Just that she wanted him.
Secrets and all.
For in the aftermath of this stark, undeniable betrayal by Compton, it was still his emotionally honest grin flashing through her mind.
She’d drawn her lines and she’d made her decisions and she’d been wrong.
What if there was more to it than just cameras?
Of course there’s more to it. Once she started questioning her place here, none of it could be taken for granted. Especially not lately.
Starting with that architect and his incorrect address. She hadn’t pulled that address from thin air; she’d gone where told. And it had put her in the position to be attacked.
To meet Devin.
And then Compton had insisted...
She closed her eyes. Compton’s insistence on hiring Devin...his insistence that Devin stay here. Devin’s continuing struggles in spite of the focus work he was doing, the quick progress Natalie had seen.
Had there been a battle fought outside her door, a man killed and then removed? And what about the intent look on that distinctly mature gentleman’s face as he approached them? And that night, at dinner...two people sick on Devin’s meal. Peyote? She’d seen how sensitive he was...how he eschewed even caffeine. It wouldn’t have taken much.
Too many pieces, none of them quite coming together.
The practical ring tone of her phone startled her; she jerked, huffing steamy breath into the darkness, car windows already fogging.
The caller ID gave her an unfamiliar number; she answered the phone with caution, relaxing only when she heard the voice of the skip tracer looking into the details and identity of the tattooed dead man from the parking lot.
But not relaxing for long, as she realized who had provided her with this phone—as she heard the tension in this man’s voice.
“Wait,” she said, as he would have started the conversation. “I’m not sure...that is...this phone—”
There was a long silence. And then he said, so carefully, “Then you probably already know what I have to tell you. I’m tearing up your check, Miss Chambers. Please don’t call me again.”
The click of his disconnect startled her just as much as the ring tone. The abrupt nature of it, the finality of his voice. The fear of it.
She’d asked him to find out who the man was working for, among other things.
And she understood his message, loud and clear.
The man in the parking lot, the man in the dark, the man with the gun and the brutality, had been hired by Sawyer Compton.
Natalie rolled down her window and threw the phone out of the car.
She stared at it for a long moment, as cold air rushed in through the open window and the fogged air cleared out, and then she decided, yes. Leave it there. It looked as though she’d dropped it on the way to the car, and if it left her without a phone...it also left her without a device that was GPS-enabled.
She’d pick up a prepaid phone. Unless...
She worked here. She lived here. He’d been watching her. Did he have access to her credit accounts? Her bank accounts? Every little private piece of her life? Had he watched, the other night, as she and Devin very nearly made love directly in view of that camera? Or the times she’d so casually walked naked through the house, blinds closed and privacy ensured as she pulled on clothes while heading for coffee?
She had only one place to go. One place she wanted to go.
She stopped at a pay phone and called Devin, but he didn’t answer. Not on his cell, which he so freely ignored, and not on his home phone.
A glance at her watch showed the hour growing late...she’d try Enrique’s anyway. If Devin wasn’t there—if she couldn’t find either of them—she’d just go camp in his driveway.
But she wasn’t expecting Enrique’s gym door to be ajar. She pushed through, listening.... Her hand went to her pocket, pulling out the pepper spray...thumbing the safety to the side.
Inside was all darkness...she heard nothing but her pulse pounding in her ears. She peered into the office, found it empty...found the dim light smeared beneath the swinging door at the back corner. Men’s territory.
She pushed it open, just enough to poke her head through. “Hello?”
A faint grunt, a cry of sorts—wordless, but pleading.
And then she glanced down—and gasped, and froze, staring stupidly.
A blood trail out the door, and she stood right on top of it.
She stepped over the blood, moving more swiftly now. Whatever had happened, her answers lay within—through a door left ajar, through a few modest rows of bent-up lockers.
It wasn’t hard to follow the trail.
Or, once she reached the showers, to find Enrique.
She stiffened, wasting a moment to clap her hand over her mouth.
A dirty alley, flickering light, battered features, blood everywhere—
But this wasn’t that night. This was an old man, beaten half to death in his own gym. She ran to him, skipping over the pools of evidence—and already thinking like her old petty crime self. Leave no fingerprints. No trace. Got to get out of here.
“Enrique,” she breathed, crouching by him—daring to touch him. When they’d met, he’d been boundless bright energy in an aging body. Now he lay crumpled and brittle and broken. “What—”
“Damned phone,” he said, his words muffled—lower lip grotesquely swollen right down to his chin, one side of his face puffed out shiny and tight. “How to use such a thing?”
She followed his twitch of movement, and found a cell phone cradled loosely in his hand.
Devin’s phone.
“Devin was here,” she said, quite suddenly unable to breathe. Of course Devin had been here.
Except...the only blood Devin appeared incapable of cleaning up was...
His own.
“Help me,” Enrique said. “Take me to the front door. Show me to call help. And then you go. Go to him.”
“Take you to the—” Natalie frowned, involuntarily glancing in the direction of the front door. “Enrique, I shouldn’t move you.”
He grunted. “Then I move myself.” And made as if to prove that point.
“No!” She panicked with it, imagining him dying right here before her.
If she helped him, he might die, too. But at least she would be helping.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me first.”
This made sense enough to him—it showed on that distorted face. Tell her, in case he passed out. In case his aging heart gave out or internal injuries worsened with the movement. “We ask about the alleys. We ask about Sawyer Compton. Three of them...I couldn’t warn my boy...took him from behind.” He gestured at the blood. “Two of them, dead and gone. The third, hurt and running. Devin—”
“This is his blood,” she whispered.
He nodded, and his eyes, black in the shadows, nonetheless briefly turned sharp. “Take me to front door. Over his blood. Obscure it. Make it mine. If I live, they maybe won’t test. An old man beaten in a bad neighborhood. Nothing to investigate. Take my cash box, too.”
“My God,” she said. “That’s what you’ve been doing, lying here alone. Figuring out how to cover for him.”
He didn’t bother to respond to that. “Then you go to him,” he said. “You go to him. He is alone, and the wild road will take him—”
She didn’t understand the words. But she understood the meaning. She understood all this blood. And she remembered with piercing clarity what had happened the last time Devin had been hurt.
She helped Enrique to the door. She showed him the easy sequence for dialing nine-one-one on the cell phone, she took the cash box, and she rifled the first-aid supplies.
And then she ran back out into the night.
* * *
It took forever to reach Devin’s home. Forever, with her hands clenching and releasing the steering wheel, her mind slipping back into every little trick she’d taught herself. Focusing on the details of where she wa
s.
It was the only way to keep that tentative, slippery grasp on control until she pulled into his driveway.
There she found the truck parked askew, the driver’s door still open. She slammed it closed on the way by and ran to the front door—also open, with heat and faint light spilling out into the darkness.
She closed that, too. She flipped on the light, dumped her bag and the first-aid supplies on the couch, and shrugged off her coat, letting it lie on the floor where it fell. “Devin?”
The shower was silent. The house, silent.
She flipped lights as she moved more deeply into the house. Peeking into the kitchen, heading down the short hall, double-checking the bathroom...knowing, then, he’d simply gone for the bedroom.
The blood trail confirmed it. New hand prints on the walls. Splotches and smears across the carpet.
She hesitated inside the door, and for an instant, couldn’t quite bring herself to turn on the light.
Until she heard his breathing—ragged and uneven and full of pain. Then suddenly she stopped thinking so hard at all, and the light was on and she’d found him, crumpled on his way to the patio doors.
“Hey,” she said, coming up behind him—not daring to touch, simply because she didn’t know where she could. Blood soaked everything; she couldn’t see the wounds. Not through his vest and hoodie and flannel shirt and jeans.
He watched her—dazed, unthinking—not raging as she’d seen that first night. Beyond it. Blood trailed from his mouth, bright and frothy, staining the carpet by his face. She looked for the knife, didn’t see it....
It was here somewhere. The inexplicable, the mutable, the gleaming wail of anger and steel—
She had no doubt.
Well, she didn’t need it. She could cut his clothes away with Enrique’s bandage scissors. And she didn’t let herself think about the possibility that his amazing healing prowess wasn’t up to fixing...this.
Compton. Compton had done this. Going after Enrique. Of course Devin had tried to stop his men—whatever the cost.
He choked, and blood pooled beneath his mouth.
“Devin,” she said, still afraid to touch. “Tell me what I can do.” No assumptions, about this man who had raged through the night, healing after what should have been a fatal stab wound—and now lay clenched in pain, his fingers working against the carpet, his faint movements purposeless and vague. “Tell me.”
His body curled against a new pain—there, she saw it in him, the building heat. The same as that night, but weaker. Not enough.
“Tell me,” she demanded.
His jaw clenched until she thought she heard it crack; a tear leaked from the corner of a closed eye.
She understood, then. Or thought she did. It wouldn’t let him die...but it couldn’t heal him. Not as it had the other night.
And she only knew one thing to do.
She touched him.
Kneeling beside him, her hand so gentle, still uncertain of his wounds, she hovered splayed fingers over his side, let them slide down across his ribs and over to his stomach.
He gasped like a drowning man finding air, arching into her touch. His chest labored beneath her hand; he cried something agonized—his hand found hers. She, too, gasped as his fingers tightened down—but she didn’t draw back.
His eyes opened, dark shadows of a man who believed himself lost. His voice was little more than a wheeze carried on stolen air. “What—”
“I came to see you,” she said, much more firmly than she’d expected. She added, just as matter-of-factly, “Because I was wrong.”
“But—”
“Hey.” Her voice sharpened slightly, self-aware asperity. “It was a choice, okay?”
She didn’t expect him to laugh—and it didn’t last long, as he rolled over on a groan, his hand clamping down on hers again.
“Can’t—” he said.
“No kidding,” Natalie muttered. “Devin, I have no idea what’s going on here. I have no idea what’s going on with you. Let me help. Can’t you tell me—?”
“Get them out,” he managed. “Can’t—the knife—” He opened his other hand, curled in so close to his body, and the knife spilled out. No more than an ordinary little pen knife.
Right. She didn’t believe that for a moment.
“Take it,” he said. Or she thought that’s what he said, anyway, for just as soon as he spoke, the heat flared again—she felt it, this time, an amazing wash of dark impotent fury as it took him in its grip and shook him out and left him trembling. “It can’t... It won’t stop trying...it’s going to...”
He couldn’t finish, gasping for that shallow breath. But he didn’t have to. She could see it. It was going to kill him. Whatever this thing was, trying to heal him as it had done so brutally the night they’d met, it was hitting a wall. But it wouldn’t stop trying.
“Get them out,” he said, eyes no longer opening, but words as distinct as he could make them.
Get what?
He glanced—toward his back. Down to his leg.
And then, suddenly, the blood made sense.
He’d been shot. Not once, but twice.
“Devin—” she said, aghast, at a complete loss for words. She couldn’t. Never mind her nerve, which might or might not be good enough. She had no skill. She’d kill him, as surely as the bullets themselves.
“The blade will,” he said, barely audible. Another seizure of that brutal healing—not-healing—took him, and left him limp. “Just...try.”
Because if she didn’t, she was going to lose him. Right here and right now. The forces battling within him would tear him apart. She didn’t have to understand them to see it—this man, so full of life, so startling honest with that grin and that sudden light in his eyes, faded before her.
And the knife, suddenly in her hand, was no innocuous pen knife. It was stiletto, deadly and narrow, and she had no idea how that had happened, or even when her fingers had closed around the grip in the first place.
The blade will.
Fine. None of it made sense. Not from the first moment she’d met him. Crumbling men, healing wounds, a crazed hero battling some inner demon—
Demon.
It resonated through her mind, a hiss of triumph and threat. She almost flung the blade away—
Except she thought she would save this man’s life, and make sense of it later.
“Devin,” she murmured, and bent over him, touching her forehead to his upper biceps. “I’ll try.”
The blade will.
She found the neat bullet hole in his jeans. Behind. They shot him from behind.
Of course they had. What other chance had they had?
Not a huge caliber. Carrying concealed and cheap. Those days with Ajay had taught her something after all. But still the blood pulsed steadily outward, soaking denim, and still the flesh tore raw beneath. And what was she supposed to do with a stiletto? Even if the bullet was close to the surface, a knife could hardly pluck it out.
The blade will.
As if he’d done it before.
Her hand shook, poised. “I hope this is what you mean,” she murmured, more for herself than in expectation of a response, for he had gone beyond it.
Or she thought he had, until she probed the stiletto into that wound.
“Son of a bitch!” He stiffened, a series of pointed curses spitting out through gritted teeth and his hand latching unerringly on to her elbow, tears damping the side of his face and his body clenched and trembling and just as honest as the open grin and the open desire. “Son of a—”
“I’m sorry!” Her elbow ached and her throat had tightened down so hard she didn’t know if she would ever breathe again. Oh, this is so wrong! She should have called for help, she should have pushed Enrique for answers, she should have slapped Devin awake and insisted on them before doing this....
Oh, so very wrong!
Except there, in the instant of silence between his cursing and his harsh, bloody and dam
aged breath, she heard the faintest of clinks.
And when, startled, she looked at the stiletto—withdrew it from the several inches it had claimed of that wound—on the end, she found a misshapen slug of metal.
Devin made a noise that could have been a sob, and passed out.
* * *
Nothing kept still in Devin’s world. The floor shifted; the ceiling rotated. Fiery coals burned his back, his lung, his leg, and flushed on through his entire body.
But he wasn’t alone.
And he wasn’t wearing any clothes, either.
At least, not many.
Cool air brushed over one leg where jeans had been; his shoes were long gone, and blood-soaked socks removed. Vest, jacket and shirt, gone. The furnace turned up to offset the chill of it all—set high enough so sweat dampened the nape of his neck and along his temple. “I’m naked,” he started to say, except it didn’t turn out that way. Just a groan of unintelligible words, forced from an aching chest. Aching back. Aching self.
But not dead.
“Hey,” he said, with more success. “Not dead.”
“Hey,” Natalie said, a cool hand resting on his side. “Not dead.” A warm damp cloth brushed along his leg, catching briefly on the crusted blood there. “But don’t expect me to sew you up like Enrique did.”
Alarm surged up—so did he, but no more successfully than he’d first tried to speak.
“I found him,” Natalie said, guessing his concern. “He sent me after you.” She hesitated. “I came looking for you in the first place because...”
“Compton,” he muttered.
“I don’t understand.” Her voice caught; her hand stopped moving. But then she took the cloth away, dipped it in water somewhere, and wrung it out, coming back for more. “There’s so very much I don’t understand. But none of this is coincidence. I know that much. Not what happened in the alley years ago...not what happened the other night.”
“No,” he said, voicing it on a sigh. And then, “Cut up my clothes, didn’t you?” He managed to twist his head just enough to see her—the overhead light bringing out the glimmer in her hair, the warmth of the room bringing out the flush on her cheeks.
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