24. Chapter 24 #2
We pushed downhill at a brisk pace, keeping our voices low as we talked.
I was explaining that there was a reason coffee covered so many of El Salvador’s mountainsides.
The volcanic soil, higher elevations, and shade made the slopes particularly good for growing high-quality Arabica.
I was still talking when my right boot caught a root hidden beneath the leaves.
My ankle rolled hard beneath me.
Pain shot up my leg, and I lost my balance.
Lachlan caught me around the waist and pulled me against him before I hit the ground.
“Isabella, are you okay?”
Embarrassment flared almost as quickly as the pain. “I’m fine. It was just a misstep, that’s all.”
“Hold on.” His arm stayed firm around my waist as his gaze dropped to my right foot, which I was still instinctively keeping off the ground. “You’re not even putting it down. Give it a second before you try putting weight on it.”
“It’s only a twist.”
I lowered my foot anyway, determined to prove it was nothing.
A sharp stab of pain made me suck in a breath.
Lachlan’s concern deepened. “All right, Mouse. Sit down for me and let me look at it.”
“Really, I’m fine.”
“Maybe, but I’d rather know that before we keep going.”
There wasn’t much to argue with in that, so I let him guide me to a broad boulder nearby and shrugged off the backpack.
Lachlan knelt in front of me and reached for my boot.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know. Give me your foot.” He started to loosen the laces. “Let me see the ankle.”
This man ran a nightclub in Manhattan. He belonged to a syndicate of mafia men, carried guns as naturally as other men carried wallets, and had killed without hesitation to get me out of the compound. Yet here he was, on his knee in the dirt because I had turned my ankle.
I chewed on my lip as he worked. Somewhere between one lace and the next, my thoughts jumped ahead to what might actually happen if we made it out of El Salvador.
Lachlan had a life waiting for him there.
His fancy club. His brother. His mafia world.
Probably some beautiful apartment filled with expensive things, and no shortage of sophisticated women who knew exactly how to move through his world.
Women who wore beautiful clothes, understood nightclubs and business deals, and all the ordinary freedoms I had only ever watched from a distance.
The possibility of actually reaching that world suddenly made my own future feel much less abstract and much more terrifying.
Lachlan had somewhere to go back to.
I had no idea where I belonged.
He eased my boot off carefully, supporting my heel in one hand before slipping off my sock.
His fingers moved slowly along the outside of it, firm enough to locate the injury but careful not to press harder than necessary. When his thumb reached a tender spot and pressed, I flinched.
“There?”
“Yes.”
He gently tested the movement of my foot, watching my face.
“I don’t think anything’s broken. You’ve still got good movement, and it isn’t swelling yet. Probably a mild sprain, but I’m giving it some support before we keep going.”
He reached for the backpack, pulled out the towel and my knife, then set the pack on the boulder beside me. He nicked one edge of the fabric and tore off a long strip.
Clever man. Lachlan never seemed to make a production out of solving a problem. He simply figured out what needed to be done and did it.
He tucked the knife and what remained of the towel back into the backpack, then crouched in front of me again.
He slipped my sock back on and began winding the strip firmly around my foot and ankle.
His hands looked enormous there, all rough fingers and battered knuckles moving with surprising care as he adjusted the wrap until it supported the joint without binding it too tightly.
I liked having those hands on me.
The realization wasn’t exactly shocking. I’d already spent far too much time thinking about his mouth that morning, and his hands had now joined the list.
These were hands capable of violence, but there was nothing rough about the way he handled me. Watching those big fingers move over my ankle made it far too easy to wonder how they would feel on the rest of me when taking care of me wasn’t the only thing on his mind.
My attention followed his hand as he finished the wrap, and that was when I noticed the large scar cutting across his palm.
“Wait.” I caught his hand before he could pull away.
Lachlan rose from his crouch and leaned one hip against the boulder beside me. I used my good foot to push myself a little farther up onto the rock, then drew his hand closer, turning his palm up for a better look.
“What happened here?”
His gaze dropped to the scar. “That’s from when Luca Genovese and Nikolai Volkov brought me and the rest of the Xyst men into The Syndicate.
Luca controls the old-school mob side of things across the Northeast—the families, the unions, the docks, and plenty of legitimate businesses too.
Nik rules the underworld from the shadows.
He runs Anonymous, DarkMatter Security, and ended up Pakhan of his father’s Russian Bratva, whether he wanted the job or not.
We cut our palms and swore a blood oath to one another. ”
I traced the uneven line with my thumb. “That looks more like a burn wound than a cut.”
“Aye. The cut was only the beginning.”
I stopped tracing the scar and stared up at him, thoroughly confused.
Lachlan smirked. “Luca gave each of us a saint card. We rolled them up, set them on fire, and burned them into the cuts to seal them.”
“You burned a piece of paper into an open wound?”
“Aye.”
“On purpose?”
“That is generally how an oath works, Mouse.”
I gave him a long look, reconsidering the collective sanity of every man in The Syndicate. “I bet it hurt a lot.”
His expression lost some of its amusement. “Like fucking hell.”
The blunt answer caught me off guard.
I’d heard Lachlan scream beneath electrical shocks, water torture, beatings, and things I tried not to think about. I’d also watched him refuse to give Isabeast a damn thing she wanted. If he described the pain as fucking hell, I could only imagine how awful that ritual must have been.
And he had chosen it.
“Everyone did that?” I asked, my voice pitching up in disbelief.
“Aye. My brother and the other men from Xyst. Every one of us.”
“Why saints?”
“Luca’s idea. Each man got one he thought suited him.”
I looked again at Lachlan’s scarred palm. “Who did he give you?”
“Saint Columba.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was an Irish monk with one hell of a temper. It got him exiled, but he eventually learned enough discipline to put all that rage to better use and became a leader instead of getting himself killed.”
I glanced up at him. “So the saint was a warning.”
“Most likely. Luca probably got as far as Irish and bad temper and decided he’d found his man.”
I smiled, but my attention returned to the scar beneath my thumb.
“You really believe your men will risk their lives to find you?”
Lachlan’s answer came without hesitation. “I know they will.”
“Because of the oath?”
“The oath made official what we already were.” His fingers closed loosely around mine. “Those men are my brothers, Isabella. You don’t leave a brother to rot in another country.”
What hit me hard wasn’t the brutality of the ritual, but the choice behind it. Those men had chosen to bind themselves to one another as brothers, and they would die for each other.
Lachlan’s attention dropped to our joined hands before slowly lifting to my mouth.
The intent in that look was unmistakable.