Hero (Hero 1)

I didn’t have to go the meeting. The truth was I probably never needed to go to more than half the lunches and meetings Caine attended. But I suspected, like his peers who also always had someone with them, he brought me along to relax the atmosphere. He always said people who were relaxed were more amenable to persuasion.

“I always come with you,” I reminded him. “And honestly I want to be in on this. I have to see what’s so special about this guy that you would put up with his crass jokes.”

I thought Caine might protest at my being there because it would mean more time spent in my company, but he didn’t.

We were leaving the building at lunchtime rush hour, and since the meeting was at a restaurant on Congress Street, we were walking there. In those crowds it would be easier to pretend that it was natural that we weren’t talking to each other.

It didn’t start off great. We greeted colleagues who were packing up to go out for lunch and they chatted to us as we headed for the elevator. When Caine awkwardly guided me into the crowded box, I flinched at the feel of his hand on my lower back. He must have felt me tense, because he removed his hand with whiplike speed, as though he’d just dipped it in invisible fire.

We stood together, our bodies touching because there was no way of avoiding it, and I gritted my teeth against the tension between us. Caine and I practically dove out of there when the elevator doors opened and we refused to look at each other.

Taking the main exit, Caine held the door open for me and I muttered my thanks, stepping out into the dreary day. I walked into the busy sidewalk by our building and realized I was alone. Caine had been delayed at the door, talking to someone I didn’t recognize. It was a big company—I couldn’t keep tabs on who absolutely everyone was.

Someone bumped into my shoulder and I stumbled back, attempting to move out of the way of the oncoming traffic of pedestrians. I looked over at Caine, saw he was on his way back to me, and stepped out onto the main sidewalk again.

The blur of a body in black brushed right up against me.

This sharp agonizing burn tore through my gut, the pain radiating throughout every nerve in my body.

Stunned, I was incapable of processing anything but the pain.

“Alexa?”

The voice penetrated and I blinked, the unfocused vision of Caine’s concerned face appearing before me.

Along with the pain I suddenly became aware of this wet warmth leaking on my belly. I looked down, my hands trembling as they sought out the problem.

I felt the blood before I saw it.

“Lex—what the …” I heard Caine’s voice.

My legs buckled, my vision flickering out.

“Lexie!”

His panicked features blinked in and out of the darkness.

“We need an ambulance! Call nine-one-one!”

The darkness swam toward me.

“Lexie, baby, hold on. Fuck, hold on.”

To what? I thought before I floated away from the agony toward safety.

CHAPTER 26

There was tightness around my legs. I couldn’t move them freely and it felt like I was suffocating—too warm, needing air.

I kicked and the covers around them began to give way.

“Hey, hey,” a deep, soothing voice said in my ear, “Careful.”

Caine?

The beeping sound in the distance suddenly grew louder as I forced my eyes open. I blinked against the brightness of the unfamiliar room. I was in a bed. One much smaller than my own.

At the foot of it stood my grandfather. “Grandpa?” I croaked, and then pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. It was so dry.

Grandpa’s hands curled around my foot. He looked tired. Disheveled. Not at all himself. “You’re going to be okay, sweetheart.”

“Lexie.”

I moved my head to the side and found Caine sitting at my bedside. He held my hand between both of his and he was leaning in so close his face was inches from mine. He looked exhausted too.

I was confused. “What’s going on?”

Caine frowned. “You don’t remember? You’re in the hospital.”

The hospital?

I frowned and glanced up behind me at the origin of the beeping. I saw the monitors and the IV drip that pierced my arm and it finally hit me that I was in a hospital bed. “Hospital?” I repeated.

The memories came back in an avalanche of images.

The dark blur. The pain. The blood.

Waking up on the gurney as I was wheeled into the ER. Caine’s anxious face. His shirt covered in my blood. His hand refusing to let mine go as the paramedics tried to calm me down.

The sight of the ER doctor rushing toward me was the last thing I remembered.

The beeping on the machine escalated in rhythm as my heart rate picked up.

“I had better go tell the doctor she’s awake,” Grandpa said before disappearing out of the private room. As he passed the door I noted the huge guy in a tight T-shirt and jeans standing outside with his hands behind his back, alert to the world around him. A gun holder was strapped across his back. He was armed?

Understanding only the basics of what had happened to me, I felt fear and panic starting to crawl inside me. I looked back at Caine, whose grip on my hand had tightened. “Someone stabbed me.”

I remembered the black blur of the body that had brushed me before the pain hit me in the gut.

Why? Why would someone attack me?

Anger blazed in Caine’s eyes as he replied thickly, “Yes. I didn’t even see it happen. When I came over to you, you looked up at me with this strange, pained look on your face. Your eyes weren’t focusing. You were pale. And then I looked down and I saw the blood spreading across your shirt. You passed out. We got you here and you woke up for a bit in the ER, but then you were out again. A surgeon arrived and he didn’t think anything major had been hit. He had you taken to the OR to explore the area. Thankfully he was right. The knife didn’t hit any major organs or arteries. They stitched you up and we got you a private room. They said you’ll have to stay in the hospital for a few days.”