Safe With Him (38 page)

Cole was the one who reached out and wiped the tears from her face. “Anything you need, sweetheart.”

Draco wanted to snatch him back. Break every bone in the hands that had touched his Breezie’s face. Instead, he stood and watched as his Breezie turned her back on him and walked away.

Then he turned, pulled out his phone, and hit Lee’s number as he walked to the exit doors. He might not be able to be there for Bree, but he damn sure was going to find out what the hell happened. And most importantly, who the fuck shot Storm? Draco had a bullet with their name on it, and he was going to make damn sure that who-the-fuck-ever had shot Storm got a bullet right between the eyes. After that?
Fuck it!
Draco didn’t give a damn anymore.

When he reached the exit doors, he turned back and looked at the doors Bree had disappeared through. “
Regole familiari da parte le proprie leggi
.” He growled his ‘family motto.’ Yeah, dear old papà had taught him quite a bit and even though it had been years, Draco had never forgotten. “La vendetta e’ mia.” He growled low in his throat and right as Lee answered he repeated it in English. “Vengeance is mine.” By the time he reached his truck Lee had agreed to meet him at his house and that together they would figure out what the hell had happened.

*  *  *

Draco unlocked his door and walked into his empty house alone, and he hated it. He had taken only a few steps inside when he paused and looked around. He went into the kitchen and searched…nothing. In the living room and again he found nothing. He ran up the steps into his bedroom, looking around then over to his dresser, nightstands, and chest, opening and closing drawers and then into the bathroom and looked around. The body wash and bubble bath he had bought for Bree still sat on the bathtub self. In the shower, her body wash and that other shit he had bought was there. He moved back into the bedroom, opened the door and walked into the huge walk-in closet. His clothes, mostly his uniforms and a few dress clothes, hung on one side and the other side was just…empty. Then he saw it. In the very back, in one corner and stacked neatly, were Bree’s bags she had packed from her apartment and brought here. They were still packed. She had been living in his house for almost a week and yet there was not one trace of her anywhere to be seen. There should be movies lying around in the living room or her laptop, her sketch pad, something of hers left out. But other than the few things he had bought and her bags at the very back of his closet, no one would have ever known that Bree had been there.
So they wouldn’t be in your way
. That was what she had said to him when he discovered she had been keeping her things on the back porch. He had told her to put her things away. He hadn’t meant for her to hide them. Then her words came back to him.
I’m sure Draco will be happy to have me gone so he can finally have his home back
. “Fuck!” Had she kept her stuff hidden to lessen the reminder that he had a woman in his house? Did she think she was taking away his feeling of home? It was her who had made his house feel like home.

“Tu sei la mia casa, Breezie.”

Draco stood in front of his white board in his home office, staring at everything they had gathered. Three days. Three days of gathering every scrap of Intel that had come in from anywhere. Everything was passed along to Draco whether it was protocol or not; he didn’t give a fuck, and neither did the rest of his unit. They had a brother down, meaning proper procedures, protocols, and bullshit rules, went out the window.

They found out pretty quick that Marcus Warwick had made bail just hours after his arrest, on a Saturday night. After that, it was pretty obvious who pulled the trigger, or at least had given the order. The question was, why? If Warwick already knew Storm was a cop, why wait so long to try and kill him? Why tell Bree that he knew Storm was a cop?
Seen you with that fuckin’ cop,
those were Warwick’s words to Bree. She just didn’t know at the time that Storm was the cop he was referring to and not Draco. And if he had really thought it through, at the time, he would have realized that there was very little chance Warwick had seen Draco with Bree at that point. She hadn’t been around any other cops so that only left Storm. So again, why tell Bree he knew Storm was a cop? How long had Warwick known and what had been his plans concerning Storm? With Bree? No one knew the answers or where the hell Warwick had disappeared to. So they kept a man posted outside of Storm’s door, for Storm’s safety as well as Bree’s.

For three days Draco went over and over everything while he also kept close tabs on Bree. So Draco knew she had never left the hospital and barely left Storm’s bedside. It was Cole himself that had contacted Draco on Storm’s condition and also continued to keep him updated. So he knew that the gunshot wound to Storm’s right shoulder hadn’t been life threatening. However, the head wound, that as of yet no one knew how he had sustained, had caused some swelling on the brain. According to the doctors, the swelling wasn’t severe enough to risk surgery at the moment, and they wanted to give it time for the swelling to go down on its own. In the meantime, Storm lay unconscious. Cole may have kept Draco informed on Storm’s condition but, it was Skylar, Minga, Krista, and Ellie, who kept him informed about Bree. Those women made sure Bree was never left alone for long amounts of time, that she got some sleep and ate at least a little bit every few hours. And it was those same women who took over his kitchen. They made sure Draco ate while they kept him up to date on Bree. Food was the last thing on Draco’s mind, but those four women had made a pact. If Draco didn’t take a break to sit and eat, they wouldn’t tell him anything about Bree.

Besides the women coming and going, every man in his unit also came and went. Sometimes they would have new information, sometimes to again go over everything they had, and sometimes just for support. Marco barely went home. Most nights he and Ellie stayed at his house and since the guest room and his office were one in the same, Draco let them have his room. It wasn’t like he could sleep there anyway. Whenever Draco walked into his bedroom, even without any of Bree’s things to be seen, all thoughts turned to Bree. It had only been three days since he last saw her, held her, kissed her. But it felt like a lifetime.

With so many people coming and going, most of the time Draco had a house full of people and yet he had never felt so alone in his life. So to keep his mind as occupied as possible, he concentrated on the case and the unanswered questions. That didn’t mean Bree left his thoughts completely, because she hadn’t, and he doubted she ever would.

Draco turned from the whiteboard. He had intended to go over to his desk but, halfway to it he looked toward the door and his mind flashed back to the day he had met Bree and bringing her in here so she could use the guest bathroom. Her standing at that door, hand on the knob, asking if it locked. She was so gorgeous just standing there with her beautiful hair all piled up on top of her head in some kind of messy knot and her baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. She’d had him tongue-tied that very first day. Hell, she had him falling in love with her that day, and he hadn’t stop falling yet and probably never would. He walked the rest of the way to his desk, sat, glanced back to the door and whispered, “I miss you, baby.”

*  *  *

Bree sat by Storm’s bed while he lay there, so still, and so unlike her brother. For three days now she had sat by his bed, slept on the small cot one of the nurses had brought in for her when they realized she wasn’t leaving. That is if she slept at all. When the doctors had told her about Storm’s head injury and the swelling in his brain she had been glad that Cole was there, but all she really wanted was her Dra to wrap his big strong arms around her and tell her it would be okay. If Draco had said it, Bree would have known it would be okay. But, he wasn’t there and Bree wasn’t sure if
her
Dra even existed. Cole had tried to comfort her and in some ways she supposed he did. At least he had been able to answer some of Bree’s questions. Like how long Storm had been a cop. From what Cole was able to tell her, either because Storm had trusted Cole enough to tell him about their past, or because Cole was there, Bree was able to fit some of the pieces together.

When Storm took her to that apartment, across state lines into North Carolina, he went back home and pretended he didn’t know where Bree was. Apparently the story was that when Bree left the hospital on her own, right after she walked out, Storm came in to ‘pick her up,’ then discovered she had disappeared. He went back home to ‘check if she was there’ and then had spent the rest of that night ‘out searching for her.’ That was what he led everyone to believe. Then, for the next year and a half, he only came to see her when he knew he could get away without being seen. Which wasn’t very often, of course. By the time he moved her out of that first apartment and into another, still in North Carolina but very close to the VA/NC state line, Storm enrolled in the police academy—that was where Cole had met Storm—and wanted Bree as close to him as possible, but still across state line. Why? Cole told her because if she was ever caught that she would be a ward of the state of North Carolina and not Virginia, and back then computers and internet weren’t so widely used. In fact, most small towns at that time didn’t use them much at all, so Intel between states took a lot longer to access. Storm had told her that if she was ever caught to give a fake name to slow down the process of the dirty cops from back home finding her.

As soon as she had turned eighteen, Storm enrolled her in a small and very private school so she was able to complete high school. That was around the same time that Storm and Cole had graduated from the academy. They had gotten their first job as state troopers together, while Bree went back to high school. By the time she graduated Storm had convinced her that she needed to go to college, so she enrolled in college and began taking just a few classes at a time. Then Cole was transferred to a different division but kept in touch with Storm as they both built their careers as well as their ‘specialty’ training. About seven years ago, Cole was transferred to Mt. Eve as head of the new Special Units Division for this area, and about two years later Storm was brought in as Cole’s partner.

Bree explained to Cole that she and Storm had never lived close to each other, that at first Storm thought it would be safer for a while, and then the “while” just seemed too have stretched out. Storm continued to live in Virginia while Bree worked and took college classes in North Carolina. That didn’t mean they didn’t see each other. Storm had come to visit usually about once a week, sometimes for only a day or two, sometimes longer. And he called her just about every single night after she got off from work. It wasn’t until back in December when she started getting harassed by one of the new professors from school who just happened to see her at the bar where she had been working. She hadn’t said anything to Storm about it until one night after closing the man had cornered her. After she told Storm about it that night when he called, he had shown up the next day, packed her up and moved her to Mt. Eve. It seemed like it had been easy for Storm to keep the fact of him being a cop from her, with them living apart, but why he did it, Cole couldn’t answer because out of everything Storm had told Cole over the years, Storm never mentioned he kept the knowledge of him being a cop from Bree. Cole had just always thought Bree knew that her brother was a cop.

Cole stayed at the hospital with her at nights when she or Storm didn’t have any visitors. During the day, however, she had quite a few. Skylar would come to see her, as well as Minga and Lee, Krista and Kade, and Ellie and Marco. Sometimes they would come as a couple and sometimes they would come as a group, but they always came, always with some type of food and stayed until they were satisfied with the amount Bree ate. And before they left, someone else would show up, so it wasn’t often that Bree was left alone. They all came and they all stayed for a while. They would just visit and chat about this or that, nothing of any consequence, but to show they were there for her. All of them. All of them came, except Draco. He never came, never called, and the few times Bree asked about him, she got the same response. “He’s working the case.” Yeah, well, weren’t Lee and Cole also ‘working the case?’ And even Kade had been helping. Yet, they came even if they didn’t stay long. They came. Everyone except Draco.

She also knew about the cop right outside the door, knew that there had been one since Storm was moved to this room. Not always the same one as they seemed to be taking turns. Some would walk in and introduce themselves or ask if there had been any change, and some would just stand quietly outside of the door. But Bree saw them all each time the door would open and someone would walk in whether it be the doctor, the nurses, or friends. She saw them all. That was how she knew that out of all the cops that took turns ‘protecting’ her and Storm, Draco hadn’t been one of them.

Whenever Bree was by herself all of her thoughts turned to Draco. It had only been three days since she last saw him, held him, kissed him, but it felt like a lifetime. Her heart wasn’t broken. No, broken implied it could be fixed. Her heart was shattered with no possible way of ever being ‘fixed,’ or of being whole again. Even if Storm woke up.
No!
When Storm woke up part of her would rejoice and be there for Storm, but part of her would always feel that hole left when Draco walked away.

Right before she had followed the nurse through the ED doors from the waiting room she had turned back to Draco, but he had already turned away and was walking toward the exit. That was the last sight she had of him; him walking away. She felt so torn. Why would he not tell her something so important? How could he let her wonder and worry about Storm and never tell her? That was what hurt so much. His lie. But it still didn’t stop her from loving him, or missing him, or hoping that it would be Draco every time the door opened.

She looked down at her brother and squeezed his hand that she was holding. “Love ya, always,” she said softly to him. Then she turned her head to the door with thoughts of Draco and whispered, “I miss you, Dra.”