Page 48 of Assassin's Heart
Ross said he’d protected her. Was that what Brooke was saying?
“Why’d the bad man hurt him, Mommy?” More tears fell. “Will he come back? Will he hurt us too?”
I raised desperate eyes to Remi’s. How did I answer that question?
“Brooke,” Remi said, his voice low and firm. Something in me settled at that tone, just as he’d probably intended. “The bad man is not coming back, I promise you.”
Don’t promise. Don’t make her believe something that might not be true.
But Remi wasn’t listening. Laying his napkin on the table, he rose from his seat. “Come look at this.”
I followed as Brooke scooted from her chair and walked with Remi across the room to the darkened window. Kneeling next to Brooke, he pulled the curtain aside. “See that gate way out there?” He pointed. “And that fence that goes as far as you can see?”
Brooke nodded.
“That gate keeps the bad man out. And we have cameras everywhere so we can see any bad men coming a mile away.”
“What if they get in anyway?”
“They won’t,” Remi told her, the words absolutely certain. “And even if something bad happened, if someone tried to get in? They’ll never get past me and my brothers.”
Brooke frowned up at him. “What brothers? Are they as big as you?”
Remi grinned. “Almost.” He flexed a bicep. “Do you think any bad guys could get past that?”
Brooke dared to poke the hard muscle with a finger. “No.”
Remi gave her a sharp nod. “No is right.”
And then my daughter did something I hadn’t expected to see for a long time—she smiled. Not just a turning up of her lips, but a genuine smile that reached all the way to her eyes. Remi smiled too, and the oddest sensation filled me. Like my heart melted right into the floor and my ovaries exploded all at the same time.
Lethal. This man was lethal, in more ways than one, and I’d better remember that.
After we finished the cookies Abby had sent and gathered our dishes onto the tray, I put a couple of pillows on the floor in front of my chair for Brooke, bumping her up to the right height, and began long, soothing brushes through her hair as she leaned against my knee. Remi sat, watching us in the quiet. Gradually Brooke’s weight became heavier and heavier against me until I knew she was asleep, her head lying on my thigh.
“You’re a good mom, Leah,” Remi said as I laid the brush aside.
“I try.” That’s all you could really do. When I’d discovered I was pregnant, I’d been terrified. My mom had died when I was little, and Angelo hadn’t had any family. How was I supposed to know how to raise a child? But then I’d ended up on the run. At that point I figured I couldn’t screw it up any worse, so I’d promised myself to try my hardest. Brooke and I had figured out the mother/daughter thing together.
“Not everyone does.”
No, they didn’t. I sifted my fingers through Brooke’s honey-colored strands. “What about your parents?”
Pain flashed in his amber eyes, and I wished I’d bitten my tongue.
“They were the best, at least what little I remember. Kids have an amazing ability to forget things that aren’t so perfect.”
I hoped Brooke managed to forget some things from the past few days. “You were young when they died, right?” I thought I remembered that from the news coverage when they had taken over Hacr Technologies. “When your uncle sent you to boarding school?”
Remi huffed. “He didn’t send us to boarding school. We ran away. Or rather, Levi took us away.”
“What? Why?”
Remi raised his gaze from Brooke’s sleeping form to meet mine, staring hard. “Because he’d killed my parents. And he would’ve eventually killed us.”
“I thought they never caught your parents’ killer.” Or his uncle’s.
“Levi witnessed the murder.”
