Page 30 of Cruel Debts
I shook off her touch, feeling very uncomfortable in all the wrong regions all of a sudden. “I’ll be fine. Just a scratch, really.”I pulled my hand away and watched the blood well back up, swearing when I realized I’d need stitches. Not many, but more than I’d like.
“You could have been killed,” she whispered, her hands moving to my shoulders as I tried to stand. “You need medical attention; stop moving?—”
“Trinity,” I sighed, shaking her off again so I could stand. “I’m a grown ass man who’s had worse than this. I’ll be fine.” I shook off the urge to cup her jaw when I saw her bottom lip quiver just a little. “Now, we have to get you out of here.”
She didn’t argue, bless her. She just moved methodically over to where her bag sat and started to put the caps on the tubes of paint, shaking out brushes like she hadn’t just had an attempt made on her life.
“Trinity,” I said firmly, hoping she’d get the idea, but it was like she couldn’t hear me.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she muttered, stacking her shit in that stupid ass bag one by one. Slowly, achingly so.
If she kept putting her shit away at that speed, I’d bleed out on the floor. “Trin,” I tried again, using her brother’s pet name for her in the hopes it’d snap her out of this shit. “Come on.”
She ignored me still, a million miles away at this moment, and I was well past entertaining a breakdown.
“McCoy!”
Her back went ramrod straight, and she snapped to attention, turning on a dime to face me like she’d been shocked. “Don’t call me like your dog,” she spat, her eyes narrowed as she threw that bag over her shoulder and moved toward me with purpose. “I hate that.”
“Is your last name not McCoy?” I asked in confusion, perhaps letting a little bit of scorn and contempt leak into my words. When she didn’t answer, I put my good hand on her shoulder and forced her to stop a few feet in front of me.
Her eyes remained glued to the floor. “McCoy was what you guys called Keehn,” she whispered, a hitch in her voice that I didn’t like that I put there. “You can’t call me that, because that’shisname.”
I didn’t bother arguing the fact that he was most likely dead.
“Let’s go, Trin,” I muttered, humbled by the visceral reminder that we’d just abandoned Keehn in his time of need. When he struggled, we were nowhere to be found. We were nothing more than distant ex-bunkies, pretending the one phone call a month or an email here and there was enough.
It was an embarrassment.
And we lacked a good excuse to justify it.
Maybe we were just shit human beings. And now, this little girl in a big, bad city was determined to show us how we should have acted. What we should have done.
I led her out the back, shooting off a text to Asher on the way to the hidden car, my senses on high alert.
>>Assassination attempt tonight. Need stitches. Heading 2 you.
FOURTEEN
ASHER
“What the hell were you thinking?”
Liam sat in the kitchen with me as I threaded the needle to stitch him up. He said nothing as I stabbed him quite pointedly, refusing to waste any numbing supplies on this thick-skulled motherfucker.
He should have known better.
He was a trained ex-SpecOps soldier.
Maybe he was slipping.
No. That wasn’t like Liam. He was controlled. Strict, especially with himself.
“I was thinking we had a contract,” he muttered as I threaded the needle through his skin a second time, hissing at the tiny prick like he hadn’t sat here like this a million times before, getting stitched for one wound or another. “I wasthinkingtheir security would be a little more of a help than it was.”
“They were worthless, and you knew that going in,” Hawke snapped, tapping his fingers against the counter as he popped the cap on a bottle of water and downed it in one go. “You should have called one of us.”
“Hey, I did my job,” he fired back, and I had to still my hand as he jerked in the chair, practically snarling at Hawke over hisshoulder. “You’re the one who was supposed to have her tonight, and you bailed.”
