Deklan stops talking for a few minutes as he looks down at my hand and rubs his thumb across my wrist.
“Kera, did I hurt you? I mean, when I held you against the wall? I was only trying to keep you from falling over.”
“No, you didn’t hurt me. I knocked my head on the wall, but that was me, not you.”
“They kept accusing me of beating you. They said you were hurt while we were fighting, and that you were all bruised up.”
“Oh.” I stare at the buttons on Dek’s shirt.
“Kera? Where did the bruises come from?”
“The other night.”
“What other night?”
“The night before you left, um, when we were in bed. I didn’t even notice them until morning, but the ones on my arm kinda look like fingerprints.”
Deklan turns my arm over for a better look.
“Did you get these when we were having sex? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, Kera,” Deklan mumbles. “I didn’t know I grabbed you that tight.”
“Neither did I.” I press my cheek against his shirt. “They don’t hurt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say as I look back up at him. “Now, will you please go back to the subject at hand? I don’t understand why you can’t do anything about that man.”
“I know you don’t.” Deklan sighs. “You don’t know who he is.”
“Then tell me.”
“He’s the king of hitmen, and probably one of the deadliest men in the world. There’s always a bounty on his head, and he’s probably had a hundred attempts on his life. Do you know what happened to every one of them? They’re dead, Kera. Every fucking one of them is dead. This guy—he’s the real deal, Kera. I…I brought him here because Sean wants something done that’s out of my league, and Arden is a vicious killer with no qualms about what he does.”
“And you have qualms?”
“Yeah, Kera, a lot of them,” Deklan says. I can feel the tension in his muscles, everywhere we touch. “I’m successful in my job because of how I look. I have size and what is a somewhat undeserved reputation. More times than not, a simple threat is all that’s needed. I rarely have to resort to actual violence.”
“But you have.” I remember the bloody shirt in the bathroom. “You can if you need to. You could go after him.”
“Arden works with one of the most powerful organizations in Chicago. Crossing them is suicide, and he practically runs the damn place. They are far larger than the Foley operation. They have informants everywhere, and if he got wind that I was looking for him, I’d have a bullet in my head without ever knowing where it came from.”
“You’d just have to shoot first,” I say, but my stomach is knotting up. I have no idea what I’m talking about, and we both know it.
“It’s not that easy, Kera,” Deklan says. “I would never get close enough to him. I’d never get a shot off. I’d be dead, and where would that leave you? He might very well decide to take you out as well, just for good measure. How am I supposed to protect you if I’m gone?”
“We witnessed what he did,” I say. “What if he’s already planning to get rid of us?”
“He’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because”—Deklan huffs through his nose—“because I’ve talked to him.”
This is news to me, and I’m not happy about it. Kathy is gone, and Deklan is conversing with the man who killed her. I grit my teeth.
“When?” The word leaves my mouth sounding like snarl.
“As soon as I was released. I wanted to know what the hell he was thinking, and when he explained…” As Deklan’s voice trails off, he hugs me and kisses the top of my head before he continues. “He thought she was going to shoot me. He didn’t know who either of you were and reacted only to what he saw. He thought…well, he thought he had my back. His intent was to protect me, showing me that he could do the job we need him to do.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No, I know it doesn’t.” Deklan shifts his position and takes my face in his hands. “I’d do anything for you, Kera—really, I would—but I have to balance that with your safety. Going after Arden is beyond risky, and I can’t risk you.”
I pull my face from his hands and lay back down on his chest. I want to yell and scream at him—tell him I’ll leave him if he doesn’t do what I want—but it’s futile. My position hasn’t changed. Though I don’t believe that Deklan would hurt me, I still have nowhere to go. Besides, nothing he does will bring Kathy back.
My head is still pounding, so I focus on the pain. I just want to be numb. I want my mind to go blank, but it’s not cooperating.
Deklan leans back against the pillow and holds me as he starts stroking my wrist again. I get an odd sense of déjà vu, but it only lasts a second. As he rubs, and I relax against him, I’m reminded of the other times he’s done this, starting with our wedding.
“Why do you do that?” I ask.
“What?”
“Rub my wrist. You always rub my wrist.”
“Do you want me to stop?” His voice is so quiet, I can barely hear him.
“No, but why do you do it?”
I close my eyes and wait for his response, but he’s gone quiet. My head feels heavy, and the warmth of near-sleep starts to fill my limbs. By the time he answers my question, I barely remember what it was I had asked.
“Because”—Deklan pauses for several seconds before continuing—“because it’s what I did the first night I met you.”
“You mean at the wedding?”
“No, before then.”
I glance at Deklan for a moment, trying to remember a previous time when he had touched me. It wasn’t the day before the wedding—I remember that clearly. When had I been in Deklan’s presence before that? When would he have been close enough to touch me at all, let alone so intimately?
I feel strong arms as they wrap around my shoulders and under my knees, lifting me from the deck of the boat. I can smell leather and gunpowder as my head is cradled against his shoulder. The stale odors from the boat are replaced with fresh rain as I’m carried outside. He tears the blindfold from my eyes, and as I look up into the face of my rescuer, I am in awe of him.
“Deklan?” I sit up and pull my hand away from him. He stares at me for a moment before he looks away. I blink several times as I hear a now familiar voice in my head.
“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re all right now. They can’t hurt you.”
The voice in my head belongs to Deklan. I blink again, trying to make sense of it. How could I be hearing the voice of my husband in a memory of my kidnapping?
I remember the feeling of the arms around me and how my rescuer picked me up and mentally compare it with the feeling of Deklan carrying me out of the hospital. The sensation is the same.
“It was you,” I whisper.
Deklan nods but says nothing.
“You rescued me.”
Deklan closes his eyes and grits his teeth before pushing himself off the bed and walking out of the room. I jump up to follow him into the kitchen, fully awake now. I stand off to the side as Deklan pours himself a drink, confused at the vague memory that keeps replaying itself in my head.
“Sit down.” Deklan points to the couch in the living room, and I comply. I watch him get another glass from the cabinet and fill it with water.
“I didn’t know who you were.” Deklan hands me the water and sits beside me on the couch. “I was just doing a job. Mr. Foley told me to go to the marina and get the girl who was being held on a boat there, so I did.”
“You killed the men who took me.”
Deklan doesn’t respond.
“You saved me from them.”
He nods again, remaining silent.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I thought…I thought you remembered. That day before the wedding, I thought that’s why y
ou said you were okay with it when Sean told you to marry me instead. It wasn’t until you told me later that you didn’t remember any of it—that you didn’t want to remember any of it—that I realized you didn’t know who I was. I was afraid if I said anything, it would bring back memories you didn’t want to recall.”
“Did…did the Foleys have me kidnapped? Is that how you knew where I was?”
“No,” Deklan says with a shake of his head.
“Who did?”
“I have no idea. I was just sent to get you. I’d never seen the men who were holding you before that night.”
“So, my dad asked for help from the Foleys; Fergus Foley found out where I was and sent you to get me?”
“There’s more to it than that,” Deklan says quietly. “A lot more.”
“Tell me.”
“You sure you want the whole story? It might make you remember.”
“Yes,” I say. “All of it.”
Chapter 23
Deklan makes himself another drink before rejoining me on the couch. He turns sideways with his back against the arm and his foot up on the cushion and reaches out to me. My chest is tight, and my stomach feels as if a nest of bees is having a party inside of it, but I go to him, resting by back against his chest as he wraps his arms around me.
“I’d heard about the kidnapping,” Deklan says. “It wasn’t on the nightly news, but this business has its own networks for such information. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it before your father asked for a meeting, and Fergus sat him down in the office.”
“He went to ask the Foleys for the ransom money,” I say.
“Yes. He didn’t have enough, and he was already in debt to Fergus. He said he had no one else to turn to, and he was afraid you would be killed if he didn’t meet the deadline.”
Deklan hugs me close for a moment before he continues.
“I’ve never thought much of your father. I think you’ve probably figured that out. He was always on the fringes of the organization, never in the fold, so to speak, and he wanted to get closer. He knew that if he was laundering the Foley’s money, he’d be set for life even with his gambling habit. Fergus never wanted to do business with him, not on that scale. He was too unreliable and desperate.
“Even when he was there, begging for your life to be saved, I got the impression it wasn’t concern for you in his heart but concern for his reputation if he were to let something happen to you. It annoyed me. To me, Cormick O’Conner had everything—a wife, a kid, a bunch of successful businesses—and he squandered it all. He blew it on fucking poker, and I figured it was probably his bookie that had his kid.
“When your dad offered Fergus anything in the world to get the money for his kid, Fergus saw an opportunity. He’d been having problems with Sean. He wasn’t falling in step the way his father wanted him to, and he was close to his eighteenth birthday. Fergus was looking for a way to get him to wise up and take some responsibility.
“Your dad was thrilled with the idea. Marrying his kid to the Foley heir would bring him that much closer to the organization, which was exactly what he wanted. It absolved him of his debt to the Foleys, and he didn’t have to worry about coming up with ransom money at all. He was all smiles when he walked out, and I just kept thinking, ‘How can this dude be happy when he has no idea what his kid is going through right now?’ As soon as he was gone, Fergus called me over. He handed me the picture your father had given to him along with a piece of paper.
“‘That’s the address where she’s being held,’ he told me. ‘Take the rest of the day off. Wait sixteen hours and then go pick her up. If you go too soon, it will look suspicious.’”
“He already knew where I was?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. I never asked. Fergus had a dozen informants all over the city. He usually knew everything that was going on, especially if someone was operating in his territory.”
Deklan reaches over to the coffee table and takes a quick drink from his whiskey glass.
“When I left, I got in my car and put your picture up on the dashboard where I could see it. It was a school picture, I think. You were wearing a green dress, and your hair was curled. You looked bored against the blue background that didn’t go well with your hair.”
“I remember that picture,” I say. “It was from the eighth grade.”
“You were just a kid,” Deklan says softly, “and I was still pissed about your father’s attitude. Every time I looked at the picture, I wondered what was happening to you right then. I wondered what you were thinking and how scared you must be. You were the same age my sister was when she was killed. When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I checked the address and saw it was a slip at the main dock at the lake. You were only about a half an hour away. Then I started thinking about how long a half hour must feel like to the girl in the picture.”
“It didn’t sit right with me, not at all. I couldn’t stand the thought of some kid being in that position for something her father did. For the first time since he took me in, I went against what Fergus Foley told me to do. I didn’t wait sixteen hours to go pick you up. I grabbed my gun and my car keys and headed to the lake.
“It was late, dark, and raining. There wasn’t anyone around when I got to the lake—only one car with out-of-state plates. I parked next to the dock and made my way to the slip that matched the one on the paper Fergus gave me. There was a small cargo boat there, but no one was on deck. When I went on board, I could hear two men talking.”
“What were they saying?” I ask when Deklan pauses.
“Nothing pleasant,” he replies. “I could tell by the conversation that I had the right place.”
“So you shot them?”
Deklan nods and takes another drink.
“I headed down the stairs to the cabin. I killed the first one before either of them saw me enter. The other one panicked and went for a gun, but it was close quarters. I grabbed it away from him, put my gun to his head, and asked him where you were. He told me you were in the cargo hold. I…incapacitated him before I went to find you.”
“Incapacitated?” I turn my head so I can see Deklan’s face, but he keeps staring at his whiskey. “What did you do?”
“I blew off his kneecaps,” Deklan finally says after a deep breath. He glances at me briefly before looking away again.
His jaw is set, and I’m not sure if he just doesn’t want me to know the details or if he’s embarrassed by them. Inside my head, I hear two blasts and screaming, but the memory fades quickly. It occurs to me that this is the first time he’s actually admitted to me that he’s killed someone, and I shudder.
“I needed to make sure you were really there,” Deklan says, continuing with the story. “If he lied, and they had moved you, I wouldn’t have anyone to ask.”
“You let him live?”
“Not after I saw you. You were in the hold, right where he said you would be. You were blindfolded, hogtied, and crying. As soon as I found you, I finished him off and went back down to the hold. You were shaking all over when I came up to you, and you tried to scream. You were…well, you were a mess. I just wanted to get you out of there, so I picked you up and carried you off the boat.”
My jaw is cramped. I hear footsteps on the stairs and struggle against the ropes. The footsteps retreat, and I hear another loud blast. Then another. The footsteps return, and I feel a hand on the side of my face. Fingers reach into my mouth, removing the gag before I feel myself being lifted from the floor…
“Once I had you on the dock, I took off the blindfold and untied you. You tried to fight me, and I kept telling you it was going to be all right—that I was there to help you. I don’t know if you finally believed me or just gave up, but you stopped struggling. I tried to lead you back to my car, but you couldn’t even walk, so I carried you to the car and got you out of there.”
“Was Fergus mad that you went early?”
“He never found out.”
“You didn’t take me to him?”
“Not right away.”
“Where did we go?”
“Back here.” Deklan stills as he says the words. “You were going back and forth from comatose to hysterical. It was almost daybreak by then, and I couldn’t risk someone seeing you like that, so I brought you here.”
I glance around the apartment, trying to remember, but it doesn’t trigger anything. I’ve been here long enough to have seen every inch of the place. If I was going to remember something, I would have already.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “What does all this have to do with you rubbing my wrist?”
Deklan runs his fingers down my arm, stopping at my wrist. He slowly begins to massage the skin there, and I reflexively melt into him.
“When I brought you here, you were exhausted. You’d stopped screaming, but you were still crying. I laid you down in the bed, but you latched onto my arm and wouldn’t let go, so I lay down with you. There were red marks from the ropes around your wrists. They…well, they looked painful. I started rubbing the marks, hoping it would make your wrists feel better. That’s when you finally started to calm down.”
“Did we stay there the whole time? Sixteen hours?”
“By the time I got us back here, it was more like fourteen, but yes. Once you calmed down, you slept for a long time. When you woke up, you started to panic. I don’t think you knew where you were. I rubbed your wrist again, and you relaxed. I got you to drink water and eat something, but then you went right back to sleep. I waited until dusk before I moved you. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
“Did you take me to the Foley’s?”
“No, I took you to the hospital. I put a note in your pocket with your father’s phone number on it and left you in the emergency room. You slept the whole way over there, and you were still pretty groggy when I left. I waited in the parking lot where I could see you through the window. Once one of the nurses came over to you, I left. Your father came back the next day to thank us for delivering you safely. He said your mother finally stopped her bitching.”
Deklan shifts his legs and grabs my waist, moving me to sit beside him as he turns and glares at his glass. I try to process everything he’s revealed to me. From the few flashes of memory I do have, his story fits.