“You were in on it with her all along?” Dani asked. She was keeping him talking, which was a valid strategy if we waited for support, but I was ready to just be done with it.
“Put the gun down, or I can guarantee you, you’ll be dead,” I told him, the promise in my voice clear.
“How ‘bout we both shoot and see who dies. Might be your little girl here. It’s fair, after all, girl for a?”
I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him square in the head, and the second hit him in the heart before his body even had time to react.
He crashed backward out the door into Malone whose gun was already raised at him, and we all watched as he fell to the ground.
Malone turned to us, face grim. His eyes took in Dani and me before brushing a hand over his eyes and holstering his weapon. “Thank God,” he said.
“God had nothing to do with it,” I said quietly.
We exchanged a moment of shared respect before the hallway behind him filled with agents. Marco. Trevor. People who should have been watching Brady to make sure the threat was truly gone. Malone seemed to understand me even without a word, and he turned, directing the men back to their posts and off to the bathroom to secure the scene.
Garner’s words spoke in my ear, “Wellsley, confirm Owl is with you.”
It was Malone who confirmed Dani’s location.
“What’s her status?” Garner asked.
Malone seemed to take in all the spots on her I’d noticed as well—the red welt, the tie wrapped around her bleeding knuckles. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”
The words rounded in my head, and my arms tightened around her.
She was. She was going to be fine. There were still tears on her face, blurring the makeup she’d warned me not to kiss off, and her body was trembling, but she was okay. She was alive. She would walk out of this place with nothing that would scar her physically, even though I knew those were the last scars that should worry me. The internal ones were the ones that lasted.
“I’m taking her back to the hotel,” I told Malone, standing with her still in my arms. I wasn’t prepared to let her go yet.
He nodded. “She’ll have to answer questions.”
I nodded. It wasn’t going to happen until she was ready. I’d be damned if I let anyone force her to live through it again until she could handle it. I didn’t care if that was days from now and they were all screaming at me. It would be on her terms and no one else’s.
We left by a back entrance and entered the hotel via the loading dock we’d been using all day. She didn’t object once to being in my arms as I walked. She just wrapped her arms around my neck and placed her head on my shoulder.
Having heard that we were on our way back, the agent at the elevator had it opened and waiting for us.
I pulled the radio from my ear and shoved it in my pocket.
I didn’t want to hear any of them anymore.
The door shut behind me, I hit the button for our floor, and I was grateful when she didn’t convulse in fear and panic like the night we’d found the knife in her jacket. Instead, she placed a kiss on my neck. Nothing heated. A reassurance. As if I were the one falling apart.
Maybe I was. I needed to examine every part of her. To make sure there were no other marks. Nothing that needed to be seen by a doctor. Nothing that needed a trip to the ER. Just so I could reassure myself that her heart was still beating.
When we got to the room, I sat her down on the bathroom counter, and yet, I was still unable to let her go. She kissed her fingers and touched my lips gently. “I’m giving the kiss back. It’s safe. We’re all safe.”
My mother’s words that I’d given her, the kiss she was giving me back, were all too much. It caused the admission to tear out of me as if it was ripping a hole through my chest. “I love you.”
I crushed her lips to mine again, and she met my tortured confession without words but with her lips and hands kneading into me the truth that she’d already spoken the day before. The fact that she loved me as well.
Two people who’d held the world at bay giving in to each other. Connecting. Joining. The bond more inseparable than the oath I’d taken on the day I got my Trident.
I pulled back, hand gently touching the mark on her beautiful neck, as tears filled my eyes that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to hold back anymore. I unwound my tie from her hand and gently washed it out with warm water. The cuts would need an antiseptic at some point.
“I’m going to get ice. Will you be okay?” I asked, my eyes unable to remove themselves from hers.
She nodded. Only the need to heal her allowed me to drag myself from her. I left with the ice bucket, filled it at the machine, and came back. When I got there, she’d slid off the counter and had removed the heavy chains she’d been wearing as well as the sequined dress. She was standing there in a pair of black underwear and a strapless bra that were almost sheer. Hiding nothing.
