“Can you focus on my finger?” Landon asked.
The voice came from a nondescript mass in front of me, so I assumed it was him. I tried to focus on his hand where he held it up, but there were at least three of them. I shook my head, but that was a big mistake.
The nausea that had been building inside of me took over, and Landon had to roll me to my side to let me puke all over the inside of the chopper. Once I was done, he rolled me to my back and straightened me out.
“Sebastian,” Landon said, “I’m going to have to reset your leg. It’s better for me to do it now; we won’t have proper medical treatment for at least twelve hours.”
I tried to nod, but wasn’t sure if I managed it or not.
“You hear me?” Landon called out. I felt his hand on the top of my head. “Fucking answer me if you can.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“I’m going to set your leg now. You want a fucking bullet to bite on?”
“No.” I laughed, but it hurt like a motherfucker.
“Good.”
Maybe I should have asked for one.
I heard the crack and then myself screaming. After that, everything went dark.
Gunter Darke used to tell me what banging heroin felt like. He would describe it in great detail, everything from the needle prick in his arm to the pressure of the fluid filling his veins. Then he’d talk about the warm, sleepy feeling like it was the best fucking thing in the world, better than Christmas morning, better than rich desserts, better than orgasms.
I was sinking. I felt heavy everywhere though there wasn’t any discernable pain. I was dizzy, and when I tried to understand why, I realized I didn’t have any idea where I was or what had happened to me. My eyelids felt heavy as I pried them open.
I’d been in enough hospital rooms to recognize the setup. There were white walls, dimmed lights, and a lot of beeping machines. I was on my back with a sheet pulled up to my chest, but my arms were on top of the covers. One of them had an IV hooked up to it. My left leg was encased in a cast and elevated off the bed in traction.
“Bastian?” a feminine voice spoke.
I moved my eyes toward the sound, and a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman sat near me in an oversized chair. She was a tiny thing—petite in frame with long, straight hair flowing past her shoulders. She stood as I looked at her and moved close to the bed.
She was beautiful, but her eyes were sad.
I tried to place her, but nothing came to me other than pain and throbbing. My throat was dry, and I couldn’t swallow properly. She reached over to touch my face with her hand. Her expression was so tender and familiar, but I couldn’t remember who she was.
As I looked around again, I figured I must have recently finished a tournament though I couldn’t remember the details. All the games kind of flowed together anyway. Obviously I’d won, or I wouldn’t be here at all.
Where’s Landon?
I couldn’t speak to ask.
The woman’s eyes filled with tears. Had I been sleeping with her before the tournament? She wasn’t dressed like a nurse, but she seemed awfully concerned for someone who had just spent a single night with me. Maybe she was just like that. I wished I could remember her name.
“Can you hear me?” she asked.
I opened my mouth, but my lips were as dry and cracked as my throat felt. The woman reached over to the table beside the bed and held a glass of water with a straw up to my lips. I couldn’t lift my head to drink, but she angled the straw for me to take a few sips.
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
I still couldn’t place her. I thought about her question and did a mental evaluation of my body before I tried to speak.
“Leg hurts,” I croaked.
“It’s broken,” the woman said.
I’d assumed so from the cast. I took a deep breath and focused on my other limbs. My right thigh felt a little strange, and I was achy almost everywhere. My head was pounding, making it hard to think.
“What else?” I asked.
She pulled a rolling chair close to the side of the bed and took my hand in hers.
“Your leg was basically crushed,” she said quietly. “You’ve gone through two surgeries to fix it. The ligaments and tendons around your knee had to be repaired, too. You have a really bad concussion, and Landon said you…you…”
She choked up a little, took a breath, and went on.
“You were shot in the leg. He said it wasn’t that bad, but it was infected by the time they found you. They had to give you a skin graft there.”
I closed my eyes and focused on my right thigh for a moment. It was itchy, and I figured that was due to the graft; I’d had them before. I recalled a brief flash of the pain from the bullet, and I remembered the snow and ice surrounding me as I tried to clean it up. It had been too cold to leave my flesh exposed long enough to do it properly.
Cold. Ice. Snow.
“Avalanche.”
“Right,” the woman said with a nod. “You were caught in it.”
A slight dizzying sensation overcame me as I remembered tumbling down the mountainside. The pain in my leg throbbed as I recalled the abrupt stop as I hit the rock ledge below. Visions of being trapped and unable to move traipsed along in my head together with images of a little piece of folded paper with a drawing on it.
It all came back to me like a bright and violent flash of lightning as it strikes a tree.
One final tournament in the frozen north. No one but me and a certified hit man left in the game. Certified and certifiable.
Evan Arden.
We had both been covered by the snow and had formed an unprecedented alliance to free ourselves. I had to survive. I didn’t care about the money or a fucking trophy. I had to get back to her. To them.
“Raine,” I whispered.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Oh, fuck—Raine!”
Ignoring the tug of the IV needle in my hand, I reached out and brought her to me. I’d done it. I’d lived up to my promise to her. She was here with me, safe and protected again. Somehow, I had gotten out alive and back to the one woman who mattered in my world.
With the help of my key competition.
Did Evan make it? Did he get off that island alive? There was only one way I would ever know, and that was if and when I heard that Franks had been murdered. Assuming Evan made it, how long would he wait before taking action? Days? Weeks? Longer?
Would he even bother to fulfill his promise to me?
I only thought about it for a moment before deciding that yes, he would. Evan Arden was about as fucked up as they get, but I didn’t think he was a liar. I also got the idea he was a guy of principle—he’d never back out of a hit. If he did survive, I had no doubt that he would get the job done. I’d just have to be patient.
Not my best attribute.
Raine was crying against my shoulder, and I placed my hand on the back of her head and pressed my lips to her temple.
“I’m all right, babe,” I told her. “I got you.”
“They said you might not make it,” she cried against me. “They said even after the surgery, you might not wake up.”
“I’m awake,” I said. “I’m going to be fine, Raine. I’m going to be fine.”
I had no idea if it was true or not, but I wasn’t going to contradict myself. I made it down a fucking mountain with a crushed leg. There was no way I was going to die in a fucking hospital bed.
I held her as long as I could, but my head was aching, and I nearly passed out again. Raine summoned a nurse to tell her I was awake, and the woman checked my pulse, temperature, and the output of the various machines connected to me.
Raine stood to the side, wringing her hands and biting her lip.
“Where’s Alex?” I asked.
“With John Paul,” Raine replied. “They’re in that building where we were staying.”
“He’s okay?”
“He’s great,” Raine said. “He and John
Paul hit it off. I didn’t realize that man was such a child at heart.”
I smiled, but it hurt my head.
“Landon?” I asked.
Raine’s face scrunched up at the mention of his name.
“He left a little while ago to get something to eat,” she said. “He should be back in an hour.”
A doctor showed up and checked me over in greater detail. She pulled back the dressing on my thigh, ordered the nurse to add something to my IV, and shined a flashlight in my eyes.
“How does your head feel?” she asked.
“Like shit,” I replied.
“Bastian!” Raine snapped.
“Well, it fucking does,” I muttered.
“Quite all right,” the doctor said. “He’s got a few reasons to curse. You might want to consider a safer hobby.”
I wasn’t sure what she thought my hobby was, but I figured it was best not to say anything else. Raine watched as the doctor finished up my examination and then left. The nurse came back with a bag of something to add to my IV drip, and Raine gave me a little more water.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just worried about you.”
“No worries,” I told her. “I always bounce back.”
Landon appeared in the doorway just as the nurse was finishing up. He stood quietly near the entrance until she was done then asked Raine to give us a few minutes alone. She glared at him without responding but stood from her chair. She leaned over to kiss my forehead and run her hand through my hair.
“I’ll be outside,” she said sharply. “I’m going to let John Paul and Alex know you’re awake.”
“Thanks, babe.”
Landon moved out of the way as Raine passed, a slight smile on his face. He watched her walk out before shutting the door and coming to sit by my side.
“You look a little better,” he remarked. “There was a time I thought I’d have to convince them to give Raine your winnings posthumously.”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence.”
“You were in bad shape,” he said. “You had hypothermia along with your injuries. Bad infection in your leg, too.”
“So I hear.”
“Prognosis is good, now that you’re conscious. Your leg is going to need some physical therapy once it’s mended enough, but you should be back to normal in a few months. You gained a few more scars.”
“Just additions to the collection,” I mused.
“If you are going for a record, I think you might have won.”
I had to keep myself from laughing at his comment—moving hurt.
“Did you find Arden’s body?” I asked.
Landon shook his head.
“No sign of him,” he said. “Considering the depth of the snow, I doubt he’ll be uncovered any time soon. We’ll just have to wait until global warming takes its toll.”
I gave him a half grin, but it hurt to do so.
“I saw him go down,” I told him. “The only way I kept from being buried was from hitting a ledge part way down. That’s what broke my leg, but it stopped me long enough for the rest of the avalanche to pass over me. He kept going to the bottom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” I hoped I sounded convincing.
“Any chance he could have survived?”
“Not as far as I could tell.”
Landon took in a breath, filling his lungs deeply before he stood up.
“I’m heading back to Seattle,” he announced. “John Paul is arranging for you to be moved to a hospital in Miami. It will take a day or two, but you can finish your recovery from there. You were in a skiing accident in case anyone asks.”
“Good to know.”
“I’ll be in touch.” He started for the door.
“Landon?”
He turned back to me.
“I’m done now,” I said as I looked straight at him. “No more tournaments. No more favors. This was it.”
Landon nodded but didn’t look back at me. I had no doubt that he was simply agreeing because he knew it was what I wanted to hear. Evan had been right—there was no way out of this except to eliminate those who had leverage over you.
I have to kill him.
First things first—I was in no shape to go after Landon.
Should have asked Evan to do it.
No, that wasn’t right. I needed to take care of Landon. I wanted him to know it was me. I didn’t give a shit about Franks—I’d wanted him dead since that night I watched him torture and murder people, Raine’s father included. I didn’t care how it happened as long as he was gone. Landon was a whole other issue. I was going to get him out of my way once and for all, but I couldn’t do that in my current condition. Even at full strength, Landon wouldn’t be an easy man to eliminate, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I still needed to get myself back into shape before I conquered him.
My plan would wait. At least for now, I’d let myself heal.
Getting back to normal was a long fucking road.
I spent two weeks in the hospital after I was transported back to Miami. Had it been any other tournament, I would have told the doctors to fuck off and left earlier, but Raine made me promise to do anything they said. Any time I tried to protest, she’d say something about how Alex was going to need me to be able to walk and run so I could teach him to play football or some such shit.
I couldn’t really argue with her emotionally charged logic. In fact, I thought about it a lot while I was lying around in the private hospital room, going to physical therapy sessions twice a day, and trying to get around on crutches. I thought about how life just wasn’t the same when you had a kid to think about. I loved Raine with every ounce of my being, but Alex…Alex made everything different.
Raine brought him to the hospital a lot while I was recovering. We stuck with the skiing accident story though the way he looked at both of us when we told him gave me the impression he didn’t believe a word of it. The kid had been in a mob family for the first six years of his life, so he had probably seen more shit than he should have for a kid his age.
While he visited, he’d color pictures of the three of us or of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He also kept drawing the same picture over and over again of a house with a big field of rolling hills behind it. He said it was the place we were all going to live someday. All of the pictures ended up taped to the walls of the hospital room so I could see them from the bed.
The more I watched him, the more I wanted to ensure he had the best fucking childhood anyone had ever given a kid. I wanted to make up for not being there when he was younger but also for what he had to go through living with Jillian and her husband. I didn’t know the details, but Alex’s reaction to his parents’ death was so…calm. There had to be more to it than he was sharing, but I didn’t know what. I just knew he didn’t talk about them much at all.
I had no idea how to handle it. I’d never been a father and certainly didn’t know shit about child psychology. My only experience was my own fucked up life, and I didn’t want his to be anything like that. Everything about Alex’s life needed to be the exact opposite of mine. That meant I had to change.
I had always been a selfish bastard.
Even when I considered everything I’d done to try to make Raine happy since we returned from our isolation on the island, I’d still been thinking more of myself than her. My focus was on how miserable I was and not on how I needed to be. I was supposed to be her partner in life, but I wasn’t. I had been focused on pitying myself and ignoring what she wanted and needed from me. She had put up with it, but it also reminded me of how unworthy I was of her, not because of my past, but because of the present.
As I lay in the bed, I was still being that man from the past. I couldn’t think of much of anything except how I was going to get rid of Landon. I also waited for news of Franks, but I was in the dark about everything that had happened after the tournament ended. By the time I was released,
I presumed Evan hadn’t managed to get off that island after all, or if he had, that he wasn’t going to do the job. Thinking about it too much gave me a headache, and I just hoped Evan was waiting for the right time.
Maybe that was the concussion talking.
After I was released, Raine made me keep a huge-ass boot on my leg as it continued to heal. I had physical therapy three times a week until I could walk without it. I spent most of that time researching places to live and plotting Landon’s demise.
I hadn’t seen him since the hospital in Thompson.
John Paul had traded a few messages back and forth between Landon and me, but he wouldn’t come clean as to what Landon or Franks was doing. When Raine headed off to the university, John Paul stopped by and gave me some updates on the outcome of the war in Chicago.
“The Russians have gone back to wherever the hell they came from,” he said as he helped himself to a bottle of iced tea from the fridge.
He glared at the beverage, and I knew exactly what he was thinking, but I wasn’t keeping beer in the house. He could go fuck himself.
“Get over it,” I snapped.
“I didn’t say anything,” John Paul insisted.
“You were going to tell me about Chicago.” I leaned back on the couch and put my leg up on the coffee table. I’d taken the boot off; the damn thing was uncomfortable and itchy. Raine wouldn’t be back from meeting with her university advisor about taking online classes for at least another hour. I could put it back on then.
John Paul sat in the chair across from me.
“Greco’s organization stepped back and dropped out of the caviar business altogether. They’re still at odds with Moretti but in a relatively peaceful way.”
“What about Franks?”
“Back in Seattle,” John Paul said. “He’s taking a big chunk of Moretti’s profits from caviar sales, but there hasn’t been much grumbling about it. That dude is pissed, though.”
“Which dude?”
“The Chicago guy—Moretti.”
“About what?”
“Arden.”
“What, because he died?” My heart beat wildly in my chest. John Paul had known me way too long. If I showed any signs of hiding something, he was going to sense it and call me out. I had to be very careful about what I said.