“Oh, God.” Her eyes well with tears. “This is all too much. Zane just shot someone. You killed I don’t know how many people in there. Like a professional.”
Six people. And I suppose I am a professional, but I don’t tell her that.
“This…” She shakes her head, sending tears streaming in several directions down her cheeks. “I can’t unsee. I need to be away from this stuff. I can’t do it. I can’t do any of it.”
“Do what?” I press against my better judgement. She’s in shock. This isn’t the time to have the relationship talk I thought we’d have at the end of her thirty days.
She turns to me, lips trembling. “Will you please take me home?”
There’s a lot to read into those words, and I’m fairly sure I get the full meaning.
She’s not coming back to my place. Not tonight.
Not ever.
I work to swallow around the tight band cinching my throat. “Yeah. Okay.” I glance at Zane, still with my gun in his hand. Looking as broken and lost as she does. “This time I think Zane really does need a hospital, but I’ll take him.”
“Oh, God. No…”
Zane, hearing his name, walks closer. I take the gun from him and say firmly, “I’m going to take your sister home, and then we’ll get you to a hospital. Come with me.”
“I should go to the hospital, too,” Chelle says weakly.
“You’re going home.” I place my hand on her back and gently lead her away from the building. “Unless you have injuries that need to be looked at.”
She touches the back of her head but just says in a small voice, “I want to go home.”
The three of us are dead silent on the ride to her apartment. I’m still in crisis mode, my emotions overridden by adrenaline, my brain only focused on what needs to be done.
Zane tries to apologize to Chelle a couple times, but she doesn’t answer him.
“I’ll walk you up,” I say when we get there.
“No,” she says too sharply. Too quickly. “Please. Please just get Zane to the hospital.”
I want to say a thousand things. Tell her that she means more than the money Zane owes. That I love her. That she means everything.
But I don’t say any of them. Now is not the time.
I should have told her those things before we got to this moment, so she had something to hold onto.
But now she has nothing. I’m just the mobster who lured her brother to the dark side and almost got her raped or killed. I’m the killer who gunned down six men in a warehouse. I’m the guy who bought her for a month.
I’m nothing.
I should tell her I’ll bring her things by, but I don’t want to go there either. I don’t want any words between us that make it officially over.
So I say nothing.
I just wait for the door to shut and drive away.
At the hospital, I want to be a dick and drop Zane at the door because this shit storm is all his doing, but I can’t.
He’s her brother and as lost as she is.
If I can’t take care of her right now, at least I can take care of him.
21
Chelle
I go to work the next day like nothing happened. Like everything’s normal in my world. I told Janette I got the bruise from running into the doorframe when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Zane texted me at two in the morning to tell me his hand requires surgery.
I didn’t reply. I had zero fucks left to give about Zane’s situation.
I know I should be grateful to Nikolai for getting me and Zane out of his mess. I am grateful.
Except the gratitude rips my heart to shreds. I don’t want to feel anything for him.
I want to write this whole thing off.
Pretend it never happened. Move on and never, ever look back.
I can’t have this level of drama in my life. I don’t run with motorcycle clubs or drug dealers. I definitely shouldn’t run with the Russian mafiya. Not with killers who can single-handedly gun down a room of armed and dangerous men.
Nikolai let me walk away, but I don’t know if it’s over.
Our deal was thirty days or nothing, but I don’t care. I’m out, regardless. Zane can figure out his own shit.
I’m officially done.
It’s not like Nikolai didn’t try to warn me off in the first place. He told me not to bail Zane out.
Well, I guess I had to learn in the hardest way possible.
I will never, ever allow myself to be in a situation like I was at that warehouse again.
I can’t be in bed with a killer, no matter how great the orgasms.
I can make it through the day. And then I’ll make it through the next one.