Levi gripped Remi’s shoulder and squeezed down. “It’s good to have you back, brother.”
The relief in his voice couldn’t be missed, but it drew Remi’s attention for less than a second before he came back to me. Recognition sparked a moment later, and a guttural groan escaped. “That’s Abigail Roslyn,” he muttered. His grasp on the bed rails was shaky at best, but he forced himself upright nonetheless. Leah moved close, her sure hands supporting his back to keep him that way. Remi barely seemed to notice—the entire time, he stared at me, eyes wide, incredulous. And increasingly angry.
The stare jerked to his brother then. “Goddamn it, Levi, what the fuck have you done?”
Chapter Twenty-One
“What I had to,” Levi said, impassive as stone, but his gaze traveled over his brother despite the blankness of his expression, seeming to catalog every sign of weakness and strength. When Remi listed to one side, he was right there, holding him up.
Remi jerked away. “Don’t—” The effort it took to hold himself upright shook through his muscles, seeming ready to topple him at any moment, but these brothers shared more than their skills with weapons, apparently. I’d never seen three more stubborn men.
“You’ve painted a target on our backs.”
Levi nodded his head toward the gunshot wound in the hollow of Remi’s shoulder. “Do you really think it matters?”
We’d had this argument more than once with Levi and gotten nowhere, but one look at the brothers’ faces convinced me to stay out of it. Not Leah—I swear the woman didn’t know the meaning of the word intimidated. She ignored Levi’s looming presence as she fiddled with the controls on the side of the bed. Slowly the back part rose until Remi was fully supported. He tried to hide his relief as he settled against the pillow, but I could see it in the softening lines around his mouth, the returning color in his knuckles where he gripped the railing.
His tired eyes found me again. Remi sucked in a ragged breath. “Yes, I think what we do matters.”
It was what Levi had taught them to believe. Don’t harm the innocent. But I was beginning to realize that what Levi had taught his brothers and what he lived weren’t necessarily the same. There was a different rule, a higher purpose that Levi answered to, and looking at him now, watching him watch his brothers, I thought I knew what that purpose was.
Eli ran a hand through his hair, leaving the blond strands standing on end. “Do we really need to have this discussion now?”
“If not now, when?” Remi asked him.
“I don’t know, maybe when you’re not just waking up from being in a coma for a week and still healing from a hole in your fucking shoulder?”
Neither Remi nor Levi was going to leave it alone; one look told me that. Levi stood granite-still, impassive, thick arms crossed over his chest. The cold, dangerous assassin I’d seen for the first time the morning after Levi had taken my virginity was back, and he was immovable. Remi, though…his nostrils flared, and the glare he shot Levi glowed with amber fire. For a moment I saw not a wounded man but an avenging angel, intent on justice. A warrior fighting for a cause. He was Levi’s opposite; one brother shunned emotion, and the other blazed so bright with it that I had to look away.
No, there was no stopping this head-on collision.
“There was a target on our backs the minute we took Roslyn’s contract, and you know it. Getting rid of him is the only way out.”
“So you kidnapped his daughter?” Remi barked. A grimace of pain crossed his lips. “That’s not getting rid of him. That’s heaping coals on the monster’s head and hoping you can handle the fallout.”
“I don’t have to hope. I know.”
“Remi…” Leah moved closer to the side of the bed and grasped Remi’s wrist, fingertips on the pulse point. Checking his heart rate. Her frown said she didn’t like what she was feeling.
Remi shot her a confused look before turning back to his brother. “You need to let her go. Now. You didn’t have to do this.”
“I didn’t have to.” Levi leaned in, satisfaction in every line of his body. “I wanted to. I want to annihilate that son of a bitch’s life piece by piece until there’s nothing left but his body; then I want to destroy that too. And nothing can stop me.”
“Then you’re no better than he is,” Remi yelled.
Levi didn’t flinch away from his brother’s accusation. “I haven’t been better than him since I was eleven years old. You know that as well as I do. You are better, you and Elijah; that’s all I care about.”
And there it was, Levi’s entire purpose in a nutshell.
Remi was shaking his head. “That wasn’t your fault.”
“No.” Levi’s chuckle had a bitter tinge. “Maybe I inherited more from old Uncle Amos than any of us realized.”
“You are nothing like him. You never were,” Eli countered.
“Eli—”
Levi’s voice overrode Remi’s. “I wasn’t? I trained and I waited, and when I knew I could take him, I bathed in his blood.” Every word grew louder and louder until Levi’s voice boomed through the room, through my heart. “And you know what? I enjoyed every minute of killing him. Every fucking minute.”
An alarm sounded, something beside the bed.
“Remi.” Leah’s voice was at its most soothing, dripping with calm in the midst of the raging emotions dominating the room. She reached to turn off the annoying sound. “You need to calm down a bit.”
No one but me seemed to hear her. “Remi…” I said.
“No.” Remi swallowed hard. His sick-bed pallor took on a green tint. “No.”
Levi flung his arms in the air. “No, what? You don’t think I savored cutting that bastard into tiny little pieces? I did. He killed our parents! His own flesh-and-blood. And for what? Fucking money. That sick fuck wouldn’t have stopped there, either. I hid you both for a reason. Amos Agozi deserved to die, as painfully and slowly as possible, and I didn’t care who or what I had to mow down to make sure it happened. For you. For Eli. For our family.” His steel-gray gaze glittered with ice. “I didn’t regret it then, and I still don’t.”
“If you did it for revenge, maybe you should,” Remi argued.
“No.” Levi gritted his teeth on the word, spitting it out like a bullet. “I shouldn’t.”
A second alarm sounded, this one louder than the first. The men ignored it, staring at each other like strangers who’d never met before. And maybe they hadn’t—these parts of themselves, anyway. I could see the cold rage building in Levi’s expression, quivering through his big body like an eruption waiting to blow. Who would get caught in that blast? A glance at Leah’s worried expression had me hoping it wasn’t the brother he’d done so much to save.
“Revenge is just another word for what I do—and I do it well, thoroughly, and without emotion. I don’t have the luxury of feeling anything,” Levi growled, his tone belying his words. “Emotion died in me a long time ago; it had to. All that matters, all I care about, is keeping my family safe. And I’ll do that no matter the cost.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Remi growled right back. “If you didn’t feel anything, she wouldn’t be here.” He pointed my way without looking at me. “You’re not doing an emotionless job—you’re acting on nothing but emotion. Once you took Roslyn’s child, you gave in to the need not only to kill him physically, but to tear out his heart.”
Between one breath and the next, Levi was in Remi’s face. “I’ll tell you what I feel—a burning need to keep you alive.” He shot a glance at Eli. “Both of you. Nothing and no one else matters. Period.”
“Of course other people matter. She’s a person. She has a life. You had no right to use her in your game against Roslyn. There’s always another way. You taught me that.”
“I lied.”
Remi’s laugh was filled with gravel. “No, what you lied about was keeping your emotions out of it. You like to play the coldhearted bastard, but the truth is, you were in a rage after I got s
hot, and you took it out on her instead of the real target.”
“No! No.” Levi’s hands fisted at his sides, the palpable force of his anger thickening the muscles in his arms and neck as he tensed. “I hurt the real target by taking her.”
“Did you? At what cost? You saw how he treated her when I did the surveillance. You know what that bastard is like. She's been hurt enough.”
“What?”
The question escaped before I could stop it. Remi had been watching me even before the shooting? I’d thought… Levi knew intimate details—my habits, my comings and going. It had never occurred to me that he’d known the exact nature of my relationship with my father. He’d known how little I mattered, and still he’d used me as a pawn.
His opening gambit. The most insignificant pawn in his arsenal. Even the money had been more important.
“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Remi asked.
Levi scoffed. “Believe me, she figured it out quick enough.”
Not all of it, apparently. I wouldn’t feel this way if I had.
My gaze met Remi’s, and I knew he read the truth there, the revelations and wounds and pain. His eyes went dark.
“Like my methods or not, I am protecting you.”
Remi huffed out a breath, and for a moment I swore I saw a sheen of tears in his eyes as he stared at his brother. “Sure. Right. That song and dance is getting pretty tired there, brother.” He shifted in the bed, and a grimace twisted his mouth as he reached up to rub near the site of his gunshot wound. His breath sped up, the sound ragged in the quiet. Leah swore, her gaze on the machines beeping and humming beside the bed.
“What happens when Derrick Roslyn comes here?” Remi asked.
“We’ll be long gone by then.”
“And her?” He nodded in my direction.
Levi didn’t respond. Another arrow pierced my heart.
“Then fuck you,” Remi rasped.
Eli reached for his brother. “You don’t mean that, Remi.”
“Wanna bet?” Remi jerked away from his brother’s hold and shifted his legs as if he would get out of his hospital bed. Midswing, his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped against the raised back of the bed. All eyes shot to Remi, then Leah.
The woman had been a Valkyrie fighting to get back to her daughter, but right now, standing with the port for Remi’s IV in one hand and an empty needle in the other, the fire in her eyes rivaled even that first moment I’d seen her.
“What the hell did you do?” Levi shouted.
Leah placed the needle on a nearby table, then turned to glare at her captor. “What I had to. I said he needed to calm down, but apparently you didn’t hear me. Hear me now.” She jammed her fists onto her hips. “You can kill whomever you want, but not my patient. Get the fuck out. All of you. Right now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Levi left. Eli kept telling me not to worry, that his brother was never far away, mostly because he didn’t trust anyone but himself when it came to keeping them safe—as if this morning’s drama hadn’t told me that. I spent the day helping Leah in any way I could.
I was taking in the soup Eli had brought home for lunch when I caught Remi’s gravel-rough voice for the first time since Leah had drugged him this morning.
“Who are you, anyway? I know we aren’t at the hospital. How did Levi find a nurse?”
“He found me at the hospital, actually, while you were still there. Right before a man tried to attack you. Eli…asked me to come, to help stabilize you.”
“You mean he forced you.”
Leah didn’t answer.
“What’s your name again?”
“Leah.”
“Leah, I’m going to get you out of here. I promise. No one is going to hurt you.”
“Just get better, Remi. If you don’t, you won’t be able to deliver on that promise.”
A smile tugged at my lips. I admired Leah’s spunk. I wasn’t sure if it came from being a nurse, a mom, or something else in her life, but she had a spark I struggled to find under all the layers of training and attachment and people pleasing that had buried what my personality might have otherwise been, and I knew with sudden clarity that I wanted to be like this woman when I “grew up.” When I rediscovered me.
Stepping into the sickroom with my tray drew both occupants’ attention. There was something about the way Remi watched me, like I was a bug under a microscope, that made my skin itch. Did he blame me for Levi’s actions? Did he think I could change anything in this situation? I was the one with the least amount of power in the warehouse. So why did those amber eyes make me feel guilty?
“I brought lunch.”
Obviously. But Leah merely smiled when she took the tray from me. I stood at the foot of Remi’s bed just as I had that morning, awkwardly gripping the hem of my T-shirt with nervous hands as I watched her position the tray on Remi’s lap, setting her own food aside. Remi’s hands shook as he tried to lift his spoon, but Leah was right there, guiding him, making sure he ate. She must be a fantastic nurse, compassionate as well as competent. Would I ever go back to pursuing my degree, or had my dreams of being a nurse died the night I’d been taken?
“Why am I so damn weak?”
It sounded like Remi appreciated compassion as much as his brothers did. If I hadn’t been so aware of the man’s odd gaze watching me, I might’ve rolled my eyes.
“Because you’ve been flat on your back for a week, maybe?” Leah’s tone was acerbic. “You were in a coma; you can’t expect to just wake up and be ready for a marathon.”
“A gunshot wound doesn’t put you in a coma unless it’s in the head—I’ve had enough to know. What happened?”
“I guess you wouldn’t remember any of it, would you?” Leah lifted the water glass for Remi to drink. “The gunshot missed anything vital, thank your lucky stars…”
Remi carefully wiped his mouth with a napkin. I thought I caught a smirk behind the paper. “Dickhead wasn’t as good a shot as he thought.”
“Right.” Leah shot me an exasperated glance. “Unfortunately it did knock you off a balcony two stories up. You were found on the ground beneath after your brother made a panicked 911 call.”
“Levi?”
“No, Eli. Levi didn’t stick around.”
Remi grunted, then winced. “He would’ve secured the weapons and cleaned the scene.”
“Nice of him.”
Remi shook his head, then winced. “More than you’d probably think. Just ensuring we were all covered and I didn’t end up in the prison hospital ward.”
“What about the other guy?” I dared to ask. “The one who shot you.”
Remi’s smirk was right out in the open then. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.”
Probably not. An ache in my fingers had me glancing down. My hands were white, twisted hard enough in my shirt to almost tear it. I’d seen Levi’s anger; I really didn’t want to imagine being on the receiving end of his full-blown rage.
I deliberately relaxed my grip and smoothed down my tee. When I raised my head, my gaze clashed with Remi’s again. Yes, definitely a bug under a microscope. I let my “hostess” mask slip down, surprised it had taken me this long to reach for it. Things were definitely changing inside me. Probably shouldn’t be a surprise after all I’d been through, but it left me dangling, without the tried-and-true methods I’d always fallen back on to protect myself. I was caught in the change, stripped bare, vulnerable, and like a doe in the hunter’s sites, I had no idea how to protect myself except to run.
“Stop staring and eat, Remi,” Leah said, proving her compassion extended beyond her patient. “You won’t get better if you don’t. I’ll need to switch you over to oral meds and get the IV and cath out today.”
Remi grimaced, but I noticed he obeyed her. Maybe not all of the assassin brothers were stubborn to a fault.
I also noticed that he didn’t look at Leah like he looked at me. Rather than trying to dissect her with his gaz
e, his look was almost…fascinated? Maybe not that deep, not yet, but something in those amber eyes softened as he watched her, yet became even more intense. Was he attracted; was that it? Remembering Leah’s daughter, I hoped not. The last thing Leah needed was to catch the attention of these men. Hopefully with Remi awake, she could go home soon and leave this whole nightmare behind.
I had no doubt I wouldn’t be so lucky.
Leah sent me back to the kitchen after they finished their meals. I closed the door behind me, giving nurse and patient privacy to do what needed to be done. A half hour later Leah called Eli in to help Remi walk to the bathroom.
Still Levi didn’t return.
Remi continued to improve throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, Eli retreated to his brother’s bedside, and the whispered conversations between them told me something was up, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was going on. Finally it was Eli who sat me down on the couch.
“What’s wrong?” It was the only reason the brother I’d dubbed “the pissy one” would be talking to me. “Is Levi okay?”
What kind of idiot asks if her kidnapper is okay? I mean, really, what was up with this Stockholm syndrome thing?
Eli didn’t question it, though. “He’s fine. He’ll be back soon.” The same thing he’d said all day. “There is something else we need to discuss.”
There was likely no avoiding whatever the next disaster was, so I didn’t bother trying. “Okay.”
“There’s something being reported on the news sites…”
Eli wouldn’t meet my eyes; that’s when I knew it was bad. I had the sudden urge to rip the Band-Aid off and get the pain over with already. “Just spit it out, Eli.”
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