Chapter Forty-Seven Ryder
Chapter Forty-Seven
Ryder
Seraphina was asleep next to me in Alex’s private ICU room. It wasn’t my first time sitting next to a friend in a hospital bed like this, and it never got easier.
But this was one of the first times it felt like my fault. I should never have let him go to her room. I could’ve prevented this.
I stretched out my legs, slouching in the cheap chair, a tight fit for me. The only thing that gave me comfort was Seraphina sitting next to me, her head resting on my shoulder as she slept.
I’d bulldozed my way through the ICU’s one-visitor-only policy so she could join me.
After fighting the urge to pass out like she had, I finally decided to close my eyes. There was nothing we could do right now but wait.
Wait for Alex to wake up.
Wait on Bravo Team to arrive.
Wait to have Ezra talk to the Moraleses to agree upon a location.
Wait on the Moraleses to tell ángel where and when he needed to bring “the bait,” which was when we’d actually strike (no need to wait for the meet time).
I tipped my head, resting it against hers, thinking back to what went down before we’d left for the hospital, when Seraphina had interrogated Beth and Ezra.
While I’d hated her being alone with them, I’d controlled myself and stayed behind the screen to watch, letting her do her thing. And she’d done it damn well.
The blade to Beth’s throat hadn’t encouraged her to talk; Beth’s CIA training held up there.
But what Beth didn’t account for was how good Seraphina was with math.
She truly could make anything add up to whatever she wanted it to with enough pushing, and my girl had done a hell of a job at peeling back the layers.
She’d taken advantage of Ezra’s arrogance, getting him to spill his guts without even realizing it, and she’d lit Beth’s fuse with that.
Seraphina turned the two against each other in under an hour. A genius move, and we’d recorded everything. We even knew where they kept their money. Not too original—the Caymans.
All we had left to do now was dismantle the rest of their operation. Well, first, I needed Alex to wake up and be A-the-fuck-okay.
At some point, I finally tucked away my thoughts and drifted off. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep, but when I opened my eyes, the sun was more awake than I was, splashing a bit too harshly in the room.
My head must’ve fallen forward, because my neck was stiff. Doing my best not to wake Seraphina, I sat up without shifting her head from my shoulder.
I was in the process of moving my free arm around to deal with the pain at the back of my neck, but my hand dropped to my lap in shock.
Alex’s eyes were open and on me.
Unable to stop myself, I startled, my quick, jerky movements waking up Seraphina as a result.
“I didn’t want to disturb you.” Alex’s voice was rough and raspy, but ... he was talking.
Fuck. “You’re okay?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, worried I was still dreaming.
“I am.” His brows drew together. “Tell me you got her.” Of course his mind went there. Straight to that demon of a woman.
Holding each other’s hand, Seraphina and I both stood and went to his bedside. Relief nailed me harder than the round that’d struck me in the plate earlier. “Yeah. She’s back at the villa tied up. Ezra too.”
He rested his head back and closed his eyes.
“Can you go get Reed? He’s somewhere in the building.” I turned to her, my heart still racing. “He needs to know he’s awake.” I checked the hallway, catching eyes with the GRS operator I’d assigned there as protection. “Go with him. Don’t be alone, got it?”
“Of course.” She rested her other hand on top of our clasped ones, and I lifted her knuckles to my lips and kissed her before she gave me a small smile of Thank God , then took off.
“You want to know what the other side looks like?” Alex lazily lolled his head to the side, opening his eyes. “It was nice.”
“You fuckin’ with me, or ...?” I crossed my arms, trying to keep it together. Alex was a brother to me. Closer than that, because he was family I’d chosen.
His lips twitched. I had to assume the doctors had already come in and checked on him after he’d woken up. Seraphina and I had to have been knocked the fuck out to sleep through that.
“There was a light. A bright one.” I still had no clue if he was serious or doped up, but as long as he was okay and good, he could tell me he had a conversation with Elvis on the other side, and I’d be on board. “Not my time, apparently. I got kicked back.”
“I shouldn’t have let you—”
He cut me off. “Don’t start with that shit. Catch me up instead. Tell me what I missed. Is the op still on later? I, uh, don’t know what time it is.”
I checked my watch, unsure about that myself, then brought him up to speed.
“Wait, you’re saying Ezra corrupted her?” he asked after I’d finished my bullet-point monologue. “She admitted that?” He tried to sit upright, but I overrode his decision, urging him down with a hand on his shoulder.
“Not in those words, but yeah. Beth decided to turn Ezra, not just Nina and Andrej. But she didn’t get approval for that and went behind everyone’s back. He was her dirty secret.” One of many, apparently. Along with that bank account in the Caymans.
“She say why she did it?”
“Nina was failing in trying to seduce him, or something like that. If she couldn’t get him to fall for Nina and marry her, then she decided she had to force his hand and convince him it’d be in his best interest to get married. Director Johnson had a fallback alternative if Ezra didn’t marry Nina.”
“Of course he did. Probably had three,” he grumbled.
I pulled my hand away from his shoulder and hooked my thumbs at the front of my jeans. “Somewhere along the line, Ezra got into her head. Changed the plans. Then she fell for him. Not that he wanted her like that, from what I remember him saying.” Didn’t blame him there.
“Someone managed to manipulate a master manipulator? Damn.” The fact he could get out that mouthful was a good sign he wasn’t suffering any major side effects from “seeing the other side.”
“You can’t corrupt someone who doesn’t have it in them to be corrupted, if you get what I’m saying.” Beth was never really a good person.
“Maybe I need my head examined, but not because of what happened here. The fact I ever married her ...” He closed his eyes. “I have fucking shit taste in women, don’t I?”
“I mean, yeah.” No point in not being blunt. The man had been given another chance at life, and I wanted him to have what I’d found this week.
“Wow. So, Beth’s been going behind everyone’s back and colluding with Ezra.” His voice was getting better. Words more fluid. All good signs, which prompted more relief to roll down my spine.
“Yeah, and Ezra went behind hers by keeping Anna’s real identity a secret from her. That had Beth jealous.” So fucking weird. That remark had him reopening his eyes. “Andrej found out about the two of them. Discovered Ezra was actually her partner, not even an asset. He threatened to expose them.”
“So she had Andrej killed and framed him.” He looked up at the ceiling, his jaw visibly tensing, a different kind of hurt hitting him.
The kind morphine wouldn’t dull. “I have to believe she started this operation with the right intentions, but hell, maybe without me in her life as her husband to keep her balanced and in check, she spun out. Lost her way.”
I stumbled forward at his remark, at what sounded like blame in his voice. “What’s your point?”
“Just rationalizing how she turned into this person. Not forgiving her.”
In my opinion, the woman had always been evil, and Ezra saw it in her and brought it out front and center. But I could understand Alex not wanting to believe he hadn’t recognized that in her. My mind was made up in having this woman become collateral damage tonight, but ...
“Do you want me to keep her alive tonight?” I hated asking him that, but if Beth dying would be too hard for him to handle, even after everything she’d put him through, I didn’t want to hurt him more than he already was.
“You’re Delta One. That’s your call to make.”
“But if it was yours?” I pressed him, my pulse flying.
He closed his eyes and gave me the only answer I needed to make up my mind. “Well, one thing I know to be true is, she’d rather die than spend her life powerless, wearing orange behind bars.”