Page 67 of Luke, The Profiler

“Fuck you. And I’m still telling the kids their uncle Kels is a nutjob.”

“Kids? What kids?”

“Luke.” I nearly jumped out of my skin when his voice sounded near my ear. Half a second later his hand was on my nape and his lips were on mine, a quick claiming as he took the seat next to me at the round cafeteria table. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.” I loved the way his eyes smiled into mine, like we were sharing some little private joke no one else could possibly understand, before glancing at Kels. “What kids?”

“Pretend kids,” Kels offered blandly, lifting a shoulder. “It was just a little thought exercise we were going through, trying to get some perspective on the situation.”

“We didn’t get very far, mainly because I’m too much in my head, wondering what’s happening upstairs.” That wasn’t exactly a lie, and I scowled at my phone lying silent on the table. “You know, maybe I’m somehow not getting a strong signal in here. I know the nurses said they’d call me as soon as they had my father extubated and awake enough for visitors, but we’ve been here for two hours now, and they still haven’t called. I know,” I said suddenly, snapping my fingers before turning to Luke. “Call me.”

He slow-blinked. “Call you what?”

“I usually go with dork,” Kels offered helpfully. “Idiot can also work, though that one depends on whether or not she’s actually being idiotic.”

“Call me on your phone, Lucien.” Not bothering to wait for him to get off the dime, I started frisking him for his phone. I obviously hit a sensitive point when he offered a sudden bark of laughter, then gave me a murderous look. Oops. “I didn’t know you were ticklish. Sorry.”

“You’ll pay for that,” he muttered while Kels, the jerk, snorted with laughter. Still scowling, Luke reached into his back pocket, thumbed his phone to life, and a few seconds later my phone rang. “There, see? Your signal’s just fine.”

“Yeah, your signal’s fine, but the rest of you is questionable,” Kels said with a neener-neener grin while Luke tucked his phone away once more.

My phone continued to ring.

I stared at it. “Didn’t you hang up?”

“I did.” Luke snatched the phone off the table before I could get it and put it to his ear. “This is Eden Steadfast’s phone. Who’s this?” There was something about the sudden, rigid set of his shoulders that made me go still while the breath backed up in my lungs. “All right. We’re in the cafeteria now, so we’ll be right up.” He hung up, then handed me the phone. “We need to head up to ICU.”

*

Luke

There was no doubt about it. No matter what Tru Steadfast ultimately was in my mind—narcissist, manipulative Rasputin, villain—Eden loved her old man, and that was never going to change.

I kept a close eye on her from the moment we arrived in the ICU. Like every other ICU in the world, the vibe in the waiting rooms and hallways was toxic with anxiety and fear, and even if you weren’t a believer in anything supernatural, you still wouldn’t be surprised if you rounded a corner and bumped into the Grim Reaper waiting to conduct his latest harvest. That was the nature of the place. Luckily most got out, headed on a healthy road to recovery.

Some, however, didn’t.

Tru Steadfast had everything going for him when it came to being one of the patients who got themselves onto that road to recovery. But I couldn’t tell Eden that when the docs called her in to try to calm down her father—who was screaming, incoherent and terrified—in the hope that he’d respond to someone familiar. Clearly the old guy was stuck in a combative fight-or-flight response, whether due to his head injury or the psychological horror of being attacked. The result, though, was a living nightmare for everyone, from the doctors and nurses trying to help Tru, to Eden, who got right in her father’s face to plead with him to focus on her. Kels was there as well, echoing whatever Eden said, but it was clear he was crushed to see the man who’d saved him so completely undone.

For the first hour we were there, chaos reigned in that little room full of medical staff and equipment, but eventually Tru seemed to come to some semblance of sanity. I’d been watching his vitals—not great, to say the least—but Eden’s constant, soothing stream of assurances and the drugs the medical staff had given him at last worked their magic. His oxygen levels increased while his blood pressure and heart rate lowered. After his numbers began to stabilize I knew things were looking up, but after a couple hours of watching those numbers I thought I still might have a fight on my hands getting Eden out of there. Kels had left an hour earlier, looking wrung out but promising to be back in the morning, so the only one to be at Tru’s bedside was Eden. When I suggested she needed to get away to recharge her batteries, I was braced for whatever excuse she’d throw my way just so she could stay at her father’s bedside. Instead she nodded, gave her sleeping father a kiss on his bruised cheek and let me lead the way out to the car.

She didn’t talk all the way to my apartment, not even answering when I asked her if she was cold, other than to simply shake her head. But the moment I shut the front door and turned the lock, that seemed to be her cue to unravel. A muffled sob broke from her, and when I say broke, I meanbroke—she doubled over, with one hand plastered to her mouth as if she feared the world would end if she let out whatever dark hell was raging inside her.

That wouldn’t fucking do.

In three strides I was by her side, scooped her up and sat on the couch, her ass firmly planted in my lap as she made valiant snuffling noises that were a testament to how much she was trying to bottle it all up inside. I cupped a hand to her cheek and gently but firmly forced her watery eyes to mine.

“Your pain is killing me, love. Let it out before it fucking suffocates us both, yeah? Just let it out.”

Those catlike eyes slowly filled with tears. Then, as they began to fall the first sobs escaped, shaking her body with the force of her grief. She cried as if her heart were broken—probably because it was—and I didn’t know how to put it back together. Not when her old man, the fucker she was mourning, was undoubtedly behind all the hell she was going through and had somehow brought this attack on his own stupid ass.

“It shouldn’t be like this.” The sobs slowed to shuddering breaths, making her voice thick and raspy. “I can accept my father getting older, winding down, whatever you want to call it, and visiting him in the hospital that way. But this? It shouldn’t be like this.”

“Nobody gets to decide how it goes, my genius. Whether it’s old age or illness, or a fucking piano falling on your head like a goddamn cartoon, everyone has to face the fact that we’ve got just a short time on this earth. I figure we need to make the most of it while we can, yeah? That way we don’t wind up having any regrets when our time is up. Hell, the way I’ve lived my life and all the dangers my job has, that could be tomorrow.”

“Don’t say that.” Her body froze up until it felt like I held a statue in my arms. Her eyes were huge and dark with a horror that was somehow worse than what she’d already been through that day. “Don’t you dare say that. I can’t handle even the thought of any more loss, okay? I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I could lose my father, the only family I have left in the world. I refuse to think about the possibility of losing you, too.”

“You’re not going to lose me.” My arms tightened around her even as she held on to me as if her life depended on it, and everything inside me lightened until it felt like I was floating. After a crap-ass day like today, having her hold on to me like I was precious to her was just what the doctor ordered. “And your father isn’t the only family you have left in the world.”

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