“Not yet,” I growled, my own anger reflecting.
“Putain de bordel de merde,” he swore before asking, “Where is she?”
“New London Memorial. She was full of her normal piss and vinegar and kicked Vi and me out. We have a twenty-four-hour guard on her. She’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“But you let her get shot,” he said, anger returning. My throat closed. If our roles were reversed and it had been Vi who had been shot, I would have wanted to kill him.
I had no response for him, and after a few moments, he was the one to speak again.
“At least you feel like shit about it. Will they let me see her?” he asked.
“I’ll call now and put you on the approved list.”
Silence settled down again between us, and this time, I was the one to break it.
“I’m sorry I involved you?our business?in this,” I choked. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“Going to cry on me, Langley?” he tried to tease, but his voice was full of emotion too, the same mixed bag of them he’d had for the whole call: anger, hurt, worry.
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug he couldn’t see.
“Honestly…it’s better than what I was imagining, in many ways,” he said quietly.
“What were you imagining?”
“There were times when I thought you might have been her supplier, working for them for real,” he said quietly.
“And you still went into business with me?” I said, surprised.
“Well, we’d already gone down the road together, and I wasn’t willing to throw it away for a hunch. I also wasn’t ready to ask and have everything fall apart because I had to walk away.”
“Plausible deniability,” I said.
“I like to consider ithoping for the best,” he said. “But Dawson?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to be honest with me for this to continue. I need to know it’s done.”
“It is. I swear on my love of the water.”
“Swear on Violet.”
My throat closed. “I won’t ever swear on her, but I will swear on everything in my life but her.”
He hesitated. “Okay. Well. We’ll have to take it a step at a time then.”
We hung up, and I called the agent in charge at the hospital and added Dax to the list before locking the Aston Martin and heading into the building.
Malone, Nolan, and several other agents who had been with us at Jada’s the night before were huddled around a table in the conference room. They’d moved from the house next to the Moris’ so the FBI could use it in the future, if they needed to, without blowing their cover. I wasn’t sure any of the men had slept or showered, and the remnants of their meals were scattered across the surfaces of the room. I felt guilty for the rest I’d had, for the ability to escape and lose myself in Violet.
When he saw me in the doorway, Malone pushed away from the table and came toward me.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
I turned, and we fell into stride, leaving the building and walking through the streets toward the pier. The sun was setting, dropping over the horizon and turning the water into a mess of colors that reminded me of arriving back in New London less than two weeks ago. It felt like my world had rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in that short space of time. Or more like they’d all run full force into each other, hitting the wall and crumbling everything around it. Three merging into one.
“Have any of the men given us anything useful?” I asked.
