Page 82 of Taming Achilles

“My mother would love to have a doctor in the family.” She ran a hand through her hair and raised a darkened brow. “You should visit Jason Rhodes.”

I looked up at her.

“He’s in a black site with Brett, and Callum,” she said with a sadistic glint in her eye. “They’re working him over, but they’re doing you the courtesy of waiting before they start any real questioning.”

I smiled. That sadism blossomed in my chest. Rhodes was the reason she was here. It was the reason she was in this hospital bed. Well, yes. It was also my fault too. She had jumped in front of a bullet to protect me. Jason had fired the bullet. We were both to blame.

“Thank you,” I told her.

She got up from the chair and left, leaving me in the silence with Pippa and those blasted machines.

When Chloe arrived, her hair was frizzy and thick from her plane ride - commercial, of course, because she was a woman of the people and cared about her carbon emissions, and refused to fly private. She stood guard beside her sister, placing her forehead in Pippa’s limp palm.

“How could this have happened?” She said through teary eyes. “I should have come back after the first time. After the Ricoda show. She said she was fine … now …”

“It’s just a few bruised ribs and a graze …”

“From a bullet!” She interrupted. Her eyes glanced at me, red and puffy. Her French accent held an extra bite. “How could you let this happen to her? How could Cal?”

The molten hate of her eyes cut through me. Even as a child, she hated me. She disliked how I took Pippa away. How we’d enjoyed each other’s company alone. She preferred Callum because she was allowed to be a part of their trio. She was always allowed to tag along. But me? No. I wanted Pippa all to myself. I was selfish that way. Still am.

“I had to learn about it from that bitch, Callisandra Davenport,” she looked at me with fury, made even more menacing by her tight, ringlet curls. I wondered why she hated Davenport so much, considering their relation. “I heard it from the bloody news! No one even called me!” And that was her real problem. Being left out. “Have you bastards forgotten that I’m a doctor? Do you think that maybe I should have been here?”

She placed her head back down on the back of Pippa’s hand, crying like the little girl she had been decades ago, when Pippa dared to leave her behind.

I needed to go. I knew Pippa wouldn’t wake up without a friendly face.

“I won’t forgive you if something happens to her,” Cabbage whispered as I walked out the door. “You or Cal.”

She said it with the saddest, but strongest conviction. I would be persona non grata if something happened to Pip. And that was fine. Because if something happened to her, that would be the end for me, too.

“I know, Cabbage,” I said. “We have men on the perimeter, and I’m posting Hugo outside the door. I won’t let anything happen to her.”

“Something already has happened to her.” Her eyes met mine for an instant, and I knew that what I saw there was accusation. Did she mean the other shooting? Did she mean now? Or did she mean the last twenty years?

We called her Cabbage, as if she was a kid. But in this moment, she had the look of a woman decades older, that had seen more hardships than could ever be described.

“I know.” There was nothing else that I could say.

The black site was just a storage facility, nestled in the California hills near a place called Chico. Available in plain sight, it was run off the books, paying for itself through legitimate rentals.

That was the best way to keep a government secret - hiding a money trail.

In the back of the lot was a nondescript garage made of stacked cinder block, and even further in the belly was a soundproof room. The cement floor sloped down to a drain, for obvious reasons. The human body was a filthy creation, not made to withstand torture. Blood, and the body's other functions, tended to evacuate fast when struck with fear. The drain made for easy cleanup with use from a high-pressure water hose. Which, incidentally, could also be used for torture, if we were feeling too lazy to use our fists.

Strung up, Rhodes looked like he was nine feet tall. The man was a beast, shoulders wide and muscled, but his face was devoid of anything.

They had done me the courtesy of waiting before they did any real interrogation. He was starved, given just enough water to keep him alive, and was kept with his arms up high, an untreated, festering bullet wound on his torso. There was no need to give him medical attention. He wouldn’t live long enough for it to matter.

“What’s your obsession with Pippa Fox?” I asked, getting straight to the point.

He tried to spit in my face, but it fell short, landing as a blob on the ground.

I looked to the side where Brett was playing with an ice pick. I had heard rumours that he had ties to the Russian bratva. That must explain his strange fascination with ice picks. I think these icy bastards killed Trotsky with an ice pick, right?

Hugo had developed a love of brass knuckles taken off some bratva guys that beat up Alastair’s wife, and he was cradling it in his hand now.

I smirked up at Rhodes.

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