I crushed my lips into hers, and she let me. Not only let me but returned the ferocious kiss with the same strength and fervor. Lips and tongues joining together as if to reassure each other we were both okay. That she was alive. That we were both here. But the anger at the fact that Fiona had reached her once again, marking her on the outside this time, was enough for me to want to go back and fill the already dead body with another twenty rounds.
“Nash, look at me,” Dani said, voice straining. I put my finger on the red welt, wanting to absorb the pain as my own. I met her eyes with ones that felt like they were bleeding. “Are you listening to me?”
I nodded, a barely noticeable movement because I didn’t trust my voice yet.
“You saved me.” She grabbed my chin to make sure I was focused on her and her words. “You saved me twice. You taught me how to fight, and I did that first. I thought I’d knocked her out. Maybe I had. I don’t know; maybe she just recovered faster than I expected. But you saved me a second time with your gun and your aim. I’m safe because of you.”
I buried my head in her chest, her hands traveling to my hair and then my back, squeezing me tight as if I’d been the one wounded instead of her.
“You weren’t too late,” she whispered, hearing the words I hadn’t spoken.
My thoughts went spiraling to my team in pieces on the ground in the moonlight that slid out from behind the clouds. To my mom’s body, being hit with the gentle waves from the pond as it blew in the breeze in another moon-swept scene.
To the men whose lives I’d taken. To the men I’d fought with who were now buried.
Back to Dani, in my arms, body quivering in the aftershock. And I focused through it all to her. Her eyes boring into me. Her thumb stroking my face, grounding me.
And it hit me that there was blood coming from wounds on her hand.
I took her slim fingers into my own. “You’re bleeding.”
She looked down as if surprised by the fact.
I pulled off my tie, wrapping it gently around the knuckles that were already turning colors.
“You hit her,” I said.
She nodded. “I thought I’d knocked her out.”
She repeated the words, and I heard them this time. She’d saved herself first. I bent and kissed the red welt on her neck, softly, breathing her in. The lemon scent of her clouded with another scent. Fear. Adrenaline. A perfume that wasn’t hers.
The door to the room opened, and my gun came up, trained on the doorway before seeing the one directed at us. Tanner…with hatred in his eyes.
Dani was in my lap, in the line of fire, and as I attempted to shift her, he said, “Move and I shoot her.”
“You’ll die first,” I said, the panic disappearing back into a mission calm as I protected the person I loved most in the entire world.
“I fucking hate you. We had a plan! We would’ve gotten back every goddamn penny they took from us if you hadn’t shown up.”
Money. Of course this was about money. Greed. It was one of the deadliest sins on this planet. It had been behind almost every damn operation I’d ever been on.
“Money. The money in the Caymans?” Dani’s ragged voice was full of shock, and she tried to move, but my arm not holding my gun locked her in place as I stared at his finger on the trigger.
“Money we earned working just as hard as him!” Tanner bellowed. “What did he do? Sing a few songs? Did he ever once think about sharing the wealth? No, not even when we’d been with him since the beginning.”
“You were in on it with her all along?” Dani asked. She was keeping him talking, which was a valid strategy if we waited for support, but I was ready to just be done with it.
“Put the gun down, or I can guarantee you, you’ll be dead,” I told him, the promise in my voice clear.
“How ‘bout we both shoot and see who dies. Might be your little girl here. It’s fair, after all, girl for a―”
I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him square in the head, and the second hit him in the heart before his body even had time to react.
He crashed backward out the door into Malone whose gun was already raised at him, and we all watched as he fell to the ground.
Malone turned to us, face grim. His eyes took in Dani and me before brushing a hand over his eyes and holstering his weapon. “Thank God,” he said.
“God had nothing to do with it,” I said quietly.
We exchanged a moment of shared respect before the hallway behind him filled with agents. Marco. Trevor. People who should have been watching Brady to make sure the threat was truly gone. Malone seemed to understand me even without a word, and he turned, directing the men back to their posts and off to the bathroom to secure the scene.
Garner’s words spoke in my ear, “Wellsley, confirm Owl is with you.”
It was Malone who confirmed Dani’s location.
“What’s her status?” Garner asked.
Malone seemed to take in all the spots on her I’d noticed as well—the red welt, the tie wrapped around her bleeding knuckles. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”
The words rounded in my head, and my arms tightened around her.
She was. She was going to be fine. There were still tears on her face, blurring the makeup she’d warned me not to kiss off, and her body was trembling, but she was okay. She was alive. She would walk out of this place with nothing that would scar her physically, even though I knew those were the last scars that should worry me. The internal ones were the ones that lasted.
“I’m taking her back to the hotel,” I
