Page 45 of Assassin's Mark
Chapter Twenty-One
“What I had to,” Levi said, impassive as stone, but his gaze traveled over his brother despite the blankness of his expression, seeming to catalog every sign of weakness and strength. When Remi listed to one side, he was right there, holding him up.
Remi jerked away. “Don’t—” The effort it took to hold himself upright shook through his muscles, seeming ready to topplehim at any moment, but these brothers shared more than their skills with weapons, apparently. I’d never seen three more stubborn men.
“You’ve painted a target on our backs.”
Levi nodded his head toward the gunshot wound in the hollow of Remi’s shoulder. “Do you really think it matters?”
We’d had this argument more than once with Levi and gotten nowhere, but one look at the brothers’ faces convincedme to stay out of it. Not Leah—I swear the woman didn’t know the meaning of the wordintimidated. She ignored Levi’s looming presence as she fiddled with the controls on the side of the bed. Slowly the back part rose until Remi was fully supported. He tried to hide his relief as he settled against the pillow, but I could see it in the softening lines around his mouth, the returning color in hisknuckles where he gripped the railing.
His tired eyes found me again. Remi sucked in a ragged breath. “Yes, I think what we do matters.”
It was what Levi had taught them to believe.Don’t harm the innocent.But I was beginning to realize that what Levi had taught his brothers and what he lived weren’t necessarily the same. There was a different rule, a higher purpose that Levi answered to, andlooking at him now, watching him watch his brothers, I thought I knew what that purpose was.
Eli ran a hand through his hair, leaving the blond strands standing on end. “Do we really need to have this discussion now?”
“If not now, when?” Remi asked him.
“I don’t know, maybe when you’re not just waking up from being in a coma for a week and still healing from a hole in your fucking shoulder?”
Neither Remi nor Levi was going to leave it alone; one look told me that. Levi stood granite-still, impassive, thick arms crossed over his chest. The cold, dangerous assassin I’d seen for the first time the morning after Levi had taken my virginity was back, and he was immovable. Remi, though…his nostrils flared, and the glare he shot Levi glowed with amber fire. For a moment I saw not a woundedman but an avenging angel, intent on justice. A warrior fighting for a cause. He was Levi’s opposite; one brother shunned emotion, and the other blazed so bright with it that I had to look away.
No, there was no stopping this head-on collision.
“There was a target on our backs the minute we took Roslyn’s contract, and you know it. Getting rid of him is the only way out.”
“So you kidnapped hisdaughter?” Remi barked. A grimace of pain crossed his lips. “That’s not getting rid of him. That’s heaping coals on the monster’s head and hoping you can handle the fallout.”
“I don’t have to hope. I know.”
“Remi…” Leah moved closer to the side of the bed and grasped Remi’s wrist, fingertips on the pulse point. Checking his heart rate. Her frown said she didn’t like what she was feeling.
Remishot her a confused look before turning back to his brother. “You need to let her go. Now. You didn’t have to do this.”
“I didn’t have to.” Levi leaned in, satisfaction in every line of his body. “I wanted to. I want to annihilate that son of a bitch’s life piece by piece until there’s nothing left but his body; then I want to destroy that too. And nothing can stop me.”
“Then you’re no betterthan he is,” Remi yelled.
Levi didn’t flinch away from his brother’s accusation. “I haven’t been better than him since I was eleven years old. You know that as well as I do. You are better, you and Elijah; that’s all I care about.”
And there it was, Levi’s entire purpose in a nutshell.
Remi was shaking his head. “That wasn’t your fault.”
“No.” Levi’s chuckle had a bitter tinge. “Maybe I inheritedmore from old Uncle Amos than any of us realized.”
“You are nothing like him. You never were,” Eli countered.
“Eli—”
Levi’s voice overrode Remi’s. “I wasn’t? I trained and I waited, and when I knew I could take him, I bathed in his blood.” Every word grew louder and louder until Levi’s voice boomed through the room, through my heart. “And you know what? I enjoyed every minute of killing him.Every fucking minute.”
An alarm sounded, something beside the bed.
“Remi.” Leah’s voice was at its most soothing, dripping with calm in the midst of the raging emotions dominating the room. She reached to turn off the annoying sound. “You need to calm down a bit.”
No one but me seemed to hear her. “Remi…” I said.
