Page 68 of Danger Close
But still, she was scared. I raised my voice and scared her. She still didn’t trust me. That was okay. I’d have the rest of my life to wipe those fears away.
I’d have to learn to control my volume.
My brother got to work fast. In a few minutes, Teri slept in one of the luxury rooms of the ICU. It looked more like a hotel than a hospital, though still could use some improvements. I called for things to be delivered: better pillows, better sheets. A warmer blanket. She wouldn’t sleep well if she was cold.
Though, she was probably too tired to notice, but when she was better, I wanted her to be comfortable.
The swelling in her eye was severe, bruising, black. Her cheek, her jaw, her lips—they’d made a punching bag of her. I didn’t have it in me to look beneath her hospital gown. I wanted to. I wanted to intimately understand every bit of pain she was in, but knew it would just send me into a rage. She didn’t need to see that. Not right now.
I was going to kill someone. I was going to killmanypeople, in fact, for this.
“Please,” I said, looking at Teri. “Burden me.”
My heart was somewhere in my throat as I reached out to tuck a lock of her dark hair behind her ear, lightly grazing her skin. She flinched in her sleep, and I pulled away, scared to hurt her even more.
“For God’s sake, Teri,burdenme. Give me your fucking problems so I can fix them. Tell me…” I sucked in a breath through my teeth as I calmed myself. “Let me in, Princess. I swear, I will fixeverything.”
Chapter 29
No One Else to Tell
Cobra
Three Days before the wedding
Beaufort returned, knocking on the door before entering with a bag in his hand. I’d sent him back to the Vasiliev house to get Teri clothes. Those hospital gowns were hideous, and I knew she hated them. It also gave him and Jericho a chance to compare notes, because I didn’t have the space to lead the discussion and get everyone on the same page.
“I could have lost her,” was all I said when Beaufort put the bag down beside me. I didn’t need to check it. He’d have been thorough. “One more hit, one more fucking second, and I could have lost her. For good, this time.”
I wasn’t really talking to Beaufort. I was using him as an excuse to say my words out loud. I needed to unravel the tangles in my head; to unknot it bit by bit and come up with a plan. A hunting plan.
“Look what they did to her, Dave…”
I wiped my palm over my beard, feeling the course, graying hair on my palm.
He nudged me with the back of his hand, and I looked over, seeing an offered coffee cup.
“You’ll need sleep to make sure you’re firing on all pistons,” Beaufort said. “Tiring yourself out won’t help her.”
“If you were me, would you be able to sleep?”
“Nah, I wouldn’t.” Beaufort answered a question that I think I asked hours ago. “Sonia wants to talk to you directly. She won’t tell me or Jericho what she has.”
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Sonia Norkus claimed that she had a name.Thename. We could only do so much with “Ray”. Even with automatic searches, we’d have a million combinations. It could be a first, middle, or a last name, a nickname. Then of the millions that came back, it’d need to run through locations. Even narrowing that down, we’d still have thousands to manually sift through.
If Norkus could just tell us who it was, she’d save us hundreds of hours in manpower.
“She told me something,” I said, quietly. “Twenty years ago, when Trinity was ten, she saw me while I was undercover with The Frontline.”
Guilt. That was the thing tightening my chest at that moment.
My jacket was in her fists. She clung to it like she was lost at sea and that was the final life raft.
“I didn’t think anything of it. Hell, I half didn’t believe it was her. But I guess it was.” I leaned back in the chair and drank the bitter hospital coffee—the tar so thick it helped the nurses get through their long shifts. “She’d packed everything up into a car, taken the kid and disappeared in the middle of the night. That might be related to…” I gestured obliquely to my wife, the room around us, the situation we were all in. “All of this.”
“Where did she see you?”
