Sage moaned and nodded.
“When we met you thought I was going to kill you and now someone’s tried to. What did you do to make someone so mad?” I asked, pulling back my t-shirt to check his stomach.
“Don’t know.” Sage sighed, his whole body struggling with the breath. “In the alley and then…”
“In the alley?”
“Wanted…” His words trailed off.
I gritted my teeth and pushed a little heavier than necessary against his stab wound. This prick was at a bar four blocks from my house to get laid?
What a cunt.
But wait.
What?
How did this asshole know where I lived? How much did he know about me? I pulled my Ruger out of my pocket and set it by my leg so I could reach it if I needed to finish putting this fucker out of his misery.
“How did you know where I live?” I asked, rocking back on my heels.
He shook his head. “Same way I knew your name.”
“And how was that?”
“Looked you up.”
“Bullshit.” I picked up my Ruger and raised myself over him, the barrel hovering millimeters away from touching his forehead. “Who the fuckareyou?”
I didn’t want to let on that I knew exactly who he was. I was more concerned with how he knew who I was and what kind of shit I was going to end up tangled in through my association with him.
“Gonna kill me?” he whispered, his words slurring together worse than before. “Halfway there already.”
I leaned down and dragged my lips across the shell of his ear, one of the few parts on him that wasn’t covered in blood, and I whispered, “I want to.”
“I love when you talk dirty, Golden.”
The sound of Ronan pulling open my back slider was the only thing that stopped me from unloading a bullet into Sage’s head. I set the gun back onto the floor and stood up, ignoring a shocked gasp from Ronan as he rounded the kitchen island.
“What the fuck, Foster?” he asked, dropping his bag on the ground beside my gun.
“I’ll answer all your questions later,” I promised. “Well… most.”
Ronan gave me an extremely judgmental dom look, which I ignored.
“I need clean towels, all of them,” Ronan said to me, digging around in his bag. “Alcohol. Hot water.”
I flipped the knob on the sink, letting the water run to get hot while I went down the hall to empty my linen closet of towels. I brought Ronan everything he’d asked for, and when it was clear I was a hindrance not a help, I saw myself out of the kitchen.
The file on Sage sat closed on my dining room table, right where I’d left it. I collapsed into a chair and propped my elbows up, letting my hands catch my head. They were bloody, I realized, but I’d already dragged Sage’s blood across my chest and my face, so what difference did it make if a little got in my hair? Using my elbow, I flipped the folder open. My eyes focused on a photo of Sage that looked to be old, based off the longer length of his hair.
I read through all the information again. His name, which I now knew, his height, his weight, his identifying mark… the tattoo I’d noticed over our weekend together, but couldn’t make sense of. Ronan was getting a good look at it on my kitchen floor, and I traced my fingers over the swirling outline of the tattoo. It looked floral, but ornate, clearly a family crest of some sort. I estimated his name had something to do with it. Fucking family. Sharp had told me the hit was basically a free-for-all, and judging by the state of Sage, his death was in high demand.
“What the fuck am I gonna do?” I cursed under my breath and closed the folder, pushing it away. I was a mess, literally and figuratively, so I turned to Ronan. “Is he going to live?”
“Probably,” Ronan answered. “He needs to rest. And he should probably see a plastic surgeon for his nose.”
“No,” Sage grunted.
