Chapter 12
Twelve
Knox
I hadn’t been shot before. Because I was good at my job. Any scars I had on my body, I’d put there myself.
I’d vowed I’d die that way. Without the marks of anyone else on my skin. Not when I had gnarled and knotted scars on my inside from someone I wish I could’ve killed ten times over.
Yet some fucking ballerina had managed to not only sneak up on me but made me bleed. Shot me.
Not because of any kind of skill on her part, but because of how completely Piper consumed me. I was sucked into her world, her orbit, so that no outside forces penetrated.
Lucky had never been a word I used to describe myself, but there wasn’t anything else to explain how the bullet hadn’t penetrated my heart, or worse, gone through my flesh and into Piper’s.
I thought of her skin being punctured, marred, and my fists coiled.
Daisy was sitting across from me as Piper dug into my flesh for the foreign object, eating food I’d prepared for Piper, glaring daggers at me.
Though I didn’t revel in hurting women, innocent women—including women who looked to be as breakable as porcelain dolls and half my size—an ugly, evil part of me ached to hurt her for putting Piper in danger. Even if she had been attempting to save her.
She could’ve killed Piper. My vision tinged red at the thought.
The pain helped. It was the only thing keeping me lucid. That and Piper’s hands on my skin, her tunneling into my body, her being the source of that pain.
Depraved fuck I was, it was turning me on. I was desperate to throw Piper down on the table and fuck her until I felt like I was glued to her fucking insides.
I had been about to do just that before her sister burst in to save the day. An apt interruption as that was a terrible idea.
Still, the roaring, famished beast inside of me, usually sated by blood, longed for her. And only her.
She bit her lip as she dug deeper. She was nervous. But determined. She had toyed with the idea of leaving me to possibly bleed out and make her escape. I’d seen a shadow fall over her eyes as she considered it. That moment of indecision made me so fucking proud of her. For feeding that dark part of herself that she’d starved for years.
I knew it existed because if it didn’t, she’d hate me for the evil man I was, feel no longing for me. No compassion.
Her tongue poked out to caress her lips as she further concentrated. Pain speared through me, and pleasure mixed in. I wanted her to dig deeper. Fuck, I wanted her to wrap her palm around my heart, fingernails piercing as she squeezed with all of her might. I didn’t care if it killed me if the last beat of that ruined organ would be in her hands.
A worthy death.
“Got it!” she declared, a girlish grin lighting up her face as she pried the bullet from my flesh. Luckily it was still whole, no small shards that would be impossible for her to tweeze out and might’ve eventually killed me.
I winced, not at the sting but at the loss of her touch. She held the small metal object between her fingers, holding it up to the light, inspecting it.
“Such a small thing to have the power to create so much damage,” she mused.
I stared right at her. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Her body jerked when her eyes met mine, catching the meaning of the words I shouldn’t have even uttered in the first place. Most especially not with her sister within earshot.
Dangerous. I was walking a dangerous fucking line. Toying with a kind of disaster even I knew I couldn’t weather.
Piper’s gaze traveled to my shoulder.
“I need to stitch that,” she whispered, nodding to the wound.
I nodded back.
If only it were possible to stitch the ugly wound she’d torn inside of me.
Piper
“This is really good. Did you make it?” Daisy asked, gesturing to the couscous with her fork.
“Knox made it,” I told her before returning my attention to the needle I was threading. Not before I saw the disbelieving raise of her eyebrows.
“They teach Moroccan cuisine at psychopath school?” she asked him sweetly.
He didn’t answer her, but he did give her one of his patented chilling looks.
She didn’t so much as flinch, which both surprised and worried me. For all of her dramatics, Daisy was a delicate person, easily hurt. Yet the look from one of the most dangerous men in the world didn’t even scare her. What had she gone through since I’d been taken that gave her that shield?
“How did you even find me?” I demanded, keeping my eyes focused on the bloody hole in Knox’s shoulder. My hands were steady, even though I was absolutely freaking out inside. This was a gunshot wound. I had experience with knee scrapes and ‘boo boos’. But the first aid training I was required to keep up with didn’t go so far as to cover how to treat a gunshot wound.
Digging in to get the bullet out had been weirdly satisfying. It must’ve been immensely painful, yet Knox hadn’t made a move. He’d just stared at me. Before saying … whatever the heck it was about the bullet.
It must’ve been about the bullet.
He couldn’t possibly have been talking about me. But I couldn’t deny the way he’d watched my face the entire time I’d searched for the bullet, his expression not blank but … riveted. Hungry. Reverent.
“I put an AirTag in every one of your bags and suitcases,” Daisy explained, still sitting at the table, staring at Knox with her delicate brows scrunched together.
“You put tracking devices in my suitcases?” I paused in my work for a moment to take her in. And to settle my stomach. It turned out I was squeamish with gunshot wounds.
But I couldn’t vomit or pass out right then.
Daisy nodded, her curls bobbing as she did so. “I had a bad feeling. About Stone. And also, you’re a terrible liar. When you said he’d finally left you alone... I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I did research—mostly reading mafia romance books which are great, by the way…”
She trailed off, presumably having caught my look silently saying now is not the time.
“You can read them later,” she added with a wave of her hand. “I didn’t figure it was going to be as dramatic as all that. An obvious kidnapping, I mean. Messy. Stone is very good at pretending he’s civilized, so I reasoned he’d done something to make you pack of your own accord. I knew I wouldn’t be able to call the police, and trying to convince Joey to help me has been a shit show. That asshole.” Her pretty face contorted into an angry scowl that I’d never seen before. Even when she was mad or sad about the latest breakup, she never had that kind of fire in her eyes.
She was hurt. It was radiating from her pores. She loved him. The dangerous man she thought she could tame. Who had betrayed her. He was essentially her captor now too, operating on Stone’s orders.
Only a man you loved could make you hurt like she was.
I wanted to kill him with my bare hands. But my bare hands were currently covered with another killer’s blood.
“Anyway, I knew that I would find a way to come rescue you,” she continued, sniffling. “I figured I may have some help, but I’ve now learned that I can save someone all on my own.”
“And shoot someone,” Knox grunted.
Her eyes narrowed at him. “How was I to know that you’d bewitched my sister into not wanting me to shoot you? The last I heard about you was that you were a heartless killer that even Joey was afraid of.”
“That’s not saying much,” Knox scoffed, gritting his teeth as I resumed my terrible job of suturing his wound.
I failed home economics in high school.
It was a testament to just how much of a pain tolerance he had that he was able to handle me sewing together his skin after being shot and after having had the bullet excavated out of his flesh without passing out or screaming.
Then again, screaming over a ‘flesh wound’ would’ve seriously messed with his badass reputation.
Daisy was still glaring at Knox. They weren’t going to be friends anytime soon. Which made sense since great friendships were rarely built on the bedrock of one person shooting another or one person kidnapping the other’s sister.
Great relationships weren’t built on kidnapping, in other words. They were headed for disaster. Yet here I was.
“Okay, so the question of how you found my location is answered, but how did you get here? ” I tried to lead the conversation away from thorny places, as if that were possible. “I was under the impression that you were being heavily watched by Stone’s people.” My heart stuttered. “What if they’ve been following you?” Alarm shot through my veins, and my body tensed, gaze darting for the door, expecting men to burst through it at any moment.
“They haven’t,” Knox’s voice punctured my panicked haze.
His strong and unwavering gaze was zeroed in on me, too full for me to understand but blank at the same time.
“How do you know that?” I demanded.
“Because they would’ve killed Daisy if they got an inkling of what she was up to.”
I flinched at the way he said it. So matter of fact. So certain. As if the prospect of her death wasn’t world-shattering. It wasn’t for him.
My sister. My brave, free-spirited, hopeful sister had yet again acted without thinking, with only her heart guiding her. And if she hadn’t been a little less lucky, she would’ve been dead.
The blood on my hands was scorching them.
Daisy paled slightly at Knox’s words, but her tone remained confident. “I couldn’t come straightaway,” she explained. “The second you … left .” She scowled at Knox before continuing. “The second you left, things changed. Joey was everywhere, telling me I couldn’t leave the city for my ‘own safety’ and urging me not to ask questions about you. As if I’d just give up on you. For once, I slowed down. Made a plan.”
She smiled, looking mighty proud of herself. I was mighty proud of her too.
“I convinced the director of the company to send a bunch of us to a show in Knoxville then informed Joey that I had to go,” she said. “I don’t know how it was cleared up the chain of command.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I told Joey we had a five-hour practice today plus a costume fitting, then went straight from the hotel room to rent a car to come here.”
“And the gun?” I asked her, digesting how much she’d managed to orchestrate. My sister, who barely knew how to set up her insurance.
She shrugged. “It’s America, and despite my political leanings toward the opposition, it’s still easy as apple pie to procure a weapon here.”
I stared at my sister, astonished by the impossible chain of events that had come into place in order for her to make it here. To rescue me .
Her gaze softened as she watched me, understanding my expression in a way only a sister could.
“You’ve spent all my life protecting me,” she whispered. “Saving me. You wouldn’t even be in this situation if it weren’t for me. It was only fair I saved you when it counted.”
My eyes welled as I finished the last stitch in Knox’s shoulder, tying it off.
“You haven’t saved her.” The cool slice of his sharp tone broke through our moment. “You’ve only further served to endanger the both of you.” His words were delivered in his unflinching tone, but I sensed the fury underneath.
“It is pure dumb luck you made it this far,” he continued. “And you need to leave. Now. You’ve got time. Barely enough of it. If your luck holds, you can make it back in one piece.”
“I’m not leaving her here with you ,” she spat, face no longer soft and delicate but sharp and hateful, her nose scrunched and a wrinkle between her eyes deepening with a scowl.
Knox just stared at Daisy. Her glaring at him was much like Tinkerbell trying to kick a giant. “You try to enact whatever fairy tales you’ve concocted about riding off into the sunset, it’ll kill you both. I’m not letting that happen. Nothing is happening to Piper.”
His voice was still again, even. But the words contained a fierceness. A dedication. To me.
This man was a cold dragon willing to breathe fire to protect me.
Daisy looked between the two of us again, her face tense with concentration. A handful of seconds passed, then realization.
She opened her mouth, likely to vocalize something that both Knox and I had been refusing to acknowledge for some time.
“Knox is right,” I spoke before she could, standing to go to the sink in order to wash the blood from my hands. “We don’t have the resources or the skills to run from this. If we try right now, we’ll fail. Stone will get what he wants, me. And he’ll hurt you to do it.”
I turned the taps on as high as they could go then squeezed my eyes shut against the scalding water.
“This cannot possibly be our only answer,” Daisy whined.
I scrubbed at my hands and waited until I’d dried them before I turned to her. My fingernails still held crusted blood underneath them. I wanted to keep it there for a while. Knox’s blood. On my hands.
Proof he could bleed.
That he was human.
That he had protected me with his body.
“It is the only answer, Daisy, you know that.” I sighed. “Is Joey, is he … h-hurting you?” I stumbled over the words. I hadn’t considered what the true reality of this situation might’ve been. Perhaps Daisy had come to her senses once the ugly reality of what being tangled up with the mafia was and tried to break it off with Joey.
Daisy huffed and rolled her eyes in a way that communicated that she was annoyed, not scarred for life.
“He still insists he’s in love with me,” she flicked her wrist dismissively. “He wouldn’t dare lay a hand on me. He gets all ragey when anyone else in the … organization comes near me.”
I clicked my tongue. I hadn’t had a good first impression of Joey, yet it seemed like he was protecting Daisy. Not that I could count on that to continue.
“Okay, well you need to stick close to him. For now, at least. Until we figure this out.”
“You think we’re going to figure this out ?” Her eyes went wide as saucers, hands on her hips. “This is not me making a mistake on tax returns… This is an international crime boss intent on marrying you and forcing you into submission. Joey told me everything.”
I glanced in Knox’s direction. He was still sitting in the chair, watching us intently, making no secret of the fact that he was listening to every word.
“We’re going to figure this out,” I told her firmly. In the tone I’d used so many times over our lives that I’d perfected it. Even when I was most afraid, uncertain or panicked, I’d always presented as assuring and confident to my little sister. That was my job, after all.
For once, though, she didn’t look the least bit convinced.
“I need to talk to you. Without him.” She violently jabbed her pointer finger in Knox’s direction.
I sighed. The separation of these two was probably most sensible. It was going to be hard for Daisy to see reason—if that was indeed what I was preaching—with Knox in the vicinity … being Knox.
“Let’s go outside,” I replied as I quickly served up a large portion of stew, taking it over to Knox.
“Eat,” I demanded. “The last thing I need is you passing out, hitting your head and losing your memory or something.” I made my voice snappy, not letting him know I was panicked by the very prospect. Of Knox forgetting his job, who he was. Of him forgetting who I was to him. If I truly was anything to him.
He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t get up and walk away, which was enough for me.
“Come on, Daisy,” I told my sister, walking toward the door.
She was still standing by the sink, looking intently at me, then Knox, then the bowl of food that he had begun eating.
“Daisy,” I urged, uncomfortable with her gaze.
She moved, slowly, looking pensive but thankfully, following me outside.
“You’ve fallen in love with him,” Daisy half-shrieked before the door had properly shut.
I shot a horrified glance at the cabin before grabbing her by the upper arm and dragging her in the direction of the garden. I did not need Knox within earshot of this conversation.
Daisy had been protesting my grasp until her eyes fell upon the garden.
I’d worked with what I had. Most of the seeds had only just begun sprouting through the dirt, the ground worked and lush. The unexpected flowers bordering the space reached for the sun. The weeds were tamed. I’d managed to salvage some of the rotted wooden fence that served as a border. It looked pretty, peaceful, especially with the backdrop of the wilderness behind it.
Daisy’s eyes widened. “I’m guessing this wasn’t here when you arrived.”
I shook my head, uncomfortable with the garden I’d labored over, of what it represented. It had previously been sacred, precious to me. Now with Daisy’s eyes on it, I felt it was being sullied. I was protective over this garden. This cabin. My solitude with Knox.
I’d quite obviously gone over the proverbial deep end.
“Let me get this straight… In the time that I’ve been worried about your fate, your safety and whether you’d be equipped with all of your fingernails, you were here … gardening and falling in love with a sick fuck?” Daisy’s voice bordered on shrill and hysterical. But there was also a hint of amusement. Daisy was shocked and caught off guard, but a large part of her was delighted.
She consumed romance books like Skittles, nothing too dark for her. She carried an idyllic heart around, unguarded and nonjudgmental. I’d thought it was her weakness, but maybe it was one of her greatest strengths.
“You crazy bitch,” she smacked my arm. “You hide it well, you know.” She tugged on my ponytail.
“Hide what?” I said, folding my arms. I knew she wasn’t talking about my feelings for Knox. Try as I might, I was wearing them on my sleeve for my emotionally shrewd—if not street smart—sister to see.
“That you’re a depraved little romantic, desperate for the villain just like the rest of us,” she giggled. “I always thought the dating of accountants and insurance salesmen was a thin veneer over your true needs.”
I gaped at her, unable to fathom what she had apparently known yet had taken me thirty-two years and a kidnapping to discover about myself.
“I know that route seems safer because of Daddy.” She stroked an iris with melancholy in her gaze.
I still hated that she called our father ‘Daddy’ with a note of fondness that he did not deserve. But that was Daisy, loving things that didn’t deserve it in the first place.
“The safe route may keep you alive, but it doesn’t keep you living,” she continued. “And the ‘safe’ route doesn’t guarantee that bad people won’t come stomping in to steal you anyway. That’s what Stone did. You made all the right choices, and still, the wrong man ruined everything.” She looked back to the cabin. “Maybe not everything, though. Maybe this was meant to happen all along. And maybe that man—wrong in all the ways he can be—may very well be right for you.”
I refused to look at the cabin. I could practically feel the structure pulsating with life, with Knox, with the intensity of feelings contained in the small space. The layers of skin I’d shed like a snake to reveal my true self.
“Are you trying to find a silver lining in all of this?” I asked, agape. I hadn’t put much thought into what outside parties might make of … this situation, considering I’d been actively trying not to think of it that way. But deep down I’d been ashamed, scared of my wrongness, depravity, still uncomfortable with my shadows. And yet my sunshine sister didn’t so much as blanch at them.
She smiled. “You always have to find the silver lining, Sis.” She reached out to squeeze my hand. “I like this for you.”
Shock tugged at my brows. “You like me falling for the mafioso who was supposed to break me?”
Her eyes glimmered with tears. “If he’s the only one who can protect you from all the darkness you’ve bundled up and hidden inside of yourself.”
The words hit me like bricks.
“I know you’ve spent your life absorbing every blow that might’ve hit me, taking all the ugliness on. You’ve gone through so much, Piper, and you’ve refused to let me shoulder the burden because you don’t think I’m strong enough.” She nodded to the cabin. “I’m thinking me shooting him, and him barely even flinching proves he’s strong enough. And although I may not like him—on account of the near strangling and the ease of violence he seeps out from his very pores—I love that he did it in protection of my sister.”
My vision blurred from tears of my own, ones I choked down. “You don’t think he’s like…?”
“Daddy?” she finished for me. She shook her head. “Daddy hurt us because he took pleasure in it. Because he didn’t know how to love. He was a weak and broken man.” She glanced to the cabin again, suddenly seeming too wise for her years. “He may be broken, but he’s not weak.”
I considered her words. Knox hadn’t shown me violence, not true violence until he laid his hands on Daisy. That was not something to dismiss. It was a giant red flag, waving in my face.
Then there was my father. Beating my mother without remorse as she begged. While his small daughters watched in horror, crying and screaming.
A man capable of violence against women was my line. Always. How had that line become blurry? How could I know that Knox wouldn’t do that to me, or worse, to Daisy?
My heart told me he wouldn’t. Never. But my heart couldn’t be trusted. No one’s could. My mother’s heart believed my father when he begged, when he promised it was the last time, when he poured out all the vodka.
I picked at a hangnail.
“Will you promise to be safe?” I asked my sister instead of addressing the enormity of the situation. “Keep your head down. Pretend with Joey a little longer.”
Her eyes darted to the side, and her posture slumped, as if curling into herself would hide her secrets. “I’m not pretending. Not entirely.”
I nodded. “I know.”
How was it that both of us, different in so many ways, found ourselves in similar situations, tangled up with dangerously wrong men and unable to wrangle ourselves from their clutches? We were our mother’s daughters... That chilled me. You couldn’t escape your genetics. And apparently, genetics had doomed us to love wicked men.
The silence of the forest took over until a light giggle penetrated it. Daisy.
Who else would it be?
She giggled some more, genuine and light. “I really did it this time, didn’t I?”
It was then that I understood her light giggle was covering something heavy, dark and thorny. Her guilt.
I cupped her cheek. “This is not your fault, Daisy. We don’t lay the sins of men at our feet. We leave them where they belong.” I infused my tone with iron.
She pursed her lips, nodding.
“We’ll get through this,” I promised. Even though it wasn’t a promise I could make.
Daisy would get through this. That was nonnegotiable. Me on the other hand? That remained to be seen.
But I’d die for my sister.
In a heartbeat.