NONE of us seemed to know what to do as Julius and Steffie patched up Blaze the best they knew how. The bullet he’d taken to his abdomen had passed through his body rather than lodging inside, and Julius had confirmed that it hadn’t punctured any major organs, but the hacker was still clearly in a lot of pain. He alternated between groaning, hissing, and mumbling incoherently in a choked voice. Julius hadn’t thought it was a good idea to give him any painkillers until they’d determined the extent of the damage.
“So damn lucky,” Steffie murmured, a refrain she’d repeated more than once already, alongside phrases in what must have been her native language. She was stitching up the entry wound now with brisk but careful tugs of the thread. She and Julius worked well together, coordinating their actions with minimal speaking as if they’d done this a dozen times before.
Maybe they had.
Still, I couldn’t stop myself from turning to Talon where we were watching from the far end of the room and asking, “Are you sure we shouldn’t get an official doctor or something?”
Blaze cried out, as if punctuating my question. Then he grumbled something about “fucking needles, I’ll pierce their goddamn eyeballs” which didn’t make a ton of sense but was at least more understandable than the babbling before.
“Julius got some medical training through the military,” Talon said. “And Steffie… The men who had her made her do first aid when they needed it, so she had some experience already. After she came to us, Julius saw that she got a more in-depth education so she’d be able to help in situations like this.”
“She’s practically a qualified nurse,” Garrison put in from where he was standing beyond Talon.
I eyed the younger man warily. I hadn’t asked him even though he generally had more to say than Talon because I wasn’t sure where we stood after the way he’d laid into me this morning. So far, no one had mentioned anything about that argument, which was understandable given that we had much bigger things on our minds. I had no idea where I really stood with any of the guys, but Garrison had been by far the most furious.
Their comments reassured me a little when it came to Blaze’s survival, as did Julius’s a moment later. “We would get him to a hospital if I felt it was necessary. But he just needed some patching up.” He pressed a sterile pad over the stitched wound and taped it in place. “As soon as we’re finished getting on the bandages, you can have the good pain meds,” he told Blaze.
The other man nodded rapidly, his mouth pressing flat. I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of that much patience.
“Someone could go get that stuff now,” Steffie suggested, and Talon moved before she’d even finished speaking. The woman shook her head as she looked Blaze over. “An inch farther, and the bullet would have torn through a handful of organs. I’d love to have the luck that sticks with you boys.”
“You’re with us,” Blaze said with a rasp. “Very lucky. Wanna trade places?”
She snorted and finished her work on the exit wound. As they let Blaze roll fully onto his back on his bed, Talon reentered with a small case. Julius opened it, took out a syringe, and applied the contents directly to one of Blaze’s veins.
The effect was almost immediate. A sigh rushed out of the hacker, and he settled a little more loosely into the bed. A crooked smile crossed his face. “Now we’re talking.” Then he cracked his eyes open a slit, glancing from me to the other guys. “There should be more talking. You all need to tell Dess what idiots you were being.”
Steffie raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think I’m needed for this conversation.” She nodded to Julius. “I’ll stay at the apartment until you’re sure you don’t need me to monitor him further.”
“Thank you.” Julius watched her go, closing the door behind her, and then shifted his gaze to me. Under his authoritative stare, my mouth went dry.
Was this really a conversation we should be having right now, while Blaze was half-dead from his injury? But then, it was Blaze who’d prompted it. He let out an impatient grunt when Julius didn’t speak right away.
“I apologize,” Julius said, with a shamed twisting of his mouth. “I made unnecessary assumptions and acted out of possessiveness when I didn’t have any right to. I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did. None of us should have.” His eyes flicked from me toward the other men, focusing longer on Garrison.
I kept my attention on the crew’s commander, my arms coming up to fold over my chest. I held them back from hugging myself the way I wanted to. “No, you shouldn’t have.”
He exhaled slowly. “It isn’t an excuse, but I wasn’t prepared. I do understand that you shouldn’t have to rein yourself in from what you want—even if that’s more than one of us. I have no interest in taking away your freedom. Hell, I’m dedicated to making sure you get more of it. I trust my crew, and I know you’ll be in good hands with them.” One side of his mouth curled up. “And I’ll continue to be happy to contribute my own hands if you’d like to have them in the mix too.”
My own lips pulled into a small smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Talon cleared his throat. “I agree with everything Julius said. I should have spoken up sooner and not let them badger you the way they did. Thankfully I didn’t have to go as far as cracking skulls to get them to see sense.”
Had he been the one to force them to understand my perspective when they’d all been talking on the deck? Given how little the taciturn man normally spoke, I wouldn’t have expected that, but his words and his solid presence steadied me as they usually did.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Talon didn’t talk much, but he’d always been a sort of calm in the storm of chaos the crew thrived on.
My gaze slid to Garrison. He met my eyes for a second before his own jerked away, his mouth slanting at an awkward angle. His expression tensed and released as if he was grappling with himself. I braced for more snark or another accusation.
“You don’t have to make yourself apologize if you’re not really sorry,” I couldn’t help saying. “If it’s just to get the other guys off your case, it won’t mean much.”
His gaze flicked back up to hold mine again. He swiped his hand across his mouth.
“I am sorry,” he said. “Just not very good at saying it, obviously. Because I mean it.”
The words echoed back to our conversation at the fundraiser in a way that sent a pang of understanding and relief through me.
Garrison tipped his head toward me and went on. “You never lied to me or broke any promises, and I shouldn’t have accused you of anything like that. I only—I only got so angry because I thought I’d screwed up by trusting you. But you haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m sorry I went off on you like that.” He paused, and a hint of his usual smirk touched his lips. “I guess I should have known you’re too much woman for any one of us to satisfy on our own.”
Blaze chuckled lightly from the bed. “It’s a good thing there’s four of us.”
A laugh tumbled out of me. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“A compliment. Definitely a compliment,” Blaze insisted.
Garrison’s smirk grew. “Absolutely. Hell, if being with all of us makes you happy, who am I to argue with that?”
“Here, here,” Blaze said with a wobbly nod.
Julius shot him a sharp look. “I know this is a difficult ask, but if you could manage to stay still for another twelve or so hours at least, I’d really appreciate it.”
Blaze let out a huff, but he rested his head back into the pillow.
With that, the tension that had been wound through me since this morning started to dissipate. It didn’t vanish completely, but at least the crew felt like a consolidated unit again and not one fracturing under strain. I wasn’t sure whether things would actually play out so smoothly going forward, once they had to put that newfound generosity into practice, but it wasn’t as if I was planning on hooking up with anyone in the middle of this mess. We had more important things to focus on.
“Now that we’ve determined that you’re not all pissed off at me still,” I said, “should we talk about what happened at the storage facility? It was obviously a trap.”
Julius grimaced. “Yes. One you spotted well before we did. We rushed when we shouldn’t have.”
“We were worried about you,” Garrison said quietly.
I shot him a baleful look. “And because of that, you made me way more worried about all of you.”
“I should have known,” Blaze muttered. “For the search to come up with a result this close to home after it’s already been running for days… It should have popped up much earlier if it’d been there all along.”
“Do you think someone planted the image specifically for us to find?” I asked.
Talon hummed. “It wasn’t in the storage units where we thought it would be.”
“Right,” Blaze said. “No symbol there at all. They faked it as bait to get us to come while they prepared their ambush.”
Julius sighed. “After our standoff at the meat factory, the organization behind Dess’s capture must have realized we were looking for their symbol, that we were using it to track them down. They turned the main lead we have against us.”
A gloom settled over me, seeping into my gut. A similar shadow had crossed Garrison’s face.
“If that was faked…” he said. “If they’ve figured out that much about the way we’re working… can we trust any of the leads we’ve gotten? Almost everything we’ve found has been through the image recognition app. All of it could have been manipulated to leave a false trail—the images and videos of Dess’s trainer, the ones of the people we saw her with, the symbol…”
“The symbol is definitely real,” I jumped in, even though a deeper sense of hopelessness was swelling inside me. “It’s on my neck—it was in the mansion.”
“But we don’t know much other than that for sure,” Julius said, frowning. “We can’t trust any information that came to us from outside sources, no matter how innocuous it seemed at the time.”
My heart sank. “Then what do we have, really?”
Garrison made a face. “We’re basically back to square one.”
Silence fell over all of us, even Blaze the chatterbox. I swallowed hard. After all the effort we’d gone to and the danger these men had put themselves in for me, we might not be any closer to answers than when we’d started this mission.
And I had no idea where to go from here.
