22. Micah
“You look like you’re going to be sick, Grá.” I reach across and take Tiia’s hand, while Smith drives and Stovic occupies the front passenger seat. Though they tremble, I twine our fingers together and bring our joined hands to rest in my lap. “You still messed up about the robbery today?”
“How is your friend?” Ignoring my question, she turns to me, lifting her leg to the seat so her knee almost lies across my thigh. Her eyes are desperate. Pleading. And though she darts her tongue forward to wet her bottom lip, it’s still dry. Still quivering. “Will he be okay?”
“Jasper?” I bring her hand up and press a gentle kiss to her knuckles. “Yeah. He caught two slugs. One through the thigh, and the other got caught up in his belly. Could have been kill shots, but we have the best doctors in the city taking care of him.”
“It’s only been a few hours.” She searches my eyes, anxiety creating a sheen on her skin. “You already know his prognosis?”
“He’s out of surgery and in the ICU. His doctors said everything went well, he lost a lot of blood, and he’ll be on his back for a couple weeks yet. But overall,” I study her expression and frown, “he’s gonna be okay. Why are you freaking out so much about a guy you don’t even know?”
“I’m not freaking out.”
“You’re absolutely freaking out. I’ve seen you in a few shitty places under scary circumstances, Grá, least of which one of them being right in front of me while I threatened your life. You’ve never looked as scared as you look right now.”
She shakes her head, short, little sharp jerks of her chin. “Not scared.”
“Tiia!”
“That could have been you, Micah!” Her eyes redden and swell up. “You were heading to that club. You could be the one in a hospital bed right now.”
“And yet,” I reach across and hold her chin, forcing her to remain still and meet my stare. “I’m not. I’m right here with you.” I drag her closer and drop a kiss on her lips. “Seems you’re my good luck charm.”
She closes her eyes, locking me out and dropping her head back in frustration. I feel her rejection. Her despair. I feel her worry, because I experience the same for every person I love every time they leave the house and venture into a city that would have them dead.
Tiia Hale is finally learning what it would be like to be with someone like me.
Not just for a night. Or a week. Not for fun, or a sex-filled thrill. This would be her world if she chose to stay.
And stupid me, I really, really want her to.
“He’s gonna be okay.” I pull her closer and stop only when her shoulder tucks in under my arm. Her hair smells of fresh shampoo. Her body, the perfect flowery scent I will forever associate with her.
With Hawaii.
“Felix and I make sure our people are okay, Grá. Always. So just try to relax.” I lift my left hand and check the time on my watch. “We’ll be another ten minutes. Then we can escape into the house for a bit.” I kiss her temple and, with all my willpower, ignore the way she flinches. “Mary’s making pasta for dinner.”
“Okay…” She leans into me, at least. Snuggling as close as humanly possible and sliding her hand into the sleeve of my jacket. She uses her thumb to stroke my forearm. A soothing, constant movement that would lull me to sleep if not for the fact we’re in the car and have an audience. “I worry about you,” she whispers. “More than I want to.”
“Funny. I worry about you, too. Maybe that’s inevitable when a person’s heart goes and does something stupid like fall in love.”
She sighs, but it’s not a happy sound. No contentment.
There’s no love there. Just exasperation.
Or at least, that’s what my brain interprets it as.
“Arch and Doctor Delicious are heading over in a couple of days,” Felix announces, striding through the kitchen and shucking his jacket as Christabelle lowers to a stool at the counter. I sit on another and pull Tiia toward my lap instead of allowing her to sit on her own. But her proximity, her body touching mine, is how I become aware of her stunned jolt. Her eyes follow Lix as he tosses his jacket and rolls the sleeve of his shirt up to his elbows.
Because beneath the fabric is a tiny cotton ball taped to the inside of his elbow.
Then, of course, she twists my way and shoves my sleeve up, too.
“You’ve both had needles?” Her amber eyes search mine, scanning my face in question. “Why did you get needles?”
“Jasper lost a lot of blood.” I take her chin between my fingers and force her to remain still so I can nibble on her lips. “Lix and I donated blood. He won’t get ours, since obviously that’s not how that works?—”
“But the intention remains,” Christabelle inserts, entering our conversation without invitation. “And the scales are rebalanced. Jasper used up some of the stores, so the guys replaced them.” She smiles when Lix plops a bottle of water on the counter by her elbow. “Thank you.”
He winks.
Just a quick flicker. A private moment between a couple that isn’t all that private to anyone else in the kitchen.
“We had spare time,” I murmur. “We had to wait for answers. So we got busy being productive.”
Bastard bounds through the door, his nose snuffling noisily, his backside wiggling as he trots closer to Christabelle and plants his chin on her lap. “Aw,” she scratches behind his ear and grins. “Hi, baby.”
“Arch and Minka are coming to New York?” I direct our conversation back to the point. “When? Why?”
“Next week sometime.” Felix circles to the sink and pumps soap into his palms. “And I don’t know why, but we don’t tell them no.”
“Why not?” Tiia’s voice is soft. Hesitant. Scared and yet sweet as Felix curiously glances across and studies her.
“What?”
“Well…” Her cheeks warm and I swear, her body grows heavier against mine. Like she can somehow fold closer and force me to hold more of her weight, though I was already carrying it all. “You’re the boss, right? Everyone knows Felix Malone is the current…” she clears her throat, “boss of the family.”
He slaps the tap off and snags a towel from the counter, then smug, he rests against the edge of the counter and grins. “Yes, Sweet Tiia. I’m the boss. Have been my whole life.”
I roll my eyes. Though the only person who sees them move is Felix himself.
“Right…” Tiia murmurs reluctantly. “But then you go ahead and say, ‘we don’t tell them no’, which kind of implies some sort of superiority.”
He chuckles, soft and almost silent in the back of his throat as Mary bustles into the room, swatting him away from her side of the kitchen. He tosses the towel down and wanders toward the fridge.
“We don’t tell them no, because we love them. We’ve lost half a lifetime already, and if we could ship them back here and put them up in Arch’s old bedroom safely, we would.” He grabs a bottle of white wine from the top rack, then a glass from the cupboard beside it. “But since they’re never moving to New York, then I guess we’ll settle for their visits. If they say they’re coming next week, then they’re coming next week.” He breaks the seal on the chilled bottle. “Whatever plans we had, we change.” He looks to Christabelle. “Cato’s coming too, right?”
“Yeah. I spoke to him earlier on the phone. He’s excited to come back and already fed up with college.”
Lix snorts and starts pouring. “He was sick of high school, too. And elementary school. He’s hated every classroom he’s ever been in, because he’d prefer to be on the basketball court, playing with his balls or messing around with the cheerleaders.” He stops pouring just before the lip of the glass, lifting the bottle as a smug grin curls his lips. “He’ll get over it and still find those straight A’s. Then we’ll celebrate him as the smartest motherfucker to come out of this godforsaken home.”
My phone rings in my pocket, vibrating and singing loud enough to capture everyone’s attention. So I lay one arm across Tiia’s lap to keep her from falling, then I angle my hips and fish for the device.
I rarely have my phone on loud. And never this loud. So as curiosity beats at the back of my mind, I free the phone from my pocket and frown when the screen announces unknown number.
“Who is it?” Lix reads my confusion just as easily as one would read a menu in a restaurant. “What’s wrong?”
“Dunno.” Swiping to answer, I bring the phone to my ear. But I don’t release Tiia. I refuse to let her go, even if she would prefer to be less conspicuous and sit on her own. “Yeah?”
“Micah Malone.” A woman’s voice comes through the line, surprising me when I was so sure it would be a man. “It’s Soph.”
“Oh, hey. Yeah.” I look at Felix. “It’s Ace.”
“Get some space, Malone.” Sophia’s voice is chillingly serious. Hard. “I know you’re there with an audience, so go find yourself another room. Take Lix… or don’t.” She crunches on something on her end of the line. Chips, maybe. “Figure it’s his business too. But that’s your decision to make.”
“What’s his business?” Frustrated, I push up to stand and carefully rotate to let Tiia take my seat. Her eyes swing to mine, wary. Confused. Her fingers come to my sleeve, gripping to keep me close. “I have to take this call.” I kiss the corner of her cheek and take her hand with mine. But I catch Lix’s eyes, too, and tip my head toward the doorway in summons. “And why are you calling me? You never do that.”
“Which kind of implies what I have to say is important, dipshit. I’m giving you thirty seconds to find that space, then I’m dumping my information in your lap and walking away. I have no horse in this race, so my affections for your sister-in-law are the only reason I don’t mind looking out for her family.”
“Minka?”
Like a cattle prod to the ass, that name on my lips has Lix moving quickly. “What about her?” He leaves Christabelle behind. And his wine. His shoulder touches mine before I even fully release Tiia’s hand. “Ace? What’s wrong with Minka?”
“Who is Ace?” Tiia whispers to Christabelle.
“Hurry up, Malone.” Another chip. Another crunch. “And go further than the pool patio.
I stop on a skid and look toward the door I intended to walk through. I mean, we all know Soph has eyes and ears inside our home. In our phones. Probably in our skin at this point. She’s a fucking spy who plays every side of every team, and yet, no one seems to mind keeping her around.
“Head upstairs or somethin’. You’re gonna want privacy.”
“For fuck’s sake.” I turn on my heels and make a beeline for the hall instead, hitting the stairs at a brisk pace. Side by side, Felix matches my steps and races me up four flights. If we’re going up any stairs, I figure we may as well go up them all and head to his office.
So when we finally pass his guards and cross the threshold to his room, I take the phone from my ear and hit speaker instead. “Alright. We’re ready.”
“You have a crowd?”
I cross to the couch in the middle of his room and sit on the edge. “Just Felix. What’s up?”
“Tiia Ailani Hale.” She taps at her keyboard, proving she sits at her desk wherever she is. “August fifth birthday, nineteen ninety-three. Two siblings. One is a twin.”
My heart slams against my diaphragm, aching and deep. “We know all this, Soph. My guy ran the background check. You said you wouldn’t do it, so I moved on.”
“Yeah, but I caught a few free minutes, and you’d already given me the pertinent info to get started. Tiia went to Brown University straight out of high school. Double major in Art History and?—”
“Soph…” Felix scowls. “We already know. You’re wasting our time.”
“Yeah, well…” Soph clears her throat. “It gets worse. Your guy Harrison caught nothing odd about this family? Nothing at all?”
“He didn’t run the family. He ran Tiia. We got her name and DOB. We caught the stuff about her schooling, and how her parents are married. Nothing popped.”
“Her parents are dead, Malone. There’s no happy family there, waiting to welcome the kids home for Christmas. Did you catch the bits about her hearing?”
“What ab—” I drop my hands and wait for my vision to clear. “What?”
“Medical records are popping like fizzling candy over here. She’s had testing done for her ear issues, which essentially has her at moderate loss.”
“Which she already told me. I don’t get what the issue?—”
“Explosive trauma. Ms. Hale was present when a homemade ticker went off inside a residential home. The boom was loud, but the firepower was lacking. She caught a little shrapnel and spent a night in the hospital. But her ears suffered the worst of it.”
“An explosion?” Baffled, I meet Felix’s eyes, but he only gives me a boyish shrug of his shoulders. Then I peek to the door, though it’s closed and the woman we discuss is four flights down and sitting with two others. “She was in an explosion? What the fuck? She said she’d had a cold that turned to a nasty ear infection.”
“Medical records show a moderate improvement over the last twelve-months. But the damage was severe, so it’s possible she’ll never get back to normal.”
My mind swirls. It spins and leaps and searches for the bridge that somehow connects the Tiia I know, and the one who might’ve been in an explosion a year ago.
“I don’t understand, Ace.” I set my hands together and massage my left palm with my right thumb. “She’s just… I mean… she lied about the cold thing, I guess. But an explosion? Antiquities dealers who live in the East Village don’t hang around people who blow things up.”
“Yeah… But your girl ain’t an antiques dealer, bro. She’s a Fed, and right this minute she’s undercover in your kitchen, talking with Christabelle Cannon while you dumb-dumbs are upstairs chatting with me.”
Felix spins, so fucking fast. Rage pulsing in his veins as he stalks toward the door. “I’ll deal with this. You stay here. You don’t have to see what happens.”
“Wait!” I kill my call and shove up from my chair. My brain sizzling in my skull, and my hand fisting around my phone, threatening to crack the glass. I grab my brother before he stalks out and slam his back against the wall. “I said wait!”
“We have a threat inside our home! She’s alone with the woman I love.”
“I’m gonna deal with it.” I press one hand to his pounding chest. And the other to the wall. Because without it, I might not remain standing. “I just need a second.”
“Micah—”
“I just need a second!” Turning away and chucking my phone to the floor, the device smashes to a thousand pieces, glass and mechanisms scattering from the rug to the ceiling, pinging off the walls like tiny droplets of rain made of steel. “I told you from the fucking start my instincts were firing.” I twist back to my brother, rage pulsing in my veins. “I told you! You’re the one who said to set that shit aside and fall in love, anyway.”
“She’s a fucking Fed,” he snarls. “A spy inside my home.”
“You told me to love her anyway!”
“A spy fucking with my brother,” he seethes.
“I warned you, Felix! I called it from the start and now…” I slam my eyes shut. Fuck knows, if I don’t, I might embarrass myself. “Now it’s gone too far.”
I fell in love with the enemy.
Like a fucking idiot!
“We have ways of dealing with these situations.” He paces by the door. Enraged energy pulsing and searching for release. But then he snags his phone and dials, waiting only a single second before the call connects. “Michaels. Stand by in the kitchen. Eyes on Cannon and Hale at all times.” He listens. Then nods. “Discreet. I’ll be five minutes.”
“I have to kill her.” I drop into a crouch, my lungs spasming in my chest and coalescing with the blood I’ve already given today, leaving me breathless. Dizzy. Or maybe it’s just my anger doing that. “I have to end it.”
“I can do it for you.” Stony faced, he sets his hands on his hips and sneers. “I would do that for you, Micah. Take the trash out and save you from having to do it.”
“Like how I offered with Christabelle?” I drop my head and let it simply loll between my shoulders. Shaking it side to side, I just… survive. I breathe. Exist. But I do it somewhere between heartache and rage.
Love still remains, even when anger tries to shove it aside.
Then grief fights for top spot, because even though she still lives right at this moment, the end is coming.
It has to.
There’s no alternative.
“Fucking sneak,” I growl. “Slipped in right under our noses.”
“Micah…”
“Yep.” I push to my feet and work through the dizziness that beats in my blood from the speedy altitude change. Then I stalk to the door and yank it open. Guards snap to attention in the hall, guns are held firmly. The whole fucking world waits for my move. “I’m telling you to leave it, Lix.” I start toward the stairs, glancing over my shoulder as he matches my pace. “I’m dealing with it.”
“I could dispose of her.” He presses his hand to my arm as we start down. “You don’t have to do it yourself.”
“I’ve got it. I started this shit. I’ll finish it.”