Page 42 of Kiss Kiss Bang
CHAPTER EIGHT
BREAKING NEWS: Gubernatorial candidate Olivia Russo brutally attacked at NY Fitness in downtown Miami. Information about her condition is not yet available. Stay tuned for more information.
She was quiet. Too quiet.
As someone who didn’t worry too much about too many things, worrying about a female was new and very disconcerting. He wanted to hold her and make everything go away, but he also wanted to drop her off at ICS and go find whoever did this and kill him with his own bare hands. But that would mean leaving her alone, and the way she had held his hand and begged him to stay with her at the hospital—his heart swelled so big he could barely contain the way he felt. She made him feel important and needed.
Growing up in a military family, going into the armed forces was a given. It had been ingrained in him since birth. But, he’d never been the fastest or the strongest. Shit, the truth was, Annie could probably kick his ass, even if he’d never actually admit it. He’d always been more book smart than the rest of his family. He wasn’t physically incapable, by any means, but he’d never been the one someone would call on to protect them, until now.
Normally, he was the man behind the scenes, and not only at ICS. Even when they’d been in Iraq he’d been in the central command post ordering instructions, finding intel, deciphering codes. He had undergone the same training as everyone else, but he’d always been more cerebral and less physical. He thought things out, analyzed, reasoned, and then acted. He wasn’t like Jax, who wore his heart on his sleeve and if it meant going head on into bullets to save someone, he’d do it. No questions. No thoughts.
It wasn’t that Joey was a coward. Far from it. But he calculated and reasoned. If there was a safer way of doing something that yielded the same result, or possibly a better one, he’d find it and go that route. Dying or getting hurt didn’t help anyone. It didn’t make you braver. In his opinion, it made you stupid and hotheaded, and he wasn’t either of those things.
But now, with Olivia hurt and scared, he’d run through fire if it made her safe, even if it made not one iota of sense. Totally and completely, he now understood why men made stupid and irrational decisions when it came to women.
That feeling of trust and wonder that Olivia placed on him, it made him feel stupid and irrational. It made him want to beat his chest with his fists and roar.
He swiped his prints at the door to ICS and opened it, then escorted her in.
“I want to see Sophie,” she said. She hadn’t said one single word on the quick car ride over, but she had allowed him to tuck her close and run his hand up and down her arm.
He took her hand and led her to the security room. It was full of monitors. One wall was internal and monitored the inside and outside of the compound. The other walls displayed various jobs they were keeping tabs on. Ruben and Jacob, two ICS employees, sat at the controls clicking and changing screens. “Hiya, boss.”
“Guys,” he said as a hello and then led Olivia to the screens for ICS where he quickly located Sophie and pointed. “See, she’s fine.”
Olivia leaned in to see that Sophie was sitting with Annie, Megan, Winnie, and Jax, coloring. Sophie looked up at something Jax must’ve said and all five of them began to laugh. Olivia took a visible breath. “I wanna see her.”
“Babe, look . . .” he pointed to one of the monitors that was off, which made their reflections visible, almost like a mirror. “You still have some blood on your face. You should clean up. You don’t want to frighten her.”
She leaned in closer and touched her face and then her hair before nodding somberly. “Why don’t you take a shower? Change to some fresh clothes, and then we’ll go find Sophie, okay?”
Again, she nodded. She looked like a zombie and he hoped that after the initial shock wore off, she’d be back to normal.
“This place is enormous,” she said as he escorted her down some winding halls.
“It’s three warehouses that have been reconfigured. The first one is the offices, which you’ve seen. There’s another one right through that door,” he pointed, “that has a big room where we do simulation training. And then there’s the third warehouse, which has been made into an apartment. It has three bedrooms, two baths, the kitchen slash lunchroom, and a living room.”
“Why would you have rooms here?” she said, as he opened a big set of doors.
“Sometimes the staff needs a place to rest before missions if they don’t want to fly back to their hometowns, or sometimes they’ve been here too many hours and need a place to rest. And sometimes it’s a safe house where we bring clients we’re transporting.”
She ran her hands through her hair. “Safe house? I don’t even want to start to understand.”
Sometimes they had to transport dignitaries or “off the books” assets for “off the books” government jobs, but he decided not to explain that to her right now. The only way of getting into this safe house was through a fake wall on the west side of the building. Even some of the guys who worked for ICS didn’t know about it.
Once they were inside, he shuffled her to the back to the big room with the en suite bathroom. “Take a shower. There’s some clothes in the drawers that should work for tonight until we can get you more things. I need to change the dressing on your chest afterward, since you’re going to get it wet.”
“How bad is it?” she asked.
It was bad. The doctor had said it should heal with minimal scarring, but right now, it did not look good. He took her hand. “You’re alive.”
“That bad, huh?”
He leaned in and kissed her lips. It was soft and quick, but it communicated what he felt at the moment. “You’re beautiful. You’re strong. You’re brave.”
Her chin wobbled like it had earlier. “Oh, Joey,” her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t feel brave or strong. I froze.”
“Of course you did, Livie. He had a knife to your throat. Grown men with military training would’ve frozen.”
