Page 31 of High Stakes

Her eyes meet mine and I can see the gears turning in her mind. She’s trying to calculate if she should tell me, or just let me go without knowing any details about her. Her teeth sink into her bottom lip and her brows furrow in concentration as she assesses me. She’s a smart one, and there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s in this life.

I hold up my hand with a small smirk, because that’s all I can manage with the amount of pain I’m trying to control. “Don’t hurt yourself. I’m fine with not knowing.”

She nods once and then looks at the driver, who’s watching us impassively through the mirror. “Solovyov,” she says softly before closing the door in my face.

I let the word sink into my skin. The name isn’t one I’m familiar with, but the origin is obvious. What is a Russian doll doing working in the ICU of a hospital in plain sight? My eyes watch her figure as she disappears through the sliding doors.

“Where are we going, my man?” the driver asks, breaking my train of thought.

I give him the address and then settle back into the seat as he puts the car in gear and drives away.

Where am I going?

Home.

I’m going the fuck home.

14

HECTOR

An ear piercing shriek shatters my peace and quiet, pulling me from my tranquil state as I finger the strings of my guitar. The scream is so loud that it would put a pterodactyl to shame. I sigh and let my fingers strum across the chords, waiting to see if another banshee wail follows or if it’s just going to be the one today. My fingertips twitch again before playing a few notes from Home by Phillip Phillips, just waiting.

A door slams. Another half-shriek, half-growl. Then several loud thuds followed by breaking glass. She’s using knives today. I sigh again and gently lay my guitar back in its case, already dreading going into that room. She’s been in a foul mood since she came rolling in last night, like a hurricane making landfall. Everything in her path was either leveled, broken beyond repair, or left for dead. And I sure as shit didn’t want to be any of the above.

I stop just outside the doorway and press my ear to the wall, trying to gauge what kind of warzone I’m about to walk into, but the room is silent. Deadly so. Inhaling through my nose, I open the door and step inside, prepared to duck at the slightmovement, but I’m met with only darkness and shadows. My eyes find her in the low light from the open door behind me.

Emelia is on her knees with her back to me, a knife loosely gripped in each hand and resting on the floor on either side of her. Her head is tilted back and she’s staring at the wall of photographs, news clippings, and string mazes stretching randomly from one piece of paper to another. Each string is a different color, representing something only Emelia knows. She inhales slowly, and deeply, and I know that she is counting her breaths.

“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” I ask when she doesn’t acknowledge me.

She doesn’t move a muscle. “I broke the lamp,” she says nonchalantly. “The overhead lights are too bright. They hurt my eyes.”

“And here I thought you had better aim.” I smirk and sink to the floor beside her, nudging her thigh with my knee.

“My aim is perfect,” she snaps back and gives me the side-eye glare I love so much. “I was just tired of looking at their stupid faces.” She still hasn’t moved an inch, her hands still grasping the knives at her side. “It’s like they’re mocking me.”

I tilt my head back and close my eyes. “What happened the other day?” I ask her after a few seconds of silence. “The other day. After you turned off your comm?” There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to know. A part of me that’s still angry and hurt that she lied to me.

Her head finally moves as she turns to face me. Her eyes hold a spark of insanity as she speaks. “I found him. After all this time. I finally fucking found him.” Emelia springs to her feet and bounds across the room to the lightswitch.

I groan and cover my eyes with my forearm at the sudden brightness. “Dammit, woman!”

She spins around and tosses both knives at the wall in quick succession. The blades bury halfway into the drywall, piercing a photo of a man. “I found that son of a bitch withering away in a hospital bed. And you wanna know what he gave me?” She stalks over to me and wraps her arms around my waist, sliding her hands into my back pockets. “A name,” she whispers when I don’t answer immediately.

I can’t answer her. My brain has misfired and my neurons can’t seem to find an electrical pathway to my voice box. I stare at the photograph of Sanders taped to the wall, my vision narrowing onto the face and everything else fades away. That fucking bastard. I inhale sharply and pull her tighter against me, one hand on her hip and the other cradling the back of her head. “What’d you do to get that?” My voice is little more than a whisper, hoarse and gravely.

She tilts her head back until her chin is resting against my sternum and I drop my hands to her shoulders. “I promised him I would make it painless.”

“And did you?”

Her eyes flash dangerously and I can’t help but smile down at her. “Abso-fucking-lutely not!”

“Good. That fucking bastard deserved the slowest of deaths. Fucking shot me in the back,” I mutter under my breath, and look back over at the wall. It’s then that I notice the other knives sticking out of the drywall, each one piercing a photograph of familiar faces.

Declan.

Hayden.

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