Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Curtis.” His pulse spiked, every instinct he’d ever had screaming at him to run. “What is this?”
Curtis watched, hands still folded, as the first man crossed the room and swung.
The blow caught Leo by surprise, landing against his jaw and slamming him back into the chair before he’d fully registered the threat.
Adrenaline flooded through him a half second too late to stop the second hit from landing square in his ribs.
He threw himself sideways, driving an elbow into the nearest man’s throat, and felt cartilage give under the impact.
He fought with everything he had, but there were two of them, and his bad arm screamed in protest every time he tried to use it.
Leo got one clean punch in and felt a nose give under his knuckles.
He tasted his own blood filling his mouth from a split lip, and then a fist connected with his temple hard enough to send the room sideways.
He went down onto the hardwood, and they were on him fast after that.
One of the men drove an elbow into his wounded arm, and Leo nearly threw up from the pain as stars burst across his vision.
The stitches had definitely ripped open.
They took advantage of the second he froze, grinding a knee into his spine and wrenching his wrists behind his back.
Something cinched tight around them, biting into his skin.
“Curtis.” Leo forced his head up to look into his eyes, needing to see his face and for this to somehow not be what it so clearly was.
Curtis rose from his chair and came around the desk, unhurried, and crouched down to Leo’s level with genuine, aching regret.
It was the expression he’d worn telling Leo about Tim Hargrove’s death.
That same face had looked at Leo across a hundred desks and dinner tables and never once, not for a single second, appeared to be anything other than a man who loved him.
And Leo understood, with a horror that went bone-deep and ice-cold, that he’d spent six years unable to see the monster wearing his second father’s face.
#
Remi had gone philosophical somewhere around the second dose of pain medication. Propped against his pillow, his glassy focus apparently decided the ceiling tiles deserved a lot more scrutiny than anyone had previously given them.
He squinted upward. “You ever notice how hospital tile always has those little holes in it? Hundreds of them. Some poor engineer actually had to design that. I mean, they sat down and thought, what this room needs is exactly this many holes, no more, no less.”
“Acoustic dampening,” Anja murmured, not looking up from her phone. “It absorbs sound.”
“See, that’s the kind of thing you just know.” Remi shook his head slowly, marveling at her. “I’ve been shot, stabbed, and blown up more times than I can count on both hands, and you’re the one who knows about the holes.”
“You’re very high right now.”
“Believe me, I’m aware.” There was no trace of embarrassment as he settled deeper into the pillow. “Doesn’t make me wrong about the holes.”
Anja managed a smile, though it didn’t reach far.
Her whole body hummed with the aftershock of three words tossed off with effortless certainty, and Leo ignoring how he’d just cracked open a drawer she’d spent five months purposely keeping shut.
She hadn’t said it back. She’d stood there gaping, the doors sliding closed, with nothing coming out.
Now he was thirty minutes away in Frontenac, telling his boss that his best friend was a murderer while she was stuck in a hospital room waiting on a discharge nurse down the hall moving at the speed of a glacier.
“Where’d you go?” Remi’s voice had lost some of its dreamy edge.
“Nowhere.” She glanced at the door. “Wondering where your discharge papers are.”
“Liar.” This time she didn’t have the energy to argue. “You’ve got a look.”
“I do not.”
“You do.” Remi’s grin came out slow and a little crooked around the drugs, but his eyes stayed sharp enough to unsettle her. “What’d he do?”
She hesitated long enough that Remi’s eyebrows climbed, delighted, waiting her out with the patience of having absolutely nowhere else to be.
“He told me he loved me,” she admitted. Why she was unloading on Remi, a man she’d barely known before this case, she had no idea. It didn’t stop her. “In the lobby. He casually dropped it on his way out the door.”
“Oh, that’s good.” Remi’s grin widened, all the teasing gone. “That’s fantastic, Anja.”
“I didn’t say it back.”
“Did you want to?”
The question sat there, simple and unbearable, and Anja found she didn’t have a ready answer for it. At least not one she was prepared to say out loud to a man two doses deep into hospital-grade pharmaceuticals, however gentle his eyes had gone.
“I froze,” she admitted. “He said it, and then he was gone, and I just stood there like a stone statue.”
“You’ll get another chance.” Some of Remi’s loopiness was burning off. “A man like that doesn’t say it once and let it drop. Trust me. I’ve got a good read on people, even sideways on painkillers.”
Her phone chimed against her palm before she could answer, and her pulse jumped straight into her throat before she’d even looked at the screen. Leo.
At Curtis’s house. Lydia let me in. He’s in his office. Going to tell him now. Miss you already. Talk soon.
Her insides twisted at the ordinary sweetness of it.
Miss you already was tacked on at the end with the ease of an afterthought that wasn’t one at all.
She found herself smiling down at the screen despite everything, including the ache lodged in her heart from three words she hadn’t managed to return.
“Is that him?” Remi asked.
“Yes. He’s telling Curtis now.” She typed back a quick response, be safe, call me after, and set the phone face-up on her knee so she wouldn’t miss the reply, if there was one.
It took another forty minutes for the discharge nurse to reappear, a fresh stack of papers in hand.
She ran through the same thorough warnings a second time, apparently guessing correctly that they hadn’t absorbed a word of it the first time.
Anja signed where she was told, gathered Remi’s prescriptions, and got him upright and moving with one arm braced under his good side, ignoring his half-hearted protest.
“I can walk.”
“You can wobble,” she corrected. “Let me help.”