“Kenna,” I gasp raggedly, struggling around the thickness filling my throat. “Kenna. Wake up. Baby, Reb, please, wake up. Wake up!”
The last two words rocket off my tongue, sheer panic, ripping me in two. I've lived the past three decades of my life learning self-control, discipline, learning to stay calm. And right now that's falling to shit because the only woman I've cared about is dying in my arms.
No response. No whimper. No movement. Nada.
She’s as still and silent as the dead, hanging in my arms, this rag doll without the fire and spirit and laughter and sweetness I love. This is my fucking fault.
I took her wide-eyed, trusting innocence that believed in me so much and I ruined it. I brought my poison to her doorstep, and injected it in her veins. Dallas may have done the deed, but she's here, collapsed, dying because of me.
This is all my selfishness, my shittiness, and it isn't fucking fair.
I should be the one lying here barely breathing, clinging to life. She doesn't deserve any of this.
I clutch her to me with one arm, fumbling for my radio with the other hand. But before I can find words, a raw, roaring scream of sheer anguish pours from inside me, ripping out of my chest. I trail off, gasping for breath, then bark into the speaker.
“I need help, help, get someone the fuck up here now!” I snap off. “Kenna – she’s – I’m in the hall near the manager's office, send the paramedics – James? Riker? Skylar? Anyone?”
A sharp bang cuts me off. There’s a crackle of confirmation from my radio, but I barely hear it as I snap my head up, toward the door that just rocketed open.
Instinctively, I clutch Kenna closer to me with a lion-like snarl – I’m full animal, protecting my mate. Protecting her as much as I possibly can after I'm the reason she's in this state.
And I have every fucking right to be worried, when Dallas comes strutting in with that smug, hateful smile on his lips, his arms spread as if he’s presenting the grand finale to this terrible carnival show he’s undoubtedly arranged right from the start.
“Landon!” he nearly purrs. “How's it hanging? The two of you couldn’t be playing this any better. Who the hell knew you were such a fine actor? Ready to play Romeo to your Juliet?”
Everything goes red. Every last bit of humanity in me vanishes to leave a raging, rabid beast.
“You!” I snarl, and launch myself at him.
He doesn’t even dodge. It’s like he’s asking for it, as my fist swings in.
I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in his eyes – teeth bared, face crazed with fury – before his head snaps to the side with a satisfying crunch and the painful reverberation of impact shakes up through my knuckles and into the bones of my arm. He staggers back, reeling, before catching himself with an almost incredulous laugh and touching his bleeding lower lip. His fingertips come away red, and he stares at them, looking all too pleased.
I clench my fists, sucking in heaving breaths. I want to fucking kill him. I want to fucking kill him now, but first I need to know what he did to Kenna and how to fix it when I can feel the silver thread tying her soul to mine growing thinner and thinner by the second.
“Talk,” I spit. “What did you do?”
“What you gave me room to do, you careless, overconfident fool. So noble.” He smirks, swiping his lower lip clean with his thumb. “You play the wounded animal, the tortured soul, but deep down you believe so much in people’s inherent goodness that you just don’t watch your back. You even trusted me to watch it for you.” He arches a brow, cracking his jaw in a back-and-forth motion. “Have to say, the bloody lip will be the perfect finishing touch.”
It takes everything in me not to launch at him and wrap my fingers around his neck. “To. What.”
“To the dramatic little story of a Juliet gone wild. And her brass balls Romeo who died heroically, trying to stop the man who discovered her attempt to cover up a jealous murder by committing suicide.”
My eyes widen. This fucker arranged this, and then used Kenna’s convenient arrival to cap it off.
He poisoned Milah to get to me, to shove me out of the game, and he’ll kill Kenna and me both to seal the deal and tie up any loose ends.
Like father, like son.
Apples don’t fall far from the tree, and these apples are rotten to the core.
I fling myself at him, operating on instinct – only to stop short like my leash gets yanked as a sleek black Beretta materializes from inside his suit. It pins me with the killing black eye of its muzzle, rooting me to the spot with it trained between my eyes.
“Don’t make this difficult, Landon,” Dallas says almost pityingly. “You always have to make everything so damn complicated. For once in your life – relax.”
“Bastard!” I snarl. I’m already calculating, looking for a moment of inattention, a second to get him in a hold and disarm him.
He smirks. “I’ve been called worse.” Then he lifts his radio to his lips, keeping the gun and his sidelong gaze trained on me. “I have target alpha secured in the manager’s office. Let’s sweep, clean up, and dispose of the trash. Converge.”
Fuck. I have maybe five seconds to overpower Dallas and get away with Kenna before his team shows up to finish the job and mop up the mess. As he lowers the radio to clip it to his slacks, I seize the distraction.
I lunge, throwing myself forward with all my strength, all my speed. He barely even hesitates.
There’s a sharp report.
A bright, blinding muzzle flash exploding over me.
Then pain, searing into my side, hot enough to eclipse the entire right side of my body with red liquid fire, like I’m drowning in blood. I stagger, falling to my knees at his feet. There’s only a moment to grab at him, struggling, fighting.
Then the butt of the Beretta comes down, pain crashes into my skull, and in a flicker-flash of white to black everything goes dark.
*
I don’t expect to wake up again.
For a moment I don’t know where I am. Not when I went down under enemy fire, and the first thing that penetrates the dark is the familiar sound of gunfire exchanged on a battlefield. I expect to wake up in a bivouac tent in Fallujah, surrounded by light the color of the sand that creeps into everything, from your gear to your mouth to the crack of your ass.
Instead I wake up to the cold white light of an overhead bank of fluorescents, James and Riker standing over me with their weapons drawn and aimed toward the door, Kenna cold and barely breathing next to me while the blood from the seeping pit of fire carved into my side stretches between us to soak into her clothing and link us like some terrible pact in dying heart’s blood.
I manage to lift one arm, reaching across the space between us to touch her cheek. It’s so cold, but I can still feel her breaths feathering against my knuckles.
She’s alive. But I don’t know for how long.
I’ve got to get her to a hospital.
And then I’m killing Dallas.
I’ve let childhood nostalgia blind me to that asshole the same way it blinded Steve to the darkness inside me.
No matter how awful Reg Reese was, I'd actually been na?ve enough to think his son wouldn’t be just as fucked.
Na?ve enough to buy all that diversionary shit about finding my old man’s killer, about working with the police.
Dallas and I have been rivals since the fucking cradle, but it was always that sort of high school shit with trying to be the better son, two princes vying for the crown. I never thought he’d carry it too far.
He was right about me.
No matter how poisoned I may be, there’s some part of me that believes most people are like Kenna.
Inherently good. Worth having faith in.
I’ve always thought I was the only one who couldn’t be trusted, with my father’s tainted blood in my veins.
And now, my oversight, my error, is killing my Kenna.
Move asshole, a voice deep inside me barks.