He nodded. “She’ll have to answer questions.”
I nodded. It wasn’t going to happen until she was ready. I’d be damned if I let anyone force her to live through it again until she could handle it. I didn’t care if that was days from now and they were all screaming at me. It would be on her terms and no one else’s.
We left by a back entrance and entered the hotel via the loading dock we’d been using all day. She didn’t object once to being in my arms as I walked. She just wrapped her arms around my neck and placed her head on my shoulder.
Having heard that we were on our way back, the agent at the elevator had it opened and waiting for us.
I pulled the radio from my ear and shoved it in my pocket.
I didn’t want to hear any of them anymore.
The door shut behind me, I hit the button for our floor, and I was grateful when she didn’t convulse in fear and panic like the night we’d found the knife in her jacket. Instead, she placed a kiss on my neck. Nothing heated. A reassurance. As if I were the one falling apart.
Maybe I was. I needed to examine every part of her. To make sure there were no other marks. Nothing that needed to be seen by a doctor. Nothing that needed a trip to the ER. Just so I could reassure myself that her heart was still beating.
When we got to the room, I sat her down on the bathroom counter, and yet, I was still unable to let her go. She kissed her fingers and touched my lips gently. “I’m giving the kiss back. It’s safe. We’re all safe.”
My mother’s words that I’d given her, the kiss she was giving me back, were all too much. It caused the admission to tear out of me as if it was ripping a hole through my chest. “I love you.”
I crushed her lips to mine again, and she met my tortured confession without words but with her lips and hands kneading into me the truth that she’d already spoken the day before. The fact that she loved me as well.
Two people who’d held the world at bay giving in to each other. Connecting. Joining. The bond more inseparable than the oath I’d taken on the day I got my Trident.
I pulled back, hand gently touching the mark on her beautiful neck, as tears filled my eyes that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to hold back anymore. I unwound my tie from her hand and gently washed it out with warm water. The cuts would need an antiseptic at some point.
“I’m going to get ice. Will you be okay?” I asked, my eyes unable to remove themselves from hers.
She nodded. Only the need to heal her allowed me to drag myself from her. I left with the ice bucket, filled it at the machine, and came back. When I got there, she’d slid off the counter and had removed the heavy chains she’d been wearing as well as the sequined dress. She was standing there in a pair of black underwear and a strapless bra that were almost sheer. Hiding nothing.
She had her hand on the red welt on her neck, the shape of the chains she’d removed already forming, and when she looked at me in the mirror, I didn’t see panic. I saw anger. I set the ice bucket down.
“Fenway threatened to do this to me,” she said.
My entire being convulsed.
“What?”
“A belt around my neck,” she said. She had every right to be angry.
“I’m so goddamn sorry,” I told her gently, self-reproach coloring every word.
She shook her head. “I’m not angry at you.” The rasp in her voice was doing nothing for my waves of regret. “I’m angry at seeing my face like this in yet another mirror. I’m tired of being a victim.”
“You weren’t a victim tonight. You’re Athena and Isis rolled into one. You were—you are—a warrior. Sometimes, there are wounds from a battle, but that doesn’t mean you lost.”
Her eyes filled with tears that she blinked back like I’d been blinking back my own.
She turned the water on, washing the makeup from her face. I handed her a towel and then wrapped ice in two others. I pulled her hand into mine and guided her to the bed. “Lie down.”
She did as I asked, and I placed the first towel along her neck and then surrounded her knuckles with the second one, tying a knot to keep it there. The clip she’d had in her hair earlier had disappeared somewhere along the way, and the dark silk was tumbling about her face and shoulders. I brushed it aside tenderly.
“How’d she get in the bathroom?” she asked. Every time she spoke, her torn voice hit me in the gut.
“She killed the agent at the door,” I told her, and Dani winced, eyes shutting. “That isn’t your fault,” I said with force.
Dani nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her.
She shook her head, eyes opening. “No, I want to stop thinking about it. For just one damn moment.”
I understood.
As the adrenaline that filled you on a mission drained off, it was hard to shake the scenes that replayed in your mind. As a team, we got rid of them with laughter by ribbing each other constantly. When we got back home, many of us used alcohol and sex. Things that required us to think little and feel even less of what had happened.
“Lie down with me?” she asked.
I took off my jacket, undid the two top buttons on the dress shirt, toed off the dress shoes, and joined her on the bed. I pulled her body so it was curled into mine so I could reassure myself―and her―that she was okay. As the adrenaline left her, she closed
