Chapter 36
THOMAS
Thomas hurt. His back ached from lying prone in bed for three days. His arm throbbed, and his leg… he couldn’t really feel that, so maybe it was a good thing for the moment. He’d been in so much pain lately he didn’t want to do much of anything but sleep it off. But his heart was full.
Nadia wanted him. She loved him. Despite it all.
They had much to discuss, but there was time for that later.
Plenty of time. Time where he no longer needed to track the news and his other undisclosed sources for the Hidalgos’ movements.
He didn’t have to look over his shoulder anymore.
Maybe he’d stop waking up in the middle of the night in a full-blown panic, coated in a cold sweat.
Thomas tracked James as his brother crossed the room, wary about what he’d come here to say. He might be just days past from being at death’s door, but it was good to see him. James looked healthy, alive. He carried himself in a way that suggested life was treating him well.
“How are you feeling?” James dragged the chair Nadia had been using back so it wasn’t so close to the bed.
“I hurt. Better,” he amended when his brother gave him a look that told him he needed specifics. “My head finally feels clear.”
“You seem more alert.” James settled in the chair.
Thomas glanced at the door. “Where’s Mom?”
“At a follow-up with her doctor. She’ll be up after.”
“Tell me again what happened to her.” He only remembered bits and pieces from what James already told him.
James leaned forward on his knees. “They broke into her house, took her hostage, roughed her up some where they’d held her. Other than cutting off one of her fingers, I don’t know what was done to her. I haven’t asked for specifics. That’s between her and her doctor.”
“She won’t tell us.”
James shook his head in agreement. “The Hidalgos tried to get out of her what she knew about us, where we were. They tormented her with his… the parts…” James stopped.
“I get the picture.” Thomas briefly closed his eyes on an awful grimace. So that was what they’d used Phil’s hands and feet for. To extract information from her.
James squeezed his nape where he carried his tension. “She didn’t give us up—not that she knew where we’d been relocated.”
Thomas felt pressure in his chest. For all of Claire’s faults, one didn’t mess with her boys.
He discovered the extent of her rage when he confessed he’d faked James’s death.
He’d been lucky to leave her house with his head intact given the damage she inflicted on the room.
Shattered china. Broken furniture. Torn curtains.
“Do you know where those assholes were holding her?”
“Only that she was held with some DEA agent’s family.”
Thomas lifted his head. “Kane Mitchell’s?”
James shrugged. Names probably hadn’t been released to the public. He’d never forgive Kane for giving up his and Nadia’s location at the safe house, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been worried about the agent’s family. He hoped his wife and kids were safe at home.
“Ruiz had an elaborate network set up. Guards, agents, so many people had been bought off or families kidnapped to force their cooperation. He had people keeping him off-grid, moving him from one location to the next, edging him closer to the border where he could meet up with his sons and they’d fly him home.
It’s been all over the news,” James shared.
Thomas studied his face, the lines that came from age as well as from horrific trauma, and a paralyzing grief settled over him. “I’m so sorry about what I did to you.” James narrowed his eyes. “I took so much from you.”
James moistened his lips. “You did what you had to do.”
He shook his head. “No, I disregarded everything. I saw one option and ran with it. I’m sorry—”
“Tom—”
“Shut up and let me fucking apologize.” He took a deep breath, fighting the exhaustion that wanted to drag him under. “I’m sorry.”
James looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t hate you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t. I have a good life. A very good life.
Look, uh…” He scratched his temple. “If it’s because Aimee and I didn’t end up together, don’t beat yourself up about it.
I loved her, I really did. But I’d done some things that we kind of ignored dealing with.
Sooner or later we would have had to confront our issues, and…
I can’t honestly say we would have lasted.
Had we married, we probably would have divorced by now. ”
The air left Thomas. “Wow. Okay.” He scratched at the short beard that had grown in. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“Aimee’s good with it. We’re both happier with the people we’re with than we ever would have been with each other.”
Thomas breathed through the burn in his throat. “All right. I still think you hate me.”
“No. I don’t. But there is something I need you to understand.”
Thomas lifted his brows.
“You don’t have to protect me anymore.”
“I will always—”
The chair scraped backward as James abruptly stood.
He laid a hand on Thomas’s shoulder and looked him straight in the eye.
“I know this has to do with the promise you made me when we were kids, when Dad used to take the belt to us. When Phil would beat me up. Never again sacrifice yourself for my sake. Please. I release you of that responsibility.”
“James, I—”
“I love you. Just be a brother. Can you do that for me?”
Thomas inhaled a shaky breath. He nodded. “Yeah, I can do that.”
James gently clapped his shoulder and sat back down.
When Thomas felt like he could talk again, he asked, “How’s Mom handling what happened to Phil?”
James just shook his head. Thomas took that as not good.
Movement dragged both their gazes to the door.
Claire entered the room wearing a loose scalloped shirt and haunted eyes.
For a woman never known for her affection, she walked over to them, laying her good hand on James’s shoulder and her bandaged hand on Thomas’s shin.
James reached up and clasped their mother’s fingers.
Claire’s eyes fluttered. “Give me a moment with Thomas, James.”
Thomas’s eyes widened.
“Of course.” James stood. He tossed Thomas a silent message to go easy on their mother.
As if he was in the condition or position to argue with her.
Besides, Claire had disowned him in a matter of words, if not on paper.
Not the other way around. Except on rare occasions, they hadn’t spoken in some time.
When they did, their conversation had been stilted and spiteful.
“You stole the company from me,” Thomas said as soon as James left the room. He regretted the words as soon as they aired. So much for going easy on her. He blamed the medication. But, hell… Maybe it was time they got everything out in the open. He’d promised Nadia no holding back.
Claire lifted her chin. “You never would have quit on your own. You weren’t meant to run it.”
“Like hell. Ever since I was a kid you and Dad told me the business would be mine one day. You trained me to take over because you both knew Phil wasn’t capable. My whole life—”
“Yes, yes. Your whole life was shaped around one role. You poor thing, you had a career others would die for—” She stalled, hand twitching when she realized what she’d just said.
Her mouth pursed and she glanced away before a shadow passed over her eyes and her face slackened.
She turned back to him, saying, “We expected too much from you. It wasn’t fair, the burden we put on you. We should have given you a choice.”
He gave her a sidewards glance. “I didn’t believe James when he told me.” She arched a brow. “You’ve gotten soft in your old age.” The past few days might have been cloudy, but Thomas did recall bits of what James shared with him of their mother’s visits with her grandkids.
Claire sniffed. “I paint too,” she said, refusing to take the insult. “Fancy that.”
That, James hadn’t shared.
Thomas relaxed into the mattress. He looked at the empty space where her finger had been under all the bandaging. “Sorry for what they did to you.”
Claire held up her hand and studied the gauze wrapping. “Good reason never to remarry. Can’t put a ring on it.”
He huffed a dry laugh, which only hurt his arm and he groaned. “Can’t believe you can joke about that.”
Claire touched his leg, worriedly glancing at the monitor beside the bed.
“I’m all right,” he reassured.
“You need more meds.”
“I’m sure the nurse will be by soon.” They rotated more efficiently than an F1 race team.
Thomas could hardly bring himself to ask, but he had to. “Phil…”
“Was a troubled boy, long before he discovered his parentage.” Claire looked at the floor then out the window. “I’m… not perfect. I grew up very lonely, and my brother took advantage of that. But I loved him, as strange as that might seem to you.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.” Claire’s relationship with his uncle made him queasy and he preferred to leave that part of the discussion untouched.
“I loved Phil, if that’s what you want to know.” She turned back to him and lifted her nose. “I could have done better with him. But that’s in the past now, something I’ll have to live with.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened to him.”
She nodded tightly, studying the sheets on his bed like she wanted to know the thread count. “I should let you rest.”
Thomas knew when to change the subject. “I heard you and Natalya’s dad have a thing.”
“Don’t push it, young man.” She headed for the door.
Thomas coughed another laugh and grimaced. He was far from young. His body ached, often betraying his middle age, even when he wasn’t laid up in the hospital.
“Bye, Grammie.”
“I can still disown you.” Her voice trailed her from the room.
James reappeared, nudged aside by a nurse stopping in on her rounds. He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.
Thomas groaned. “You’re still here?”
“Just making sure Mom didn’t suffocate you with a pillow. But yes,” he said, coming into the room. “I didn’t want to leave until you remembered that you were welcome to come visit Natalya and me, anytime.”
He blinked up at his brother. “Really?”
“Yeah, I invited you like five times over the past three days, but you keep falling asleep before you give me an answer.”
Thomas attempted to swallow the knot in his throat but it wasn’t going anywhere. “I’d like that. Very much. Once I get out of here.”
“Good.” James smiled. “Hurry up and get back on your feet. The boys want to meet their uncle. And I want you to meet my daughter.”
The nurse poked at him, checking his vitals, and he glared at her. She just smiled, used to difficult patients.
“You have a daughter?” he asked, incredulous. The first girl in their family of boys.
“Zelie. She’s six months. Copper-red hair just like her mother and as stubborn as her uncle.”
The nurse glanced from James to Thomas and back. “You’re making your brother cry.”
Thomas felt the tear leak down his face and into his short beard, and he paid it no mind. Was this what true happiness felt like?
“I’ll swing by tonight after dinner.” James smiled and clapped the doorframe. Then he left the room.
Thomas turned to the nurse. “I’m an uncle.”
“Yes, you are. Now give me your arm so I can check your dressing.”