Chapter 6

I don’t understand why gyms have mirrors. I know I need some work, that’s why I’m here.

-Cobie’s secret thoughts

Cobie

Six months later

“Let me help,” Drake Garwood, my best friend’s widower, pleaded.

I shook my head.

“You can’t make me do this, Drake,” I apologized. “I don’t want treatment.”

Drake had been there for me, just like I’d been there for him, for six months now since Marianne’s death.

Those six months hadn’t always been great.

In fact, after a certain time period—about four months after his wife’s death—Drake had started to court me. Or at least he tried to, anyway.

I didn’t want anything to do with that—or him.

I still wasn’t over Marianne’s death, and it bothered me that Drake would think that I would want anything to do with him like that.

It felt like a slap in the face to Marianne.

So, I’d done my level best to keep him at arm’s length, but he did everything he could to push against the boundaries I’d set.

And now, with the news that I’d gotten just yesterday, he was already pushing to help me.

I didn’t want his help.

In fact, I wanted nothing to do with his help because having his help meant that I’d have to face cancer again, and I didn’t want to face it.

I just wanted to breathe easy.

Something I hadn’t been able to do since I was informed that I had cancer when I’d gone to the ER for shortness of breath.

Ever since, I hadn’t known what breathing easy was.

I just wanted to breathe.

I couldn’t breathe.

“I’ll see you later, Drake,” I apologized as I backed away. “Thank you for the ride home from the hospital.”

Drake watched me go up the front steps of my walk, and the moment I reached the door, I hurriedly pushed it open and locked it behind me.

If there had been anybody else in the world that I could have contacted right then, I would have.

However, I had nobody.

My co-workers, although nice, didn’t really know much about me.

I’d been a nurse for six years, and four of those years I’d been in the same labor and delivery unit, yet I was no closer to my co-workers then I had been when I started.

Though, I had a feeling that a lot of that had to do with me.

Women just never seemed to like me.

Never.

That’s why, when I met Marianne after she’d given birth to her son, I’d been happy for her extension of friendship.

We’d hit it off well, and during the time that she battled postpartum depression followed shortly after by her battle with cancer—which coincided with mine—I was happy to call her friend.

Now, I had nobody.

Not a single person.

No one.

I looked around at my house, wondering who I would donate it all to once I was gone.

Maybe the historical district.

They’d been hounding me about this house, and all of my grandfather’s things, for a very long time now.

They wanted me to restore the house, while I, on the other hand, wanted to remember the house how it was when my grandfather had lived in it.

I missed my grandfather.

He’d been the one who raised me, and not a day went by that I did not miss seeing him.

He’d died six years ago, now.

My eyes lit on the picture of him and my grandmother on their wedding day sixty-five years ago that was hanging above the fireplace.

He looked so happy.

So, so happy.

I couldn’t see much of my grandmother’s face due to my grandfather’s massive hand covering most of it as he held her mouth to his, but I could imagine that she was practically beaming just like he was.

I wiped the single tear that fell from my eye and went to step away from my door when a knock sounded at the back of my house.

Frowning, I moved through the hallway, around through the dining room, and stopped in the kitchen.

There was a man standing at my back door.

A blond man.

A familiar looking blond man.

I scowled.

Where did I know him from?

Before I could so much as ask him why he was at my back door and where I knew him from, he reared forward. His arms went around my waist, and suddenly I was no longer alone in my house.

I opened my mouth to scream, but he was there, his hand over my face, shushing me. “Stop.”

I froze.

Terror was filling my veins, but a shiver of something else rushed through me, too.

This man, he was hot.

Let’s just get that out in the open.

However, hot or not, he was in my house, uninvited. I didn’t know him, and I wasn’t fucking stupid.

There wasn’t going to be any misconstrued feelings from me. No, sir. I was well and truly freakin’ the fuck out.

“Don’t scream.”

I nodded because who the hell wouldn’t agree when a big man, one who was over six-foot tall—and I say that number because my grandfather had been that size and I didn’t have to strain my neck to look up at him like I had to do with this man—and he was staring me straight in the eye. He didn’t have to say what he would do if I did scream, which I wouldn’t.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he rasped, letting go of my face, as well as me entirely.

I blinked, unsure what to do.

Did I ask him what he was doing there? Did I tell him that I wanted him to leave? Though, that one would be stupid to ask, because I damn well knew he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t be there if he didn’t have some sort of agenda.

“Call Drake and tell him you won’t be meeting him for lunch like you’d planned. You’re not feeling well.”

I blinked, opened my mouth to reply and tell him that there wouldn’t be lunch with him ever, but he shook his head. “Trust me.”

I laughed harshly at that. “I have much more reason to trust Drake than I do you. You’ve forced yourself into my home. There is no trusting you, moron.”

The man’s eye twitched.

“You got a computer?”

I blinked, then nodded, “If I show you where it’s at, you’ll take it and leave?”

He rolled his eyes as if I’d just asked him the stupidest question on earth.

“No, I’m gonna show you what your boyfriend Drake does.”

Brows furrowing, I watched as he walked to it, flipped it open, and glared at the background photo.

Yeah, I wasn’t really all that great looking in that one. It was the day that Marianne had come home. Marianne, who’d been kidnapped straight out of her home.

Her long hair was wispy, flying around her face like a freakin’ hair commercial. Her eyes were wide and smiling, and her lips were plump and pink.

She was beautiful…and then there was me.

Me? Well, I wasn’t much to look at. I was average, not tall but not short, either. Around five-foot-five or so. I had long brown hair—well, at one point in time I did. Now it fell to just barely below my chin now that it’d started growing back after my chemo and radiation treatments. I had muddy brown eyes the color of dirt, freckles all over my face that weren’t the kind that were considered ‘cute’ but were instead what I’d call ‘too much.’ I used to have a healthy-looking, somewhat muscular figure. Not fat, but not skinny, either. Then I got cancer, went through chemo, hadn’t able to keep a damn thing down for months and lost way too much weight.

I’d just started putting that weight back on when I got sick again and started having shortness of breath—which had prompted my visit to the emergency room. The ER had run some tests, and I now had a mammogram scheduled in two days thanks to my left breast being swollen and red.

I’d thought it was just the flu.

I should’ve known it wasn’t.

My life wasn’t all that great.

It’d been hard from the day I was born up until now.

My mom left me with my grandparents the day I was born. I never knew who my father was. When I was seven, I was run over by a car. When I was twelve, I tried to run away, but instead of actually running away, I instead managed to get myself stuck in a storm drain, nearly drowning when a torrential downpour began. At the age of sixteen, I got pregnant and almost died from an ectopic pregnancy, and in the process, I, of course, lost the baby. At nineteen, I lost my grandmother. At twenty-four, two days before my nursing graduation, my grandfather died.

Then, at twenty-eight, I’d found out that I had stage four gall bladder cancer.

Just when I thought I had it beaten, I found out that I now had breast cancer. Oh, and let’s not forget about the psycho standing in my room, doing something with my computer.

I scratched my chin and started to back up toward the back door, but stopped when he suddenly turned the computer to me.

“What is that?” I gasped, rushing forward.

“That is Drake.”

I knew that. I could see that. Drake was standing outside the house that I’d let him use.

“What is he doing?” I whispered.

He pointed to the truck and ignored my question. “Look at this one.”

Then he switched to the next picture.

Drake was hauling open the door, and inside the truck, there were floor-to-ceiling crates. The only thing I’d ever seen in crates were guns, so I was hoping that my mind was just filling in the blanks, rather than knowing for a certainty.

Surely there could be something else inside those boxes.

“What?”

“I think he’s allowing his house to be used as a base of some sort.”

“Base?”

“Or a storage facility.” He paused. “I don’t fuckin’ know. I do know that whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it at night so no one can see him. I also know that when he sees these people that make these deliveries at a restaurant in town, they don’t acknowledge that they know each other. Seems legitimately shady to me.”

I agreed.

“I know that one,” I pointed to the man with the Asian features. “He’s a trainer at the gym where I used to work out.”

My captor grunted.

“None of this makes sense,” I muttered to myself. “None of it.”

“What sense do you need to make of this to know he’s doing something bad?” he practically spat. “The man is a fuckin’ douche.”

“Whatever he has going on here can be verified rather quickly.” I walked away from him and to the set of keys on the counter but paused in turning for a few seconds when a wave of dizziness washed over me.

“Cobie?”

I shook it off and raised the keys in the air.

“I own that house.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

He nodded. “That was at least easy to find. But, even if tax records for property weren’t public knowledge, Marianne told me before she passed.”

“Marianne…”

And then it all clicked, where I’d seen him.

I’d seen him for the first time in the hospital as I’d left Marianne’s room. The second time I’d seen him had been at her funeral.

“You.”

He winced.

“Took me three freakin’ months to find you,” he said. “And then three months of looking into you and Drake to decide that maybe you weren’t in on it.”

“Why do you care if I’m in on it or not?”

He looked down at his hands. “Marianne asked me to take care of you.”

“What?”

“She told me to take care of you,” he repeated.

“Why?” I blurted.

Not that he’d have to deal with that promise for much longer.

Stage two breast cancer meant that I would possibly die by the end of next year, according to my doctor, if I didn’t try to treat it.

And honestly, I was just so damn tired.

I was tired of fighting.

Tired of losing.

I wanted some peace.

Even if that peace came in the form of death.

At least in death, I knew that I wouldn’t suffer anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t wake up and realize that I was alive to live another day in pain.

Since I’d battled cancer before, I knew what would happen.

I knew that my life would suck for however long the doctor deemed necessary for me to do the chemo and radiation treatments.

Plus, I would still need to have a double mastectomy if the chemo and radiation did its job and killed all the cancerous cells in my body. And I say that ‘if’ cautiously since there was still a chance that it wouldn’t work, and I would go through all these treatments—all the fighting—only to succumb to the cancer. I just didn’t know if I had it in me or if I even wanted to do it anymore.

There was nobody left to make me want to fight—to convince me that the pain was worth it.

Not even knowing that there was something going on with Drake, and this man was trying to let me in on said information, was going to make me change my mind.

Suddenly, I was just freakin’ tired.

“What’s your name?” I blurted, suddenly needing to know who this man was.

“Dante Hail.”

Dante Hail.

“What put all those shadows in your eyes, Dante Hail?”

His entire being stilled.

His eyes on me. The breath in his chest. The absent tapping of his fingers against the countertop next to the computer.

Everything.

“Some time I’ll tell you of my own personal hell,” he said. “But now’s not that time.”

“I could be dead by next year,” I told him bluntly. “Let’s make sure you tell me before that time comes.”

He blinked.

“What do you mean, dead?”

I fought through the exhaustion. Through the wave of knowledge that stuck with me as I moved toward Dante, and shrugged.

“I have breast cancer,” I admitted. “It’s fairly advanced, and without treatment, the doctor doesn’t think I’ll make it through the year.”

He stared at me for a long time, his gaze so damn intense that it almost made me squirm.

“Dying is the coward’s way out.”

I laughed at that. “Maybe.”

He opened his mouth to argue. “Why wouldn’t you do the treatment?”

I dropped the keys next to his hand and stared up into his eyes.

“Why would I?” I asked, pausing to study his eyes as I said what I had to say next. “Whatever put those shadows in your eyes lets me know that you probably have a good idea what it feels like to have nothing left.”

His hand came up to my cheek, and only his index finger ran along the line of my cheekbone. “Used to think I had nothing,” he answered. “Found out about a year and a half ago that I did.”

I smiled sadly. “I’m glad that you do.”

He pushed the keys away from his hand and took a step back.

“Come on,” he urged, reaching forward and almost brushing my face with his shirt.

Then he yanked the jump drive out of the computer.

I blinked.

“You just took the jump drive out of the computer without ejecting it first,” I told him. “That’s a good way to corrupt the data you have there.”

He shrugged. “Sometimes I like to live dangerously.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I guess if that’s what you think dangerous is, then maybe we shouldn’t be going any further into this investigation without someone who knows what they’re doing.”

His lips twitched.

“Honey, I was in the Air Force. You’re not going to find anyone who knows what they’re doing more than I do.”

I laughed. “If you say so.”

He took a hold of my arm and pulled me along in his wake.

“Where are we going now?”

He let go of my arm long enough to twist the lock on the back side of my door, and then pushed me out into the warm autumn air.

“We’re going to get a few answers.”

Then he was pulling me along with him.

“Where is that?”

He grunted something, and I had to tug on his hand to get him to repeat himself. “What?”

“Kilgore.”