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My little badass, he thought fondly, taking in the woman shaking with fear but still brandishing the closest weapon she could find to take up against her attacker. She hadn’t heard the call out from the guys and something told me that was due to the head injury she had more than actual hearing loss. I reached for her hand, slowly working each of her fingers up and off of the mirror shard, picking up the jagged glass and tossing it away before examining her newest injury. With all the blood, I wasn’t able to tell if she’d need stitches, but knew I needed to stop the bleeding. Clumsily peeling off my suit jacket, I ripped the right arm off of it and wrapped it around Lake’s hand until it looked like a mitten.
When she looked like she might object, I turned my attention to our driver. “Turner, injuries?”
“Unknown, legs are pinned and they hurt like a bitch so not paralyzed.” His voice was laced with pain as he kept working on the steering wheel in vain. He pulled back suddenly when Cabot’s face appeared next to his on the driver’s side, and Turner let out a hiss of agony at the sudden movement. The other man didn’t look much better, small cuts dotted across his face.
I’d been so consumed with wondering what had happened to Cabot when Fitz had appeared at the passenger’s window, his face full of concern and confusion until he noticed me in the back of the car with Lake. The way Fitz’s expression morphed into that hesitant relief put me right back in Iraq. The look of determination mixed with anguish as he’d pulled Grady’s body from the humvee. The unmasked horror as he’d climbed into the vehicle and over to me to assess my pinned shoulder. The hesitant relief that I was still awake and responsive when he began questioning me to keep me present.
“Gas,” came Cabot’s harsh growl through the haze of the past, rocketing me right back to the present danger. Then, I too smelled the gasoline, and concern shifted to getting away from the car.
“The Wraith?” I asked, working with Fitz to wedge a door open to get us out quickly.
“Gone,” Fitz grunted as he worked quickly. “Shot out the tires and sent us into the side of a fucking building, Cabot spotted him and got him. By the time we got up there, he was gone. But he didn’t have time to clean up. Whatever Cabot hit, bled. A lot.”
The door was open and I was already gently moving a silent Lake over my lap and out the door to Fitz when his words sank in. We didn’t have The Wraith, but we had DNA. A clue. Some starting point.
Finally.
I looked back toward the driver’s seat and noticed it was empty with a bar wedged under the steering wheel. Cabot had obviously used it for leverage to get Turner out and I was the last one still in the SUV that was leaking gasoline. I scurried out on all fours, pausing only a moment to locate the rest of my team and Lake, then struggled to stand and staggered over to them. Turner was laying on the incline, breathing heavily as Cabot poked and prodded his legs, checking for permanent damage to his upper thighs that had been pinned by the steering column.
My attention shifted to Fitz who was questioning a silent and slightly swaying Lake. He looked overly concerned as he ran a hand through her hair. The action was far too intimate and my primal possessiveness growled from deep within me until I saw his hand come away from her scalp covered in slick wet redness. I ate up the distance between us in an instant ducking into her line of sight to check her myself.
Lake’s eyes met mine, and for an instant it looked like she’d clicked back into the moment, present for just a second before her eyes took on that thousand yard stare. She wasn’t focused and I knew she was concussed. My hand moved to her cheek, palm pressing gently to her face as I worked to get her focusing again. Instead she looked like she almost surrendered to the touch, eyes rolling back and she collapsed into my arms, completely out.
I was already lowering her to the ground, concern filling me as I watched her face go slack. “Lake?” My voice cracked with outright terror as she laid limp in my arms, and before I could call for her again, Turner had scooted closer in worry as well and was nearly shouting her name.
Fitz was the one who took her from me and began checking her, lifting each closed eyelid as he worked. Distantly I hear Cabot explaining that help was on the way, but my attention was all on Lake and the fear clutching at my chest. I’d watched her eyes go blank in that way I’d seen on Grady, and the only thought was of losing her the same way too. I couldn’t have cared less about her being a client at that moment. My hand reached across the small distance between us, my fingers tangling with her limp ones on her non-bandaged hand.
The connection of our hands seemed to slow everything, silencing it to the imagined sounds of her breath mixing with mine. A part of me was screaming that this was a concussion of my own, and I needed to stay awake, but the news of help coming, and danger having left, it was too much and darkness swam at the edges of my vision. Lake was in safe hands with the rest of my team, I mused as I finally gave over to the darkness that immediately swam up to meet me.
CHAPTER 17
LAKE
The gentle dull beep of something mechanical was the first thing to break through the silent darkness. I let it pull me forward up from the calm, still darkness and into a blinding light that almost hurt. The bright light flooding my senses seemed to pulsate before receding to reveal a dimly lit room, barely visible through my heavy lids. The smell hit me next, the overwhelming scent of antiseptic filled my nostrils making my stomach turn in revolt. Slowly I lifted a hand to my stomach in an attempt to settle the urge to vomit. Something pulled at the back of my hand and even without looking to investigate, my mind made the connection that I was hooked up to an IV of some sort.
It wasn’t until another noise stopped that I could even identify it. Murmured voices had halted the instant I’d moved. I was quickly aware that I wasn’t alone wherever I was. Ignoring the tense silence only broken by the steady beep of some machine, I tried to focus my memory on the last I could remember.
Flying into DC for a meeting with my father. Immediately the scowling face of Decker flooded my mind and I was assaulted with the memories as they came flooding back. The meeting, the Hampton house, the texts… the Pasternaks. But there was something else pulling at my mind trying to surface and I sifted through the memories until it clicked.
We’d been in the car heading to New Jersey when communication with Jack had gone haywire. He’d said something… a word I couldn’t remember but certainly hadn’t been English, and Decker had reacted seconds before…
The explosion of the SUV in front of me had knocked the air from my lungs. I’d never seen anyone die before and immediately I’d known the men in that SUV were gone. Men who had protected me, talked to me. Men I’d begun to get to know. I had been running over the order that the cars left in an attempt to identify the men in the SUV, when I’d caught Decker’s eye in the mirror. He had just watched two of his men die before his eyes and when his hand shot back between the seats to me, I wondered which of us he was attempting to comfort as I held onto his hand with a death grip.
My mind snapped to being lured to consciousness by Decker’s voice, his face so closed when I’d opened my eyes to our world literally turned upside down. The roll down the embankment, the last thing I’d been able to focus on. The rest was a void in my mind, black and open, completely free of the information and the beeping picked up as I tried to turn my head, looking for some sign that he’d made it too.
The pain in my skull slammed into me and I fell back against the pillow with a long suffering groan. I hadn’t even had time to look to see who had been in the room with me before my eyes were screwed shut and my hands were clutching my head for some sort of relief.
“Lake, don’t try to get up, just breathe through the pain. In and out slowly. Come on.” I knew that voice, dripping with heat even as he was commanding my actions. Decker was beside me, his fingers gently stroking my arm in comfort. I cracked an eye open the smallest amount and gasped before opening my eyes wide and reaching for his face.
He let me grab him, each hand covering a cheek as I carefully inspected the stitched up gash on the side of his face. Three inches in length, it seemed to bisect the corner of his eyebrow and skate down his temple. He’d been lucky that he hadn’t lost his eye, the cut seeming to curve as if to avoid anything too disfiguring. It would scar, that I knew, but that dirty little part of me that had no manners when it came to timing for inappropriate thoughts about this man, whispered that it would only add to his overall sex appeal to have a scar. That thought sent a shiver of want down my spine and Decker confused it with cold and immediately started questioning me about needing more blankets.
I’d been about to tell him no when a throat clearing caught both of our attention and we turned, Decker’s face still securely in between my hands, to see the last person in the world I’d ever want visiting me in my sickbed.
Dominic Parker stood casually leaned against the doorframe looking quite disgusted with the scene in front of him. Even while sporting a sour face, he was still the most put together man in the hospital. His tailored, gray suit held no wrinkles, the white dress shirt seeming to be brighter than the white wall he perched next to. And every hair was perfectly in place. One would probably argue he was attractive. Okaymany, not me, would argue it. A friend had once compared him to a model on the cover of some billionaire romance novel, his brown eyes the color of whiskey, and dark hair styled to perfection.
I’d never seen that fade grow out and wondered if he had weekly hair appointments so he’d never have a single hair grow beyond his rigid desire. With a sharp jawline that never held so much as a five o’clock shadow and a strong straight nose that was so symmetrical that I had wondered on many occasions if he’d had a nose job. Top it all off with an olive complexion, lashes that put mine to shame, and flawless teeth… yeah, I could objectively see how each of those details made up a man who was attractive, but the man himself ruined the picture and seemed to radiate evil to the point that it made him as hideous as a cockroach to me.
I dropped my hands to my lap and glared at him. “What the hell are you doing here?” I spat, not even wasting time on sarcastic pleasantries. Not with this demonic parasite.
