Lie with Me (25 page)

He had to get her back into the truck and away from here. Had to keep her safe. Because now both their asses were on the line.

She’d believe him sooner or later.

Within seconds, he had her, pinned her arms behind her back and lifted her with an easy arm around the waist. She fought, but she was no match for him, and she knew it.

Fatigue, the illness and recovery, stress and exhaustion all took their toll at once, and Sky went limp as she passed out.

Cam wasted no time getting her back into the truck and getting her warm. He put a blanket on her, felt her pulse and rubbed her cheeks until she began to come to.

For a long moment, she stared at him, in her eyes a combination of anger, fear and disgust.

Nothing like the way she’d looked at him just hours ago. “You need to rest. I’m taking you someplace safe.”

She licked her bottom lip and when she spoke, her voice sounded raw. “I’m not safe with you—I never was.”

“I’ll prove you wrong, Sky, if it’s the last thing I do.”

He’d have to tell her everything and prayed that it would be enough.

He didn’t trust Gabriel Creighton—this could still all be one big game. In the puzzle of the world of spooks, figuring out the hows and whys was not only impossible, but he’d learned that ultimately, those reasons didn’t matter.

He tried to remember why he started this in the first place. And he turned it over in his head again, as if the puzzle could be solved. Whether Gabriel knew Cam was with his daughter or not was irrelevant—because someone knew, and they wanted Sky.

The men had been surprised to see Cam, hadn’t been prepared for him. But still, they were trained. Deadly. The type of men Gabriel would send.

None of this made sense anymore.

Sky was staring straight ahead, almost zombielike. Stressed.

“Sky, listen to me—I’m going to take you someplace they won’t be able to track us anymore. And then I can get more help if we need it.”

“Where?” she asked finally, her voice sleepy.

There was only one choice, and it was the last place he wanted to take her. His refuge. His ultimate plan A, B and C.

His new life.

Motherfucker
.

“Home. We’re going home.”

E
lijah watched the interrogation from the open doorway. He had two of his best men working the spy over. For added measure, Gabriel remained chained to the steel chair, helpless to stop the proceedings.

Unless, of course, he talked.

Don’t kill him
was Elijah’s only condition. Because this torture, this was for fun. There was no way Gabriel would talk, not until they had his only child laid out on the rack in front of him, her limbs in danger of ripping away from her body as she screamed.

Screamed with a brutality that would make the walls nearly shake and echo around Elijah like a warm blanket. Elijah was sure that then the words would pour out of the man, faster than they could write them down. Because Skylar might’ve eluded them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know exactly where she was.

Timing was everything.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun with your daughter. Maybe even more than we had with your wife,” one of the men said.

Gabriel remained stock-still. No change in facial expression, except for a small smile on his face. One that said,
I know something you don’t
.

Cold-blooded bastard.

The ringing phone interrupted Elijah’s thoughts. He watched Gabriel even as he said hello.

“Rocket’s dead. Bodyguard too. Place is a fucking mess,” the man Elijah called Ace reported, his disdain clear over the phone. “Taken down by a woman.”

Mariana’s face flashed before his eyes and he turned away from the scene in front of him in disgust. “Dispose of the bodies. Put the apartment up for sale.”

“And find Riley?”

Elijah sat back and drummed his fingers on the scarred antique desktop in front of him. “Not right now—we have other problems to deal with. We need Skylar Slavin. And after a few days with us, she might not be in the greatest health, considering her condition with the recent transplant. We also need a doctor here who can keep her alive, if necessary. We don’t want Skylar dying before we get all the pertinent intel from her father.”

He scrolled through Gabriel’s phone until he hit on the right name, and he smiled and gave the information to Ace. “We’ve needed a doctor anyway, and a transplant doctor will suit our purposes. It works out well for everyone. She’ll be useful, even after Skylar and her father die.”

“We can’t make her perform surgery,” Ace pointed out.

“You cut a patient open in front of a doctor, and it’s her duty to help them. She won’t have much of a choice.”

S
he’d started the morning crying for fifteen minutes in a utility closet after her teenage transplant patient died before the liver donor came through.

Now Olivia put her pager into the pocket of her scrubs and grabbed her bag from the locker. It was after midnight—she had been sorely tempted to just stay in the on-call room, but her brand-new bed, supposedly the top of the line, promised a good night’s sleep. The mattress was three months old and she’d slept in it only half that time.

Tonight, she needed the sleep.

She started the car and it turned over easily, the familiar hum music to her ears. But when she tried to reverse out of the space, it wouldn’t move.

She checked the gas—not the problem. And then she leaned her head back against the seat and sighed.

She was a damned capable woman. But at times like this, having a man to call for help might actually be nice.

She closed her eyes for a second and wondered about the possibility of sleeping right here. She’d crashed in worse places during her residency. Worse since then even. And after today’s near crash of the hospital’s helicopter—on the way back from picking up a donor liver, two hours away, in heavy winds—
crash
was probably not the best word choice.

Following that, she’d had a six-hour surgery in which the liver did not pink up, resulting in Mr. Johnson going back on dialysis, yet another disappointment for his family. Add to that a staff meeting from hell, a new pack of residents following her around the hospital like they were chum circling, and yeah, she needed to go home. Definitely home.

Didn’t matter that she had to be back in less than seven hours.

She opened the door to check behind the car, but that yielded no results. And when she turned back around, she stiffened as she discovered a man sitting next to her. Pointing a gun. At her.

“Dr. Strohm?”

She swallowed. Stared at him, and wondered, if this was a robbery, why he was using her name?

It’s not a robbery
.

“Where is Skylar Slavin?”

“Why the hell are you in my car?”

He raised the gun and asked the question again, and okay, she got it—he had the gun, questions need to be answered.

“Skylar? I don’t know.” Why were they asking about her patient? A patient who had been discharged months ago. “Is she okay?”

“You’re going to have to be the one to tell us.”

She looked to the left—there was a man standing outside her window, a gun tucked into the pocket of his jeans. Without thinking it through, she slammed the lock shut with her elbow and then turned back to the guy sitting next to her. “Get out. Or shoot me. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

The man grabbed for her arm and she went limp and then brought her hand up for a nice chop to his throat. Hanging out with the cops who always seemed to be in the ER for one reason or another did have some benefits. Next, she sprayed the mace on her key chain directly into his face. The man howled and she managed to bring her legs out from under the wheel and kick at him until he was scrambling out of the car.

It wouldn’t stop them for long. The phone—where the hell was her phone?

She fished in the pocket of her scrubs, yelling as she dialed—Skylar’s number was in her phone, as were all her current patients’. She had to warn Sky that something bad was happening—because 911 wasn’t going to get here fast enough to save her. Even now the glass shattered on the passenger’s side. She ducked and tried not to scream and then she spoke as fast as she could into the phone.

“Skylar, there are men asking about you—they’re taking me, kidnapping me, I don’t know what they want—” She yelled as they dragged her out of the car and across the near-deserted rooftop parking lot, into a waiting car.

She opened her mouth to scream again, but one of the men carrying her backhanded her hard across the face. She saw zigzags of light and fought to stay conscious—the second slam across her face put an end to that.

CHAPTER

14

T
he night remained quiet at the safe house where Dylan had taken her a few hours earlier.

He’d let Riley rest for a few hours. And she’d slept deeply—part stress and exhaustion, he was sure, part not wanting to face up to what had happened. To what she would have to do.

Dylan called Cam, left him a message that he had intel. That Cam and Sky were in deep to some serious shit. That he couldn’t say more because he knew Cam’s cell wasn’t secure, but that he’d be with them by the next afternoon, if not sooner.

When he heard the shower running, he unpacked the take-out Chinese food. And when she came out of the bathroom, wearing one of his T-shirts, which reached down to mid-thigh, her eyes were slightly puffy and the fingerprints around her neck were red. Raised.

Made him want to go caveman and kill the guy who did it. Except for the fact that he was already dead.

“I’m okay,” she told him, a palm pressed to her throat. “Don’t go all motherly on me.”

“I’ll show you motherly,” he muttered, and realized he was actually dishing out her food for her. “Fuck it, get it yourself.”

She giggled—a good sign at the moment—and then sat next to him and began to eat.

For a while, there was contented silence. When she’d finished her meal, he told her that he’d booked a flight for them to New York. “There are new clothes in the bedroom—you should find some stuff in your size.”

“When do we leave?”

“First flight out in the morning.” He would bring Zane along—his brother had a week before he had to report in.

“And from there, we find Gabriel, using the intel I’ve got about DMH. At least I can help with that.” She shook her head at the irony of it all. “I thought turning Gabriel in to DMH would be so much better. I figured I’d feel relieved. Lighter. Instead, I stopped sleeping. And when I did finally fall asleep, I had nightmares. I’d see my mom wasting away, and I’d walk over to the bed to comfort her, and it’s my face I see, not hers.”

“It’s almost over.”

“But it’s not. Dylan, I’m in trouble. They might not stop looking for me.” She rubbed her palms over her bare arms until he wound a blanket around her shoulders and tightened it around her.

“Maybe you should think about looking for them. Maybe they should be fearful of you. You’re a force to be reckoned with, Ri. And I’ll fight DMH—with or without you … but I’d rather it be with you.”

She shifted uneasily as he continued.

“You’ve been running from me—from us—for three years. Finding out about your father, about Gabriel Creighton were big factors, but they were also a really convenient excuse to keep distance between us. I’m not your father and you’re not your mother. I’m sorry she died from a broken heart, sorry you had to go through that. But she loved him, she was in love. You can’t fault her for that.”

“Love shouldn’t make you weak.”

“I don’t find you weak.”

No, she wasn’t. And Dylan, even when he was saving her ass, hadn’t made her feel that way. “I want to start over. Not in Florida—someplace completely different.”

“You don’t like the cold, or I’d offer you the perfect place.”

She felt the smile curve her lips. “You know, I don’t think the cold will bother me all that much anymore.”

She dropped the blanket and let Dylan gather her in his arms instead.

S
ky slept for well over an hour. For the first few minutes after she woke, her brain was still fuzzy, the gentle shifting of the truck lulling her into believing that the warm, well-rested feeling would stick around.

But she remembered quickly what happened before she’d dozed, and her body chilled. She glanced over at Cam, his profile stoic in the dim lights of the dashboard, the silence between them a taut rope neither was willing to cut or cross.

I’m not scared of him
, she told herself fiercely, but she was pretty sure she was lying.

She couldn’t stop replaying the events of the day, over and over, until her head spun and her stomach hurt.

Her father was in trouble—and so was she, according to Cam. But not from him … not anymore.

Still he had a lot more explaining to do.

As she shifted, coming fully out of sleep, she knew it was time for her to take her medicine. Even in crisis, her body’s internal clock reminded her as surely as if an alarm went off, and that’s why she’d woken in the first place.