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“Connor!” His head lolled to the side when I rolled him over. My hands fluttered uselessly over his face. I wanted to check his pulse, but I’d forgotten how. All my training fled in an instant, seeing him sprawled unconscious on the floor like that.
His eyes started fluttering when I pressed a hand to his cheek. He was burning up. Blue eyes, bright with fever, found mine. I knelt next to him and gently pulled his head into my lap. “Connor, what’s wrong. Are you sick?”
“Ngh…” Connor tried to sit up. “F-Fine. I’m fine.”
“Oh, no you don’t.” I tightened my hold around him, but when my hand pressed against his ribcage, he sucked in a pained breath.
He was muttering something sounding like Gaelic that probably consisted of a string of curses as I loosened his tie and opened his suit jacket. The white shirt was stained red. “What the hell?”
“It’s fine, love. Just caught a blade the other day, it’s nothing.”
“Nothing my ass, you’re burning up and it’s still bleeding.” I ripped open his shirt, to hell with how much it cost. “It’s—”
What the fuck. Connor’s ribcage looked like a love-child between Frankenstein’s monster and a B zombie movie. A long, angry slash reached from just below his pectoral down his right side, ending just above his hip. The skin was red and inflamed, weeping watery blood, and—was that carpet thread they used? “Who stitched this up?”
Connor groaned as I poked the sides of the wound. “Tommy. It’s not his fault, though—”
“He’s an idiot. You both are. You can’t just use any old thread to stitch up a wound, it’s not sterile, it’s not…it’s not…this is infected!” My voice had risen to a shrill note of indignation and disbelief that made Connor wince. “You are one step away from sepsis—do you even know what that is? When I get my hands on Tommy, I’m going to wring his neck…”
Connor, smartly, said nothing. Whether it was a lack of argument or he was just too sick to voice it was neither here nor there, but his total complicity with my directions as we got him off the floor and into the bedroom was worrying. This quiet surrender wasn’t like him. The butterflies in my stomach from before had turned into birds, whirling and beating at the inside of my ribcage as I yanked open the front door and barked a set of orders at the bewildered guard on duty.
What was already a long night turned out to be an even longer one. Connor’s wound had to be re-opened and cleaned, a gritty business that had him gasping and cursing my name.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
I smiled grimly. “More than I should, probably.”
“You’re the very devil, you know that? A goddamn—foockin’ Christthat hurts!”
“And you are a big baby.”
Connor narrowed his eyes, but he managed a crooked smile. “Then give me that disinfectant and that brillo pad of yours and let’s have a go at you, then.”
“It’s not a brillo pad, although I’m sure it feels like one.” I snapped the cap on the disinfectant and opened the suture kit. “Don’t worry, I’m a much better seamstress than Tommy.”
“I’d hope so,Doctor Brannigan,” he said sarcastically. He paused a moment, brow furrowing, thinking. When he spoke again it was softer. “I meant to ask you, if you came all the way back to Boston, why hide like that? Why change your name?”
“I wasn’t hiding,” I said quickly. Too quickly.
Connor was looking at me with that inscrutable gaze of his, the one I’d seen on Sloane earlier that evening. “I think you were. I think you were brave in the beginning, but once you actually set foot on the pavement with us mere mortals down here in Southie, facing your past wasn’t as easy as you’d hoped it would be. And that pissed you off.”
The words could’ve been cutting if he chose, but he didn’t. Still, they hit closer to home than I would have liked. I tugged harder than I needed too on the last suture, and Connor winced, but he continued to stare up at me, fever-bright eyes open and vulnerable. I looked around the lavish penthouse, then down at the bloody knife wound I was stitching shut. “I’m not hiding anymore, am I.”
“You still are,” he said softly. “Sometimes.”
“The same could be said of you.”
“Fair enough.”
Silently, he watched me bandage the neat row of sutures, his eyes dark with an emotion I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Not tonight. I shook out a couple of painkillers and handed them to him along with a bottle of vitamin water. “I cannot believe you let Tommy stitch you up like this.”
“In all fairness, Alfie warned me against it,” he mumbled around the pills.
“Oh yeah? What did he say?”
“That I should go to you.”
“At least one of you three have some sense.” I reached for the vial of antibiotics, but I frowned. “Why didn’t you? You could’ve saved yourself a lot of trouble.”
