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“No sign of him,” he said. “Considering the depth of the snow, I doubt he’ll be uncovered any time soon. We’ll just have to wait until global warming takes its toll.”
I gave him a half grin, but it hurt to do so.
“I saw him go down,” I told him. “The only way I kept from being buried was from hitting a ledge part way down. That’s what broke my leg, but it stopped me long enough for the rest of the avalanche to pass over me. He kept going to the bottom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” I hoped I sounded convincing.
“Any chance he could have survived?”
“Not as far as I could tell.”
Landon took in a breath, filling his lungs deeply before he stood up.
“I’m heading back to Seattle,” he announced. “John Paul is arranging for you to be moved to a hospital in Miami. It will take a day or two, but you can finish your recovery from there. You were in a skiing accident in case anyone asks.”
“Good to know.”
“I’ll be in touch.” He started for the door.
“Landon?”
He turned back to me.
“I’m done now,” I said as I looked straight at him. “No more tournaments. No more favors. This was it.”
Landon nodded but didn’t look back at me. I had no doubt that he was simply agreeing because he knew it was what I wanted to hear. Evan had been right—there was no way out of this except to eliminate those who had leverage over you.
I have to kill him.
First things first—I was in no shape to go after Landon.
Should have asked Evan to do it.
No, that wasn’t right. I needed to take care of Landon. I wanted him to know it was me. I didn’t give a shit about Franks—I’d wanted him dead since that night I watched him torture and murder people, Raine’s father included. I didn’t care how it happened as long as he was gone. Landon was a whole other issue. I was going to get him out of my way once and for all, but I couldn’t do that in my current condition. Even at full strength, Landon wouldn’t be an easy man to eliminate, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I still needed to get myself back into shape before I conquered him.
My plan would wait. At least for now, I’d let myself heal.
Getting back to normal was a long fucking road.
I spent two weeks in the hospital after I was transported back to Miami. Had it been any other tournament, I would have told the doctors to fuck off and left earlier, but Raine made me promise to do anything they said. Any time I tried to protest, she’d say something about how Alex was going to need me to be able to walk and run so I could teach him to play football or some such shit.
I couldn’t really argue with her emotionally charged logic. In fact, I thought about it a lot while I was lying around in the private hospital room, going to physical therapy sessions twice a day, and trying to get around on crutches. I thought about how life just wasn’t the same when you had a kid to think about. I loved Raine with every ounce of my being, but Alex…Alex made everything different.
Raine brought him to the hospital a lot while I was recovering. We stuck with the skiing accident story though the way he looked at both of us when we told him gave me the impression he didn’t believe a word of it. The kid had been in a mob family for the first six years of his life, so he had probably seen more shit than he should have for a kid his age.
While he visited, he’d color pictures of the three of us or of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He also kept drawing the same picture over and over again of a house with a big field of rolling hills behind it. He said it was the place we were all going to live someday. All of the pictures ended up taped to the walls of the hospital room so I could see them from the bed.
The more I watched him, the more I wanted to ensure he had the best fucking childhood anyone had ever given a kid. I wanted to make up for not being there when he was younger but also for what he had to go through living with Jillian and her husband. I didn’t know the details, but Alex’s reaction to his parents’ death was so…calm. There had to be more to it than he was sharing, but I didn’t know what. I just knew he didn’t talk about them much at all.
I had no idea how to handle it. I’d never been a father and certainly didn’t know shit about child psychology. My only experience was my own fucked up life, and I didn’t want his to be anything like that. Everything about Alex’s life needed to be the exact opposite of mine. That meant I had to change.
I had always been a selfish bastard.
Even when I considered everything I’d done to try to make Raine happy since we returned from our isolation on the island, I’d still been thinking more of myself than her. My focus was on how miserable I was and not on how I needed to be. I was supposed to be her partner in life, but I wasn’t. I had been focused on pitying myself and ignoring what she wanted and needed from me. She had put up with it, but it also reminded me of how unworthy I was of her, not because of my past, but because of the present.
As I lay in the bed, I was still being that man from the past. I couldn’t think of much of anything except how I was going to get rid of Landon. I also waited for news of Franks, but I was in the dark about everything that had happened after the tournament ended. By the time I was released,
