Page 92 of Never Fall for an Angel

Levi: We need to talk.

I ignore my brother’s text as I have every day for the last three weeks and watch Mila clean out the greenhouse below.

Not that anything will grow inside with the cold coming soon, but I’m happy to see her find something to do with her time while I’m in the office.

I was finally able to get ahold of the footage from that night at the hospital. The car that dropped her off was a blacked-out Volvo SUV.

They pulled up to the curb by the road and barely stopped before they pushed her out onto the sidewalk, leaving her there to bleed out.

If it weren’t for the homeless man sitting against the side of the building who alerted the hospital, who knows how long she would have laid there, waiting for help while she bled out?

It pissed me off. Seeing her like that, broken and bloody and all fucking alone. I want to skin the men who did this to her alive and leave them in a field to rot on wooden spikes in the hot sun.

Sometimes, I sit and think about all the things I’m going to do to them when I find them. How I’m going to make them bleed. Cry for their mothers and beg for mercy.

It won’t come, though. I’ll let them choke on their own blood, slowly downing themselves until they aren’t alive to hurt anyone ever again.

Especially not her.

I’m standing at the window, watching Mila cart out a bucket of old vines and leaves, when my phone buzzes in my pocket.

I pull it out, gritting my teeth when I see the name, but I answer it anyway.

“I told you I would call.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line, and I cross the room to my chair, my eyes going to the photograph I’d pulled out of my wallet still laid out on the desk.

Absentmindedly, I rub the ache in my chest. Fucking bullet.

“You’ve found her.”

“I did.”

“And? Does she know?”

“No.”

“Fuck,” the man on the other end of the line sighs. “I’m coming up there.”

“You have a wife to think about. Your mother needs you.”

“Sheneeds me too,” he growls. “It’s my job to protect her.”

“Not anymore.”

He chuckles darkly. He knows what I did. Shortly after he married his wife, I changed the course of both our lives. I don’t regret it. He may not like it, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

“You don’t get to make that choice,” he grits.

“I already did.”

“You remember what I said if you hurt her?”

His voice is menacing, and if it were anyone else in the world, I’d probably laugh. Mason Carpenter isn’t one to fuck with, though.

“Because I have to say it,” he says, holding his wife’s hand as she lays in her hospital bed, passed out from being shot only hours before. “I’ll fucking kill you if you hurt her.”

“I’m doing this for her.”

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