Deny Me

by Ella Sheridan

  “Get back,” Hugh yelled over Sophia’s screams. “She’s mine. We’re leaving, and you can’t stop me!”

  King moved up behind Charlotte, praying she wouldn’t startle when he touched her. His hands settled on her hips as Saint and Dain walked closer, tightening the noose on Hugh between them.

  “Charlotte.” The word was barely a whisper, but King knew she heard it. She gave him a nod, but when he pulled to get her moving, get her behind him, she resisted.

  “Charlotte—”

  “Stay back!” Hugh glanced frantically between one end of the corridor and the other, desperation rising in his eyes.

  King pulled harder on Charlotte. She stumbled back one step but braced against another. “Sophia!”

  Hugh jerked his head around at her shout, and King could see the moment his decision was made.

  “No!” He tightened his hold on Charlotte and pulled her against him, began to turn them around, put himself between her and Hugh.

  The gun went off.

  A shock of fire and agony blazed through his side at the same time Charlotte gasped, choking out his name.

  They both went down.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  She hurt. Oh God, she hurt. So bad she couldn’t breathe, but there was a reason she needed to breathe. What was it?

  “Sophia…”

  Hugh had shot them. He’d killed Wes.

  He had Sophia.

  King groaned behind her as he rolled onto his back. Charlotte rolled too, onto her stomach to try and get up. Agony shot through her.

  From the corner of her eye she saw a large form run past—Hugh, holding a crying Sophia.

  She struggled to her knees. “No!”

  “I don’t think you want to do that,” a voice said. It took Charlotte a moment to figure out whoever it was wasn’t speaking to her, that it was Elliot, that she was near the elevators. A glance up showed Hugh standing at the open door, one foot in front of the other as if to walk into the elevator. Elliot was right against his back, one arm around him, gripping the back of Sophia’s onesie, the other…

  Charlotte squinted, not sure what she was seeing. Elliot’s hand was…between them. What was she doing?

  She held her breath.

  Elliot was grinning, of all things. Charlotte couldn’t figure that one out, but whatever she was up to, it was making Hugh sweat. The man was barely breathing as he held completely still, half in and half out of the elevator, Sophia still in one arm like a football he’d caught and hurried toward the goalpost.

  “Remember that little story I told the other night,” Elliot breathed in Hugh’s ear. “The one about my father and what I did to him?”

  Hugh gasped. “Let me go.”

  Elliot’s arm twitched, and Hugh jumped. “Please!”

  “I meant what I said about filleting him,” Elliot continued as if Hugh had never spoken. “I’m very, very good with a knife. Wanna see?”

  “No! No, don’t!”

  Oh God. The smallest flash of metal appeared between Hugh’s legs, and the urge to laugh hit Charlotte out of the blue, the jerk of holding it back sending pain piercing through her side. Elliot had a knife; that’s why her hand was down between her and Hugh. How could she hold Sophia and Hugh still? By threatening the only thing the man probably valued more than the money he wanted to earn.

  Cold stung her cheek. Charlotte blinked, realizing she wasn’t on her knees anymore. She was lying on the cold floor. How had she gotten here? Where was King?

  Elliot was still talking. “The question is, Hugh”—Elliot twisted her arm again, and Hugh cried out—“do you want to walk out of here and into a cop car intact, or do you want to visit your baby-selling buddies without your balls?” She looked thoughtful. “Then again, maybe your balls could stay behind either way. Prison might be easier to navigate without them. Your dick too. Kinda eliminates the question of where you’ll fit in the pecking order, right? Giver or receiver.” Another twist. “Definitely receiver, I’m thinking.”

  Hugh’s face was sickly white. “Please don’t.”

  “No?” Elliot’s grin took a disappointed turn. “You know how to ruin all a girl’s fun.” Her voice hardened. “Drop the gun.”

  The thick clatter of metal on tile reached Charlotte as her eyes closed.

  “Now the baby—hand her to the nice nurse there.”

  Charlotte heard footsteps, then the shushing of the nurse. Sophia cried louder.

  More steps rushing toward them. Some stopped nearby; others went farther, to the elevators. Hugh cried out, but Charlotte couldn’t see why—her eyes weren’t working, but she wasn’t sure why. Her ears were managing somehow, because she heard the crack of a fist impacting a face, a sound she was now personally familiar with, then Elliot whining.

  “Hey!”

  “Figured it was someone else’s turn to have some fun for a change.” Saint. Had he punched Hugh?

  Good.

  “Charlotte?”

  She lifted eyelids that weighed ten pounds at the sound of King’s voice. His face hovered over hers, which told her she was on her back. When had that happened?

  “King?” His face was too pale. Was he hurt? “You…okay?”

  Something pressed against her side, and white-hot pain choked a gasp out of her. “Stop!”

  “Gotta keep pressure on it, angel,” King panted above her.

  “On what?”

  “Hugh shot you.”

  He had, hadn’t he? Bastard. “Wes.” Tears welled in her eyes and slid down into her hair. “He killed Wes.”

  King bent closer, the side of his face coming to rest against the side of hers. “I know, angel. I’m sorry,” he choked out. “So sorry.”

  “Not”—she groaned as pain pounded through her—“your fault.”

  “I love you,” King rasped in her ear. “I never stopped loving you, and I never will.” His weight became heavier on her. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making up to you for all those years apart, so you better stick around for that, you got me?”

  “Not going anywhere.” The blackness closing in on her might be saying otherwise, but Charlotte fought it off as hard as she could. She had something she needed to say too, something important.

  What was it?

  Oh. “I love you too, King.” She turned her head to look at him through blurry eyes. “I’ve always loved you. It’s always been you, only you.”

  Those pale blue eyes that sent so much emotion through her every time she saw them smiled down at her. King started to speak, blinked, and closed his eyes.

  His full weight fell on top of her. Charlotte bit back a cry at the agony in her side. “King? King!”

  Someone rolled him over. Charlotte got a vague impression of a white coat and people yelling. Rough hands on her body that she struggled to fight off. They were hurting her; everything was hurting her. If they would just leave her alone, let her rest. She needed to get back to King.

  “King!”

  A gentle hand rested against her cheek. Elliot’s voice reached her, low and concerned instead of smug and sure. “It’s all right, Charlotte. King’s right here. You’re both going to be okay.”

  Why were they both going to be okay? What was wrong with King?

  She tried to ask, tried to get her tongue to work, but nothing came out except King’s name. She called for him once, twice, before even that was lost to her and the blackness finally took over.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  King woke in a rush, his muscles tense, ready to face any threat that waited. But there was no threat, only a wide white room with a row of beds just like his and scratchy white sheets tangled around his body.

  He tried to sit up.

  “Uh uh uh.” A busty nurse in blue scrubs with dancing butterflies in colors so bright they hurt his eyes hurried over, her hand out to stop him from moving. “You’re not quite ready for getting up, young man. Just a little bit longer.”

  Young man? The woman looked to be in her
fifties, but still, young man?

  Maybe she’d at least give him some answers. “Where am I? What happened?”

  “You’ve just come out of surgery, but everything’s fine,” she said, patting his hand that didn’t have an IV. “Just fine. Give yourself a few more minutes and we’ll be moving you to a room.”

  Surgery. He’d been shot. King closed his eyes, willing himself to remember, to figure out what the something was that nagged at him, pulling him awake… Was it a what? A who?

  Charlotte.

  His eyes flew open, and he gripped the rail of the bed, grunting as he made a second attempt to pull himself up to sitting. The nurse fussed and flailed, but he ignored her, determined to find Charlotte and make sure she was okay. Except he couldn’t get the rail to release and his body refused to stay upright. He’d dragged himself up twice more before a dark-haired figure appeared at the end of the aisle, striding toward him.

  “Dain!”

  The word was choked out, and Dain shook his Mohawked head as he bore down on King’s bed. The nurse gave a little squeak and hurried somewhere out of King’s line of sight.

  “Lay down, you stubborn dick,” his team lead said gruffly. “You’re stressing the staff out, and they haven’t done anything but save your life.”

  It seemed more like Dain had intimidated Ms. Butterfly Scrubs, but King found it impossible to argue with the pain rocketing through him. He let the weight of his body pull him back down to the thin, hard mattress. “Charlotte. Where is she? What—”

  Dain held up his hand like slow your roll, dude, leaving King impatient while Dain gave the jumpy nurse a quiet thank-you and took the chair she’d brought him before sitting down. His smile brought a blush to her cheeks before she scurried away again. Only then did he turn back to King. “Charlotte’s fine. She’s already out of surgery. Pretty straightforward for her, actually,” he said with infuriating calm, “just a through-and-through.”

  Just? King thought about getting out of this bed to kick Dain’s ass for minimizing Charlotte’s pain, but since he’d probably fall on his face instead, he made a mental note to follow up on that later.

  “Bullet made much more of a mess when it hit you,” Dain was saying. “Charlotte slowed it down for you.”

  “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “Of course I am. Anything to distract you from trying to crawl out of that bed and flash me your naked ass when you hit the floor.” He gave King a grim smile.

  King scoffed, then groaned as pain shot through his side. “So,” he groused, “is ‘made more of a mess’ the medical term for why my side hurts like hell?”

  Dain leaned forward, planting his elbows on the bed rail. “I’m sure the doc will give you all the medical jargon you can stand. What I do know is the bullet bounced around for a bit before stopping in your spleen. But you’ve still got all your major organs intact and you’re going to heal fine. That’s all that matters.”

  Maybe so. He’d decide when he wasn’t half drugged and hurting like a son of a bitch. “And Charlotte?”

  “She’ll heal too.”

  “She passed out.” King remembered that. Remembered the sheer panic that had steamrolled him when she went down. The sight would haunt him for the rest of his life, he had no doubt.

  Dain nodded, not unsympathetically. “Shock and blood loss, mostly. She’s already in a room and her parents have been in to see her.”

  King let himself breathe for a moment, absorb the fact that Charlotte had been shot but had come out the other side okay. God, if she hadn’t… “When can I see her?”

  “We’re seeing what we can arrange.”

  Of course they were already on it. He should’ve known his team wouldn’t let him down.

  He drifted in and out for a bit, coming back to full awareness when the nurse returned. Dain stood close by as she prepped King for the move to a regular room.

  “Where’s Hugh?” King asked as his gurney began its roll toward the door.

  Dain’s face went unreadable.

  “Where, Dain?”

  “In custody,” he finally said, the words reluctant. They entered the hall, Dain walking alongside them. “They’re isolating him to avoid retaliation from the organization he worked with. Especially since our FBI friends made a few arrests this morning while we were otherwise occupied. Hawker called while you were in surgery. The coincidence of Hugh’s arrest so close with the FBI’s might cause suspicion, so they’re taking precautions.”

  King didn’t know how he felt about that. On the one hand, Hugh was his cousin. On the other, he hadn’t known the man at all. He’d murdered his own brother, for fuck’s sake. The thought filled him with a mix of rage and pain he didn’t know how to handle right now.

  Dain held the elevator door while King’s nurse guided his gurney inside. “It might make you feel better—”

  “I think only really good painkillers are gonna do that for a few days.”

  “Ha, ha.” Dain joined them in the elevator and let the doors close. “Sophia is back with her mama, safe and sound. Cute kid. Hawker thinks the Atlanta branch of the ring is shut down for now. Becky and Sophia should be in the clear from here on out.”

  Relief spread through him. Becky had paid enough for the sins of too many people. She deserved to be safe, to focus on the new life she’d been given.

  “What about Violet and the other mother looking for her child?”

  “The FBI will continue to work with the women in the safe house to find their children,” Dain said. “Luckily, with the connection to Jessica Arnold and…Wes”—Dain cleared his throat—“Creating Families should be in the clear as well.”

  Hearing Wes’s name brought grief crashing in as they exited onto a different floor. After navigating a couple of halls, the nurse paused outside a closed door and nodded to Dain. “Would you mind?”

  “Not at all.” Dain grinned as he moved to hold the door for her to push King’s gurney through. “Since I’m responsible for him being here.”

  “Being where?” King glanced around. The room wasn’t a single, and he cursed under his breath. He really didn’t want to put up with a roomie for however many days he had to be here.

  But Dain let the door close and went straight to the curtain separating King’s bed from his neighbor’s. “Being here,” he said and pushed back the curtain. The bed next to him was occupied by a slender woman with black hair and a bruise forming on her incredibly beautiful face.

  King cursed again, for a far different reason than before.

  “Stop making so much noise,” Charlotte complained without opening her eyes. “Use your inside voice too, Dain. I’m trying to sleep over here.”

  “Charlotte,” King said, pain ricocheting through him as he tried once more, just as unsuccessfully, to sit up in bed.

  His nurse tsked. “You know the head of these beds inclines, don’t you?”

  The mattress began lifting, and he subsided in relief. “Are you okay, angel?” God, that bruise looked agonizing. If Hugh had been here—and if King hadn’t been shot—he’d make sure the man knew exactly what it felt like to have all the bones in his face rearranged.

  Dain must have followed a similar train of thought because he said, “Saint paid Hugh back for the shiner. The staff had to set his broken nose before they took him to jail.”

  “Remind me to thank him next time I see him,” Charlotte said. Her eyes still weren’t open, and he needed them to be, needed to see her gray gaze steady on him. At peace. Just plain okay.

  “Look at me, Charlotte.”

  The hint of command in his voice got her to comply. For no more than a moment, but King could see from the hazy connection as their eyes met that she was with him. The last of his worry trickled away.

  “Let me sleep, King,” she said grouchily. Apparently anesthesia made her cranky.

  He could do that. He was lying beside her, after all. Not like she could escape him. He prayed she wouldn’t try, but if she did, he could
stop her, bullet wound or not.

  He grinned. Dain raised a questioning brow at him as if wondering what was so funny, but rather than answer, he closed his eyes and drifted off, content in knowing Charlotte was here, they were together, and they’d both heal eventually.

  Three days later he and Charlotte went straight from the hospital to Wes’s funeral. Saint kindly drove them after providing formal clothes for them to change into. The three of them were quiet on the way to the church, each absorbed in their own thoughts, Charlotte and King in their own memories of Wes. King’s chest felt like he couldn’t draw a full breath, the ache for his cousin was so strong. Added to the pain in his side, he couldn’t wait to get through this and back to Charlotte’s, to fall asleep not in separate beds but one, his arm around her—carefully, since they’d both been shot on the same side. They’d make it work, though. Not being able to lie beside one another had been agony the past few days.

  But all that would have to wait a few more hours. Wes needed them first.

  The massive downtown church was already full when they arrived. Of course it would be. Not only was Wes from a prominent, wealthy Atlanta family, but he’d been active in the community, in charities, and everyone who’d met him had loved him. King led Charlotte inside, careful to protect her from jostling in the crowd. The church narthex was quieter, giving them some breathing space, and King stopped at the entrance to the sanctuary, his gaze centered on the coffin, gleaming dark mahogany, that waited at the altar.

  Charlotte placed her hand on his heart, her face reflecting the pain he also felt.

  He’d expected to visit Wes in a church someday. For his cousin’s wedding, maybe, or the christening of his first child. Not his funeral. Definitely not this. The hole where his cousin had fit in his heart was empty, gaping, and he didn’t know if it would ever heal. When he noticed Warren and Christy at the head of the aisle, greeting the mourners, he knew they must feel the same.

  He and Charlotte walked slowly toward them, taking their time. Although Charlotte’s injuries hadn’t been as complicated as King’s, her body was so much smaller and she was struggling with pain more than he was. Wes’s parents watched them come, worry on both their faces, but King gave them a sad smile. They had enough to worry about, enough devastation to their family as it was; they didn’t need to worry about him and Charlotte as well.