Chapter 5
Alex
It killedme to look at her. She had dark rings of exhaustion beneath her eyes and a red-and-black bruise mark on her cheek that was about to go a rainbow of color. She had a bandage on her ear and her fingers were in a splint. Under her coat she was wearing a low-cut black top that crossed the line from sexy straight into trashy, the kind of top a woman wears when she’s relying on tips for income. Because Kat, my Kat, was tending bar at a dive joint.
I wanted to rip the world apart every time I looked at her. I wanted to burn everything down.
But I couldn’t show weakness. Kat preyed on weakness—or maybe just on mine. If I gave her an opening, she would use it to rip me to pieces. Like she’d tried to do just now.
So I said nothing as I put the SUV in gear and started out of the hospital parking lot. As we moved toward the exit to the street, my eyes were drawn to a sedan that had just parked two rows down from me. A man was getting out, buttoning up a uniform shirt. White, skinny, hair cropped close to his head. Something about him—the set of his body, the way his gaze moved over the parked cars, the fact that he was putting on a uniform as he got out of his car—put my instincts in gear.
“Get down,” I barked at Kat. “Now.”
She slid all the way down in her seat, groaning softly with pain. The man’s gaze slid over me as I passed him, rejecting me as uninteresting. I pretended like I hadn’t even seen him, but I stopped to let another car pull out of a spot in front of me. While I waited, when I was sure the man’s back was turned, I pulled out my cell and took a picture of his car’s license plate.
The man didn’t notice. The other car pulled away, and I followed it. In my rear view mirror, I watched the man walk toward the hospital entrance.
We pulled out into traffic and I told Kat she could sit up again. When she had managed it, I asked, “Did you injure any of the men who attacked you?”
She rubbed her forehead. “I bit the hand of one of them.”
“Which hand?”
“The right. I drew blood.”
“Well, we just passed a guy with a bandage on his right hand, putting on a uniform shirt as he walked into the hospital.”
She was silent for a long minute, her face pale.
“My guess is that the uniform is a fake,” I continued. “He probably doesn’t actually work there. But I got a good look at him. I’ll have the personnel records checked. I also got his license plate, which I’ll run, but it’s possible the car is stolen.”
“My God, this is a nightmare,” she said softly, and for the first time, I heard a tremor in her voice. It wasn’t faked.
“Are you still going to tell me the boyfriend story?”
“No.”
“Good. You’re going to tell me what you know—the truth this time. But first, I want a rundown of your injuries. Where are you hurt?”
The stubborn look came back to her face. “I thought you saw my paperwork.”
“I only had time to glance at it. Besides, I want to hear it from you. Give me a list.”
She looked like she was considering arguing again, but then she gave in. “The pinky and ring finger on my left hand are broken. My left arm is banged up bad, but not broken. Some skin scraped off my lower back. They put a stitch in my ear and it’s still bleeding. I got two punches hard in the face. My head hit the concrete, which is why they’re worried about concussion. That’s about it.”
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, my fingers aching because they were gripping so hard. “How did your ear get split?” I asked, my voice a croak.
“He was trying to kick me in the face, and I twisted away.”
The road in front of me was red. The signs were red. I had to get control, or I would crash this car. I made myself take a breath. “They’re sure you’re not seriously hurt?”
“They did X-rays and a scan. They say everything is fine.”
“Do you want painkillers?”
“I don’t do drugs.” Her voice was tight. “I didn’t have a choice when they gave me the last ones. I don’t want any more. Where are we going?”
“I’m getting you out of town. Do you have your wallet?”
“Yes. How did you know where I live? How did you know I was in the hospital?”
It was a fair question, but I wasn’t going to answer it. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“The fuck we are.” She was enraged. “Tell me now, Alex, or I’ll call 911 and tell them I’ve been abducted.”
I made myself take a deep breath. I was usually the calmest, most laid-back guy you’ve ever met. It was only Kat who turned me into a madman. But lying to her wasn’t part of my plan, so I said, “I keep tabs on you. Just to make sure you’re safe.”
She was silent for a second, taking this in. “Are you kidding me?” she said at last. “How do you do it? Let me guess. You hire someone.”
“Yes.”
“And what does this someone do? Does he follow me around? Come into the bar where I work and pretend to be a customer?”
“No. Nothing like that. He just keeps tabs by computer. Your address, your driver’s license.”
“And when I get taken to the hospital, he knows about it?”
“It was actually the police report that triggered his system, but something like that, yes.”
“Oh, the police report. Pardon me.” Her tone was sardonic. “How long? How long have you been doing this?”
To be honest, I’d never thought I’d have to answer these questions in person. It was so painful I tried not to twist uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. “Your brother crossed my path in Dallas for a business deal. I asked him how you were. He said he had no idea, because you’d been disowned by the family and he never wanted to see you again. I was worried about you, so I looked you up. That was three years after we divorced.”
Was I lying? No. Was I leaving part of the story out? Hell yes, I was. I was leaving out the part about her brother’s pale skin, his dilated pupils, the rambling speech patterns that said he was an addict, even though he was on the board of an investment company. I left out the part about how that conversation had made me investigate her brother’s history, only to find four charges of drug possession that had been rapidly dropped. Kat’s family had money, and they were obviously spending it keeping Tyler out of prison.
Maybe Kat didn’t know about her brother’s habits, but the way she’d said the words I don’t do drugs told me she had a pretty good idea.
“Ten years?” She stared at me in shock. “You’ve had me followed for ten years?”
“Not followed,” I shot back, my voice sharper than I’d intended. “Just tracked.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“It was for your own safety, Kat.” The anger in her brother’s voice when he talked of her had made my stomach turn. “Your family dumped you. They cut off the money. You had to leave town and find work. You could be dead and none of them would know.”
“But you would know.” She shook her head. “I suppose I should find that comforting. You might take enough time out of your day to dump my ashes.”
It was always dramatics with this woman. That hadn’t changed. No one could fly off the handle like Kat. “You should be thanking me,” I told her. “It looks like I’m the only person who cares enough to keep you alive. If I wanted to let you die, I could have let that guy in his uniform back there take another crack at you.”
She was quiet then, and so was I. We were both thinking about the man in the hospital parking lot. He’d know by now that Kat was gone, that he’d missed her by—what? Twenty minutes? Ten? He’d be trying to track her.
“You can’t go to your apartment,” I said, softening my voice.
“I know.” She shook her head and slumped back in her seat, looking out the window. “I didn’t have anything I cared about there anyway. A secondhand bed and a few books. A TV. A laptop I got used for two hundred bucks.”
“What about a camera?” Kat had always loved photography. She’d talked about doing it for a living one day. Her camera was her prized possession.
“I sold my last camera a month ago. I suppose that makes you happy.”
Nothing about this made me happy. Fucking nothing. How hard up was she that she had to give up photography? “I never wished you ill,” I managed.
Her laugh was bitter. “That isn’t what you said the last time we saw each other.”
“I was angry. So were you. We both said some things.” It had been in the divorce lawyer’s office. Kat had said, among other things, that she wished she’d never met me. And I hadn’t been any nicer.
Why? It was so long ago now. Sure, our marriage hadn’t worked out. There had been lies and betrayals and arguments. But I looked at the woman sitting next to me now, thirteen years later, and wondered again if I hated her. If I ever had.
Even bruised, bandaged, exhausted, and bleeding, Kat was beautiful. She was lean and strong, with dark eyes and high cheekbones descended from her Cherokee grandfather. Her hair was black, worn long and straight down her back, though it was tangled from her ordeal and her hospital stay.
When I’d met her at sixteen, she had been royalty, the daughter of one of the richest and most prestigious families in Chicago. Her mother was from old money. Her stepfather had been gearing up for a Senate run. In the years since Kat and I divorced, her brother had started up his investment firm, which was why I had crossed paths with him in Dallas. But while Tower VC made millions, Tyler Sloane made a business of sloppy, short-term investments that sometimes panned out and sometimes didn’t. Maybe it was because of Tyler’s addiction, or maybe it was just because he was bad at business. I didn’t much care.
I’d been a scrappy, poor kid from Chicago’s streets. Kat’s family had hated my guts. And now we were reversed—I was rich beyond anything I’d imagined, and Kat was living in a tiny apartment in Nashville, tending bar and unable to afford a camera. I suppose that makes you happy, she’d said.
Funny, I didn’t think I was happy at all.
“Tell me who did this to you and why,” I said into the silence of the car. “I need to know.”
For once, she didn’t argue. She simply started to talk.
She told me about taking the garbage out, about the men she’d seen with the car and the duffel bag. She told me what one had said to her, and that she’d expected him to come into the bar afterward, but he hadn’t.
It was a guess. She hadn’t seen the faces of the men who had tried to abduct her, so she didn’t have proof that the two were connected. But gut instinct, especially from someone as street-smart as Kat, was never wrong.
“Okay,” I said when she’d finished. I had pulled into a parking lot, and I turned off the SUV. “I can work with that. But first, you have to get some rest.”
She looked out the window, taking in where we were, the planes taking off in the near distance. “We’re at a hotel at the airport.”
“Not just any hotel. One of the nicest hotels in Nashville. And I’m getting us a suite.”
Kat frowned. “Alex.”
“Don’t argue with me. Just this once. You’re no good to me, or to yourself, until you’ve had some rest and some food. You need to feel better so you can deal with this properly.”
She didn’t like that, but she couldn’t argue with it. “Fine,” she said reluctantly. “But after I’ve rested, then what?”
I didn’t answer her question. I had one simple reason.
I honestly had no damned clue.