by Stacy Gail
“Dasha.” The voice, deeper, rougher, slapped out at me through the dark even as I stumbled to my feet, barely feeling the pain that screeched at me from all over my body as I prepared to run. “Dash, stop. It’s me. It’s me.”
I half-ran backwards, still determined to make it to the gas station because that was what I had set out to do. It was safety, it was home free, it was…
Out of nowhere, that voice sank in.
Why did you let me die?
“No.” I staggered back again—away from my attacker, now lying like a broken doll in the middle of the deserted street, away from the insanity that had suddenly become my world. I knew what reality held for me and what it didn’t.
Reality sure as hell didn’t have that voice still in existence.
I was losing my mind.
Oh God, no!
With a feverish strength I didn’t know I had, and more terrified than I had been only moments before, I turned and ran from the phantasm that had sprung from the depths of my obviously broken mind. I knew what was going to come next. Any minute now, I was going to fall into quicksand. Then a river of blood would start pouring out of the thing behind me, and then he’d want an answer as to why I’d let him die…
“Dasha.” Strong arms came around me like a vise. Instantly I fought against the thing that didn’t exist, battling for my sanity with everything I had by using elbows, kicking legs and head butts. But it was impossible. It was always impossible, fighting a ghost. “Dasha, it’s me, it’s Polo, do you understand? I’m alive, Fearless. I’m alive.”
Chapter Three
“That’s the last one.” Luke Keyes patted my bandaged ankle that throbbed in time with all my other wounds. Besides my ankle and the impressive slash across my forearm that Luke had glued together—yes, actually glued—I hurt everywhere. I had left an impressive amount of skin from my knees, elbows and hands on that road; my head was pounding from the center and radiating outward so that the whole thing hurt in equal measure; the line of my jaw was scraped raw, and the skin over the brow bone and cheekbone that had hit the pavement was now swollen enough for me to see out of my peripheral vision.
I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror, but I didn’t have to. Considering the way I felt, I had to look like a crash test dummy after a long day’s work.
Not exactly the best picture I wanted to present to Polo now that we were reunited.
Polo.
A hurricane of emotions tore through me, too many to sort out. As the anxiety bloomed, I glanced toward the closed door of the first-aid room housed within the headquarters of Private Security International. It was like a doctor’s exam room, but with more in it—a portable x-ray machine, a crash cart and something that looked to be a surgery cart. At any other time I would have been full of questions about why they needed a first aid room that could rival any ER. But right now there were more pressing things on my mind.
Polo. My Polo.
He was alive. Gloriously, magnificently alive.
Except…
He shouldn’t be.
As if it were caught in a loop, my mind kept stumbling over what I knew. I knew what I saw. It didn’t make sense for Polo to be alive. He’d flown backward with the force of the bullet hitting him, and that was a physical action that no human being could possibly fake.
Then there was the blood. Cap Fogelmann, founder of PSI, had had massive amounts of blood on his hands as he’d tried to put pressure on Polo’s chest wound. It had been everywhere.
And then there was Rudy. He’d told me Polo was dead. I’d believed him, because I’d seen it.
I’d seen Polo die.
But now he wasn’t dead.
Apparently miracles really did exist.
Unless I’d just dreamed that he’d come back, saved me from my attacker, then hurriedly bundled me into an unfamiliar car and driven me to PSI. If that was the case, I was either insane or I’d died in my attack, and this was my version of the afterlife.
If this was death, I didn’t have any complaints. As long as Polo and I were together, it was my idea of heaven.
“Dash.”
Distractedly I glanced at Luke before looking back toward the door. Was Polo still there in the world? What if he wasn’t? What if I’d dreamed it all? “Yes?”
“I asked if you hurt anywhere else.”
“Oh. No, I’m…” Confused. Anxious. Terrified I’m losing my mind. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh.” He got up from the rolling stool he’d been perched on to wrap my ankle, and began to clear the detritus of patching me up. “You were so fine you felt the need to get up out of bed at two in the morning to paint some walls and get attacked.”
“In my defense, the getting-attacked part wasn’t on my agenda.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“Is it all right for me to go?” I knew what his point was, but I didn’t care about that now. If I didn’t get to see Polo again with my own eyes—drink in the reality of him simply being there with me—I was going to start screaming.
“Why were you up at two in the morning?”
“What?” With an effort, I dragged my gaze from the door to frown at him. Didn’t he get that I had more important things on my mind than my weird nocturnal habits?
“Why,” he repeated, dumping a handful of sterile packaging in the waste basket, “were you compelled to get up in the middle of the night and paint walls?”
“What’s wrong with getting a head start on a day’s work?”
“At two in the morning?”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s certainly not good.”
At last the light went on, and I grimaced guiltily. “Of course it’s not good. You and Rudy got dragged out of bed at this ungodly hour because of me, and I haven’t even apologized for it.”
“I don’t want an apology.”
“Well, too bad, because I think you’re owed one. I’m sorry I dragged you guys out of bed. I actually wanted to go to the ER to get stitched up and not bother anyone with this. But the ER idea was shot down by…uh…”
Polo.
How weird.
I put a hand to my throat as if that would somehow switch it on. For some reason, I couldn’t make myself say it. I couldn’t say Polo’s name.
Why?
Because I’d seen him die.
That answer sank through me, settling in all the dark places inside of me. I’d embraced the reality of Polo’s death so completely I still couldn’t believe anything else. To say out loud that Polo was back and had refused to drive me to the ER was the definition of crazy, and way too much for me to hope for. Since hope and I were no longer on friendly terms, I didn’t know where to go from there.
“Uh…so,” I went on awkwardly when the silence and his watchful gaze became too much for me to handle, “my point is, this won’t happen again. I promise that from here on in, you and Rudy can count on getting a good night’s sleep, okay? Since I’ve now learned that nothing good goes on at two in the morning, the next time this happens I won’t leave my place until the sun is up.”
“The next time what happens? What happened tonight that made you leave your place in the middle of the night?”
There he went again, trying to read me when usually I was the one who did the reading. “Nothing. Do you accept my apology?”
“I’ll accept it if you tell me why you were painting walls in the middle of the night. Are you having nightmares, Dash?”
Damn him. “I was bored.”
“You should have been asleep. When a person’s asleep, they’re never bored.”
“Sleep is overrated. And by the way, you don’t look like my father, yet you sound remarkably like him.”
“Geez, you’re a hard case. Being a hard case is actually bad for your health, you know.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
He shook his head. “What is it about the Vitaliev women and their titanium exteriors?”
“Beats me, si
nce I’m the only Vitaliev woman I know.” I scooted to the edge of the exam table, my attention once more swinging toward the door. “I have to go and…um…”
“See Polo?”
It would be stupid to believe he hadn’t noticed how my breath caught. Stupider still to think he hadn’t seen how I struggled to find the right words. “I don’t…”
“What? Talk, Dash. Say anything you want. Just talk.”
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” There. That was a nice, safe way to ask if I was hallucinating and in need of strong medication.
“It’s no dream. Polo Scorpeone is really alive. He really saved you. He really drove you here, and he’s really just outside that door waiting for you.” He paused. “How do you feel about that?”
I looked back to him, shocked. “How do you think I feel?”
“You tell me.”
“Typical shrink response.” Fire kindled inside, just a tiny spark beneath the anxiety to get back to Polo, but its heat was unmistakable. “You’re not surprised he’s alive, Luke. That tells me you knew. You all knew.”
His gaze was steady. “Yes.”
I returned that look without letting anything show. Of course they’d all known. It was Rudy Panuzzi who’d told me Polo was dead, and I still had flashbacks of seeing horrific amounts of blood all over the hands of PSI’s founder, Cap Fogelmann. Both Rudy and Cap had attended Polo’s funeral. I remembered that day, every last hideous moment of it.
They’d worn convincing expressions of sorrow.
They’d looked me in the eye and given me their deepest condolences.
They’d worn their regret for my loss all over their faces.
They’d lied to me.
Presumably they’d lied to keep Polo protected. And just as presumably, they’d been keeping Polo under wraps in some faraway safe house all this time.
But still.
They’d lied to me.
All of them.
“I’m grateful you kept Polo safe.” It took one hell of a lot to keep my poker face impassive. To distract myself from the embers growing hotter beneath a blanket of confusion about why I’d had to suffer for months, I slid off the table. The screech of protest my ankle sent up was all the distraction I needed, and I had to work hard not to yelp in pain. “Thanks for patching me up.”
“Hold on, you’re going to need some crutches to—”
“No thanks. I wouldn’t use them.” It was weird, but at that moment I wanted the pain. It kept me from thinking about that slow burn buried deep in my chest. If I were a good person, I would have simply been happy to have Polo back, and nothing else. That was the kind of miracle everyone who’d lost a loved one dreamed about.
But I was a Vitaliev.
That meant it wasn’t necessarily my nature to be good.
I’d never given that genetic trait much thought until this moment. If anything, I’d believed I wasn’t any worse than the average person. But now that I was confronted with this epic test of character, all I could think about was ripping Luke and everyone at PSI to pieces with my bare hands, because they’d made me suffer for fucking months.
And for what? Why did I have to go through that hell? Why?
Desperately I tried not to feel that way. It was selfish, thinking only about what I’d gone through. The professionals at PSI had obviously saved Polo and then kept him from harm, even as they’d kept him from me. I should be grateful.
And I was. God knew I was grateful.
Truly.
But grateful wasn’t all that I felt.
I had Polo back, I reminded myself grimly, hobbling as fast as I could to the door and opening it myself despite Luke making a move to do it for me. I had to focus on counting my blessings, and leave it at that. That was what a good person would do.
I wanted to be a good person.
“Dash.”
I was concentrating so hard on trying to be good while also not whimpering every time I stepped on my bad ankle, that I hadn’t seen Polo waiting by the door.
His voice—Lord, that beautiful voice I never thought I’d hear again—vibrated with urgency, and carried as much churned-up emotion as I felt. I turned to drink him in, even though that was all I had done on the drive over, but I couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t get my fill of the sight of him. After two months of believing he was dead, I’d never be able to get enough of him.
Aside from the shock of seeing him alive, it was mind-blowing to see him without his customary ponytail. Now his silken dark brown hair was parted on the side and hanging just past his chin—a chin that was now covered in a close-cropped beard that changed his look completely. Clean-shaven, he was city-slick and devastatingly sophisticated. With a beard, he was rough and rugged in a way that made a woman think he’d be a beast in bed.
Rawr.
There were other intriguing differences as well. Twin frown lines between his brows appeared to be a permanent new fixture, and his mouth looked so grim it was hard to remember what his smile looked like. There was a smoldering intensity in his brown eyes that seemed more deeply set than they had been. Those were the eyes of a hungry predator. Just looking into them made me shiver.
Rawr again.
I had just enough time to register all these surprising new elements that I could see in the brightness of the hall lighting, before he reached out and wrapped me up in his arms so tightly my feet almost left the ground. Every cell in my body rejoiced at the sensation of being held once again by the man who had my heart and soul.
Oh God, yes.
“Why is she moving around on that ankle?” Polo’s growled words stopped me from gushing about how beautiful he felt, or that just breathing in his scent one more time was enough to make me cry. “She can’t even fucking walk.”
“Yes, I can.” My arms tightened around him, and I reveled in the solid warmth of him against me. If this was a dream, I never wanted to wake up. “I have you back from the dead. Forget walking. I can fly.”
“Fearless. Baby.” He nuzzled his face against my hair before he retreated just far enough to search my face with eyes that burned. Apparently I looked like the backside of hell, because those frown lines deepened. “That piece of shit hurt you. I’m not fucking happy about this.”
“We’re together now.” I cupped my hand over his bearded cheek and delighted in the unfamiliar abrasiveness of it. “Happiness is mandatory. Everything else in the world is an inconsequential waste of time.”
He squeezed his eyes closed and leaned into my palm a moment before he stooped and swept me up into his arms. Nothing in the world could have stopped me from girlie-squeaking and wrapping my arms around his neck in a surprised stranglehold.
“Jesus, you weigh nothing.” The hollow ache in his words whispered against my ear turned me inside out, and I couldn’t ignore the faint shudder that went through the arms holding me. “Dash, what have you done to yourself?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Having him taken from me was something that had been done to me, so I didn’t see how the blame was mine. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah. Fine.” That hollowness was still there, and when he kissed my temple he did it as though he feared too much pressure might shatter me. “I’ll make sure you’re fine from now on, you got that? I’m in charge of you being fine from here on in.”
My breath trembled. I trembled. “Sounds good to me.”
“Damn straight.” His head lifted, and he glanced at Luke standing in the doorway. “I’m taking her back to my place. Rudy’s already transported her car there and Yuri and Alex have taken care of the body. Does she need anything?”
“Body?” I tensed, looking from one to the other.
Luke shook his head. “Just OTC pain meds, as needed. Keep her arm and ankle elevated for the first twenty-four hours, and ice the wounds every four hours. If the swelling on her face gets any worse, ice that, too. As for her ankle, it shouldn’t bear any weight. She should be on crutches for at least a couple of days before we x-ray it ag
ain to make sure it isn’t broken.”
“It isn’t broken.” I was almost sure of it. “What body?”
Polo looked at me as if I had spoken Swahili. “Your attacker, beautiful. Don’t you remember? Shit,” he muttered, and his arms tightened on me until I half-feared I’d have to be x-rayed for more broken bones. “Do something for her, Keyes. She smashed her face on the road when she was tackled. She’s fucked up, she’s got a concussion, she can’t remember—”
“Polo, calm down.” I wriggled in his hold, fighting for a little breathing room. “I remember every terrifying detail, but I didn’t know the guy who attacked me was dead. It was too dark for me to see anything. I didn’t even know it was you, if you’ll remember. I’m just sorry that asshole is gone. I was hoping I could talk to him.”
Luke straightened, his gaze sharpening. “Why?”
“Why do you think? That guy wanted to kill me. He came specifically to Chicago’s Future in the middle of the night to kill me. I want to know why he thought getting rid of me would give him the recognition he deserved.”
Polo went unnaturally still while Luke stepped forward. “What exactly did he say? Exactly, Dash.”
My eyebrows shot up before I tried to remember. “‘I’m going to enjoy this, bitch. I get you, I get the recognition I deserve—without having to grab my fucking ankles.’” When Luke exchanged speaking glances with Polo, I looked from one to the other. “What? Who was he?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Polo muttered, and the scowl that darkened his face was almost terrifying in its fury. “Motherfucker signed his death warrant the moment he set his sights on you.”
“Thank you for that, baby,” I said softly, and again put my hand to his cheek. My heart flipped over when he turned to press a gentle kiss into the cradle of my palm. “I just wish I knew why he targeted me, or if someone sent him. My instincts on that say no, because it felt…I don’t know. Personal, I guess. Did either Yuri or Alex recognize him?”