Chapter 11 #2
Lyra let out a soft sigh and crouched. Silence became an unwanted companion in the room. The air was thick like fog in my throat, and I wanted to say a million things. Her eyelashes dusted her cheeks.
Open. Shut.
Open. Shut.
“I regret the way I treated you.”
Lyra clicked off her flashlight and plunged us into shadow. The moon was a half-crescent in the sky, but its rays were weak behind a steady stream of wispy clouds. My gaze adjusted to the low light. Hollows shadowed Lyra’s eyes, and her lips cracked from constant teeth-biting.
I knew she was hurting, but she said nothing.
“Did you hear me?” My voice cracked.
Lyra checked the safe, refusing to look at me.
The memory of her warm embrace, and the way she opened herself to me the night everything went wrong flooded back.
She’d trusted me not to hurt her. How hard was it for someone like her to trust?
How precious it had been to have had her heart, and I’d never respected the value.
If she would just say something, I could fix it.
Salvation starved in silence.
“Lyra.” I reached across the safe.
“I heard you. Now is not the time for emotions.”
Her voice was so cold it sliced through the tendons at the back of my legs, and I grabbed the bed to steady myself.
Her muted rebuke made me clamp my teeth on my tongue.
We were on a mission. I had to get it together.
But in the silence, the chasm between us loomed, and it threatened to swallow me whole.
The safe clicked and whirred. After a moment, Lyra carefully opened it. I turned on my flashlight as she pulled out a stack of paper and took photos of each piece. Invoices, receipts, and emails. Lyra worked as if flames licked at her heels. Underneath it all was a thumb drive.
Lyra tucked it into her pocket. I grabbed her shoulder.
“We’ve got what we need.”
Lyra’s gaze burned against mine for a moment, and she dipped her chin. We slipped down the dark corridor and away from the empty opulence. We reached the exit, where Ray and Beck were waiting. Darkness obscured their expressions.
“Got it?” Ray whispered.
“Yes.” Lyra tapped her pocket. “Guards?”
“You think I can’t deal with two measly guards?” Beck pressed against her with a curl of his lips.
“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” Lyra said as we hurried back to the cut fence.
The icy air burned my throat as I sucked in a relieved breath. Almost there. A gust of frigid wind blasted our backs, as if the mountain was trying to hasten our escape. A crack in the air shattered our furtive exit. Bark exploded off a tree ahead of us.
A bullet.
A stream of gunfire divided the gloom of the forest. Shouts echoed out behind us, and floodlights lit up the surrounding trees. I stumbled on slippery mud, and Ray pulled me upright, his lips pressed in a grim line.
“I thought you dealt with it?” Lyra snapped.
“They must have had others waiting. They knew we were coming,” Beck cursed.
My muscles burned as we bolted further into the forest. The sound of four-wheelers roared from the mansion, and I swallowed a breath laced with fear.
It made my lungs contract. Could this have been a trap?
I didn’t think so, not with the safe being stuffed full of incriminating information. Unless that was a plant.
My thoughts severed as my body jerked forward, shoved off balance by a searing pain in my shoulder. I grunted as my knees hit the ground, and my hand went to my shoulder and came away covered in slick red.
“Fuck.” Ray wrapped his arm around my waist. “You hit, big guy?”
I grunted, tried to move my legs, but they felt like concrete slabs. Ray dragged me until my feet caught purchase and I stumbled behind Lyra and Beck. She tossed me a white-faced look of grim concern.
“Keep up,” Beck barked.
“Jeez, Chief. A little grace, please.” Ray puffed as he half-hauled, half-carried me through the trees. Lyra said something into her comms, but all I could focus on was the terrible thump of my heart and the blistering heat in my shoulder.
A bullet had grazed me in the past, and I’d been stabbed a few times. But never shot. The heat scrambled my ability to react. Like someone jammed a blowtorch inside and blasted it.
We spilled out onto a narrow path, slick with black ice, where a van idled.
“Get in.” Ellington poked his head out the window with a lopsided grin.
Pain rolled over me as Ray’s hold tightened.
“Fuck, be gentle with me.” I gritted my teeth.
Ray muttered an apology as he helped me into the car. I flattened my lips as nausea clawed at my stomach. The van jolted on the road, and my shoulder jerked forward. I swallowed a cry of pain as my vision narrowed. Crying out loud wasn’t an option.
I drowsed against the glass and bit the end of my tongue like a martyr.
Ray wedged my arm above my head and kept pressure on the wound.
He muttered wordless comfort that I didn’t hear, though my belly warmed from it.
I wasn’t a robot, that shit hurt. When we finally pulled up at our house, Ray and Lyra helped me inside.
Beck, Ellington and Connall took the evidence we’d gathered.
They’d dissect it with their algorithms and code, things I didn’t understand.
I lived in the bold and the brash, preferring a bullet to a digital virus.
“Careful, you’ve lost a lot of blood, big guy.” Ray’s pressure on the wound didn’t relent.
“I’m fine.”
They laid me on the dining table, and the legs groaned under the weight. The house smelled of stale coffee and the burritos we’d wolfed down earlier. Now the tang of iron tinged everything.
“I’ll get something to clean the wound.” Ray hovered in the doorway as Lyra worked off my clothes.
He ducked his head, as if he couldn’t stand to see me in pain.
“I’m good, I promise. It’s just a graze.”
Why did the relief that suffused his expression dull the pain in my shoulder for a second?
“Is there something between you?” Lyra asked, slicing around my wound.
Blood soaked the material, and the raw scent infested my nostrils.
My muscles unwound on the table as I tried to find the right words.
Was there something between Ray and me? The kiss we shared made my lips tingle every time I thought about it.
I couldn’t deny the attraction. On my bolder days, I could admit it’d always been there, masquerading as hate.
“Only because of you, Lyra.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“No.” I gripped her busy fingers that prodded at my wound. “Don’t be happy with me. Scratch my eyes out, shout at me. Make me pay, for fuck’s sake.”
The pain of the bullet wound didn’t matter, not when she was close enough to touch. I wanted her ice shield to melt so I could steal inside and make her love me again. Regardless of what was between Ray and me, we both wanted her back.
Lyra leaned down, unsheathed her pocketknife strapped to her calf and pricked it against my groin.
She arched an eyebrow. “Better?”
I groaned. The pain was nothing compared to the fire in her expression.
“Fuck yes.”
She leaned forward and the hurt funneled deeper.
“You want me to castrate you in front of your boyfriend?”
I grabbed her hand, but I didn’t push it away. I held it against the most private part of myself. She could slash me to pieces, and I would thank her for it. Because I’d already destroyed her most vulnerable part. Her heart.
“I want to make us right, and I can’t do that if you stay cold.”
Let me love you again.
I wanted to make up for hate-fucking and using her fear against her. When I thought Lyra was a heartless spy, but she’d been protecting me all along. The emptiness in my chest throbbed with an ache that wouldn’t go away. I was a man with integrity and loyalty, and I hadn’t trusted her.
Ice wiped her face smooth. “I’ve sworn off men.”
“Okay,” I grunted with pain as I lifted my hips into the blade. “What about eunuchs?”
The light bulb above us flickered, breaking Lyra from our intense staring contest. She tossed the knife to the side with a soft laugh. It clattered against the wall with a metallic thud.
“You don’t give up, do you?” She shook her head.
I grabbed her wrist and brought it to my lips. Her lashes fluttered, and for a moment hope surged. Could it be this simple?
“If I apologize again, will it make a difference?”
Lyra snatched her hand back. She pressed on my shoulder until I let out a curse. Pain blackened my vision. I guess I asked for that.
“We both owe each other apologies, but I don’t want to keep walking in circles. The past is the past, and I want to move on.”
Her fingers dug into the puckered edge of the wound, and jagged pain stole my breath as I rolled up.
My hand curled around her neck as I brought her lips to mine.
The sweet velvet I coveted twisted into a flattened line as she punched my wound.
I wilted, my head landing on the solid table with a crack.
“I mean it, Jonah.”
Ray paused in the doorway, his eyebrow arched. He held up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide cleaner with a grimace.
“This is all we’ve got for now. It’ll hurt like a bitch and probably scar, but it’s better than an infection.”
I smiled at Lyra, tasting iron and regret in the back of my throat.
“Make it hurt. I deserve it.”