Chapter 5 #2
Remorse immediately had her cheeks heating. That wasn't how she saw Dragon. Not really. Not when she was thinking clearly. When she wasn't terrified out of her mind, she knew there wasn't a chance in hell he would leave her after what had just happened.
Because when she wasn't scared senseless or fixated on anger at being dismissed so easily, she knew the truth.
Dragon felt the same way about her as she did about him, he was just too scared to admit it.
“S-sorry,” she mumbled as tremors began to wreck her body, making her teeth chatter. Suddenly, it felt like the temperature in the room had dropped about twenty degrees, and she knew it had little to do with the fact that she no longer had a front door. “I j-just p-panicked for a m-moment.”
Those unusual eyes of his softened slightly, and he snatched a blanket from the back of her couch and a couple of throw pillows as he hurried back to her side.
“You're bleeding,” he said softly, but there was no way he couldn’t have known that.
Her attacker had inflicted the second wound right in front of him.
“G-got me as I c-came through th-the d-door,” she told him as he slipped one of the pillows under her head, his large hand cradling her for a moment before he lowered her head down to rest on the pillow. “G-got him t-too though.”
Despite the pain, the fear, the confusion, Cassandra was proud she’d fought back.
Of all seven siblings, she was the only one who hadn't chosen a career in the military or some other agency like their parents had.
It had been another mark against her, another way she was different than the rest of them, but it had always been the right choice for her.
She wasn't as strong and tough as the rest of them, and it showed in how she was handling the recent revelations about her conception.
“Course you did, little rabbit.” There was definite pride in Dragon’s voice as he knelt at her side and draped the blanket over most of her body, leaving the wound on her leg and the one on her arm exposed.
A tiny bit of warmth infused itself into her ice-cold body at hearing Dragon was proud of her. It shouldn’t matter what he thought, it hadn't mattered to him what she had to say about his plans, but it did.
“This one doesn’t look too deep,” Dragon told her as he examined her arm, and she followed his gaze to look at the gash about five inches long in the side of her bicep.
“H-heard him a m-moment before h-he a-acted,” she explained, the way her body trembled against the hard floorboards making her ache all over.
“You have good instincts. You need to learn to listen to your gut more often.”
If she’d listened to her instincts, she wouldn't have stayed there tonight. She would have gone to her brother Cade’s house with the intent of helping out with her five-year-old niece Esther, so she didn't feel completely useless as her oldest brother played bodyguard.
Doing that wouldn't have just put the little girl in danger, but her soon-to-be sister-in-law as well.
Gabriella was four months pregnant with a high-risk pregnancy.
The former nanny to little Essie had never made it this far in a pregnancy, suffering miscarriage after miscarriage, and the whole family was praying with everything they had that this time she was able to carry to term and give birth to a healthy little boy or girl.
That all could have ended if she’d been stubborn and decided not to let Dragon watch over her from his car on the street.
She could have been responsible for another death, and she was pretty sure it would have sealed in Gabriella’s mind that she wasn't to have biological children, and she wouldn't have tried again.
That would have deprived the couple of more kids, Essie of siblings, and caused two people who had already been through so much to suffer all over again.
Maybe listening to her instincts wasn't such a good idea after all.
Maybe hers were broken.
“Is he dead?” she asked as Dragon probed the wound on her leg.
“Yes.”
Swallowing the lump of emotion clogging her throat, she nodded even though he wasn't looking at her. “Th-thank you.”
At her thanks, Dragon’s gaze snapped up to meet hers. There was surprise in his. Did he really think that she thought he was a monster? That she would react badly to him killing the man who had broken into her home and attacked her?
She’d left because she couldn’t be part of what he and his team were planning, not because she didn't understand why he wanted revenge, and certainly not because she believed him to be a monster.
She thought he was a man who had been badly hurt, prepared to lash out at someone innocent if it got him closer to the guilty person.
That didn't make him a monster, even though it wasn't right by any definition of the word.
“It was b-because of the w-woman, wasn't it?” she asked, her gaze now drawn to the man lying dead in her living room.
“Twenty-four hours after you were accosted by her, someone shows up at your house in the middle of the night, no way it can't be related,” Dragon replied as he pushed to his feet and disappeared into her kitchen, reappearing a moment later with the first aid kit she kept under the sink.
“It had to have been this D-Dr. Gardner man, r-right? He sent that man here to k-kill me.”
Dragon’s gaze refused to meet hers as he knelt beside her and began to wrap a bandage around the gash on her leg. If he wouldn't look at her, it meant there was something he didn't want her to know.
But she had every right to know.
Whatever plan the guys had enacted with this Rose woman now included her.
She’d been dragged into it, and she didn't want to be kept in the dark.
Keeping her distance was no longer an option.
She was part of this, even if she didn't have the emotional or mental capacity to deal with anything else right now.
“What?” she prompted, reaching down to grab his hands and stop him, and hissing when pain flared in her arm.
Glaring at her, Dragon’s hands closed around her shoulders, and he eased her back down. “Now I get Steel’s thing about no moving,” he muttered, making her brows dip in confusion as she had no idea what he was talking about.
“You know something,” she pushed, not willing to let him be another person in her life keeping her out of the loop to protect her.
Her brothers had tried to do that for years as they dug into the past to find the truth about their parents, but it didn't make her feel protected, it made her feel like an outsider in her own family.
Cassandra knew she wasn't part of Dragon’s family. He didn't really owe her answers, but she’d tried to walk away and it hadn't worked. Now she was in this whether she wanted to be or not, and she wanted to know what she was up against. What she had to be prepared to face.
“Tell me,” she insisted.
“He dropped something,” Dragon told her. He tucked the blanket over her legs and moved to kneel by her shoulder, gently picking up her arm and bandaging it as well.
“Dropped what?”
“A syringe.”
“A syringe?” she echoed, not catching on.
Violet eyes meeting hers, for once Dragon didn't shield what he was feeling, allowing her to see it all. Fear, regret, guilt, remorse, concern, and worry. “I don’t think the plan was to kill you tonight, little rabbit. I think the plan was to kidnap you and use you as bait to lure us in the same way we tried to use Rose to lure in her brother.”