Page 21 of Assassin's Mark
Chapter Eleven
Levi went to work—on what, I had no idea. Columns of numbers lined his computer screen, though they didn’t look like dollar amounts. We settled into a companionable impasse, if that made any sense, Levi at his computer and me on the couch, watching. I might not understand what I was looking at, but I wanted to stay aware, to see any surprises coming.
That didn’t mean I couldstay silent.
“If you don’t need me anymore, why am I still here?”
I caught half of the smirk that took over Levi’s lips as he continued to type. “You’ve seen too much, Abby. I could never let you go now.”
“That sounds like a line from a really bad movie.”
His gaze slid to me briefly before returning to the computer monitor. “It is.”
The TV was still running, now back on regular programming.I grabbed the remote off the coffee table and began flipping channels. “No Netflix, huh?”
Levi snorted, gaze glued to his computer screen.
“Right. Old-school it is.” A quick search showed local channels playing game shows and soap operas. I happened on something old enough to be black-and-white and settled there, remote in hand, butt on the couch. We could’ve been an old married couple occupyingthe same room in companionable silence, if not for the fact that I couldn’t leave. Oh, and that my companion was a killer.
Surreal didn’t even come close…
Only one thing gave me any clue as to the ongoing saga outside our eerily calm oasis: the second monitor, this one on the opposite side of Levi’s desk. He turned to it periodically, the angle of his shoulders allowing me to catch a glimpseof a camera feed showing a white room occupied by a narrow hospital bed. The man in the bed looked too big to be lying there, unmoving, a tube and oxygen obscuring most of his face. But his matted hair matched Eli’s, who passed occasionally in front of the camera.
So this was Remi.
I might be reluctant to draw attention to myself at the moment, but the three men wormed their way into my thoughtsso insidiously I couldn’t ignore them. Every time Levi returned to whatever he was working on, I caught the tension around his eyes, the frown, the clenched jaw. Had it been anyone else, I’d have said it was worry or fear, but on Levi?
I glanced at the hospital feed again. Maybe fear wasn’t too far off.
Family loyalty was as foreign a concept to me as an assassin’s life was. It had certainlynever been a factor in my own—Dad had bought my first boyfriend, just like he’d arranged my marriage without my permission. Hell, he hadn’t seemed to blink at receiving naked, drugged pictures of me, tied and helpless. What would it be like for these men, so used to violence and danger, to care enough about their brothers, to worry about their safety? To protect each other against the world insteadof abandoning the people closest to them?
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I shouldn’t want to, either. Levi was as bad as my father. Wasn’t he?
When the light began to fade from the windows far over our heads, Levi stood and stretched. I jerked my gaze toward the TV, unwilling to indulge the impulse to drink in his taut body, unwilling to give him another weapon to use against me. I’d givenhim enough last night. And this morning. Why couldn’t he be old? Ugly? Violent? That last was relative, of course, but I couldn’t deny that he hadn’t truly hurt me. I just wished I could forget the look in his eyes last night as he’d touched me before the mirror, the moment when he’d realized I was a virgin. There had been too much care then, even if he’d faked it. Knowing what he would look likeif he wanted me gave him an in I knew he’d exploit if he needed to. And I doubted I’d be able to resist, even knowing it was a lie.
The scuff of Levi’s boots drew my attention to where he stood beside the couch.
“I’m headed out for dinner. Any requests?”
“Does it matter?”
“Doesn’t have to,” Levi said. The even tone of his voice, dripping with patience, settled like scalding water on my head.I bit down hard on my tongue.
“Fratelli’s it is, then.”
My eyes went wide. Fratelli’s was my favorite, my go-to restaurant when I came home late from class and knew Dad wouldn’t be home. The Italian restaurant was too lower-class for the next governor of Georgia, but their melt-in-my-mouth pasta and authentic sauces filled the hole inside me that had always craved home-cooked meals around afamily dinner table, one that wasn’t covered in gold-plated china and crystal.
Levi chuckled, and the knot of anger in my stomach returned.
“If I come home with Fratelli’s, are you going to find something else to bash my head in while I’m gone.”
I arched a brow in his direction. “If it meant I could keep all the food for myself, I’d cut you in a heartbeat.”
Wait, was I really joking with ahit man? With my kidnapper?
This isn’t supposed to be fun. He’s not a good guy, Abby.
But then, neither was my father, apparently.
