“Dane,” I whispered through my sudden, cascading tears as I drowned in his unfeeling blue eyes. “Dane, oh, my God.”
He blinked at me, those curly eyelashes still as arresting as the day I last saw them. Abruptly, he let go of my hair and fell into a crouch so his face was even closer, the gun still in one hand now casually held between his bent knees.
“Mi hermana,” he whispered brokenly even though his face was still a perfectly blank slate. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” I countered, my hands fluttering in the air between us like loosed butterflies from a jar.
I wanted to touch him, hug him, tattoo myself to him permanently so he would never leave again.
But there was a soft menace in his air, as though there was a palpable threat he couldn’t curb even if he wanted to.
So I kept my hands to myself even though it killed something inside me to do it.
His full mouth went flat, white with tension. “Javier will be back in a second. I don’t have time to explain to you…I––I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
“That you’re alive?”
“That I’m alive,” he agreed. “Though I thought you would’ve known…I sent letters to Ignacio for you. Letters I wrote over the years so you’d know I was alive if I wasn’t able to come home.”
“I don’t speak to Ignacio. I haven’t since the last time you made me visit him when I eleven. Dane, what the hell are you wrapped up in?” I asked, searching his face, noticing a scar at his left temple that extended back over his ear and the deep lines beside his eyes that shouldn’t have been there at his age.
“I’m coming home,” he vowed. “I’ve been working on it for years, it’s just…taken so much more than I thought it would. You can’t tell anyone, though, Li. Now that you know, I can try to protect you, maybe even make contact, but the more people who know, the higher risk there is that there is no coming home for me.”
“Dane,” I said, mostly just because I needed to say his name, because I could say his name to his face, something I hadn’t been able to do in years. “Explain it to me. I can help. The Booths, they’re going to lose it when they see you––”
“You’re not gonna tell them,” he said, slipping back to the slang he’d used as a kid. “Seriously, Li, promise me.”
“I promise,” I breathed even though I didn’t want to keep such a colossal secret to myself.
I couldn’t fathom keeping it from Nova.
He tipped forward to palm my face, his palm ridged with thick callouses, then he planted his lips on my forehead, giving me the sweetest kiss I’d ever known.
“I love you,” he said, firing the words at point black range as noise sounded outside the door. “I’m sorry, Li.”
And then he lifted the gun, reared an arm back, and hit me across the temple with it.
His name was on my tongue when I passed out, hope turned to ash just as it had all those years ago when I was told that my brother was dead.
LILA
When I came to, I was cradled in unfamiliar arms, the pungent scent of expensive male cologne in my nose and the faintly familiar strains of Esta Niña Linda in my ear.
It was one of the Spanish lullabies Ellie used to sing for Dane and I when we were kids.
My eyes snapped open to reveal Javier Ventura looking down at my face with a mixture of awe, disgust, and reverence.
“Ah, she’s wakes,” he murmured. “I was afraid you might need a trip to the hospital.”
I blinked hard, worried I was dreaming a surreal and horrible nightmare. “What happened?”
“You tripped on the edge of the desk and hit your head,” he explained calmly, moving the compress I hadn’t noticed was on my temple. “When I came in, you were passed out on the ground.”
My thoughts were jumbled like a puzzle before completion, but I knew he was lying.
I wasn’t clumsy, and I hadn’t fallen.
Unbidden, thoughts of Dane rushed back to meet me, and I blinked rapidly as they flipped through my mind’s eye.
“Do you remember what you were doing?” Javier asked carefully, eyeing me steadily.
“I needed to make some calls for Irina,” I answered, wondering how I could get out of his hold without offending him.
I was shocked and more than a little disturbed that he would try to soothe me at all.
Sensing my discomfort, he opened his arms so I could move away, but he did so with a little smile as if he thought my fear was somehow…cute.
“You work for my wife,” he said, half question and answer.
I nodded as I smoothed my clothes and tidied my hair. “Yes. I have for about three months now.”