by Kira Graham
“That’s it?” I ask, needing to know everything.
“That’s the worst of it. Her face looks like hell, but that’ll heal up with time.”
“Her eyes? She couldn’t open her eyes,” I whisper, my chest going tight until the doctor smiles and claps a hand on my shoulder.
“It looks a lot worse than it is, thank God. We’ve gone over her with a fine-tooth comb, and that isn’t something I’m concerned about. I think the swelling is a result of her broken nose more than anything else. Now, rest easy. Like I said, we’re watching her closely, but from where I’m standing, she’s already survived the worst. Now’s the time for healing. And waiting.”
I nod again and let him leave, my shoulders going tight when I feel someone come up beside me. I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. The fear and panic that I was feeling has turned into fury, and anyone who gets caught in the crosshairs is going to suffer, and badly, if I lose hold of the control that I’ve been exercising for hours.
“We’re still going over the scene with the cops, but it’s not looking like we have much to go on. The car that Nate passed after the first hit was close enough that the guy driving got a look at the make and model, but we’re coming up short on a plate,” Ares says softly, wincing when I turn my head and glare at him.
“What the hell was she doing, going out at ass o’clock in the morning? Why did you let her?” I seethe, part of me not caring that he’s hurt as well, and seems as upset about all this as I am.
“Don’t put that shit on me, Parry. This is the norm for Sin and me. She’s been bouncing around like this for months—I told you that. Hell, even Honey and the old ’uns know that she’s been struggling. Tonight was just another night for her, until shit went south.”
“Why? I don’t get it. I was there with her when her shift ended, Ares. She was beat. She should have gone home and gone straight to bed.”
“Yeah? Well, she didn’t, and she hasn’t been for months. Like I said, this is the normal routine for us all. Her security guys are so well versed in Sin’s quirks that they don’t even bother to argue anymore. It’s follow along with her, or she tries to shake them. We figured that this way, she’s at least safe and not alone.”
I get the feeling that he’s telling me something…
“I’m telling you that she isn’t just some little idiot that you get to pat on the head and send home. I’m trying to tell you that whatever went down with you two, it was the last straw in a long line of straws, and she’s not handling it well,” he mutters, his jaw clenching when I frown and shake my head.
“What do you want me to say, man? I can’t guess what’s going on with Sin, and she doesn’t talk to me.”
“Surprising,” Ares drawls sarcastically, turning on his heel to walk away before I can reply.
It’s then that Rosetta comes up beside me, as if she’s just been waiting for her chance, and this time, I don’t turn to glare. I wouldn’t dare. This woman is a lot of things, but sane isn’t one of them, and with her emotions as unsettled as they are, I know that I won’t come away from this unscathed. Not that I’m afraid of Rosetta, because unlike most people who know her, I’m not as taken in by that tough shell that she shows everyone.
“You were supposed to get over your tantrum and make friends again. Not drive her crazier,” she accuses me, holding up a hand when I open my mouth to tell her to go to hell. “I’m not here to argue with you, Paris. God knows that I want to light into you like hell, and leave you broken and bleeding, but we have enough family hurting right now. Do me a favor, though, so I don’t have to fuck you up. Either resolve things with Sin, or stay away from her. I know that Adonis has you two working together at the moment because he’s got some misguided notion that it’ll spark some love and romance again, but I’m not sure that that’s a good idea for Sin, so unless you’re suddenly head over ass for her, I think it’s best if you just walk away.”
“I was in love with her—”
“No, you weren’t. You couldn’t have truly loved her, because the truth is, you don’t know her. You guys all see what she puts out there, or what you want to see, but I can guarantee that what you don’t see is what’s most important. Yes, Sin is tactless and insensitive, and she’s hard to get along with most days, but she’s also kind and sweet, and she will always fight for the underdog,” Rosetta says softly, glancing over to where Mindy has fallen asleep against Nate’s shoulder.
The man looks pained, but I notice that he doesn’t so much as move a muscle in order to get away from her. Yeah, I think. I can see that about Sin. Mindy is a good woman, and she’s a good friend to Sin, but I can’t deny that she’s as annoying as hell. Most of the Sweets barely tolerate her, and yet Sin…seems to have taken her under her wing.
“I don’t need or want a lecture from you, Rose. What’s between Sin and me is our business.”
“Yeah, well, it’s becoming my business, thanks to one small and very important fact. Someone purposely tried to hurt my family, and Sin could have been killed. It kinda puts things into perspective for me, you know? She’s going to be in a lot of pain when she wakes up, and, knowing Sin, her stubborn ass won’t just take this lying down. I don’t want her making a target of herself one random night because you’ve decided to set her off and send her chasing whatever shadows she chases. Either shit or get off the fucking pot,” she mutters, treating me to another unfinished conversation when she turns on her heel and walks away.
Now, for the first time, I notice everyone around me. Adonis is still in his pajama bottoms and wifebeater, though Cleo must have grabbed him some slippers, which, from the look of things, she picked out. And the rest of the family is in as much disarray as he is. Cleo’s nightgown is peeking out from under the hoodie that no one bothered to tell her is on backwards, Alex’s hair is a mess of snarls pulled into a loose ponytail, and everyone else is either wearing only pajamas, or wearing them underneath the first thing that they managed to pull out of the closet.
I’m the only person here—besides Ares, Nate, Mindy, and Tee—who is still wearing work clothes. That about sums it up right there, I think, looking around at all the disheveled heads, dark under-eye circles, and pale faces. This attack came out of nowhere.
“Yo, Z,” I call out, pausing until he comes over. “Walk with me to get some coffee,” I grunt, waiting until everyone has called out their orders before I walk out of the waiting room and towards the nurses’ lounge. “Talk to me, man.”
“There’s nothing to tell. As Ares probably already told you, we got nothing from the scene save for some paint that Heath scraped off the car. We have the color, make, and model, but that’s about it, since the guy chose to ram them on a part of the road where cameras are spotty. This guy is either crazy, or good, or both. He knew what he was doing,” Zeus sighs, grabbing a bunch of disposable cups to start filling at the machine in the nurses’ lounge.
“This doesn’t make sense. If no one’s doing anything, then why just attack?” I ask, sighing when my brother shrugs and rolls his tight shoulders impatiently.
“I don’t know. When this all started, I was sure that I’d have the resources and contacts to ferret this asshole out fast, but now, months later, I’m starting to think that we might never catch this fucker. He’s smart, Paris, and he’s obviously extremely organized. The car had no plates, the windows were tinted, and the paint isn’t going to tell us much else. I’ve got all my people on this, and Rosetta has half the freaking force on it, too, plus whoever she can bribe, blackmail, or fake-date into helping. And we still have no ideas. We’ve been chasing down leads on those prints we found in Alex’s car, but nothing has popped up there, either.”
“For God’s sake, this can’t just be it! We need to do something,” I hiss, grinding my jaw when he puts the cups down and turns to me, looking so haggard that it isn’t easy for me to meet his eyes.
“We’re trying, brother. Trust me, after what happened to my wife, there is no one who wants to catch
this guy more. I go to bed at night fantasizing about what I’ll do if I ever get my hands on that asshole, and I can guarantee you that Adonis and Chilli aren’t far behind me on this, after their wives almost got hurt. This is just another nail in this guy’s coffin, since I can practically smell the violence coming off you.”
“I want to kill him with my bare hands!”
“Join the club, man. Heath and Grange have thrown their own hats into the ring on this one, and even Nate isn’t looking at things quite as objectively anymore. For God’s sake, Brent is still in a coma, and judging from the crying that I caught Rose doing last night, he isn’t likely to come out of it. This stalker has hurt more people than just Sin,” he reminds me grimly, causing the coil in my gut to twist even more tightly.
“Fuck, man. I hadn’t even thought—”
“I know. But I have to. Brent is one of Rose’s best friends, and we come by the hospital to see him every day—sometimes twice a day, if Rose gets antsy about him.”
“No change?” I ask, closing my eyes in defeat when Zeus shakes his head.
“They induced him thinking that it’d give his body time to heal and recover, but then they had to rush him back into surgery when his brain showed signs of swelling. The doctors aren’t looking at things with a lot of hope at this point, and I just don’t know how to tell Rosie that Brent is probably already gone,” he whispers hoarsely, with so much anguish in his eyes that my throat goes tight, and I have to swallow to clear it.
I like Brent, although, to be honest, we didn’t hang out much, seeing as how he was more a cop than security for the girls. He’s a cool guy, in any case, and one that I think would fit into the family well. Now, though, I don’t know if he’ll make it. Hell, I don’t know if any of us will make it.
“This fucking sucks.”
“Yeah, well, as Pop keeps telling me, that’s life. Some things, we just don’t get to choose.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t choose this. Sin wasn’t doing anything! She’s been working her ass off and keeping to herself. Why plan an attack—”
“I don’t think that she was the target,” Zeus cuts in, shaking his head when I frown questioningly. “Think about it. Sin isn’t bugging anyone, and most days, all she does is work and hang out with Mindy, or go over to Honey and Jack’s to slip food into the freezer on the sly. This guy was clear when he gave Alex that message. Stop looking for answers, and no one gets hurt. Well, we’ve stopped looking, at least officially. Only Rose’s contacts know that we’re still on this, and all my guys are discreet and trustworthy. And yet—this. I’m thinking that either Tee or Ares was the target. I think. I can’t be sure, but that’s nothing new,” he mutters, picking up the tray that he’s finally filled with coffee cups.
I follow him out of the lounge and walk back to the waiting room, considering his words. In the end, all I can manage to come up with as we wait to see Sin is that there are no answers here.
And that just may be what gets one of us killed.
Chapter Seven
Sinai
Meat. Bloody. Pulverized. Ragged. Meat.
That’s what I feel like as I moan and answer the doctor’s questions, enduring yet another light shining into my eyes, which sends spikes of ice-cold pain through my skull.
I’ve had surgery before, and I remember the sick, head-roiling feeling that I experienced after they woke me up, with the anesthesia taking ages to leave my system. At the time, I likened it to the worst hangover that I would ever have in my life, and I wasn’t wrong. Add in a dose of “I got seriously fucked up, and someone took a sledgehammer to my leg,” and I’m not calling this a hangover anymore; I’m calling it hell.
I feel awful—but victorious—as I fight the need to move around. I’ve been awake since recovery, and I’ve had some time to think about things. Sort of. It’s really hard to be logical and lucid when it feels like you’re two seconds away from passing out. In fact, for a while there, I was praying that I could just pass out again…and not wake up.
“I know you’re feeling a little loopy, honey. Don’t you worry; that nasty anesthesia will wear off soon, and then all you’re gonna feel is the good stuff,” the nurse croons softly, her hand tenderly stroking my left arm.
Even that hurts a little, but it’s comforting to know that I can feel at all, I guess. For a second there, right after we crashed, I honestly thought that I was done for, that I was finally out of time. Until I woke up with my chest exploding, wishing for…
Jesus loves you.
The words suddenly pop into my head, and a sense of urgency fills me so intensely that I hear the monitor to my left go off sharply, each beep like a nail drilling into my brain tissue.
Why do those words make me feel so desperate? I wonder, frustrated when I try to think and feel my mind go fuzzy. Thinking is hard, and it’s made even harder when I feel a burning in my vein, and then sweet, blessed relief, as if someone just shot me up into the clouds and left me to float around up there.
Ahhh, morphine, I think groggily, a smile pulling at my mouth until I feel a tug and stop smiling to avoid the pain.
“There ya go, darlin’. That’s good, ain’t it?” the nurse chuckles softly, coming over to stare down into my eyes.
She’s fuzzy, since I can see her only through a very small slit in my right eyelid, but her face is beautiful and reminds me of the counselor that we had the one summer that we went to camp. Her skin is a soft brown, and her eyes are so sparkly that they look like two diamonds shining down at me.
“Jesus…” I whisper, wanting to tell someone.
“He took mighty good care of you, honey, no doubt. You should be dead but for the miracle that Jesus performed on you tonight! Now, just take it easy, and don’t fight the pain meds, you hear? You need to let go and get as much healing rest as you can.”
But I don’t want to rest. There’s something that I need to tell them, something urgent and important! Just don’t know…what…is…
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“Oh, my God! Now we’ll have to postpone the wedding again!”
The sound of several snorts, some throat clearing, and even a chuckle comes at me from a distance as I fight my way up and out of the darkness. I wake slowly, as slowly as I can, and try to block out the nausea I feel as all kinds of sounds and smells invade my senses, sparking me back to awareness. Even though I don’t want awareness right now, and I really, really don’t want to wake up without some sort of drug floating me down the stream of loopiness.
I’m actually terrified to wake up fully, because then I’ll have to feel again, and, God help me, I don’t want to. It’s easy to be awesome when you don’t feel as if you flew headfirst through a window, and from what little I remember about what the nurse told me, I flew through a bulletproof window, to boot.
How that is possible, I don’t know, but it obviously happened, because it feels like it fucking happened.
“Cleo, now is not the time for joking around.”
“I wasn’t joking. I’m not having…that in my wedding photos.”
“Cleo Sweet! You hush up right this minute and stop making your mom angry,” someone hisses.
“I’m not trying to make anyone angry, dammit, but just look at her. She looks like a truck ran over her. Oh my God, Hart, how did she even survive?” Cleo whispers in a tearful voice that chokes me up, too.
I’m not offended by her words, and in fact, I find myself wondering the same thing as I crack my left eyelid and peer down at my body. Things do not look good, feel good, or look good. I’m saying “look” twice because I really do look like hell. I’m in a hospital bed, wearing one of those generic gowns. My leg, or what I can see of it, is strapped into some sort of frame-looking thing, and from what I can feel of my face, things are not looking good up top, either.
But I’m alive, and I’m drugged up enough that I can’t feel most of it, thank God.
“She did. That’s all
that matters,” I hear Adonis whisper, his own voice choked up.
Awww. This is like the culmination of every dream and nightmare that I’ve ever had in my entire life. It’s a nightmare because, duh, I feel like Freddy Krueger had his way with ninety percent of my body, but it’s a dream, too, because all these people are focused on me.
“Oh, my poor baby.”
That is most definitely my mom sobbing, and from the sniffles and repressed wailing I hear, I can tell that Uncle Jack is somewhere close by, probably veering between sorrow and pure rage. Never let it be said that the man isn’t predictable.
“She’s gonna be just fine, sweetheart.”
That’s Dad, his soft, strong, reassuring voice breaking through some of the panic that’s been creeping in. If people are sobbing just looking at me, then I must look pretty messed up.
“You all need to stop crying. Sin doesn’t need to wake up hearing you all sobbing as if she’s dead already—do you all hear me? If you can’t control yourselves—and Jack, I’m mostly talking to you, man—then you need to leave.”
Oh, Paris. My hero, I think, snorting as I crack my eyelid open again, and then forcing it to open even further while ignoring the pain. The first face that I see is indeed Paris’s, and it’s such a welcome sight that I want to bawl like a baby. Stupid feelings.
“Sin? Sinai, are you waking up?” he asks softly, leaning in to peer at me more closely.
“Been awake,” I mutter, wincing a little because my jaw feels tight and achy. “And Cleo? Fuck you. I will always be the prettiest Sweet.”
That sets off a round of laughter that sounds more like relief than amusement. Hey, if I’m going to look like hell, then I may as well be the butt of the joke, right?
“That’s delusion talking, oh road kill,” Rosetta murmurs, coming over to stand at the bottom of the bed and stare down at me.
She looks unkempt—nothing like the put-together powerhouse that I know and reluctantly love. Right now, her hair’s a rat’s nest, and she’s wearing a tank top without a bra and what I think may be sweats, though I didn’t know that she even owned such things.