intensive care as a result of Dixon’s handy work. I stop by four sixty eight and lean against the wall. Doctors move quickly from room-to-room, patient-to-patient, and though the nurse’s station is within sight not a single one of the three women in floral print scrubs bothers to look up at me. Not with three meth overdoses being wheeled in on separate carts. I’ve been waiting for over an hour for this kind of good timing.
I pull the chart from the metal tin left of the door and thumb through the pag
es, then move on to four sixty nine. They’ve got a severe concussion and a punctured lung between the two of them, not to mention a broken arm, lacerated shoulder muscles, and a couple bruised ribs. Dixon’s not one to lose it. Also not one to drink himself to death though that seemed to be his MO last I saw him.
I wonder what I’ll do with his request. Dixon may want her dead, but Knox seems pretty bent on keeping the woman alive. I could silence her, but where would that get us? At least, the woman could be a useful source of information – information I wouldn’t hesitate to torture out of her, if that were an option – and at best, she could be leverage. Because though none of the guys want to talk about it, we’ve just stepped into the middle of a war. Against a mob and a cartel we’re five men and an army short.
“Crash cart!” someone shouts at the end of the hall. More nurses run past me. Sliding the clipboard back into place I watch one of the meth heads starts to seize. I reach for the doorknob. It’s brushed stainless steel and warm, as if recently opened. I pull it towards me and twist so that when I push the door open, it makes no sound, but I’m surprised by what I see when I get the door open two feet. I’m not surprised often.
Somebody’s in here and it isn’t a Russian. I draw back, furious that the nurses could have switched the boards – a mistake that’ll cost lives – but when the girl looks up, her gaze holds me in place.
“Brivyet…” That’s all I can make out in the spiel she gives me. The only Russian word I know though the girl couldn’t look farther from it. Her skin is the color of coffee with too much cream and she’s got darker freckles scattered across her whole face, her neck, her chest. Her wrongly colored eyes – one brown, one blue – sit far apart on her face so that she looks as open as the book in her lap.
The Hunting Town (Brothers Book 1) Page 11