DADDY AT THE ALTAR

by Claire St. Rose

  “What are you doing here?” I asked again. I was starting to think he’d been dumb enough to come.

  “I had to come and get her, Daniel. She’s a woman, the first one I liked even just a little. And she was different, not like the girls we usually run into.”

  He was right about that. Sarah was the same kind of different for him as Emily was for me. But that didn’t change the fact that Taylor had gone against what I’d asked him to do and come here to rescue her.

  “Please tell me you had a plan, at least. Because you obviously had no backup and you had no weapon.”

  Taylor looked down at his hands and winced like even the small movements was too much. If he was walking out of this with just a concussion, he would be lucky. I hoped that it was nothing more serious.

  “I was just so mad that you kept on telling me what to do. I can handle myself, Daniel.”

  I looked at him and color drained out of his face. He looked down again.

  “At least, I thought I could.”

  I shook my head and got up. I held out a hand and helped Taylor to his feet. Thank God he could stand. He looked a little green in the face, no doubt in pain, but he didn’t need physical support. Small blessings.

  “You get outside,” I said to Taylor. “Emily is in the car. I’m going to look for Sarah.”

  “The hell you are. I’m coming with you.”

  “Do you honestly think now is the time to be an ass about this? Look at you, you’re covered in blood and you’ve been unconscious for God knows how long because you were stupid in the first place.”

  Taylor opened his mouth but then screaming cut him off. We both turned our heads and listened. It was muffled, but it was nearby.

  “Sarah,” we said at the same time.

  I took one step in the direction of the screaming when the car horn started honking outside. Not once, not twice, not even in rhythm, but long and insistent. Like a cry for help.

  “Fuck,” I swore. “She’s in trouble.”

  I turned for the door. If we were going out there now, Taylor would be in trouble again. I looked at him. How was I going to keep him out of the way? By giving him exactly what he wanted.

  I picked up a chair and kicked the leg until it broke off. It was a crude club, awkward to hold with a splintered tip, but it would do. I handed it to Taylor.

  “Take this. Hit anyone that comes at you. Go and get Sarah out. I need to help Emily.”

  Taylor took the makeshift club and nodded. Determination was on his face and the combination with the blood made him look grim. I wouldn’t want to cross his path. I turned and ran for the door.

  I skidded to a halt just inside the door and ran back to the reception desk. I needed some kind of weapon to defend myself, and a chair leg wasn’t going to do it for me. I had the feeling that there were more dangerous things outside. I started going through the drawers in the reception desk, finding pens and scissors and documents. Nothing that would save a life. Nothing that would take one.

  I felt around the bottom of the desktop and found a gun pouch. The gun was still in it.

  Thank God. I pulled it out, checked the clip, and loaded it. It was a handgun, but it was better than nothing. I tucked it into the back of my jeans and ran for the door.

  Emily was still honking the horn. When I opened the door, the car was surrounded by men. They were rough-looking guys, with long or shabby hair, tattered clothes, and ill intentions. I recognized one of them. It was a guy I’d brought in a while ago, someone who had skipped parole and murdered another woman before I’d caught up to him.

  When I looked the rest over, I started recognizing them one by one. Some of them I could even remember what their crimes were, what the state had against them. And they all had one thing in common…they’d all been caught through our bounty hunting business. I’d caught all of them.

  In the middle of the group, at Emily’s door, I saw Ruby. Her copper hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she wore a Grease kind of outfit, leggings, a tight top, and ballet pumps, looking like she thought she was the shit.

  Some things never changed, not even when you were surrounded by the thugs you were meant to put away. I was starting to guess what she’d done. She’d recruited them to work for her. I had no doubt that she had someone on the inside on the police force helping her bail these guys out, and I knew that they would have nothing against her.

  Only against me.

  They didn’t know that she was behind the recapturing process. They would just remember that I brought them in. I had to admit it was clever. There was no better way to protect yourself than to choose the people who hated the one person you were protecting yourself again. The only problem was that this was about Emily, and like everyone else, Ruby had underestimated me. I wasn’t the man she loved, the one she’d dated anymore.

  I was the man she’d just fucked over. The pent-up anger I’d been holding onto since the morning manifested itself in a new wave of rage. Everything that had happened to Taylor had been because of her, and he’d seen her as a sister of sorts. That was the worst kind of betrayal. In this world, loyalty was as strong as blood ties. And Ruby had crossed the line.

  I didn’t think before I pulled out the gun. This was a grown-up game now. I pointed it at her head and started down the steps.

  “Get the fuck away from the car,” I said in a loud voice. The men who were crowding Emily whipped their heads around to me, but they’d been around enough guns and none of them budged. Ruby turned her head slower, as if she’d been expecting me.

  “Hello, Daniel,” she said and smiled at me. It was a brilliant smile, the kind of smile that used to melt me on the inside and make my knees go weak. Her brilliant green eyes shimmered, and she looked healthy and happy.

  There were just a few problems with this picture; I didn’t feel about her the way I used to. Maybe until now there had been remnants, but she’d successfully eliminated those. She was the one who put Taylor in hospital. She’d betrayed me. She’d broken the law. And most of all, she was threatening the one woman that had come to mean everything to me.

  Big mistake.

  “I said, back the fuck away from the car.”

  When I didn’t return her happy smile, her face fell, and the menace and hatred she was capable of flared on her face, turning her from magazine pretty to downright terrifying. Well, if she wanted to be this way, I could play dirty, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Emily

  Daniel looked nervous, walking toward the front door of the morgue. I didn’t blame him. This gave a whole new definition to the saying “knocking on death’s door.” He didn’t even have a gun with him or any other kind of weapon.

  Surely, he didn’t go out bounty hunting barehanded? Why had he come here with nothing to protect us? Unless it was so that the odds were in Sarah’s favor. Maybe having a gun would have put her in more danger. Maybe he was keeping her safe, and that was something I could respect.

  His nervousness wasn’t nearly as serious as my own. I sat in the car, watching him glance over his shoulder as he slipped in through that door and it felt like I couldn’t breathe. There was so much that could go wrong. What if he walked into an ambush? What if we were at the wrong place? What if Sarah had been killed straight away and none of this was real in the first place? I had so many questions that they made my head spin.

  I pushed them away. I couldn’t sit here expecting the worst. Daniel was in there being a hero, doing God knew what to find Sarah. The best I could do was sit out here where he asked me to stay and be positive about it.

  I glanced at the steering wheel. He’d told me to honk the horn if there was trouble. The idea wasn’t that there would be, obviously, but in the event that there was, it seemed like a piss poor way to defend myself. I checked the doors again, made sure that they really were locked, and took a deep breath, forcing myself to focus only on the process of breathing.

  He was fine in there. Sarah was fine. I was fine. Everything would be fine
. Maybe if I told myself that often enough I would believe it.

  I looked at the door where Daniel had disappeared. How long would he be? What was he facing in there?

  I shook my head. I just had to wait. Patience was a pain in the ass. I was a doctor in the ER and I could handle a lot of things, but sitting quietly in a car, waiting for someone else to save the day was not a strong suit. I sucked at it. I wanted to go in there and help. I wanted to be the one to save the day, because I usually was. The problem was that I wouldn’t know how.

  Daniel had been right to ask me to stay in the car. It was right of me to listen to him.

  Movement caught my attention to the side of the building. A figure removed himself from the shadows and started walking toward me. The moment he stepped into the light of the sun that had risen far enough to illuminate at least this side of the building, I realized that it wasn’t a he, but in fact, a she.

  The way she walked wasn’t like that of a man. She swayed her hips and moved as if her body was an asset, not an afterthought. She wore a hood, though, creating shadows of her own over her face, and I couldn’t see her properly. It wasn’t Sarah…that much I knew…which meant that I wasn’t going to get out and rush to her. I wasn’t going to unlock the car.

  I wound down the window the smallest bit—just enough so that sound could travel through it, but nothing else. There wasn’t even space for a finger.

  “Hello, Emily,” she said, and her voice sounded familiar. I frowned at the same time she lifted her hands to remove her hood. Copper-colored hair fell out over her shoulders like only the hood had been holding it back, and in the sunlight, her eyes were now a brilliant green, the kind that made you look twice. But her face was smug, and it detracted from what would have been naturally attractive.

  “Ruby,” I said, recognizing her face. She was stunning in real life. The low quality image on the business card didn’t do her justice.

  “Yes,” she answered and smiled a brilliant smile that crinkled the skin on both sides of her eyes. In a parallel universe, she would be someone I might want to know better. But the images of all those people dying in my hospital were too fresh in my mind, pinned to my frontal lobe so that she became the enemy. And Sarah. She had Sarah.

  “I’m so glad you came,” she said. In any other circumstance, I might have believed it.

  “Where’s Sarah?” I asked.

  She laughed and it was a happy sound that didn’t fit with the surroundings or the situation. In fact, nothing about her did. It was very deceiving, looking at her so out of place in this grim world. Maybe that was how she got what she wanted; it would be easy to be a villain when you looked innocent and pure.

  “I don’t want to talk about Sarah,” she said. “I want to talk about Daniel.”

  “What about him?”

  “I want you to give him back.”

  I pulled a face. “It’s not like he’s an object that I stole from you. He’s a living, breathing person who made his own choices.”

  Ruby’s face turned into a scowl and that happy air dissipated, leaving someone behind who I genuinely believed could be dangerous. She had different faces, I was starting to realize.

  “I know that men are defenseless against a woman who knows what she wants,” Ruby said. “And I know that you want Daniel. Now I’m going to tell you what I want. Leave him alone.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe what she was saying to me. All of this was for a boy who broke her heart?

  “Don’t you think all the things you’re doing are a little excessive?” I asked. I was brave now. I’d been nervous, but she was a woman. Granted, she had terrible mood swings and a bad grudge, but she wasn’t dangerous.

  More movement happened around the side of the building, and one-by-one men started filtering out. Mean looking men. Men with dead eyes and compassionless faces. I frowned. We were two women alone in a parking lot. It was a recipe for disaster if I’d ever seen one. The men started circling the car, and when Ruby nodded to one of them, I realized they were with her.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  She laughed again, but this time the laugh was menacing.

  “Come now, Emily. Let’s not play games, okay?”

  “Who’s playing?” I asked. My voice was a little shaky, now, and I didn’t feel nearly as brave as a moment before. The men started pulling out knives. Some of them were pocketknives with blades about the size of my pinky. Still, I knew that a well-placed knife like that could cause major problems. Other knives, however, were a lot bigger. I even saw a hunting knife the length of my forearm, and I shuddered.

  I was in the car. The doors were locked. The knives wouldn’t be able to reach me unless they broke a window. I prayed they wouldn’t do that. Ruby smiled at me, showing white teeth and soulless eyes, and I reached over and pressed the horn of the car, holding it in like a scream. I didn’t care what Daniel was busy doing; I was surrounded by a bunch of savages with knives and an ex-girlfriend with a grudge, and I was scared shitless.

  After everything I’d done in my life to right all my damn wrongs, this was where I’d ended up…in a car surrounded by killers. I wasn’t under any illusion that those knives might just be for show. This was my punishment for what had happened to Chrissy, wasn’t it? I had failed her in so many ways, and no matter how many lives I’d saved after her death, I hadn’t saved hers.

  And now I was sitting in a car, surrounded by men with knives, in an ordeal that was a lot like hers had been. Sure, she’d died because of drugs, not people. The danger had only been on the inside, not the outside. It was really all the same at the end of it.

  The door burst open a couple of seconds later, and Daniel barreled out. He paused a moment and stared at the scenario. I doubted he’d expected that. He looked at the men one-by-one, and as his eyes took in the sight, his anger grew until even I could feel it in the air.

  He pulled out a gun. Where the hell had he found a gun? He pointed it at the group of men.

  “Get away from the car,” he said in a loud voice. The men looked at him, but they didn’t seem worried about the gun at all. They didn’t move a muscle. Ruby lifted her head slowly and looked at Daniel in a way that reminded me of those slow-motion shots done in romance movies.

  “Hello, Daniel,” she said, and her voice was syrupy.

  Daniel didn’t respond to her friendly approach. In fact, it looked like it just pissed him off even more.

  “I said, back the fuck away from the car,” he said. His voice was low and gravelly, and if I didn’t know him the way I did, even I would have been scared. Ruby’s face changed. The sweet, innocent look fell away and a mask of hatred covered her features, making me believe that she was capable of inflicting a lot of pain without one ounce of regret. I was scared.

  Daniel didn’t look like he was.

  Daniel held the gun up, pointing at them with a straight arm and started walking toward the car. By the look on his face—something that matched Ruby’s look very closely—this was going to get very ugly, very quickly. And I was unarmed and stuck. The tension and the drama switched off my emotions, and my logical mind clicked on the way it did when a severe case came in through my doors in the ER. I thought on my feet and found solutions because that was the one thing I was good at.

  I reached to the back seat and found my medical bag in the foot well where it always was. Thank God we’d come in my car and not on Daniel’s bike. I had razor blades in the medical bag, something I’d added myself after I’d bought it. You never knew what kind of emergency you would run into, and razor blades were almost just as good as a scalpel when it came down to it.

  It was the old-fashioned razor blades, not the new protected ones. And they would do great for self-defense, too. The reason I didn’t just have a scalpel or two was because police didn’t ask questions this way.

  I zipped open the bag and found the packet of razor blades. I opened it up with numb fingers, glancing up at the group of people around me to mak
e sure no one saw. They were all distracted by Daniel and his gun, marching toward them with a vengeance. At least he looked like he was in charge. The razor blades were still great back up for self-defense.

  I slipped one out and held it in the palm of my hand, cupping it so that I held onto the sides and not the dangerous blade itself. Not that I thought I was in danger…so far the windows were still intact. I was safe inside, and most of the guys had their attention on Daniel with the gun.

  I glanced at Ruby. She didn’t look nervous at all with that gun out. In fact, she had a bored look on her face when she glanced at the gun, like it was just a run-of-the-mill kind of thing. Maybe it was for her. Daniel had been with her for a long time, and she’d been a part of this kind of life for even longer. Maybe guns to her were the same as penicillin to me. Run of the mill.