Ronan finally released his hold on me and I opened my eyes. There was no pity or judgement. There was just understanding. The kiss had resolved nothing between us but he’d known I’d needed it.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” he said softly and then he was the one to turn away. I watched him walk back into the house and then I turned to follow Bullet down to the beach. I let my fingers press against my tingling lips as I cast a glance over my shoulder on the off chance that Ronan was watching me from the doorway.
He wasn’t.
Chapter Seven
Ronan
Six years earlier
“Dr. Grisham?”
“Don’t call me that,” I automatically said as I turned away from the man standing at the motel room door and continued to struggle with the cap on the prescription bottle. “Here,” I said as I tossed my wallet at him. “Take whatever I owe you.”
I didn’t care when the man followed me into the room, although as I glanced at him again, I realized there could have been two men since my vision was fucked up. “How many of you do I see?” I asked stupidly as I searched for the bottle of vodka I’d put down somewhere when I’d gone to answer the door.
The man didn’t respond and truthfully, I didn’t give a shit because I’d finally gotten the cap off the pill bottle. But when I tried to dump the pain pills into my hand, none of them hit my skin and I stared in confusion at the array of white dots scattered around my feet.
“Here,” the man said and he placed one of the pills in my hand. Somewhere in my muddled mind it occurred to me that the pill was round instead of oval and it looked blue instead of white but I didn’t care.
“Need more than one,” I muttered even as I shoved the pill into my mouth and swallowed since I hadn’t managed to find the vodka.
“It will take me a few minutes to clean these up,” he said. “Why don’t you relax and I’ll give you a couple more in a second?”
A voice in the back of my head said the motel manager was being a little too nice considering what an asshole he’d been all the previous times he’d pounded on my door demanding payment, but I realized I didn’t give a fuck. Pretty oval white pills will do that for you. Hopefully round blue ones would too.
My eyes felt heavy as I watched the man kneel on the floor to collect the scattered pills and I put out my hand so he could give them to me. But as a calmness finally began to settle over my tired body, I dropped my head to the pillow and closed my eyes so I could enjoy it.
The next time I awoke, the uncomfortable bed beneath me was gone. My mouth felt like it was stuffed full of cotton and my head was hurting like a son of a bitch. It took me several long seconds to realize I wasn’t in my motel room anymore and the lovely burn of the OxyContin I’d been swallowing like candy for the last few days since I’d been discharged from the hospital was gone. I had a vague recollection of the blue pill I’d swallowed without so much as a second thought and realized now it had likely been a sedative or sleeping pill.
I forced my eyes open and let them adjust. I was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car, but there was no one else in it and it was parked in the middle of a grassy field with nothing around as far as the eye could see. Well, not nothing. There was a small lake with a picnic bench about a hundred yards away and sitting on top of the table was a man, his back to me. I glanced at the ignition but saw no keys. I searched the car for a weapon but couldn’t even find a scrap of paper to indicate who the car belonged to. My phone was gone, as was my wallet.
I was surprised to actually feel a tremor of fear go through me which was ridiculous since I hadn’t given a shit whether I lived or died once I’d locked myself in the motel room and started chugging the pills that made me forget everything. My limbs felt sluggish as I opened the car door and got out. I kept my eyes on the man’s back as I scanned my surroundings once again, but I didn’t see any other cars, roads or any signs of life. There was a slight breeze that made the tall grass sway back and forth but otherwise it was obscenely quiet. I made my way towards the man, accepting whatever fate he decided to throw my way because I didn’t care anymore. Trace was gone and the man I’d been had died with him. I’d watched our blood pool together between us in the dry, hot sand that had cradled our broken bodies and I’d felt my life end the second Trace’s had. The stranger who’d brought me out here for whatever reason couldn’t take anything else from me.
I hated that it took me so long to get to him, but while my body had healed enough for the doctors to discharge me from the military hospital in Bethesda, I wasn’t fully healed enough to move much faster than a snail’s crawl and without a very pronounced limp. As I got closer, I realized that while most of the land around us was flat, the picnic table the man was sitting on was on top of a small rise that led down to the water. So it wasn’t until I was about fifteen feet away from the man that I realized we weren’t alone and I came to a stop when I took in the sight before me.
A man was on his knees on the sand, his hands bound behind his back and a sack of some kind over his head. There were a few small blood stains on his blue button down shirt and he was wearing a pair of blue jeans that were covered in mud. His feet were bare, but it was the sheet of plastic beneath him that had me swallowing hard.
What the fuck?
My instinct was to check on the man but as I got closer to him, I took in the stranger from the motel, the stranger who’d brought me here, and noticed the gun he was holding in his hand. Panic went through me but I managed to remain absolutely still. I couldn’t make out his face but I could see his profile and what stood out more than anything was the obvious burn scar that covered his right cheek, jaw and neck. The mottled flesh disappeared beneath his shirt collar and I perversely wondered if it continued down the rest of his body. And then a chill went through me as I took in the rest of his suddenly familiar profile. And then I knew the scar did indeed continue beneath his shirt.
“Brooke Army Medical Center,” the stranger said. “2005.”
“House…house fire,” I managed to say. “I was an intern and you and your girlfriend-”
“Wife,” the man interjected with little emotion.
“Wife,” I whispered. “You and your wife came into the ER.”
The case was one I would remember for the rest of my life and had been one of the reasons I’d decided to pursue surgery as a specialty. The ER had been overrun with cases that night due to a terrible car accident that had caused a chain reaction pile up. I’d jumped in to help where I could, but by the time the man and his wife had been brought in, the attending doctor and all the residents were performing lifesaving procedures on other patients. The man had been badly burned, but it was his wife who’d been the more critical case because in addition to being burned, she’d been stabbed multiple times and had been bleeding internally. With no other doctors available, I’d been forced to open her up to try and stop the internal bleeding while my attending told me what to do a few beds over as he tried to save a six-year-old kid’s life. I’d managed to save the woman’s life, but she’d died a few days later from the burns.
“Revay,” I said softly. “That was her name, right?”
The man nodded.
“And you’re Michael,” I added.
“Hawke,” the man corrected. “She was the only one who called me Michael.”
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I wish I could have done more.”
“You gave me three days with her. Three days I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
I glanced at the man kneeling on the sheet. I could hear him crying, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening. If this man was blaming me for his wife’s death, who was the other guy?
“I can’t give you three more days with Trace but I can give you this,” Hawke said as he nodded at the man.
I was stunned to hear him refer to Trace. “How…how did you know about that?” I asked. The circumstances of Trace’s death had been carefully
covered up by the military and I’d been too out of it to even process what had happened to him…to us.
Hawke finally looked at me full on before nodding at the man on the plastic again. “Go on, take it off,” he said.
I knew he meant the sack covering the guy’s head. My fingers shook as I gave Hawke another glance and then I made my way down the slight incline. Stepping on the plastic freaked me out and I half expected to feel a bullet pierce my back as soon as I did, but there was only the man’s muted crying so I reached for the bag and pulled it off his head. His wide, terrified eyes met mine and he tried to say something around the fabric tied around his head, gagging his mouth. But I didn’t care about that because all I saw were the piercing blue eyes…the ones that had been filled with bloodlust the last time I’d seen them.
I stepped back several steps as the memories washed over me and the man stopped trying to scream because he recognized me a moment later. Images of Trace’s body jerking as the man before me brutalized him began playing on a loop in my head. I couldn’t see his hands since they were tied behind his back, but I remembered their punishing strength because after he’d finished with Trace, he’d held me down while one of his buddies had done to me what he’d done to Trace. In my memory, the cruel lips that were pressed around the gag were open, and I could hear the heavy timbre of his voice as he kept asking Trace if he liked it.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything. I felt Hawke come up behind me but I couldn’t take my eyes off the man in front of me who even now was begging me for mercy with his eyes. I had none. Not a speck. Just like he’d had none for me as I’d pleaded with him for Trace’s life.
“How?” I managed to ask Hawke.
“Overheard him telling some of his buddies that he and his guys had fucked up a couple of faggots at Bagram two months ago. His words, not mine,” Hawke added and I assumed he meant the slur. “A friend of mine was an MP at that base. He told me what they did to you and Trace and the cover-up that happened afterwards. When I found out you were one of the victims, I thought you might like to do the honors yourself,” he said. “Or at least even the score a bit if you want to keep your hands clean.”
Hawke held out the gun. “Your choice,” he said. “You want him to walk, untie him and we’re done here.”
The man on the plastic began sobbing at Hawke’s words, but the pity the doctor in me should have felt didn’t exist. The hate and rage weren’t there either. All I felt was an overwhelming warmth settle in my chest as I stared at the man. Maybe if the man and his friends had waited until Trace was dead before coming after me, I would have felt something different. Maybe I would have been able to call on some last shard of decency to spare his life.
But they hadn’t. Just as I’d had to watch the man shove a metal pipe inside of Trace over and over while his friends held Trace down, he’d had to watch the same thing happen to me even as his body began to fail him. And I’d known that had been the hardest part for Trace – that was when he’d truly suffered. Because while I’d been the healer, he’d been the protector. And they’d stolen even that from him.
I wasn’t interested in making the man suffer and I wasn’t interested in prolonging the moment. And I didn’t need my hands to be clean – they’d hadn’t been clean since the first time I’d dreamed of this moment. I took the gun from Hawke and without hesitation or doubt, I strode up to the man, aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. No final words, no wishing him to hell – I’d given him a much better death than he’d given Trace.
That was enough.
The second I closed the door leading to the patio behind me, I yanked out my phone and dialed even as I began walking through the house. I didn’t bother to check the driveway to make sure that fucker Barry was gone because the fact that the guy had pissed himself as he was running to his car was reassurance enough that he wouldn’t be coming near Seth anytime soon.
“Hey, I was just about to call you,” Mav said when he picked up. “This Fields guy is a piece of work.”
I managed to keep my cool as I said, “How so?” I’d reached the door I was looking for just before the kitchen and tore it open. I flipped on the light and started down the stairs into the dimly lit room as Mav spoke.
“I’ve found restraining orders in three different states. All from former patients who claimed their one-time psychologist, a one Dr. Barry Fields, was stalking them.”
“Any violence?” I asked. For once, I was hoping the answer would be yes because it would be the excuse I needed to end the bastard.
“No. Lots of phone calls, harassing them at their place of business, that sort of thing…it seemed to have stopped each time the RO was issued and then he’d start on the next guy.”
“Ruin him,” I ordered as I reached the bottom of the stairs.
“What?” Mav asked in surprise.
“Take it all. His license, his money – all of it. Make sure he can’t pick up in another state either.”
I was glad when Mav didn’t question me but he did say, “It will take some time.”
“Make it your number one priority.”
I knew it wasn’t fair to dump the shit on Mav since he was just standing in until I found a new tech guy to replace Benny, but seeing Barry holding Seth down on that desk while he’d violated him had stolen away what little reason I had left.
“You got it,” Mav responded quietly and then he hung up.
It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for in the chilly wine cellar and I sent a little prayer of thanks to Seth’s father for keeping what was probably some very expensive whiskey in addition to the countless bottles of wine in the wine cellar. I also sent Trace a thank you for having the foresight to make me aware of the wine cellar’s existence, by bringing me down here on more than one occasion when we’d needed some privacy for a hot and heavy make out session while we’d been visiting his family.
I grabbed the first bottle of whiskey I found and snatched one of several corkscrews from a drawer. I didn’t bother going back upstairs for a glass – I just took several swallows, one right after the other, and let the burn roll through me. I had no doubt the alcohol had cost Seth’s father a fortune, but I barely noticed the taste. But as much as I would have liked to get drunk in the hopes of obliterating the sight of Seth struggling beneath the weight of the other man, I knew he might need me to be at a hundred percent mentally, so I closed the bottle and put it away before going back upstairs.
In the six years since Michael “Hawke” Hawkins had helped me get justice for Trace, I’d taken more lives than I’d saved in all of my years of practicing medicine. No, they hadn’t all died by my hand directly, but I’d given the order on every single one. But none of those deaths, no matter how vile the criminal, had ever brought me pleasure. Only watching every single one of Trace’s killers die had ever done that for me. And I knew without a shadow of a doubt that taking Barry’s life would have come a close second. That fact should have bothered me more than it did, but the only part that I was struggling with was the fact that Seth had seen the real me in that study.
For all the times I’d worried that Seth’s hero worship of me would turn to something more when he’d been younger, I hadn’t expected to now feel the loss of that last link between us so keenly. Maybe because I didn’t want Seth to have to lose yet another thing from his past. More selfishly though, I wasn’t sure what would happen when I lost that last link to myself.
Once I was back upstairs, I paced the kitchen restlessly as I waited for Seth to return. When I checked the time on my phone, I realized a mere fifteen minutes had passed since Seth had left so I kept myself busy by going up to my room and changing out of my pants and into a pair of jeans. I left my dress shirt on but got rid of the jacket and the shoulder holster. I tucked one of my Glocks into the back of my jeans and then went back downstairs. I glanced out the back door again but still saw no sign of Seth, so I busied myself with changing the security code on the front
door. I’d have to do the security gate at the end of the driveway at some point too but since Seth’s house had nothing protecting the perimeter from intruders, the gate wasn’t much of a deterrent.
By the time I was done, Seth had been gone for less than a half an hour, but I was too restless to give him any more time or space so I went out the kitchen door and started walking towards the beach. But I stopped when I saw Bullet lying next to one of the lounge chairs on the far side of the pool. The chair was turned away from the pool and facing the dark blue waters of the Sound and the Olympic mountains beyond.
I didn’t bother grabbing a chair as I moved to Seth’s side and I was pleased that even though he didn’t look up at my approach, he moved his legs out of the way when I sat down on the end of the lounger.
“I didn’t see it,” he whispered.
“What?”
“That thing that made him dangerous,” he said. “I knew something was off the last few months but I thought I was overreacting. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings if I was wrong. He…he helped me.”
“He took advantage of you,” I corrected.
Seth shook his head. “Why did you come back, Ronan?”
“I didn’t leave, Seth,” I said. “I ran some errands today,” I hedged, not wanting to admit I’d been following him. “I left my stuff in the guest room.”
Salvation (The Protectors, Book 2) Page 7