Page 111 of Love What's Left
He lifted his chin but kept his eyes closed. I snapped on the table lamp beside him, and froze. Not bleeding anymore.Not bleeding.But at some point he had been because the hair on the right side of his head was gummed up with the thick rust of it. His right eye was swollen nearly shut, and he hadn’t let go of his ribs once.
I grabbed his head and pulled him down so I could search for the wound that had bled so freely.
“Holy hell, Walsh.” He leaned away from me and raised a hand to ward me off. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t know, but I had to see him. I yanked his black button-down from his waistband and practically ripped the buttons from their plackets in my quest to get to his skin. “How badly are you hurt? Did you go to the hospital? Why didn’t you call me?”
“Ouch. Shit. I’m a little banged up, but I’ll heal. I was at a private medical clinic. I didn’t text because I didn’t think you’d care one way or the other.”
I dragged his hand away from his ribs and peeled his shirt back. The sight of his scars, old, but vicious, made my vision swim.
Gabriel McRae was an over-privileged, spoiled player who’d never worked for anything or suffered a day in his life. That’s what I’d said about him. It’s what I’d believed.
But he’d suffered beyond anything I could have imagined.
I blinkedhard to clear the tears from my vision. A lurid blue and purple bruise in the shape of a large boot print covered his side. I reached out tentative fingers, then drew away before making contact. As gently as I could, I pulled his shirt off his shoulders. The right one looked nearly as bad as his ribs. My hands fluttered over him as I inspected, no time to devote to the reveal of a dense swathe of tattoos on his chest when I was busy looking for damage.
“When I fantasized about you taking my clothes off, I imagined a lot less pain,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Shut up.” I pressed my forehead lightly to the center of his chest. “You’re hurt. They hurt you.”
His hands came up tentatively to rest on my waist. It was the first time I’d ever allowed anything like it from him, and the first time he’d tried.
“You should see the other guy. Or, maybe you shouldn’t,” he said.
“I hope the person who did this to you didn’t get back up.”
“Give me some credit,” he rasped. “You think one guy could get the jump on me? There were five of them.”
“You should stop going with the team. You don’t have to be part of these missions.”
Silence, broken only by the almost imperceptible whisper of a furnace kicking on in the background, held us in thrall.
“You saw my scars,” he said finally. “I do have to. Fourteen more women and children are safe in a shelter as we speak. You don’t think their lives were worth a boot to the ribs?”
My tears spilled over. I’d once accused him of using his father’s cause to prop up his own ego. I’d pictured him tagging along, useless and in the way, while the ex-special forces team members took all the risks and allowed the youngest McRae son to cosplay a hero.
I straightened and propped myself under his less damaged shoulder.
“Sydney?”
“I’ll help you get cleaned up and into bed,” I said.
He leaned on me as we walked. “Careful. I’ll start to think you like me.”
I gave a brief jerk of my head and cleared the tears from my throat before I could speak. “I don’t hate you, McRae.”
He leaned harder against me, and maybe he lost his balance . . . or maybe he pressed his lips to my temple. “I don’t hate you either, Walsh.”
In his hospital bed, here and now, Gabriel shifts restlessly in his sleep, then turns on his side to face the door.
I struggle to process what I thought was true with what is. Gabriel isn’t a government agent. He’s Bruce Wayne in a flak jacket and helmet instead of a pair of bat ears. And I’m the trusty sidekick in the research and development lab trying to figure out ways to keep them all safe.
I remember my job. The lab. The projects. The science. The missions.
Knowing what I was working on at the time of my abduction only confuses me more. The project wasn’t something Markov could use against the McRae family. If he’d had me successfully complete the research and development—and that is a hugeifbecause there’s no guarantee I’ll ever make a biocompatible polymer-based sealant perform the way I want it to—he’d have become a wealthy man. But that would have taken time and had nothing to do with revenge.
What kind of bargaining chip was a project that was essentially innocuous if he didn’t use it for financial gain? How are my co-workers complicit?
