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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DORNAN
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Mariana yelled, hugging her arms around herself in the cold night. He’d intended to come back the afternoon after he’d dropped off the clothes for her, but the DEA had pounced on yet another of Emilio’s shipments, and this time the cartel couldn’t even blame Marco. The DEA were monitoring Il Sangue and their associates closer than ever. The cartel had learned from last time, and had been splitting shipments up, bringing them over every day, sometimes several runs in a day. The seizure wouldn’t affect business, but it seemed there was a mole in their operation, and it was Dornan’s job to find it and cut its head off.
He’d spent all week in Mexico interrogating the team, eventually coming up with the traitor. Juan had been with them for years, but his service came to an abrupt halt when Dornan planted a slug between his eyes. You couldn’t trust anyone these days.
He hadn’t seen his kids in a week. Celia was bitching about him always being away. And now tough girl was standing in front of him, her eyes redrimmed as she glowered at him from the kitchen.
Oh, and he’d just been shot.
Her angry stance softened when she saw his blood dripping onto the floor beneath him. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. She rushed to him, looking for the wound. He gave her a smile that was probably a grimace as he stumbled over to the kitchen table and collapsed into a chair.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked, as he peeled his blood-soaked black t-shirt off with great difficulty. He threw his shirt on the ground. ‘Vodka.’
‘Vodka happened to you?’
He was about to snap at her, but she was already reaching for the bottle he kept on top of the fridge. Through the red haze of pain he saw that it was a lot less full than it had been when he had left her.
She unscrewed it and handed it to him. He took a gulp, welcoming the burn in his throat and chest that took away just a little of the pain in his shoulder. Goddamn it, that bastard from the Deviants Motorcycle Club had come out of nowhere. He thought he had squared away shit with their prez months ago. Seemed they were more than a little upset about their coke supply drying up in the wake of Marco’s epic fuck-up.
He was about to bark at her, tell her to get the first-aid kit, but she was already onto it. The red container with the white cross sat open onto the table beside him, and Ana was rifling through. She held up a pair of tweezers, applied some rubbing alcohol on the ends, and then she was practically sitting in his lap, digging around his blood-soaked arm.
‘I can’t see with all the blood,’ she said quietly. ‘I need to get a better look.’
He shook his head, snatching the tweezers from her hand and thrusting them into his arm. The feeling of the metal inside his wound made him want to throw up. It was an entirely odd sensation, and he didn’t have the focus to go on a bullet hunt in his own gunshot wound.
‘Somebody shot you?’ she asked, her voice full of concern. ‘I can’t imagine anyone finding fault with you.’
He was irritated by that, until he looked at her and saw she was smiling. She was a sarcastic bitch, but she was funny, and that took his mind off the pain a little. With his free hand he reached over and grabbed the vodka, taking another long gulp and enjoying another burn as it worked down to his belly. He slammed the bottle down and reprised his bullet hunt in the torn gore that used to be his upper arm.
Jesus. He couldn’t find the bullet, but he could feel that motherfucker burning inside him, hotter and hotter. The pressure was intense.
‘You should just leave it in there and sew right over the top,’ Mariana said. ‘Doctors leave bullets in people all the time.’
He would have yelled at her if he’d had the energy, but right now he just needed to dig around some more, and — yes! There it was. He squeezed the tweezers around the hard piece of steel in his arm and yanked.
The bullet came out in one piece, albeit a bloody one. Dornan dumped the tweezers and bullet on the table in a pool of his blood, at the same time feeling pressure on his arm.
She was there, above him, pressing a towel to his wound. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘They started it?’
He shook his head, chuckling despite his pain. Damn, she was a pain in the ass, and he’d missed the shit out of her.
‘Someone called Marco started it, I think.’
Her face fell. Damn. That had been the wrong thing to say.
‘My father wouldn’t shoot you,’ she said, backing away with the bloody towel still in her hand. He snatched the towel away from her and pressed it to his arm, trying to backtrack.
‘You don’t understand —’
‘Was he there?’ she asked gravely. ‘Did you shoot him?’
‘Mariana!’ Dornan said sharply. ‘It wasn’t him, okay? It was some fucker from another club who got shitty because your pop lost our coke.’
She was perfectly still. ‘So he’s okay?’
‘Yes! Goddamn it, why would I shoot your father? Why would he shoot me?’
