Page 48 of Assassin's Mark
I deliberatelyrelaxed my grip and smoothed down my tee. When I raised my head, my gaze clashed with Remi’s again. Yes, definitely a bug under a microscope. I let my “hostess” mask slip down, surprised it had taken me this long to reach for it. Things were definitely changing inside me. Probably shouldn’t be a surprise after all I’d been through, but it left me dangling, without the tried-and-true methods I’d alwaysfallen back on to protect myself. I was caught in the change, stripped bare, vulnerable, and like a doe in the hunter’s sites, I had no idea how to protect myself except to run.
“Stop staring and eat, Remi,” Leah said, proving her compassion extended beyond her patient. “You won’t get better if you don’t. I’ll need to switch you over to oral meds and get the IV and cath out today.”
Remi grimaced,but I noticed he obeyed her. Maybe not all of the assassin brothers were stubborn to a fault.
I also noticed that he didn’t look at Leah like he looked at me. Rather than trying to dissect her with his gaze, his look was almost…fascinated? Maybe not that deep, not yet, but something in those amber eyes softened as he watched her, yet became even more intense. Was he attracted; was that it? RememberingLeah’s daughter, I hoped not. The last thing Leah needed was to catch the attention of these men. Hopefully with Remi awake, she could go home soon and leave this whole nightmare behind.
I had no doubt I wouldn’t be so lucky.
Leah sent me back to the kitchen after they finished their meals. I closed the door behind me, giving nurse and patient privacy to do what needed to be done. A half hourlater Leah called Eli in to help Remi walk to the bathroom.
Still Levi didn’t return.
Remi continued to improve throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, Eli retreated to his brother’s bedside, and the whispered conversations between them told me something was up, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was going on. Finally it was Eli who sat me down on the couch.
“What’s wrong?” It was theonly reason the brother I’d dubbed “the pissy one” would be talking to me. “Is Levi okay?”
What kind of idiot asks if her kidnapper is okay? I mean, really, what was up with this Stockholm syndrome thing?
Eli didn’t question it, though. “He’s fine. He’ll be back soon.” The same thing he’d said all day. “There is something else we need to discuss.”
There was likely no avoiding whatever the nextdisaster was, so I didn’t bother trying. “Okay.”
“There’s something being reported on the news sites…”
Eli wouldn’t meet my eyes; that’s when I knew it was bad. I had the sudden urge to rip the Band-Aid off and get the pain over with already. “Just spit it out, Eli.”
“The pictures Levi sent to your father—they were released to a reporter.”
The shock hit my chest like a two-by-four. I gapedat Eli, struggling to think of a response, struggling to ignore the sudden blast of mortification inside me. Levi had those images. He was angry. And now he’d shown millions of people the humiliation he’d subjected me to—and started the process all over again.
“That’s not all.”
A choked-off laugh escaped. Of course it wasn’t.
“There is speculation…uh…” Eli shifted in his seat. “There’s speculationthat you were cheating on your fiancé—”
“He’s not my fucking fiancé!”
I don’t think I’d ever, in my carefully regulated, regimented life, actually screeched. But I did now.
Eli winced. “Your alleged fiancé—”
I surged off the couch, barely managing to hold myself back before I slapped Eli’s face. Oddly enough, he didn’t try to stop me, simply sat and waited while I squeezed my fists until theyhurt and tried desperately to breathe away the roiling emotions inside me.
After a few minutes, I guess he thought I wasn’t going to actually explode. Still, his tone was placating, as if I was a wild animal he didn’t know what to do with. “Okay. Okay. They are saying you ran away with your lover to escape that fucker Kyle Pellen, and the photos are proof you were involved with someone else.”
Because of course the proper prick, Kyle, would never cuff me or take pictures of me naked. It had to be someone else. Right.
Now that Eli had spit out the words, an uncomfortable silence settled between us. All I could hear was the rush in my ears, the thundering of my heart, the horrible cry of denial locked deep inside where no one could hear it but me. No one needed to know any more aboutthe humiliation of Abby Roslyn than they already did. No one needed to know that the man who had taken my body had also taken my dignity, not once, by sending those pictures to my father, but twice, by sharing them with the world. No one needed to know, and they wouldn’t. I didn’t even want to know—but I couldn’t escape my own brain, could I?
“Abby?”
I could barely hear Eli through the roarin my head.
“Abby, we will find out who did this, I promise, okay? We will—”
Did he really expect me to believe that? “You’ll what? Avenge me? Make it right? Get revenge?” I laughed, the sound bitter enough to make me wince. “How are you going to do that? You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Those files are out now, and there’s no way to erase them.”
“No, but—”
I wasn’t done. “You wantme to believe you will take up for me, protect my precious reputation? Your brother took those pictures. He’s the reason I’m in the news. And he’s the only one who had a reason to release those files. Are you going to kill him for me? Because somehow I don’t see that happening, Eli!”
“No, he didn’t… He wouldn’t do that, Abby.“ Eli had a hand out as if he could calm me with a mere touch, but justthe thought made my skin crawl. Skin that no longer felt like my own. It had been exposed—Ihad been exposed—to too many prying, judging eyes. I wanted to tear my skin off with my bare hands, make myself something else, something unrecognizable, something…
I closed my eyes. There wasn’t something else, was there? I could never not be me, no matter how much I tried. No matter how much I wishedand prayed and cried, I’d always be me. And suddenly that was unbearable.
I whirled around, catching a toe on the edge of the couch, and stumbled away from that hand, from the hated pity in Eli’s eyes. In Leah and Remi’s eyes as they stared at me from the doorway of the sickroom. Everything inside me screamed to escape, and I let the urge take me, move me, shove me toward the outer door in alast-ditch effort to free myself.
And I almost made it. I’d almost reached the freedom lying behind those thick inches of steel when the door opened from the outside and Levi walked in.
