The pain was too much to ignore. I moaned, my hands automatically moving to the source of the pain. Other hands pulled me away, stopped me from touching the heavy bandage I could feel pressing low against my hip.

“Open your eyes, Carson.”

It wasn’t an unfamiliar voice, but not a familiar one, either. It took me a moment, almost like I’d forgotten how to use the muscles that opened and closed my eyes. When I finally did manage to open them, the bright light in the room forced them closed again. The hands left me for a second, then came back, the light pressing against my eyelids lessened.

When I opened my eyes again, I was staring up at Remy Stone.

“Where,” I tried to croak, but my throat was so dry the words refused to form.

“Here.” She pressed a piece of ice against my lips. “You haven’t had anything to drink in days.”

I stared up at her, studied her face. Then slowly began to take in the room around her. The walls were cinderblock, the furniture expensive, but practical. There was an IV pole on the far side of the bed, an infusion tube snaking down to my arm, a needle buried under a pile of tape on the top of my hand. I flexed my hand, the soreness almost reassuring.

“Where am I?”

“Stone Security.” Remy sat back, regarding me with caution in her eyes. “Aiden brought you here a week ago.”

A week. That seemed reasonable for the wound I had.

“Who?” I gestured toward the IV pole.

“We have a doctor friend who owes Jack a huge favor. This took a chunk of that out of the equation.”

I closed my eyes, mentally assessing my health. The pain was incredible, but it was manageable. I was pretty sure I didn’t have a fever. My arms and legs moved, as far as I could tell. There didn’t seem to be any permanent damage.

“He says you’ll be okay. He says you were lucky that the knife didn’t puncture a major organ. He was able to fix the damage here and says you should be on your feet in another week or so.”

“No infection?”

“No.”

I opened my eyes and focused on her. “And Aiden? Where is he?”

“Resting. He’s been sitting by your side since he brought you here. We had to force him to sleep.”

At least he’s safe.

“Who did this to you, Carson? Why?”

I shook my head. “I think that’s a conversation I need to have with Aiden first.”

She inclined her head slightly. “But you’re a doctor? That wasn’t a lie.”

“No.”

“Is that how you knew about me?”

My eyebrows rose, but then she touched her belly and I remembered. “You’re pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t told anyone.”

“I guess I’ll have to now.”

“I wouldn’t say anything.”

She smiled, but it was a gesture full of bitterness. “You’ve sent the entire family into a tizzy. Jack’s thinking it was Mad Dog that attacked you, so he’s got everyone on lock down. I haven’t been home in a week, haven’t spent more than two minutes with Bo in that week. And my brothers, my lover, are out waging war on these lunatics who, for all we know, had nothing to do with this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Was it Mad Dog? Can you at least tell me that?”

I didn’t know who Mad Dog was. I closed my eyes, the image of that dirty motorcycle club guy down on his knees in front of me rushing through my head. There’d been an emblem on his leather vest, a circular badge with the words Mad Dog in it. She must be right. It must have been him.

“It was two men. One was with the motorcyclists who were outside Jack’s gate the night after the party.”

She nodded, jumping to her feet. “Thank you. At least they aren’t out there starting something without provocation.” She walked to the door, pausing with her hand on the knob. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“Aiden?”

She shook her head, anger flashing in her eyes. “I’ll get him for you. But you better have a damn good story for him!”

She walked out, slamming the door behind her. And I was pretty sure I heard her snap a lock into place. Like I could get up and walk out of here.

I tried to sit up, but there was too much weakness in my muscles still. I rolled onto my side and tugged at the IV line to see what they were pumping into my body. I could just read the side of each bag, saline and Tygacil. Not my first choice for an antibiotic, but it made sense.

I rolled back onto my side when I heard the doorknob rattle. Aiden, looking a little worse for wear, stepped inside, his expression anxious as he looked me over.

“Welcome back,” he said as he crossed the room toward me.

“Hey.”

He took a seat in the chair Remy had vacated, his hands clutched in his lap like he was afraid to touch me.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly, remembering the blood stains that had covered his body the last time I saw him.

He tilted his head slightly. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is, though. It’s all my fault.”

He started to shake his head, but I could see the distrust in his eyes. He knew it was my fault, he just didn’t understand why.

“You’re a doctor.”

“Yes.”

“Then why aren’t you practicing? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I couldn’t. I couldn’t even tell you my real name.”

His eyes fell to the ground, a weight dropping perceptively on his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Aiden. I wanted to, I really did. But I was afraid of putting you in danger.”

“And what is this? What happened to you…what if I’d been there?”

“I know.”

“They came back. After we left the house, they came back and trashed the place.”

I nodded even as my eyes slid closed on hot tears.

“They cut the lines to the cameras. That’s why I went back to the house that morning. If I hadn’t…you would have just laid and died, Carson.” He choked a little. “Or whatever your name is.”

“It’s Carson. It’s just not Duncan.”

I focused on him, but he wouldn’t look at me.

“I’ve been on the run for eighteen months. Before that, I was part of WITSEC, the witness protection program offered by the US Marshal Service.”

His eyes came up, moving slowly over me. “Why?”

I reached up to brush away a tear, but the IV was imbedded in that hand and it didn’t want to cooperate. I gave up, let my hands fall into my lap, my tears dotting the sheet around me.

“Carson…”

“I was born in Boston. Everything I told you about my mom and me, that was true. She was a personal assistant, she did work a job she hated to take care of me. She did suffer from depression. She spent her entire adulthood grieving for a man who stole her away from her family and got himself killed working the first legitimate job he’d had since they ran off together. A man who left her pregnant and alone, locked away from the world she’d grown up in and stuck making ends meet just to make sure I made it out, that I had the life I wanted.”

“And what was that?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m a trauma surgeon. I worked the emergency room in a Boston public hospital. In fact, I’d just learned I’d passed my boards the morning before everything went to shit!”

He stared at me like he didn’t know me. The love and the trust that had always been in his eyes when he looked at me was gone. I’d killed it.

“I was on duty one night, working the second half of a double shift. A man came in with a bullet wound to the chest. I was with him, prepping him for surgery because the nurses were all occupied with a multi-vehicle accident that had just come in. I was in a hurry because I wanted to jump in on the accident victims. But just as I was finishing up, he grabbed my arm and started talking.

“It turned out he was the bookkeeper for a drug dealer known as Mr. J. This guy was a real piece of work, running drugs not only in the Boston area, but all over the east coast. He had fingers in pies all over the country. The DEA had been trying to take him down for more than a decade, but they hadn’t had any success. But, all of a sudden, here I am, listening to details of his business that even the DEA’s undercover agents weren’t capable of getting.”

I closed my eyes, remembering the things he’d told me. It was dark, the pictures his words described to me.

“I never said a word to anyone, but I guess Mr. J had people in the ER, watching to make sure this guy kept his mouth shut. He died in surgery, so I figured it was over. I wasn’t going to tell anyone and he couldn’t. But they found out, anyway. They came after me, breaking into my apartment in Boston.”

I touched my face, the left side of my face.

“It was this one guy, a trusted figure in Mr. J’s organization, I guess. He attacked me while I was in bed, held me down and pressed a gun to the side of my head. Told me if I ever spoke of what I knew, he’d come back and he would fire a single bullet into my brain. He didn’t realize that I’d had a roommate who was attacked when I was in college, that I slept with a scalpel under my pillow. I managed to pull it free and slice open the side of his face. He was gone by the time the cops arrived, but he’d single-handedly put me on the DEA’s radar. And when they learned what a damn good memory I had, they were over the moon. They had their man. Finally.”

I shuddered at the memory.

“They promised they could keep me safe. If I testified, they’d not only keep me safe, but in a couple of years they could restore my medical license and get me back to some semblance of my life. Who was I to refuse?”

Aiden was staring at his hands again, working the cuticle on one thumb. When I didn’t speak again, he looked up, his eyes moving over my face.

“You testified.”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “When Mr. J and his attorneys realized they couldn’t get to me, they couldn’t stop me, he pled out. They gave him a good deal—twenty-five to life with the possibility of parole in twenty years. It was better than what he was facing at trial.”

“And you went into protection.”

“Yeah. The guy, Greg Stamosson was his name, threatened me in open court. They couldn’t refuse to put me in WITSEC then.”

“Why aren’t you still in WITSEC?”

“They sent me to Florida, put me in a dinky apartment on the wrong side of town and got me a job at a grocery store. I hated it, but I was putting up with it. But then he found me.”

“Who?”

“Stamosson. He grabbed me while I was walking home from a convenience store. Just two months and he found me. I figured if the government couldn’t keep me safe after just two months, they wouldn’t keep me safe anywhere else. I ran.”

“That was eighteen months ago.”

“Yeah. I went to Denver after that. That’s when I started working over the internet, taking whatever work I could get. I wrote book reports, short stories, just about anything someone was willing to pay for. I lived in a rented apartment under another name—Sally Collins—but he still managed to find me. I saw him watching the apartment in the middle of the night, standing under a streetlight like he wanted me to know he was there, that he was coming for me. I slipped out a back door with just what I could carry on my back and a couple thousand dollars in an internet pay service. I took that and went to Las Vegas, made a couple of risky bets on March Madness and made enough to survive for a few months.”

“Is that when you came to Memphis?”

“By way of Albuquerque and Austin. When I first got here, I had tripled my money, but I still needed more. I needed to be able to live completely off the grid. A friend in college had taught me a few tricks with computers. I used a couple to increase my savings, making enough to buy the house and furnish it. There’s still some left, hidden away in an untraceable account in case I had to run again.”

“In case?”

“I had no way of knowing if he was still after me. That’s why I didn’t want to go out, why I worked so hard to keep my life private.”

He was quiet for a long time. He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. My chest hurt and it had nothing to do with the injury in my abdomen. I wanted him to touch me, to tell me it was okay, that he understood. But there was a wall that had grown between us that I could see over.

“Aiden—”

“What’s your real name.”

“It’s Carson. Really. I didn’t want to have to try to remember another name, so I stuck with my real first name.”

“The rest of it?”

I took a deep breath, not sure I even remembered it. Too much time had passed since the last time I’d spoken my own name aloud. “Carson Elizabeth Bailey.”

He shook his head, recognition burning through the wall. “How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know this isn’t just another batch of lies?”

“I don’t suppose you do. But I don’t know what else to say.”

He continued to watch me like he expected something to suddenly appear on my face that would help him understand, some sort of writing to appear on my forehead. When that didn’t happen, he stood and began to pace around the room. “Who hurt you?”

I reached up and brushed a piece of hair away from my face, annoyed with this long hair that I’d never wanted and never liked.

“I don’t know. One called the other Chappy, but the other’s name was never mentioned.”

“Were they Mad Dog?”

I shrugged, telling him the same thing I’d told Remy. “I saw the one outside Jack’s house the night of the party. That’s probably when he recognized me, when he called Mr. J’s people.”

“How do you know this is connected to Mr. J?”

“He said so. He said they told him to mess me up, to incapacitate me, but not to kill me. The stabbing was not premeditated.”

“Why did he stab you, then?”

“Because I kicked him in the balls.”

That brought a brief, but bright smile to his lips. He turned to regard me again, his arms crossed over his chest once more.

“You told me to leave; that they’d come back. What were you planning on doing for yourself?”

“Nothing. I just wanted you to go.”

“Why?”

“So he wouldn’t kill you, Aiden.”

I struggled to sit up, pain shooting through me as I moved the damaged muscles in my abdomen. He immediately came to my side, grabbing my arm and pulling me into a sitting position. He moved away the moment I was sitting, snatching his hand from my grip as I tried to keep him near me.

“You were dying and you were worried about me?” He sounded incredulous, like he couldn’t quite decipher what it was I was saying.

“I never lied to you.”

“You don’t call this a lie?”

“It’s a lie of omission. But I never told a lie.”

He shook his head, a snicker escaping his throat. “I’m not sure there’s a difference, Carson.”

I nodded slowly. “Maybe not. But you were never completely honest with me, either.”

Anger shot from his eyes as he regarded me again. “How’s that?”

“You refused to tell me what happened to you in Afghanistan. I had to find out from your sister even though I was the one lying beside you when you had those nightmares! You don’t call that a lie of omission?”

“It’s not the same thing! I’m not on the run from half of Boston! And I didn’t run away from the US Marshals.”

“But I wasn’t pulled into all that intentionally. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any of it.”

“You think I wanted my friends to die?”

“No. But you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for the SEALs. I was just a doctor doing my job.”

He was quiet a moment, tension making his shoulders squarer than God ever intended.

“I need time,” he said, crossing the room to the door. “I just…I need to think this through.”

“You do that.”

He looked over at me. “It’s a lot, Carson.”

“I know.”

The anger that had rushed through me had burned itself out. I sank back against the pillows, suddenly too tired to feel anything but pain. I closed my eyes, too tired to even reflect on the pain and hurt that was living in his eyes now. I heard the door close and it felt like an ending.

My ending.

Everything I had to live for had just walked out that door and I was pretty sure it wasn’t coming back.