Page 21 of Out for Blood
Bram let out a frustrated sigh. “What the fuck, Cass?”
I glared at him. “We’re not going to do that anymore, remember? We’re not falling back into the old routine where you shelter me from the real world.”
He flipped his hand at me, indicating that I should keep going, probably because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
“I met with Lilah and she told me she’d been undercover at a kind of school where they trained girls to serve the men who would buy them. I looked it up after we met and found an article about a fire that took place on a compound upstate. There weren’t a lot of details about what was going on there, which just makes me think it’s connected to Imperium Fratrum. Because if we’re right, this thing is big, and there has to be some kind of investigation underway.”
“And you think Mom and Dad were on to this early? On to Dimitri Kaprolov and Imperium Fratrum?” Bram asked. “That that was why they were killed?”
Bram never talked about himself when he referred to the accident that had killed our parents, even though he’d been stuck at the bottom of the cliff — trapped inside the car with our dead parents —for twelve hours before he’d been found.
I thought it was a way for him to disassociate, to make it seem like the accident hadn’t happened to him.
I hesitated, then reached into my bag.
I set the tape recorder I’d found in the ceiling of the paper mill on the table between Bram and me.
“What’s that?” I wondered if it was my imagination that for the first time in my life, Bram looked scared.
I pressed play and watched Bram’s face as our dead mother’s voice filled the space between us.
“If you’ve found this, something has gone wrong…”
11
JAGGER
I shiftedin the hospital bed and stifled a groan when my body screamed. I was sore all over, but it was the deep slice in my back that hurt the most. It was stitched closed and, according to Doctor Sterling, healing, but unless I wanted to lie on my stomach — and I didn’t — it sent a rocket of pain through my body every time I moved.
The burn on my arm hurt too, but it was easier to keep that immobile, and I was just relieved I wouldn’t need skin grafting. I probably should have accepted the heavy-duty pain meds Doctor Sterling had offered me, but the truth was I didn’t want to be out of it.
Didn’t want to take my eyes off Cassie.
I knew Bram had stationed people around the hospital — and outside it too — because Cassie had told me, but between her near-death experience on the mountain, Anna’s murder, and the ambush at the paper mill, I didn’t trust anybody to keep her safe.
The door to my room opened and she entered like I’d conjured her. She never stopped taking my breath away, and I drank in her long copper-colored hair, loose around her shoulders, and the face that had been a beacon of light whenI’d been swimming through my sedation in my first twenty-four hours at the hospital.
And I must have been healing, because my dick stirred at the sight of her luscious tits peeking out of her white T-shirt, her thighs poured into jeans that only made me think about peeling them off.
“Morning,” she said, setting down her bag.
She leaned in to kiss me and I caught a whiff of her shampoo, then the hint of vanilla and coffee that seemed embedded in her skin even though I knew she hadn’t been working at the coffee shop.
My mouth watered. And not because I wanted vanilla or coffee.
“Morning,” I said after I’d lingered over her lips just long enough to make me harder. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She reached into her bag. “Wow, you’re such a charmer. I feel so wanted.”
“If you want to feel how much I want you, just reach under this sheet,” I said.
She frowned. “I’m not coming anywhere near that thing until your stitches are out.”
“Fine, but you just left two hours ago. You need some real sleep in a real bed. You don’t need to be here every minute, especially not in my room or Vigo’s.”
I hadn’t been able to see Hawk but I knew he was in bad shape, knew he was still heavily sedated after the second surgery to remove the packing around his liver. I also knew he’d coded the first day, that he’d almost died.
I’d rather Cassie spend more time at home in one of our beds or outside in the sun, but if she was going to be at the hospital at all she should be with Hawk.
