35. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
“MORNING BEAUTIFUL.”
Recognizing the voice, not opening my eyes, I was too fucking sick to be mad.
Still laid up on my office sofa—something I’d probably be getting rid of after having sweat through it for who knew how many hours—I needed a shower, a shave, toothpaste, and two gallons of water.
My stomach sour, the stench of illness rotting the air, I hated audiences but I also wasn’t burning from the inside out anymore so I decided to take that as a plus.
“I thought I talked to her about letting strange white men in the house,” I said, finally braving the morning brightness and opening my eyes.
In front of me, Jon Carletti, also known as Ducky, former Army SOF turned FX agent, pulled on a pair of latex medical gloves.
Nineah must’ve called him sometime this morning.
“You’re not putting a finger up my ass.”
“Don’t start that bad patient shit,” he warned. The former 68W who was basically as good as a nurse practitioner in this situation, checked vitals and reaction timing. I sat, irritated as he pressed on my lymph nodes, checked my blood pressure, and took a tympanic temp read.
“100.1,” he read, approvingly. “She acted quick. Good girl.”
“Come again?”
He rolled his eyes like I was one of his petulant crotch brats. “Detto, tua moglie ha sposato uno stronzo.”
“Parlo anche Italiano, coglione,” I replied. “I won’t tell you a third time to call my wife by her name.”
“But you’ll tell me a second time?” he hazed.
The dark-haired former Spec Ops medic who I hated for no other reason than he had a long-standing friendship with Nineah that predated our relationship, removed the IV needle from my arm and discarded everything into a red bag marked for bio-hazardous waste.
After that, he asked me a series of questions I answered impatiently.
His pretty boy smile morphing into a serious stare, he listened like he really was a concerned doctor, something that pissed me off even more.
“No symptoms other than the high temp and the exhaustion,” he said, removing his gloves.
“No lingering immune response to heat stroke, infection, or viral pathogens. This appears to be inflammation triggered, probably an autoimmune response to stress. When was the last time you took your meds, old man?”
I didn’t answer.
“Don’t look at me like that. If you didn’t want to live, you’d have saw to that.” He tossed the gloves in the bag, knotted it, and tossed that bag into a black duffle he’d brought with him. “You know, you’re not the only one who needs to take shit just to keep your gears turning.”
“How sad for your wife.”
He smirked with the youthful ease of a man who still had two working knees and didn’t keep a fucking pharmacy in his med cabinet, so nothing bothered him.
Maybe if I was honest, I hated him for that too because I hadn’t been that man in years.
Not even before I’d gotten blown sky high in the back of an MRAP and had to drag out a half-dead nineteen-year-old while my flesh cooked.
Carletti studied me. “I know you don’t like me—”
“Jesus.”
“But the feeling isn’t mutual,” he finished, his smirk dropping. My colleague hefted his duffle over his shoulder. “Don’t change that.”
“The fuck that’s supposed to mean?”
Carletti hung back. “It means you’ve got a woman limping like she got hit by a truck with fresh scrapes on her.
Not to mention, her eyes glazed over when I mentioned her God son.
I’m not going to sit here and tell another man what to do when it comes to his wife, but if mine got knocked so good it loosened a few screws, I’d be getting her some second and third opinions before I started leaving hickeys all over her. ”
His aim precise, the comment hit dead center and shame ricocheted like shrapnel. Carletti must’ve seen that shit because his compassionate smile made me miss the pretty boy smirk. “Relax. I took a look at her and she’s okay. Just… get her seen by a neurological specialist.”
Too exhausted to keep going back and forth with a man who never made it fun, I jerked my chin at him and he nodded. Carletti reached the door when I stopped him. “You’re from Europe.”
He snorted. “I’m from New York.”
“You never visit?”
He didn’t answer.
“What’s in the Baltics?”
“Wrong end of the compass,” he said. “I’m white, but I’m not that white. Why?”
I swallowed, contemplating my choices as of late, wondering what variables I was going to have to mitigate if I brought another person into my fucked up circle of hell, but the only factor that mattered had me overriding my own boundary line—she trusted him.
“That’s where they dumped her.”
Carletti’s jaw tensed. “You mean dropped her.”
I halted.
My anger multiplying by the second, I was afraid to ask for confirmation, but I didn’t have to.
Carletti continued. “She’s got pulmonary contusions, impact trauma on the entire left side of her body—all of it consistent with someone bracing for a fall.
The scar on her cheek was probably caused by her own hand when she hit the surface.
Even at a relatively low height, depending the rate of descent, that shit would’ve been like hitting concrete. ”
I stared at him. “My wife was dropped into international waters from the fucking sky.”
“Only one way to fall from the sky.”
And there was only one aircraft that could get low enough to drop her from a height she’d survive.
Fuck.
I SLEPT SEVEN MORE hours against my will.
After Carletti got into his family unfriendly whip and peeled out of my driveway, Nineah had entered the study with a large takeout cup of something with a broth that steamed and settled my stomach.
Now that I was certain what I had wasn’t communicable, I’d moved into the bedroom intending to take a shower, but instead had sat in a chair over the drain like a bitch while she sponged gentle soap and lukewarm water all over my body.
Her silence unnerving like it always was, my discomfort hit a new bar when a full hour had passed without one word from her.
I’d hated it. It’d reminded me of those months where she’d locked herself inside of her own mind, unable to get free.
But just as I’d been about to break, she met my stare as she toweled off my chest, her dilating pupils and dark pink ears giving her away.
When she was finished, she’d slipped into our bed, under the duvet as if inviting me to get in beside her and I had. Resting a hand on my chest first, as if she’d needed the confirmation of my beating life force to fall asleep, she did. Soon after, so did I.
And when I woke up, she was asleep beside me, snoring softly.
I was still in bed watching her, unable to fathom a future without her in my past. I’d tried many times over the last several days putting myself in her shoes, but when I ruminated on it, I couldn’t convince myself I’d be handling this shit any better.
If it’d been me, all fucked in the head, memory blocked, I’d be irate and pissed at having survived another one of God’s strange tests, too stubborn to appreciate help, too mistrusting of a scared, sweet beauty at my bedside, goading me into laughing.
It would’ve felt like a set up. Her climbing in beside me so she could warm her toes on my leg or ramble nonsense that’d have drowned out the beeping noise of the monitors.
Even still, if I woke with no recollection of us, she’d cut through me like butter before I had a chance to halt that descent.
The truth was, I couldn’t imagine not wanting her in any lifetime, under any circumstance and given our current state of in between, that was especially depressing.
As if she was aware I was watching her, Nineah blinked awake. She smiled sleepily, reaching for my forehead. “You’re regular-warm again.”
“What about you?” I asked her. “Carletti mentioned you were in pain.”
She yawned. “I took meds. I’m fine.” Rolling onto her side, she propped her chin in her hand, her brows furrowing. “You really scared me. Don’t do that again.”
“Not the first time it’s happened. Won’t be the last,” I warned.
In a gesture that was so like her, she grazed her fingers over my pectoral muscles without permission, tracing the raised scar tissue. I closed a hand around hers, bringing it to my mouth and kissed her palm. “Thank you.”
Dropping her gaze the way she did when she was praised outside of a bedroom setting, she smiled but it stopped short.
“What’s up?”
She shrugged.
“Come on, Ange. I know you. You haven’t said shit since that sponge bath you gave me and you never shut the fuck up.”
That made her smile. Fingering my chain around her neck, lost inside her chaotic mental, the woman I’d have followed a lot fucking further than Northern Europe took too long to find words.
Then she did, and I wasn’t at all prepared for it.
“What’s on the drives?” Easing onto her back, she stared at the ceiling.
“I promised myself I wasn’t going to ask, but… ”
“Look at me.”
She did.
“There is nothing in this house that you don’t have access to. Nothing.”
“Should I take that to mean you don’t keep my skeletons in your floorboards for insurance purposes?” she asked.
“Should I?”
She swallowed, averting her guilty gaze like a woman who collected secrets for a living, and didn’t respond to that. Her silence made me feel like shit.
“Nineah, you didn’t marry an interrogator and I didn’t marry a cyber specialist. Every decision I make, emotional, logical, professional—all of them are prioritized behind you, not beside you.
You are not an accessory to a life I lead alongside yours, you are my life. I cannot make that any clearer.”
She considered that. “Things change.”
“They already have.” More than she fucking knew.
“Whether by fault of your own or not, you’ve made an enemy of someone who has the means and patience to see you harmed.
” I grasped her chin, tilting her face until I had her eyes back on me.
“But I promise you, as long as I live, you will never have more to fear than the person who makes the mistake of threatening you.”
For several seconds, she just stared.
Like she wasn’t sure if I meant it?
Like she wasn’t sure if she could trust it?
I stared back.
My wife eventually nodded. “No nothing. Trust nothing.”
I shook my head. “Except that.”
“Except that,” she repeated.