Didn't You Promise (A Bad for You Novel) (11 page)

Chapter Thirteen

“Angelina.”

I opened my eyes to moonlight filtering through the blinds. Haithem leaned over me, fully dressed.

When did he get up and dressed?

“Angel, get up,” he whispered. There was an edge to his voice. A low rough edge like a creature’s growl.

“What’s wrong?” I pulled back the sheet.

“Get dressed.” He glanced to the door. “We’ve been boarded.”

A thunk went down my chest, as though my heart fell though my ribs. I snatched my nightgown from the ground and tugged it over my head. “What do we do?”

“You go into the bathroom and lock the door.” He handed me something in the dark. Metal touched my fingers in the blunt shape of a handgun.

“Safety,” he said, moving my finger to a small switch on the top. “Then just point and press.”

I didn’t know where to hold the thing. I wrapped my hand around the base away from the trigger.

He turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

He tugged another gun from the back of his pants.

My skin rose like a plucked chicken. The safety clicked off. Without the gun this man was already a lethal force. With it, well, I pity the fools who chose this boat.

“The bathroom my love—get in it.”

I stared at his back, gaze adjusting to the dark. I knew where this was going. He’d left Emilo and Karim below deck, and put me in a room anyone who got past those two would then have to contend with Haithem to get to.

As though
I
were the grand prize.

Not Haithem’s valuable knowledge. He should be the one in the bathroom. I’d stand outside. There’d be no reasoning with him, I could see that already. The way he stood so still, watching the door. He wasn’t wired, he’d gone to a place of deep, ruthless non-negotiable calm.

I walked to the bathroom, the alien coolness of the gun clutched against my stomach.

“And, Angel?”

I turned to him from the bathroom door. “Yes?”

“Don’t hesitate.” He brought his weapon up to his shoulder. “If you need to shoot—just do it.”

Maybe some of his calm drifted through the room and landed on me, because I didn’t shudder, and didn’t contemplate. “I won’t.”

I entered the bathroom and shut the door, then locked it behind me. Not that the lock would keep anyone who really wanted in out, but it’d slow them down.

A blast rang out below deck.

I pressed myself against the wall.

Footsteps pounded up the stairs—maybe two sets—maybe more—thundering into the bedroom.

My heart went ballistic, fighting just as hard to exit my body as I fought myself to stay in the damn bathroom. Gunfire exploded in the room next to me. Not the short, sharp bang from before, this was fast and furious. The sound of something fully automatic. I threw myself away from the wall, crawled into the bathtub, lay down and covered my head. Another round of shots rang out, then the world dissolved into silence. I pulled myself up, and stared across the darkened bathroom. What looked like white smoke flirted through the only slice of light in the blackness.

I listened, the only sound my own desperate breaths. Sweat dribbled from my hair onto my lips. More footsteps thundered up the stairs.

Haithem
.

I climbed out of the bath. A thump slammed next to the bathroom door. A mighty rattle that shook the entire bathroom, then a roar. Haithem’s deep guttural roar. That sound—that sound didn’t scare me. That roar settled my heart back in its place. Haithem was on this, and no one stood a chance.

More steps rattled towards the bedroom. Panic ripped through me. Bangs, crashes, grunts and groans exploded from the other room.

How many people were in there now? Haithem was on his own.

There’s too many even for him...

I cradled the gun to my chest. There hadn’t been any more shots—yet. I had a weapon I didn’t need brute strength for. I crept to the door. Turned the lock one degree at a time, until it clicked so softly even I who listened for it, barely heard the sound. I pushed the door on the tracks, little by little, until it opened enough to see through.

Haithem stood in the center of the room. His fist flew into the face of another man. The man hit the ground, another jumped on Haithem’s back.

Haithem’s gun lay on the carpet.

The footsteps reached the door. Haithem rolled the second person over his shoulder. A dark figure filled the doorway. The reflective surface of a handgun flashed in the moonlight.

Adrenaline spurted through my blood.

I lunged out of the door, gun pointed—and pulled the trigger.

The blast echoed through the room. The figure in the doorway dropped on the spot.

I’d got him in the head.

Shot him in the face.

Just killed a person
.

My head swirled and my hands dropped to my sides.

Haithem’s foot came down on the skull of the person he’d thrown as he looked up at me. His expression shifted, but I glanced at what lay there—rage, blood lust, a twist of features sharp enough to turn a witness’s blood cold—before his face morphed. I squinted, my chest heaving, trying to process the terror Haithem wore now.

He sprinted, leaping over the bed that lay between us, towards me.

Pain crashed over me. A wave of agony with no true point of origin. Lights danced in front of me. Haithem dissolved into a dark lunging shadow.

My cheek smashed against carpet. My chest filled with agonizing pressure. I blinked, watching from what seemed outside my body. The blurry outline of a bull charged through the room, destroying things—ending people.

The bull was mine.

My fingers spread in the carpet. A dark trickle flowed down my arm. As though someone poured warm oil over my shoulder.

Then the bull leaned over me. A touch on my back drove pain hard enough into muscle to drag me back into the shell of my body.

I’d been stabbed in the back.

I couldn’t see the knife but knew with certainty that’s what’d happened. I tried to turn a little, look at him better, to see the shadow become a man again.

I blinked at him. He called my name. Squeezed my hand. Tapped my face.

Everything blurred. A haze of pain radiated through my being, yet my fear got lost somewhere deep in calm.

“
It’s okay
,
Haithem.
” The words didn’t make it to my mouth. Just as my arm wouldn’t reach for him. The most fearless man I’d ever met wept for me, and I couldn’t tell him what he needed to hear.

He rocked me, and yelled.

He knew I loved him.

I wanted him to know it’d all been worth it.

Chapter Fourteen

I expected to open my eyes to heaven. Or hell. Depending on how the wrong I’d done weighed out against the good. I’d expected to see my brother. To open my eyes in death and find him again. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t been afraid. He’d gone first, so it’d never be possible for me to die alone. If there was an afterlife, then that’s where you’d find me—cradled with my twin by the universe in another kind of womb. Maybe we’d be like stars, looking down at the world together. Or maybe we’d get born again. Find our way back to life and try it all over.

I didn’t get to find out. My eyes opened to the painful realities of the living.

Fire burned through my lungs with each breath. My entire upper body throbbed. There was a chance someone had beat me with a crow bar after I’d been stabbed.

Stabbed...

I blinked up at the roof.

How is this my life?

My gaze flittered around the room. Haithem sat in a chair beside the bed. His elbows on his knees, hands joined, and braced under his chin—as though lost in prayer. But he wouldn’t pray. His god was science, and his religion what he could make from it. Yet to my blurry gaze, I’d never seen anything so pious.

He opened his eyes.

His expression shattered in relief. He leaned out of the chair over me, and set his long strong fingers over my cheek. I stared at the face hovering over mine and it sank in—there was one thing in this world my brilliant man revered, but I didn’t know how it came to be me.

I’d take his devotion all the same.

He scanned my features. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been stabbed in the back.” I winced.

Fuck me, talking hurt. Breathing bloody well hurt too. My lips pressed together.

“Now you’re awake you can have something for the pain.” His fingers slid from my face and he hollered out the door.

Emilio charged into the room with his black bag. I watched him remove the vial and syringe. His knuckles were grazed, his left eye purple and closed over. He squinted with his right as he measured the dosage.

Haithem didn’t move, only held my hand while Emilio gave me the injection of painkillers. The truth was, though, I didn’t need my hand held for needles anymore.

That fear had been squished by bigger badder ones.

“Better?” Haithem asked.

“Yes,” I gritted out, even though the breath to lie pierced me with yet more agony.

Emilio packed up his things, gave Haithem a few Spanish words, then left.

“Is everyone else okay?”

Haithem’s expression didn’t change. “Karim was shot.”

I pushed off the pillows, but pain slammed me back down.

“Don’t try to move around yet—” He touched the back of his hand against my forehead. “Karim will be fine. Nothing major was hit.”

“Thank god.” My gaze sifted past him to the windows. “What about the people who boarded us?”

People.

One of whom I’d
killed
.

“Gone.” His tone went flat.

I didn’t question his meaning. Didn’t feel the guilt I should either. A kind of grief squeezed me though. That anyone would give their precious life for violence and a paycheck. I’d have given mine for love, still would. Noble as that might sound in my head, a darker truth lay underneath. I’d
taken
someone else’s life to save ours, and I would again.

“Who were they?”

“Only a very small part of what I’ve brought on us.” He kept his voice even, but I heard everything he didn’t let in there. I heard it in the line of his jaw, and the droop of his mouth as he looked at me.

“It’s not your fault, Haithem.”

“Except it is.” He leaned back. “It really is.”

The pain in my back and shoulder radiated into my chest. I couldn’t let him blame himself. I knew how they’d tracked us down. I knew it the moment he’d woken me up and told me we’d been boarded.

“Haithem.” I licked my lips. I had to tell him. “I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

“What did you do?” He looked at me, his brow creasing.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, but it was dry too. “I called my dad.”

He went still. Not even his chest moved.

He didn’t berate me. He didn’t tell me how stupid I’d been.

Tears flooded my vision.

“I’m so sorry, Haithem.” The tears spilled. “It’s my fault.”

My chest shook. Waves of pain rolled through me. “I hung up without saying anything—I thought it’d be okay.”

“No.” He lunged forward and grabbed my jaw. “Not your fault.”

I sniffed.

He kissed me hard, then let me go, and scanned my gaze.

I didn’t need to ask but I did. “Can you forgive me?”

“Nothing to forgive.” He rubbed my cheek with his knuckles, then pulled the sheet up higher over me. “So long as you do one thing for me.”

I let my head rest against the pillows. “What?”

How’d I get so tired
,
I
just woke up?

“Rest and heal.” He resumed his watchful position in the chair. “You do that and everything will be okay.”

My eyelids drooped. The painkiller must have done its job. I breathed in all the way, filled my lungs with only a nagging throb.

“Okay,” I said, and my eyes closed.

Haithem

I came awake with a gasp as though air were funneled down my lungs by a compressor. The hands resting on my knees were clean.

I checked my fingers for blood.

Angelina’s blood.

The scenes from my dream so vivid the tang of copper still tainted my nose. Blood spattered on white kitchen cupboards. Blood speckled across sunny curtains. Blood a dark creeping stain on carpet.

Blood—red and brown, sometimes even black.

Angelina’s blood.

I moved from the chair onto the edge of the bed. Her chest moved up and down. Pain pierced me with every movement—as though I were the one stabbed in the shoulder, the chest—in the lung—so every breath shot agony deeper and deeper through me until there were no place left that didn’t hurt.

When had I become so arrogant to assume I could protect her without sacrifice? That I could hide and sneak and win this fight without any losses?

Everything comes with a price.

I placed a hand on her stomach. Warm and moving. I hadn’t imagined her breaths.

I’d been fighting the inevitable. Resisting what I did not want to do. My other plan. The one she’d never forgive.

A cruel plan.

So cruel it chilled me. I couldn’t justify what I had to do other than to embrace the knowledge that I’d choose my own cost, rather than have what I refused to lose taken from me.

I lay down beside her, careful not to bump or disturb her.

This would never happen again.

She’d almost been killed.

Just because she chose this journey with me didn’t make it right. It wasn’t right to put her at risk. Wasn’t right to keep her from the people she loved. To take over her life for myself, for my cause, and most of all because I wanted her.

Her hip rested so close to mine, her heat brushed me without touch. But there was something else radiating through that space between us.

Guilt
.

My guilt.

Malignant, building and spreading. Taking over me and taking over us. I’d already begun to waste and putrefy under the metastasis of regret. I hadn’t been perfect before, far from it, but fear and shame eroded me—I was no longer the man she deserved.

She moaned.

Her pain lanced me.

We were ruined anyway.

I no longer recognized myself. Not with this fear and paranoia. I couldn’t protect her while I fought this as well. She loved me, but the way she’d looked at me when she’d seen her parents on the news—we’d never recover from that.

Things must be put right.

It was too late for me, but not for her. I scooted closer, brushed my nose against her hair, inhaled that sweetness so deeply I hoped it’d tattoo on my senses.

So I’d never forget the scent of her.

My throat burned.

I
love you
,
Angel.

She was strong. So much stronger than she’d ever given herself credit for. I had to focus on that. She’d fight me. That was a certainty. But I knew the buttons to push. The one thing that would get her to do what I needed her to do in order for the rest of my plan to work.

She’d do anything to protect me. I’d give anything to protect her.

The difference between us was only one—there were not limits to what I
wouldn’t
do.

There was only one way to be absolutely sure she’d no longer be a target.

I only wish I’d broken her heart earlier, because now I risked destroying it.