57. Rowan
FIFTY-SEVEN
ROWAN
I spent a few agonizing days at the hospital, waiting for my brothers to wake up. Multiple days of beating myself up over their condition. Several long days of nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company.
Well, and Lilly’s nagging.
"You need to find her, Rowan. She’s in bad shape; even McCoy could see that when she went back to that house for the fucking knife she stabbed that monster with?—"
I sighed heavily, hating that this conversation kept going on and on to nowhere. Lilly had been on my case for three days to find her newest asset, as she’d dubbed Harper. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t come back with Harper in tow, not to come back at all.
I stared at the phone like it would miraculously disappear if I glared hard enough. "I know, Lilly. But she left on her own willpower. I didn’t force her?—"
"I believe that as much as I believe you didn’t know she didn’t die seven years ago, Blackwood."
I froze at her words, confusion and shock warring with each other in my head. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"The fuck do you think it means, Rowan? It means I’m not an idiot. I recruited you boys specifically because you were given an insanely heinous task, and you chose the moral high ground at the risk of your own lives."
So she’d known all along. "You hired us without a single kill beneath our belt, and let us think you were in the dark about it all."
A long pause came from the other end of the line, and I could almost visualize the slow, creeping smile that was currently working its way across her face. If there was one thing Lilly St. Clair did well, it was play the long game.
"You made the assumption that I believed your lie. I simply never bothered to correct you."
It was my turn to wax contemplative now.
Technically, she was right. She’d never outright told us she believed the lie. We simply assumed she, like everyone else, believed it to be the truth.
That was my own damn fault. I was so confident, so self-assured, so full of myself, and so distracted by her future survival, that there was no doubt in my mind I’d fooled everyone. After all, if I had fooled my own brothers, how could I not have fooled the rest of the world?
Lilly’s sigh broke my train of thought. "Listen, Blackwood. I know you’re worried about your brothers. And you already said she left, and you have no idea where she went. But I think deep down, you know where she’ll be."
"I—"
She disconnected the call and left me with nothing to go on but my own gut. I knew what she wanted, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t blindly trust this feeling in the pit of my stomach. It didn’t make sense. Of all the places she’d go, she should want to go there the least.
So why did my gut tell me I’d find her there?
And why couldn’t I bring myself to go after her?
Nash woke up on day two, and since his eyes opened, he’d pestered me about Harper. I couldn’t fault the man for being smitten—after all, he had a sick sense of humor. He probably equated being intentionally stabbed with a proposal.
But it angered me that he wasn’t mad. Not even a little bit.
In fact, he was proud.
"Listen, man, I don’t understand why you’re so angry. She didn’t mean to kill me?—"
I frowned at his easygoing smile, eyes trailing to the IV in his arm. "She put you in the hospital. If she’d been properly trained, she wouldn’t have let that knife fly without confirming a target. "
"She’s not a trained killer, though, Ro." Nash groaned at my stubbornness, dragging his hands down his face. "Look. She had a reason for doing what she did. I can’t fault her for that."
"I never said I faulted her for trying to kill him."
His brow quirked. "She didn’t try. She delivered that kill shot, man. She killed him." He looked at his hands as if they were brand new, like he’d never seen them before in his life. "As much as I hated him, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was a coward."
"You weren’t a coward, Nash," I insisted, reaching out to put a hand over his on the bedspread. "I had so many opportunities to do something about him, but all I did was make excuses."
My end goal had always been to protect my brothers. To take the weight of the world from their shoulders, so that they could breathe free. And yet I’d failed spectacularly. And somewhere along the way, I’d stopped thinking of myself as a protector and started acting like a martyr.
I could have ended this all years ago. Instead, I just shoved it to the back burner. I thought if I put it out of my mind, maybe it’d go away.
"And now I’ve fucked it all up for you and Angel."
Nash’s frown deepened. "The fuck does that mean?"
"Who’s gonna pay for your mom’s life support? And we’ll never get Angel the answers he wanted about his mom. The truth." My fingers tapped idly against the inside of my thigh, drumming a staccato pattern of anxiety and frustration. "This has ruined everything."
"I can pay for her life support on my own, Ro. He threatened to stop paying years ago, so I made a failsafe account and took out life insurance. She’ll be taken care of for the foreseeable future."
It was like my eyes were opening. All along, I thought of my brothers as something to defend. And here they were, making plans behind my back because they saw me as incompetent.
"So you didn’t need me?— "
"I never said we didn’t need you, Rowan. But you didn’t need to sacrifice to him for us. We never asked you to be our Joan of Arc."
I hadn’t even realized how much I’d given up to save men who had been capable of saving themselves all along. And if I couldn’t protect them, if they didn’t need me to defend them anymore, where did that leave me?
What was I if I wasn’t their protector anymore?
"What about Angel?"
Nash sighed the sigh of a world-weary traveler who’d been tasked with delivering a painful truth. "Angel hasn’t needed either of us in a long time. What he needs is entirely different. And we can’t give it to him."
I had the feeling I already knew what our middle brother needed, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it.
All this time, I thought I was protecting them from the world. And in reality, all I was doing was using them as a shield to prevent myself from having to face life on my own.
Who was I really? Why couldn’t I trust others to carry some of the weight, some of the load I took upon myself?
A knock at the door disrupted our heart-to-heart, and our attention zeroed in on the nurse at the door as she poked her head in and smiled gently. "Mr. Blackwood?"
We exchanged a knowing smirk and grinned back at the older lady. "That would be both of us."
She nodded, satisfied with our answer. "Good. Means I’ll only need to make one trip." Her eyes found Nash’s arm, and she eyeballed his IV bag from across the room. "One of you is due for a blood draw, and one of you is being asked for in room three-oh-three."
I instantly perked up at the news. "He’s awake?"
"Yessir," she said hesitantly, her own grin growing. "And he’s been asking after a girl named Harper. We told him we’d ask about her and let you know he was awake. "
Great.
First thing he does is wake up and ask for someone who’d already gone.
"You have some explaining to do, Ro," Nash muttered, sliding his legs over the edge of the bed. "I’m coming with you in case he tries to take a swing."
The nurse glared at him like she might bite his head off if he tried. "You have a blood draw and a chest wound. You are absolutely not getting out of that bed, Mr. Blackwood."
Nash looked genuinely scared of this little woman. "I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m the Mr. Blackwood being asked about in the other room. He’s the one who needs his blood drawn, not me."
This overworked, underpaid lady was having none of it, though. As I stood to leave the room, she set to work strong-arming Nash back into bed, leaving me smiling despite myself at his weak protests.
The walk down the hall to Angel’s room was only a simple hundred feet, and yet it felt like miles to me. I couldn’t face him, knowing he sought someone who might never return. Someone who’d disappeared from our lives as quickly as she’d breezed back in. And it was all my fault.
My palm rested on the cool metal of his door as I struggled with a head hung low. I was ashamed of myself for what I’d done. Ashamed of how I’d acted. Nash was right, for once. I’d been so afraid of things being out of my control that I’d cut off my nose to spite my face.
The door opened to allow the nurse and attending doctor to slip out, and the ensuing gap caught Angel’s eye.
Making it impossible for me to back out now.
"Rowan?" he asked softly, his face paler than usual. "Come in, hurry up."
After a cursory nod to the doctor, I slipped in and shut the door behind me, not ready to take on the questions I knew he’d have.
As I expected, his eyes scanned the space behind me, face falling visibly when he realized I was alone.
"Where’s Harper?"
And there it was. The crux of the problem.
Harper.
Since we’d run into her again, our whole lives had turned upside down, and changed us all in ways none of us had wanted or needed. Now, she had both my brothers so tied up in her that their first question on waking was about her.
Neither seemed concerned with my presence. It was her they longed for on their deathbeds.
The woman who was indirectly and directly responsible for their near deaths, and all the misfortune to befall them in life.
No. That wasn’t fair.
We had no one to blame but ourselves for the choices we made.
"She’s gone, Angel," I said plainly, flipping a chair around so I could rest my arms across the back of it as a headrest. The world was so heavy these days. I just wanted to stop carrying it for a moment.
But the only person who’d been willing to take that weight away from me left. And it was all my fault.
"I chased her away."
His face was a mask of indifference, but I could see the pain in those expressive violet eyes. I could feel the disappointment in the air around us. The letdown showed in the way his lips pursed, trying too hard not to frown.
"Oh," was all he said, his eyes glued to me, waiting for me to willingly give an explanation.
But I had none.
Well, that was a lie.
I had one.
The truth .
"Why didn’t you tell me sooner?"
Angel was brilliant, but he liked to play dumb when he was fishing for intel. Now was one such time, and fortunately for him, I had no choice but to play along as he looked out the window and smiled softly. "Tell you what?"
"That you and Nash didn’t need me anymore." That somewhere along the line, I’d become the useless one.
"We do need you, Rowan. We just don’t need a protector anymore. We haven’t in a long time." He laid a hand on my shoulder, wincing as he leaned forward. "You wouldn’t let us shoulder any of the responsibility. And we were content to let you, so wrapped up in our own issues. But you never got to live like we did. You were always under his thumb, so we didn’t have to be." His gaze softened as I realized he was right.
I’d always been ‘Responsible Ro,’ the one everyone could count on. The good son. The devoted, filial son.
And yet I’d never quite measured up to my father’s expectations, partly because he expected if he pitted me against the brothers I protected with my body and my soul, one day, I’d grow to resent them.
Along the way, I suppose I had, from time to time. But our bond was too strong to be broken. And I did this out of a sense of love, not of duty.
That kind of bond wasn’t so easily broken.
"You can’t let him win now. Even in life, you found a way to beat him, Ro. You saved her twice. Now, it’s time to start living for yourself, not us." He leaned back as the door cracked open and Nash shuffled in, sheepishly grinning as he leaned heavily on his IV pole.
"Came to crash the party, fellas. Who has the booze?"
Angel’s laughter quickly turned to a grimace as he laid back on his pillows and closed his eyes momentarily. "Man, laughing hurts when you get shot through a fucking lung."
"You think that sucks. Imagine getting stabbed in the sternum. How embarrassing. By my own knife, too, man. Like, I’m mortified." Nash pantomimed his stabbing, and I realized something as I sat there watching these two idiot brothers of mine, both decked out in hospital gowns, hooked up to tubes and monitors, barely one foot out of the grave.
They were smiling. Both of them. The teasing wasn’t erupting in a fight for once. It felt . . . lighter.
"Are neither of you mad at her?"
Angel and Nash exchanged a look that spoke volumes. "Why the fuck would we be?" Angel glanced downward, his hand lifting waveringly to rest on the thick bandage just below his neckline. "I took the bullet for her willingly. Nobody forced me to do it."
Nash chuckled from his position by the door. "And I couldn’t be more proud. Imagine, Rowan. She’s been having secret lessons right under our noses. And someone had to teach her how to hack the system, so your camera feeds almost missed a loop feed. And the way she flung that blade—if I really had been one of Father’s goons, she’d have taken him out in a single blow." He threw his hand over his heart and then winced at the jarring motion. "I think I’d marry her if I wasn’t so damn ugly."
"You’re fucked in the head," Angel muttered, chuckling under his breath.
"You’re pretty, bro. Why don’t you marry her, then?" He waggled his brows at Angel and laughed when our middle brother’s face grew redder than a whore’s lips. "Aww, someone’s shy."
"Get fucked," Angel spat, turning his nose up at Nash. "I’m supposed to be healing here."
"Oh, you’d be out of that bed in seconds if I told you Harper was just down the hall in my room."
Angel’s gaze darted to the door, and I watched his knuckles turn white as he gripped the rails of his bed. "Is she?"
"No, she’s not. Because this dolt—" he jerked his thumb at me and chuffed annoyingly "—chased her off. Said it was all her fault and all that other shit."
"I told her the truth," I pleaded, but Angel and Nash were having none of it.
"What the fuck did you tell her, Rowan?" Angel looked ready to murder, and were he in slightly better shape, the look in his eyes would worry me.
"I told her that things would have been better if she’d never come along."
I barely whispered the words, but Angel heard them just fine in the quiet of the room.
And then, he did something I never thought I’d ever see him do in his entire life.
A stray tear trailed down his cheek as he stared into my soul, the sadness in his eyes too much to take. "Ro," he muttered, the words laced with seven years of pain. "Surely you don’t believe that."
"We were fine without her," I pointed out. "We had our job, our lives were steady, and we were all doing just fine?—"
"Nash and I were ready to kill each other, he had a drinking problem, and you were on the fast track to burnout." His words hit their intended mark, and I physically recoiled as each allegation hit me square in the heart. "We were falling apart, and you were desperately trying to hold us together and protect us from a boogeyman Nash and I stopped fearing a long time ago."
"You stopped needing my protection a long ass time ago and still let me go on thinking you needed to be sheltered from the world."
Angel’s stare hardened, and I saw the man he’d once been shift to make room for a man I’d become intimately familiar with. "You’re lashing out at her because you can’t bring yourself to look inward. You’re afraid it was your fault we ended up where we are. Because of what you did for her?—"
"Fuck you both, right up the ass," I spat, unable to bring myself to stay calm any longer. They were right, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to sit here and take this from two invalids who’d given their whole lives for a woman who’d walked out just because someone said some mean words to her?—
. . . if you’d never come along . . .
I stood from my chair, uncaring as it clanged to the floor in my haste. I was mid-epiphany, and if I didn’t move fast, I might lose the only chance I had left to fix the mistakes I’d made.
"Try the bridge," Angel offered helpfully as I rushed from his room, on autopilot all the way to the parking garage.
It was all your fault . . .
Her fault, my fault, none of us were at fault here. A man who’d been pulling the strings for far too long, controlled me like a puppet for a lifetime through my devotion to my brothers, was still warping my mind and damaging the good things I had. His hollow words, his menacing threat to take everything that I loved from me, rang in my ears as surely as my own did.
You’re still just a stubborn, selfish, spoiled brat . . .
You’re the whole reason any of this happened.
Sure, maybe she was. As the speedometer cranked higher, passing one-twenty like it was sitting still, I realized it didn’t matter if she’d been the catalyst. You couldn’t fight destiny. And fate had been trying to redirect us together at every turn.
If she wasn’t meant for us, then who was?
And if we weren’t meant for her, then what was the point of all this?
I pressed the pedal down to the floor and prayed I wasn’t too late to right the wrong I’d done.