Finished (Auctioned)

“When my father was deployed back in the day, he and Ma would write letters to each other,” Darius went on. “Ma would send him crossword puzzles too, and he’d send her riddles and brainteasers in return. And one day, a couple months before he was due home, he sent her a letter with those digits. Nothing else, just the numbers. She knew it was a puzzle for her to solve, but she couldn’t figure it out. Drove her fucking crazy—or so I’ve heard a million times over the years.” He cranked up the water again and stepped under the spray. “She tried everything. She converted the numbers to letters. She added, multiplied, and subtracted. The answers gave her absolutely nothing, because she didn’t know what she was looking for.” He paused to carefully check the flexibility of his knee, and the result was…none. None at all. He hissed a curse. “Did you get an answer?”

“Uh. I don’t know. I mean, I got thirty-five, but I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither did my mother. Pop thought that was hysterical.” Darius turned off the water when he was ready, and he opened the door. Gray rose automatically and went to help him out. “You’re a fusser, knucklehead. But I knew that before I met you.”

Gray smiled unsurely and glanced up at him. It felt like he was missing something big, something he was supposed to see already.

“Thirty-five,” Darius murmured. “What’s three plus five?”

“Eight.”

Darius nodded with a dip of his chin and wrapped a towel around his hips. Then Gray guided him over to sit on the toilet so he could tend to Darius’s knee.

“I learned a lot of things about you before we actually met,” Darius continued conversationally. “Through your ma, I discovered that you used to work part time in a bookstore. You’ve always been her number one helper at the inn. You’re your twin brothers’ mediator—although, sometimes you start fires between them, too. You’re not completely innocent.”

Gray exhaled a chuckle and grabbed one of the pads to dry the area around the wound. Lia had done a good job. It looked so clean. Most importantly, the wound wasn’t the angry red he remembered from the island. Christ, Darius had been shot too many times.

“I learned you wanted to get married and have a bunch of kids,” Darius said, his voice quieter now. “And you were ecstatic when Isla got pregnant. In fact, the last website you’d checked on your phone before you were taken was a store for baby clothes. You were looking at socks.”

Gray swallowed around the unease that resurfaced. Some memories would probably always cause him to flinch in fear.

It was best to steer the topic to something lighter. “It’s mildly terrifying that you and Mom went through my browser history and my photos.”

Darius smirked faintly, though it was cut short by a vicious curse when Gray applied antiseptic cream and gauze to the wound. “Motherfucker. Even when it’s just the fleshy part, the knee is the worst place to get shot.” He gripped his thigh to keep it from trembling. And to keep his leg straight. “By the way, your browser history didn’t show me anything I wasn’t expecting.”

So…a lot of porn.

“Still.”

“And to be fair, Willow saw more than your mother did.”

“Marvelous.”

Darius cracked a grin through the pain. “Your three thousand selfies were more disturbing than the porn.”

Gray shot him a scowl. “Can we get back to the numbers?” He also wanted to focus on Darius’s knee, because despite that he’d gotten lucky with the bullet seemingly not hitting bone or anything too important, there was no fleshy part of a knee. “I’m getting you a cane or a crutch before I leave. Maybe a walker. You’ve injured yourself so many times that my guard’s been lowered, and that stops now. You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

“I thought you wanted to get back to the numbers.”

“I swear to Christ, Darius.”

Darius merely smiled down at him. “This is very you, Gray. You went into psychology to understand Abel’s disorder better. You’ve read my books on field medicine to be able to take care of me when I’m a stubborn bastard. You studied autism all summer for Justin’s sake. Your mother told me you even spent countless weekends at the library studying hotel management to help her market the inn better. All your life, you’ve gone the extra mile to be there for your family. You’re the most selfless man I know. The only thing missing from your story is an anecdote from your mother about you burying birds and rodents in your backyard.”

Gray didn’t know how to react, but his body knew. As he concentrated on wrapping the wound, his throat closed up, the edges of his vision blurred, and his heart beat a little harder. He remembered when Darius told him about that on the yacht—the burying of birds and stuff, something his own little brother used to do growing up. Bleeding hearts and all that… In return, Gray had offered the truth, a bit defiantly, that Mom would make Gray bury the animals in the woods instead. Because that was somehow different.