Donovan laid there, eyes closed, breath shallow, his face pale as the sheet he stretched out on.
She felt herself rocking back and forth slightly. “Still here,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure he could hear her. “You’re still here. You’re going to be just fine.”
The paramedic glanced at her once, briefly, and something in the woman’s face told her things she didn’t want to know.
She glanced back at Donovan, rubbing her lips together.
He had been mid-thirties when he was assigned to her family. She knew that because he had told her once, in the dry, matter-of-fact way he told her most things, that he hadn’t been as new to the job as he looked and her case had aged him considerably. He had said it like a complaint. She had understood it as the closest he came to saying he cared.
He had driven her to her first job interview under her new name, which was something beyond his scope as her protector. Still, he had done it without complaint, waiting in the car outside for forty minutes because she had asked him to, because the idea of walking into that building and being Delaney Rhodes for the first time in a professional context had required the specific comfort of knowing someone who knew the truth was in the parking lot.
He had told no one that she had asked him to help her with that.
She had told no one that he had done it.
The memory ended as the ambulance pulled to a stop, the doors opening and the stretcher moving before she had fully processed the transition. The gurney’s wheels hit the pavement with a sound she felt in her gut, and then she was following through the automatic doors into the antiseptic blast of a hospital corridor. Someone was immediately asking herquestions that she answered without being sure afterward what she had said.
And then a set of double doors swung shut between her and the gurney, and she was standing in a corridor outside a surgical suite with Donovan on the other side. The quiet that rushed in behind those closing doors was the specific, absolute quiet of waiting, and she hated waiting.
Samuel appeared beside her, Nash slipping up on her other side. Both had their hands in their pockets, neither speaking, which was what she needed now. She wouldn’t know what to say anyway.
She kept her gaze fixed on the closed doors as she thought about the man who had spent fifteen years keeping her family alive and in hiding. As blood seeped through her fingers, his thoughts were about her and her happy ending, not on how he was going to make it through the next few hours.
The tears she had been holding back since Bay Street finally broke through, hot and unannounced, and she did nothing to stop them. She felt Bobby’s friends surrounding her, but it wasn’t the same as having him there with her. There was nothing else to do now but wait and hope and refuse with everything she had left to believe that another person she loved was going to be taken from her today.
She was tired of losing people and refused to let it happen again. It was time for the roller coaster of her life to stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ELVIS STARED AT THE front of the U.S. Marshals’ office, thinking they had definitely not made the building for comfort. It was a thought he repeated once he was inside and saw how small and deliberately uninviting the interrogation offices were, with their institutional gray walls, the tables bolted to the floor, and the chairs that had been engineered by someone who understood that discomfort was a tool.
As soon as they had arrived, they divided the men up, placing each in a different room down the hall from each other. Leon currently sat alone, his wrists cuffed to the ring at the center of the table as he slouched in his chair as much as he could. His expression revealed it wasn’t his first time in a room like this and he appeared quite comfortable with the experience.
Still, none of the men were talking, just sitting there trying to look tough even though they had to know the cards were stacked against them.
The marshals had allowed them to sit in on the interrogation thanks to Donovan having filled them in before they set their plan in motion. Elvis stood against the back wall, arms across his chest as he tried not to worry about Delaney not being in his sight. If they could get to Matteo, she wouldn’t have toworry ever again about someone coming after her. Dane sat in a chair across from Leon while Marshal Peter Cochran, a man who looked to be in his fifties with gray hair at the temples and a weathered patience that told Elvis he had conducted plenty of these conversations in his time, took up the other seat. Blaze remained at the Whitmore house, still watching the cameras and listening for chatter to see if anyone had noticed Leon’s capture.
Elvis’s phone buzzed in his hand, and a quick glance showed a text from Gage:The marshal’s in surgery, and we’re with Delaney in the waiting room. Everything is quiet here.
He exhaled a slow breath through his nose as he glanced back at the interrogation going on in front of him.
“I’m giving you first shot here, Leon,” Cochran said, his coastal Southern drawl unhurried and without particular emphasis. “Or you can keep sitting there pretending you’re some tough idiot while your men figure out that the first one to give me what I want gets the most comfortable spot for the next ten years.”
Leon stared at him, his expression blank. “People can’t talk about what they don’t know. Now, get me my lawyer.”
Cochran nodded, his lips pressed together. “As I understand it, he’s on his way. Might take a while, though. Savannah traffic sucks around lunchtime.”
Leon shrugged as he dropped his gaze to his hands. “I got nothing but time.” He glanced over the men sitting across from him to Elvis. “The question is, do you?”
Cochran looked over at Dane, who glanced back at Elvis. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Elvis asked.
Something was off. Leon had to know he had no call to make here, but he acted as if he was the least of their issues. They had scooped up three of his men in broad daylight, right off the street, the fourth man being shot at the scene, and they were all waiting in rooms just like him, all handcuffed to tables in afederal building. By all rights, this was a terrible morning for the man. And yet the specific anxiety that tended to appear in men who knew the weight of their situation just wasn’t showing on Leon’s face. He wasn’t comfortable necessarily, but he wasn’t worried either. Why?
He knew something they didn’t, and it set the hairs on Elvis’s neck on end. It was like his instincts were trying to tell him something his brain hadn’t figured out yet.
He cocked his head to the side. “Your boss know you’re here? Matteo Serrano sending you a fancy lawyer? That why you’re just sitting there like you’re waiting for dessert or something?”
Leon just stared at him, saying nothing.
