All Kinds of Tied Down (Marshals 1)

No one said a word.

He turned to Kage. “I want to see White and talk to his wife, and then Sharpe.”

“Yessir.”

Everyone cleared out except Kage. I noticed Chief Deputy Kenwood waiting for him in the hall. Leaning over, he put a hand on my unhurt shoulder. “When you’re up to it, you need to call Doyle’s father. Something about a wolf?”

I smiled. “Yessir.”

“I’ll talk to you in a week, Jones.”

“Not before? I could die of boredom.”

“Watch Netflix,” he advised.

I nodded.

He strode out, and in the hall, he fell into step beside his boss before they disappeared. Glancing around, I located my phone on the rolling table beside my bed, plugged into an outlet. It listed six missed messages from Ian’s father and one from Ian himself, which I wished I had been awake to take.

“Jesus Christ, Mary, and motherfucking Joseph!” I jolted as Catherine Benton stormed into my room, both her volume and perfume bracing.

Following her in, Janet Powell shouted even louder. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

“I told you he was really hurt,” Aruna Duffy shrieked, rushing by both women to reach me, grabbing my hand, and dropping gracelessly down on the bed beside me. She had never been a sweet delicate flower, even though at five six and 110 pounds she used to resemble one. Now, at seven months pregnant, eating everything in sight, bigger than she’d ever been, she was no longer certain of her own strength.

“I thought you wore body armor?” Min Kwon, rounding out the four, asked as she rushed around to my other side. “How did you get shot, chagiya?”

“It’s like a condom, Min, holes happen,” I said, lifting my chin so she’d lean down so I could kiss her. From the use of the endearment, I knew she was really worried.

She snorted as I kissed her cheek before she turned her head and kissed mine. Aruna was next, and then Janet. Catherine had the binder that had been sitting on a shelf beside my bed open. I’d had no idea what it was until I saw her perusing it, but understood as I watched her flip pages that it was my chart.

“Put that down.”

Her shushing noise was sharp.

“You shouldn’t be snooping,” I scolded.

“Uh-huh,” she said, still reading, kissing me absently before straightening up. When her head snapped up and she nailed me with her dark brown gaze, I almost flinched. “Your wrist is broken too?”

“That was before,” I defended. “It’s all healed up now.”

She grunted and kept skimming, the enormous five-carat diamond in the platinum setting on her left hand catching the light as she flipped pages. “Hit the call button,” she directed Min. “I need to talk to the nurse.”

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked the women who had been my family since my freshman year at the University of Chicago.

“Aruna’s your emergency contact,” Min explained gently, as was her way. She was kind and logical and the heart of our little group. She was also a cutthroat litigator who you really didn’t want sitting across from you in a courtroom. I watched her in court the last time I visited her, and she was damn scary. “And so after they let her know what was going on, she called us.”

I rolled my head to look at Aruna.

“What? I’m not supposed to call them?”

“You scared everyone for no reason.”

“No reason, my ass,” Catherine flared, showing off the weight of the three-inch binder with both hands. “This is serious, Miroslav.”

Good Lord, she used my given name.

“We got here as quick as we could,” Janet explained.

Aruna was the only one who’d stayed in Chicago, the only one I saw on a regular basis. Catherine was in Manhattan, Janet in Washington DC, and Min in Los Angeles. But I still talked to all of them once a week. We all knew exactly what was going on with each other. So even though I hadn’t physically seen Catherine in six months, Janet in eight, and Min in four, it didn’t feel like that because they were all still such a big part of my life.

“I was here yesterday,” Aruna explained, patting my hand, her green-gold eyes warm as she stared at me. “That’s why you’re in this room.”

I squinted at her. “What room was I in?”

“A small one,” she enlightened me, flipping her long straight brown hair over her shoulder.

“And what did you do?”

“I asked them if they wanted to be on the news tomorrow.”

“You work for 20/20,” I reminded her. “You don’t do the local news here in Chicago.”

“As if they wouldn’t die to have me do an exposé on how hospitals treat wounded heroes.”

“I’m not a hero.”

“You saved that woman, your witness,” she said quickly. “Your boss told me.”

“Oh for crissakes,” I groused.

“Shut up. They moved you, didn’t they?”

“Because you threatened them.”