Page 75 of Deny Me
Of course they were already on it. He should’ve known his team wouldn’t let him down.
He drifted in and out for a bit, coming back to full awareness when the nurse returned. Dain stood close by as she prepped King for the move to a regular room.
“Where’s Hugh?” King asked as his gurney began its roll toward the door.
Dain’s face went unreadable.
“Where, Dain?”
“In custody,” he finally said, the words reluctant. They entered the hall, Dain walking alongside them. “They’re isolating him to avoid retaliation from the organization he worked with. Especially since our FBI friends made a few arrests this morning while we were otherwise occupied. Hawker called while you were in surgery. The coincidence of Hugh’s arrest so close with the FBI’s might cause suspicion, so they’re taking precautions.”
King didn’t know how he felt about that. On the one hand, Hugh was his cousin. On the other, he hadn’t known the man at all. He’d murdered his own brother, for fuck’s sake. The thought filled him with a mix of rage and pain he didn’t know how to handle right now.
Dain held the elevator door while King’s nurse guided his gurney inside. “It might make you feel better—”
“I think only really good painkillers are gonna do that for a few days.”
“Ha, ha.” Dain joined them in the elevator and let the doors close. “Sophia is back with her mama, safe and sound. Cute kid. Hawker thinks the Atlanta branch of the ring is shut down for now. Becky and Sophia should be in the clear from here on out.”
Relief spread through him. Becky had paid enough for the sins of too many people. She deserved to be safe, to focus on the new life she’d been given.
“What about Violet and the other mother looking for her child?”
“The FBI will continue to work with the women in the safe house to find their children,” Dain said. “Luckily, with the connection to Jessica Arnold and…Wes”—Dain cleared his throat—“Creating Families should be in the clear as well.”
Hearing Wes’s name brought grief crashing in as they exited onto a different floor. After navigating a couple of halls, the nurse paused outside a closed door and nodded to Dain. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all.” Dain grinned as he moved to hold the door for her to push King’s gurney through. “Since I’m responsible for him being here.”
“Being where?” King glanced around. The room wasn’t a single, and he cursed under his breath. He really didn’t want to put up with a roomie for however many days he had to be here.
But Dain let the door close and went straight to the curtain separating King’s bed from his neighbor’s. “Being here,” he said and pushed back the curtain. The bed next to him was occupied by a slender woman with black hair and a bruise forming on her incredibly beautiful face.
King cursed again, for a far different reason than before.
“Stop making so much noise,” Charlotte complained without opening her eyes. “Use your inside voice too, Dain. I’m trying to sleep over here.”
“Charlotte,” King said, pain ricocheting through him as he tried once more, just as unsuccessfully, to sit up in bed.
His nurse tsked. “You know the head of these beds inclines, don’t you?”
The mattress began lifting, and he subsided in relief. “Are you okay, angel?” God, that bruise looked agonizing. If Hugh had been here—and if King hadn’t been shot—he’d make sure the man knew exactly what it felt like to have all the bones in his face rearranged.
Dain must have followed a similar train of thought because he said, “Saint paid Hugh back for the shiner. The staff had to set his broken nose before they took him to jail.”
“Remind me to thank him next time I see him,” Charlotte said. Her eyes still weren’t open, and he needed them to be, needed to see her gray gaze steady on him. At peace. Just plain okay.
“Look at me, Charlotte.”
The hint of command in his voice got her to comply. For no more than a moment, but King could see from the hazy connection as their eyes met that she was with him. The last of his worry trickled away.
“Let me sleep, King,” she said grouchily. Apparently anesthesia made her cranky.
He could do that. He was lying beside her, after all. Not like she could escape him. He prayed she wouldn’t try, but if she did, he could stop her, bullet wound or not.
He grinned. Dain raised a questioning brow at him as if wondering what was so funny, but rather than answer, he closed his eyes and drifted off, content in knowing Charlotte was here, they were together, and they’d both heal eventually.
Three days later he and Charlotte went straight from the hospital to Wes’s funeral. Saint kindly drove them after providing formal clothes for them to change into. The three of them were quiet on the way to the church, each absorbed in their own thoughts, Charlotte and King in their own memories of Wes. King’s chest felt like he couldn’t draw a full breath, the ache for his cousin was so strong. Added to the pain in his side, he couldn’t wait to get through this and back to Charlotte’s, to fall asleep not in separate beds but one, his arm around her—carefully, since they’d both been shot on the same side. They’d make it work, though. Not being able to lie beside one another had been agony the past few days.
