CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It seemed to Lilli she’d been awake for some time, because none of the sounds she heard seemed unfamiliar. She knew she was in the hospital. She knew she was connected to machines—she could feel the faint pinch of tape on her wrist and the stiff intrusion of an IV stent, and the pull of adhesive on her chest from a heart monitor. She could hear the unique sounds of a hospital at work, beeps in her room, conversations outside. Definitely a hospital. But she wasn’t sure why.
Before she’d opened her eyes, she knew that Isaac was holding her hand, his hard, rough palms warm and gentle on her skin. Isaac. Her love. He was here; he was with her. She tried to understand what that meant. There was something she should know, something she needed to know, something important. But it eluded her.
The room came slowly into focus. The light in the room was bright and hurt her eyes, but before she could close them again, Isaac’s hands closed around hers. “Lilli? Ah, Sport. Are you with me? Are you here?” She heard the clang of desperation in his voice, and she tried to answer him, but she couldn’t make sound pass through her throat. She tried to nod, but her neck shouted in protest. Instead, she fought to really open her eyes and see, and she curled her fingers around his.
“Oh, fuck. Lilli, thank God. Oh, Jesus, baby!” He rose up closer and kissed her forehead. He smiled down at her; then, as if that first kiss hadn’t satisfied his need, he kissed her cheeks, her nose, her chin, her lips, and, again, her forehead. By the time he was done and looking down at her again, she could see clearly. He looked awful, his bright eyes sunken in shadow. She lifted the hand he wasn’t holding and was surprised to find it in a cast.
As consciousness settled in more completely, so did pain. She realized that she hurt everywhere. She tried to think what had happened. Car wreck? What did she last remember? Isaac stroked her face and then picked up something near her shoulder.
A voice came through a speaker somewhere in the room, asking, “What do you need?”
Isaac answered, “She’s awake!”
The voice responded, “Somebody’ll be right there.”
He lifted her hand to his lips. “You’re gonna be okay, Sport. You’re gonna be okay.” She had no reason to disbelieve him. She closed her eyes.
~oOo~
Lilli woke with Isaac almost lying on her, his hands pressing down on her shoulders, his chest heavy on hers. “Wake up, baby. It’s okay. Shh. Don’t hurt yourself.”
The dream receded quickly, becoming broken pieces of image as she understood where she was. She squirmed under Isaac’s weight, feeling irritated at his words, which sounded condescending to her ears. She felt helpless and weak enough without Isaac treating her like a child.
“I’m fine.” She shrugged again, and he released her and sat back in the chair at the side of her bed.
“The dreams are bad—worse—now, Sport.”
She shrugged again. He was right—they were a lot worse. Still death dreams, but now they were shaded with memory, and death had a face: Hobson. But they didn’t stay long after she woke. She’d learn to deal with them the way she’d learned to deal with everything.
By her second day conscious, Lilli had remembered what brought her there. Hobson. She’d let him best her. Again. She’d let him hurt her. She’d failed.
She knew he was dead, and that Isaac had killed him. So the goal of the mission had been achieved. But she had failed nonetheless. Hobson had still managed to take everything he could from her. He’d wanted to take more, but he’d been unable. She remembered every second, until the one in which Isaac pulled her into his arms. After that, four days of blankness.
Hobson had done a lot of damage. But Lilli was recovering. After three days awake—a week since she’d gotten hurt—she was feeling her strength return. She was able to be awake for longer stretches of time and no longer felt lightheaded even as she lay in bed. She wasn’t yet able to stand for more than a few seconds before the world went grey, but she knew it would come. Her ankle was still gimpy, anyway.
She had a nasty wound on her neck, which was the root cause of her weakness. The sundry cuts and bruises making motley of the rest of her body were fading, even if the memory of them would not. Her left hand was in a cast, and that would probably be the thing that caused the most lasting nuisance. All of it, though, would heal. She was expected to make a full recovery.
She wasn’t sure how to get her head on straight, though. Fate had taken her family. Hobson had taken everything else, even her strength. She didn’t know what was left.
~oOo~
“Where are you, Sport?” They were sitting outside in the crappy little “courtyard.” Lilli was in a wheelchair, which was more a precaution to make sure she didn’t get lightheaded and keel over than a necessity, but it still made her feel like an invalid. Isaac had his hand on her knee, and he’d given it a squeeze as he’d asked.
She came back to the moment and smiled at him. “Nowhere. Just spacing.”
“That brain doesn’t slow down enough for you to space. There’s something goin’ on, Lilli. I can see it. Been like this since you woke up. Talk to me.” He pulled the wheelchair so it turned on its axis and she faced him. “Talk to me.”
He was staring intently into her eyes, like he was trying to see what it was she was holding back. Since she’d woken up, he had a new way of looking at her. It was . . . naked, somehow, like he was holding nothing back, like he was offering her everything. It scared her, because she didn’t have anything to give him in return. She felt empty.
When her mother killed herself, she had her father. She had him when her nonna died, too. When her father died, she had the Army. When the Army kicked her away, she had vengeance. Always something to focus on, always something to distract her from her loss. In the space of weeks she’d lived after her discharge and before she’d found out about Hobson, she’d felt empty like this, and she’d just stopped. The sense of loss she’d been running from since she was ten had begun to converge on her. And then Lopez had contacted her, and she shoved it all back into its box.
Now, she had Isaac. But since she’d woken, she could only see him through her failure. Her connection with him had complicated her mission. She had made decisions because of her feelings for him which had put him and others at great risk. And then she’d failed. She’d needed rescue. She’d been at Hobson’s mercy. Again. Two men died who would not have if she’d stayed away from Isaac and the Night Horde. There was a mountain of dead men between her and Hobson.
“Lilli. Please talk to me,” Isaac repeated his plea, caressing her thigh.
A strong voice in her head was telling her that this was her opportunity to break free from him. She could end it now, tell him that what had happened had changed her thinking. She could lie low for a while and then move on. She opened her mouth to answer.
But she loved him. She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t know what was left of her, but if there was anything, it was here. Between them. He smiled at her and put his hand on her cheek, feeding his fingers into her hair. “I love you, Sport. Lilli. I know you have secrets. I understand. But don’t shut me out.”
Feeling selfish and lost, she didn’t. She opened up. She needed him, if only to stave off the emptiness. No. It was so much more than that. She needed him for him, for what they were together. She’d given him trust, and he’d never betrayed it. Now she needed to lean on that. She told him what she was thinking, how she was feeling. She let him in. She’d been letting him in almost since she’d met him.
When she was finished, he had her hands clasped tightly in his. “Lilli, you’re wrong. Ray didn’t take everything. Don’t give it to him now. I don’t know any other woman like you—as strong as you, or as smart. You make me stronger. It’s when we’re not working together that we’re weaker. We make a good team. We fill each other out. We fit. I feel that. Do you?”
She’d felt a fit with Isaac she’d never felt before, almost from the first day. Did they fill each other out? Is that what it was? “I don’t know what I fill, Isaac. Or where I fit. I don’t know what’s next. My permanent address has been a storage locker for most of my adult life.”
“Here, Lilli. You fit here. With me. Make your home with me.”
She shook her head. This place was a cover story. “I’m not even my real self here. I can’t even claim my own name.”
He smiled and curled his big hands around her thighs. “Claim a new one, then. Take mine.”
Stunned, Lilli didn’t answer. She stared at him; his gaze didn’t falter. “Isaac, what—?”
“Askin’ you to marry me, Sport. Be my old lady. Fuck, you are my old lady. I want you with me.”
Her heart pulsed hard at the thought. But it wasn’t a solution. “No. Getting lost in you doesn’t help me figure myself out. It’s not the way.”
Isaac sat back on the bench and looked away. It was the first time since they’d come out to this courtyard that his hands weren’t on her, and she regretted the loss of his touch. “You’re wrong, Sport. For a smart woman, you’ve missed something huge. I don’t know anyone with as strong a sense of self as you have. You know who you are. It’s clear in everything you do. The only thing you don’t know is what you know.”
She was feeling tired and sad now. Not understanding his point and not in the mood for a puzzle, she sighed. “Don’t talk in circles. How could I not know that I know who I am? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
He turned back to her. “You’re right. But I think maybe you’ve spent so much time focused on the next thing, the mission or whatever was ahead of you, that you never even stopped to consider how fucking amazing you are. But you also never stopped to wonder if you could do any of the amazing things you’ve done. Because you knew you could. You knew yourself enough to know you could. You never doubted it. I think that’s why Ray getting ahold of you is screwing with you like it is. But, Lilli, he’s dead, and you’re alive. We did it together. You held on. You didn’t let him win.”
Taking her hands in his again, he leaned forward. “We have something in common, you and me. A lot of things, actually. But one that’s really important. We do what we set out to do. We get what we want. So, Sport: what do you want?”
Lilli closed her eyes. She was tired, but mostly she wanted to try to put into some kind of order the clamoring thoughts in her head. She didn’t know. She didn’t know. And then one thought emerged from the cacophony and clarified. Not even a thought—an image, a memory. She remembered leaning back against him as he lay on their blanket at the second bonfire in Tulsa, the touch of his hands on her. She had felt complete, and calm, and fulfilled.
She’d felt at home.
She opened her eyes; his green gaze was still intent on her. With a smile, she answered, “You. I want you.”
His lopsided grin was clear and open, the relief palpable in it. “Well, that’s convenient, then. I’m askin’ again, Sport. Marry me.”
She nodded.
~oOo~
She was walking on her own power and well on her way to healing by the time they released her. Only the cast on her arm and the dark red scar on her neck served as lingering reminders. She was feeling antsy already to start running and working out again, but she knew she had some weeks left before she could.
Isaac brought her to his house, where he could take care of her. It was a permanent move. He’d been able to pack all of her belongings—at least all those she had here in town—into the Camaro and drive it over. She was no longer staying in the little pre-fab house. Now she lived in Isaac’s family home.
Work had been a problem to solve. She’d given him the key to her office, and he’d brought all of that over as well and set up an office for her on the second floor of his house. She trusted him not to look at any of it, and there were no classified documents in her files, but it was still a major breach of protocol. She’d had fires to put out, though; her absence while she was in the hospital had caused alarm, and she couldn’t wait any longer to get things straight.
Getting things straight with the NSA had turned out to be easy—they had not contacted her until two days before her release, so the big guns hadn’t begun yet to worry about secrets getting out. They were only just beginning to think twice about her silence. Rick, on the other hand, her contact for the Hobson project, was about ten seconds away from triggering their failsafe when she’d connected with him. She owed that boy something to calm his nerves.
It was over. Hobson had been brought to justice—the only kind they had still be available to them. It was strange to Lilli to contemplate facing something like a normal life—a home, a partner, a community. She had no idea whether she’d even be good at it.
She wanted to find out, though.