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“I was afraid you were…that you weren’t coming back.”
“Ah.” I’m not surprised, and I forget this is her first time dealing with something like this. “That is a possible reality you need to accept,” I tell her. I try to shift my legs, but all that succeeds in doing is sending nerve pain like white-hot flames into the ghost of my foot. I do my best to hold back the wince, but from the look on her face, I must be obvious. “All of this,” I tell her, waving my hand at my legs, “is an inevitability. At some point, we all die. And we don’t live in a world where men like me end up some doddering old man in assisted living, eating applesauce and Viagra Tic Tacs. My end will be bloody and painful and sudden.”
She swallows hard. “Sure, but that’s not happening yet.”
No, I suppose not. I knew it wasn’t my time when they managed to roll my SUV. I knew it wasn’t my time when I woke up half-dead from blood loss, missing a foot, sitting in a freezing storage locker. My threads of fate are still firmly intact.
“You should get some sleep,” I finally tell her. My words are slurring from the drugs, and she looks at me with eyes full of something—not pity, but not quite sympathy either. I wish my head was clearer, but tomorrow will be the day for that.
I’m drifting in darkness before she leaves, and the last thing I feel before the door clicks shut is a careful, tender hand brushing hair off my forehead. Then warm lips—one against each eye.
Chapter9
KANE
I wake three times.The first two are from nurses checking on my vitals. At one point, I think Ari is with them, but that’s probably a hallucination. I have no doubt that he’s utilizing Phoenix and James to help him deal with his comedown, which means I likely won’t see any of them for a little while.
The third time I wake up, there are huge, rough hands brushing down my torso. The drugs have mostly worn off, and the pain is intense, but I lie still under the wandering touch because I know Phoenix needs this. One of the biggest struggles he had to overcome was not having his eyes be able to tell him what was in front of him.
He has never been a man quick to trust, so to take away one of those senses was literal hell.
I hold my breath as the tips of his fingers brush along the spot where my hospital sheet ends. My stump is wrapped in some sort of plaster, like a giant cast which I assume is to protect it, and when Phoenix realizes this, he’s a little rougher in his explorations.
“I know you’re awake,” he says after a beat.
I huff a quiet laugh as his hands trail back up. His fingers explore my face, catching on all the places I’m swollen and scabbed and will eventually be scarred. His fingers on my nose tell me it’s probably broken and has been reset, and his thumb over my bottom lip stings from where it was torn open.
God only knows what I must look like, and under his touch, his imagination is probably just as vivid.
If not worse.
“We had a deal,” he murmurs, leaning over me and dropping his forehead against mine. The deal I forced him into when I found him in that tub. Neither one of us dies without the other.
I curl my fingers into his hair and hold him in place. “I’m here. I held up my end.”
I scrape my fingers along his scalp, the motion soothing for the both of us. “Climb into bed with me,” I order after a long while.
He laughs. “I won’t fit.”
“We’ll make it work.” It’s absurd. I’m only slightly slimmer than him and an inch shorter, and this is a standard bed. But I will be damned if I don’t hold him close for this little while.
When he realizes I have no intention of giving up, he walks around to the other side to avoid my injuries, and eventually, he finds the lever that drops the railing. His hands map out a few inches of clear space.
“Can you move?”
“The doctor gave me something to numb my legs,” I confess, “and I’m pretty sure those fuckers gave me some tendon damage in my arms.”
He swears a blue streak under his breath, but his careful hands shift me over until I’m pressed against the taller railing, and then he climbs on the bed. He’s far too careful, which I appreciate around my catheter, but the rest of it annoys me because I don’t want to be treated like I’m fragile.
But maybe he needs that. The way he curls into me and the way his breath shakes, I realize that I’m the one who fucked up. I knew what Romano would do when I handed over the drive myself. I knew what action he would take.
There was a part of me that thought maybe I had gotten away free when I nearly reached the city, but there was no moment of surprise when I was thrown from the car and woke up tied to a chair. For me, it was worth it, to set it all in motion.
But for them?
My lovers?
The men I have asked to live and die for me?
