Page 216 of Never Die for a Sinner
There are voices around me and the steady, mechanical whir of machines that beep like a countdown. My head is pounding, like someone’s taking a hammer to the inside of my skull, again and again. I want to cry out, to scream, but my mouth won’t move.
God, why won’t they shut up?
“I told you to protect her,” a voice growls, sharp and livid. “No matter the cost. She was fucking shot.”
Shot. The word rattles through me. I was shot?
Oddly enough, I don’t feel a thing.
“What the fuck do you think I was doing?”
That voice—rough and ragged. Familiar.
Levi.
My heart jerks toward him like a tether pulled tight, but my body stays frozen, limp beneath the weight of the drugs or trauma—or both. The voices blur, dipping in and out of clarity, like I’m bobbing under dark water, surfacing just long enough to breathe before I’m dragged back down again.
“You let her out of your sight. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I fucking love her,” Levi snarls. His voice cracks, barely contained emotion slipping through the edges. “Or did you forget that they planned to use her to draw you out from the beginning because ofyourstupid fucking ‘mistake’?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If it has to do with her, italwaysmatters.”
“You want to blame me,” the man scoffs. “It was your own selfish desires that almost got her killed.”
That other man—who is he? The anger in his voice is volcanic, but it’s not impersonal. It’s tight with something deeper. Guilt maybe.
“You think I wanted to do that?” Levi growls, pain threaded through every word. “I played your game, Marks, and it almost cost me everything.”
“I told you we had no leads on who Wright’s son was. He was right under your nose and yet you missed him. Mendez is stillfucking breathing. Andmy daughteris bleeding out in a hospital bed becauseyoulet him slip past you.”
“She’s alive,” Levi grits.
“Barely,” the man bites back. “She’s in a fucking hospital bed and it’s your fucking fault.”
. . . Please don’t blame him . . .
I want to tell my father not to blame Levi. That he was only trying to save me.
He was trying to save me . . .
“I know,” Levi says, voice low and hollow now. Defeated.
There’s a beat of silence. It’s loud with pain.
“Enough,” a third voice cuts through the tension. Christian. He sounds like hell—like gravel and smoke and a week without sleep. “You two want to do this, go outside. Not here.”
“She’s stirring,” another voice adds gently, and I know it’s Mila. I’d know that softness anywhere.
I try to wake up. I really do. I claw toward the surface, toward the light, toward the voices that matter.
I feel air shift beside me—a subtle breeze brushing my skin—and I know it’s him. Iknowit’s him.
“Baby,” Levi whispers, his voice resolute. “Wake up.”
I can’t. I can’t move. I can’t speak.
