by K. M. Scott
I reached out and squeezed his hand as my tears threatened to overwhelm me again. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be back. Stay positive. He’s tough, Abbi. Kane’s going to be fine.”
As Cassian walked away and Alexandria repeated what he said, I prayed to God they were right. I didn’t know what I’d do if they weren’t.
Cassian returned with the news that Kane had been shot with a .38 at close range by a man named Rick Branton. The police didn’t have any more details, but they suspected it might be a drug deal gone bad.
“That’s crazy, Cassian,” I said. Alexandria took the baby from my arms, and I began to pace back and forth across the tile floor in the waiting room. “Kane wouldn’t be involved with anything like that. No way.”
He shook his head angrily. “I told them that. They don’t know what happened, but they told me it happened on Chestnut Street in Dade City.”
I stopped dead and spun around to face him. “Chestnut Street? Where?”
“I don’t know. Why? Does he know someone there?”
Stefan joined us and hugged me to him before answering his brother’s question. “Sebastian Thorne lives on Chestnut Street in Dade City. That’s where we were the other night. Did he have something to do with this?”
Cassian seemed confused. “I don’t understand. What would Kane be doing at Sebastian’s house in the middle of the day and why would someone there with him have a gun?”
Nobody said anything to answer his questions, so finally I said, “He wanted to tell him the truth. I know that. I know he wanted Sebastian to know he had brothers in you guys.”
A sheepish look came over Stefan’s face, and Cassian snapped at him. “Do you see what’s happened because of all of this digging up the past? You couldn’t just leave well enough alone? Why couldn’t you and Kane just leave it be?”
Quickly, Alexandria jumped in and stopped him. “Your brothers had good intentions, Cassian. I know why Kane would want to let Sebastian know about you three.”
“He didn’t want him to not know where he came from,” I said quietly. “I think he saw a lot of himself in Sebastian.”
“Well, I don’t,” Cassian said angrily. “All I see is trouble and that’s all I’ve ever seen from the minute Kane and Stefan brought it up. But if Sebastian was there, I want to know if he was shot too.”
He stormed away, and Stefan took me in his arms again to hug me tightly to him. “I’m so sorry, Abbi. I never dreamed anything like this would happen. I just wanted to find out about this guy. That’s all.”
I let myself cry again and said through the tears, “I don’t blame you, Stefan. Kane was going to find out about him whether you or Cassian wanted to. He’d already made up his mind.”
“I swear we didn’t think anything like this would happen, Abbi.” Stefan pulled away and looked into my eyes. “Kane would never put himself in danger of being taken away from you and the kids, even for a brother.”
“Yes, he would,” I said with a smile, knowing what family meant to Kane. “He just wouldn’t think he’d get hurt.”
I returned to pacing until I saw Cash walking towards us a few minutes later with a look of rage on his face. Unsure I wanted to know the cause, fearing he’d found out that something had happened to Kane, I still needed to ask what was wrong.
“Did something happen? Did you hear something about Kane?”
My heart sank in the millisecond between my asking and his answering. My head began to swim as the horrifying thought of Kane gone from the world sunk in. My legs started to give out as I collapsed into one of the waiting room chairs.
Cash rushed to my side and quickly explained, “No, I heard nothing. That’s not what I went to find out about.”
I listened to his words and slowly realized he hadn’t just told me the worst news I could ever hear. “I saw your face and you looked so furious. I just thought…”
My words trailed off as I began to sob, and Cash hugged me to him. “No, it’s okay. I think he’s still in surgery. Don’t give up on him, Abbi. He’s strong. He’ll make it through this.”
I tried to believe him, to believe that everything would be okay, but a tiny, terrible thought weaved its way through my mind. What if this was it? What if after everything he’d been through this was the one thing he couldn’t overcome?
Cash’s body tensed against mine, so I looked up to see why and there stood Sebastian just a few feet away. He looked so much like Kane.
I wiped my eyes and sat up straight in my seat. “How did this happen, Sebastian?”
That’s all I wanted to know. How did the man I love end up getting shot while he was at his house?
He hung his head and said softly, “I’m so sorry. I never thought Rick would do anything like that. It all happened so fast. I couldn’t stop it.”
“Rick? You know the person who shot Kane? This wasn’t a robbery?”
Sebastian lifted his head and nodded.
I couldn’t believe this. One of Sebastian’s friends had shot Kane? “I want you to tell me why your friend Rick shot my husband,” I said so loudly that everyone in the waiting area turned and looked at me.
My voice frightened Liam and he started crying, so Alexandria hurried out of the room with him. I waited for Sebastian’s answer, but he said nothing and simply looked down at his hands folded in front of him.
I stood up and screamed, “Tell me! Tell me why this happened!”
Cash and Stefan moved to stand on either side of me, and Sebastian shook his head. “I got myself into something I shouldn’t have and Rick came looking for money I owed him. I didn’t have it, so Kane was reaching into his pocket to give him the money he had. Rick must have thought he was reaching for a gun and that’s when he shot him.”
Stunned by what he said, I stared at his face, suddenly hating everything about him. I wanted to pound my fists against his chest to make him feel as bad as I felt. I wanted him to know how much this hurt.
Cash took a step toward him and snapped, “Got yourself into something you shouldn’t have? Let me guess. Drugs. Some fucking drug deal went bad and now Kane is fighting for his life.”
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. Rick and I had been doing some break-in jobs, but Kane was trying to talk me out of doing any more. That’s what he was doing at my place today. Trying to convince me to stop.”
“Like that makes it any better?” I screamed. “You’ve been nothing but trouble from the minute Kane started with all this. He worried you’d be dangerous to us so he lied to me about you. He continued to try to find out about you even though one of his brothers wanted no part of it. And what did he get for all of it?”
Sebastian began to say he was sorry again, but I didn’t want to hear it anymore. “Don’t! Your apologies won’t change the fact that Kane got shot when it should have been you. Go away! I don’t want to see you ever again!”
My outburst shocked him. Horrified by what I’d said, he opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Finally, he turned around and walked away.
I didn’t care that I’d hurt his feelings. He’d gotten the man I love hurt.
Chapter Eleven
Sebastian
Racing toward the door to get the hell out of that damned hospital, I tried to put everything Kane’s wife had said out of my mind. I wasn’t to blame for Kane getting shot. I never asked him to show up at my place to lecture me on my fucking life. He had some kind of hard on for being my brother, but I didn’t need him or those other two in my life.
Not that I was happy about him getting hurt because of me. I wasn’t. He’d been a pretty decent guy, overall. Well, after that night he and Stefan found me drunk and brought me home. That night he’d been sort of a hard ass dick, but even that didn’t make me happy that he was lying on that operating table with his chest cut open fighting to live.
If only Rick hadn’t found out about the other night.
I stopped just outside the doors to catch my breath and inhaled some a
sshole’s most recent drag of cigarette. Turning to see a guy with a long, greasy ponytail standing way too fucking close to the building, I barked, “Can’t you fucking read? There are sick people here. Like they need that shit in their lungs. If you want to kill yourself slowly, do it fifty feet away where you’re supposed to be.”
He shot back with some bullshit response about it being a free country as he began to walk toward the parking lot, but I didn’t hear most of it. I didn’t ask for his opinion on how much the world didn’t want to deal with his secondhand smoke.
I took another deep breath to clear my head, and at least this one wasn’t full of nicotine and shit that would give me lung cancer. Finding a bench away from the door, I sat down and closed my eyes, trying to push this whole day out of my mind.
Someone sat down next to me and said, “Abbi’s just really scared.”
I looked over and saw Stefan. “I know. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
He nodded and gave me a weak smile. “Kane’s tough. He’ll pull through.”
A twinge of regret pinched at me. I barely knew either of them, but this guy was sitting here with me trying to make me feel better, even though I probably didn’t deserve it.
“Why don’t you think I’m public enemy number one like they do in there?”
Stefan blew the air out of his lungs and shrugged. “I know how much letting you know we existed meant to Kane. Means to Kane.”
I turned toward him, needing some answers about this whole brother thing Kane had going on. “Why is that exactly?”
A big smile spread across his face. “You have to understand Kane isn’t like me or Cash.”
“I know. He told me he had a different mother.”
“I guess you’d call her different. She pretty much tortured him his entire life because he had our father for a dad. She wasn’t exactly mother of the year. Kane’s mother wanted him to be with them, but well, our father wasn’t exactly father of the year either. So Kane got the worst of both worlds.
“Fuck.” The guy had gotten both barrels of crap growing up.
“Yeah. It was pretty bad, from what he’s told me. She took out her anger on him. She never let him forget his father didn’t want them. I mean, she named him Kane, for fuck’s sake. You know, like Cain and Abel. He had the misfortune of looking like our dad, so that didn’t make things any better for him growing up either.”
Just hearing about Kane’s childhood made me depressed. I’d never known anything about my father, but that was better than hearing shit about him every day of my life.
“So that’s why he was so jacked up about finding out about me?”
“Yeah. I think he sees himself in you.”
Since Stefan seemed to be in a confessing kind of mood, I asked, “So how did you three get so close if he’s from a different mother?”
“My father, I mean our father, made it a requirement in his will that if we wanted to inherit anything we needed to work together at a business and make it successful. So the three of us started a club, and once it became a success, we got our inheritances.”
Now I was even more curious about this father I never knew about. “Inheritance?”
Stefan nodded, running his hands through his hair. “You know, I think that’s another reason Kane was so into finding you. I’m sorry our father never did anything for you. As I said, he wasn’t father of the year. In fact, I’d venture a guess that only my brother Cash has anything really great to say about him.”
“Cash? I’m guessing he’s the one who definitely doesn’t like me,” I said, remembering how angry the other guy was inside.
“Yeah, that’s Cash. He’s the oldest of the three of us. Cash got my father’s name and all his attention growing up. He was the heir, and I was the spare.”
“And Kane and I were the bastards he didn’t give a fuck about.”
For a moment, it looked like what I said pissed Stefan off, but finally he nodded in agreement. “I guess that’s an accurate description of it all. Cash was the apple of my father’s eye. He looked like him, had his name, and my father always let him know how much he thought of him. Cash was the golden child. I was too much like my mother. She’s the woman inside with Abbi.”
Now I was really confused. “Wait a second. Your mother is in there with Abbi worrying about the son that her husband had with some woman?”
Chuckling, he patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome to the family. It must look pretty fucked up from an outsider’s point of view, I guess, but yeah, she loves Kane as much as she loves Cash and me.”
I tried to imagine how that worked but couldn’t. “No offense, but yeah, that seems fucked up.”
“That’s my mother for you. She loved my father so she accepted how he was. Now she accepts the people who came from that.”
We sat there outside the hospital entrance for a few minutes saying nothing until I had to ask why he wanted to get to know me. “So I know why Kane was curious about me, but why were you?”
Stefan looked off in the distance and thought about my question for a while before turning to look at me. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure. I knew Kane was all about it and Cash wanted nothing to do with finding you, but I wasn’t sure one way or another. It was my girlfriend who convinced me to at least find out. I figured I had nothing to lose.”
“You don’t mind not being the youngest anymore?”
“I’m my mother’s youngest and always have been, so that’s not a problem. I figured my father had other kids out there after me anyway. And it’s not like I ever got anything from being his second kid, to be honest. I was the spare.”
Something in the way Stefan kept saying that made me feel like he’d had some of that same shittiness Kane had lived through growing up. This Cassian March guy had created a lot of grief for people in his life, it seemed.
“I have to tell you it’s freaking me out a little knowing that I look so much like these two other people. I joked, halfway serious, with Kane when he came over today that he was me from the future. You know, like you see on TV. I think your brother could be me from the future but really pissed off.”
Laughing, Stefan nodded. “Cash isn’t so bad. He’s just a different kind of person from you and me. He and Kane are serious people. We’re not. Our father was serious like them.”
“I’m guessing it’s nice to look like your own person like you do, though,” I said as I studied how different Stefan looked from the three of us.
He stood from the bench and looked down at me. “Yes and no. It pretty much just makes me odd man out. I better get back in there, but I wanted to make sure you knew this whole finding you thing meant a lot to Kane.” Stefan frowned and said, “Means a lot to him.”
“I hope you’re right about him being tough enough to handle this. I never meant for anything like this to happen. I wish Kane had listened to me when I told him to slip out the window when Rick got there.”
“That’s not like him. Kane’s thing is saving people. Always has been. It might be the only good thing that came from growing up with that mother of his.”
Stefan left me sitting there wishing I’d gotten to know Kane better before all this happened. I still didn’t know if I wanted anything to do with having three brothers all of a sudden, but from what I’d learned about Kane, I liked him.
I’d never had a big brother. I didn’t need saving, but it might have been cool to know someone had my back. But even if he survived, I doubted he’d want anything to do with me now. Not when his wife and one of his brothers blamed me for what happened.
It was nice while it lasted, though.
Chapter Twelve
Abbi
The doctor came out after what seemed like forever and let us know Kane had come through surgery okay but the following days would tell how he would do long term. The bullet did a lot of damage, even nicking his heart, but the doctor believed they’d found all of it, so now we just had to pray his body could do what it had to so he could b
e up and around again.
I smiled as he spoke the words, hearing them without really hearing what he was saying. All I could think of was Kane lying in that bed as he fought to stay with the ones he loved. I knew he would fight, but would he be strong enough now to overcome what that bullet did?
When they finally took me to see him, the shock of him lying in that hospital bed with all those tubes and wires attached to him almost made me burst into tears. I’d watched him sleeping many times as he lay next to me in bed, still except for his chest rising and falling with each breath. Even asleep, Kane always looked strong and powerful.
But now, his power looked like it had been sapped from him, leaving the outside of Kane intact but not the inside.
I sat down at his bedside and took his hand in mine. I loved the feel of his long fingers intertwined with my much smaller ones. Their harshness touching my softness always struck me as something memorable.
The nurses left me alone with him, so I did what I always did when I was worried about us. I talked. I didn’t know if he understood what I was saying or even heard me, but if there was the slightest chance he did, I needed him to know I was there with him.
“Kane, I’m right here. You’re not alone, and I promise I won’t leave here until you open your eyes and tell me you’re going to fine. Liam and Annalea are with Alexandria, so you don’t have to worry. After you and me, there’s no one we can trust more with our babies than their grandmother.”
I stopped for a moment, the emotion of the moment choking me. The last time the kids had been out at Alexandria’s, Kane and I had enjoyed a rare night of romance. Now days later, they were back at her house, and we were here in a hospital as he recovered from being shot.
How quickly things could change.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed aside my sadness and continued to talk to him about all the things he’d miss if he didn’t survive this.
“You know, when I was out in the waiting room with Liam, I was looking at him as he played with my hair and realized for the first time that he’s so much like you with that. You’ve always loved playing with my hair. Do you remember that first night at your apartment on top of Club X? My hair was much shorter then, but as I lay in your arms and drifted off to sleep, feeling safer than I’d felt in so long, you played with the ends of my hair. I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I loved that.”
