I sat up straighter and winced.
She touched my arm. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this now.”
“We’re definitely talking about this now,” I said. “It’s the first time since I got to this place that I’ve been able to talk about something besides medication and burn protocols.”
“Bram has a source inside Blackwell PD who gave him a phone they found on the dead guy. He can’t get into it yet, but he knows someone who might be able to.”
“Aloha.”
She sighed. “Of course you already know.”
“Everybody knows Aloha.”
“Clearly.”
“If Aloha can get into the phone, we might be able to confirm Dimitri sent those assholes to kill us at the paper mill,” I said. “We might even be able to figure out where to find him.”
“Then what?”
“Then we end that motherfucker for good.”
12
CASSIE
I heardVigo talking to the nurse even before I opened the door to his room.
“You need to rest,” the nurse said.
“You think I’m blessed?”
“Rest,” she said a little louder. “You need to rest.”
“That’s not as flattering but I’ll take it,” Vigo said.
“You’re exhausting,” she said, probably because she didn’t think he could hear.
“I heard ‘handsome.’”
“Sorry,” I said as I passed her on my way into the room.
“I’d say he’s in rare form this morning but this is pretty much his default,” she said on her way out.
“Morning, mouse,” Vigo said.
“Will you please stop harassing the nurses?”
I tried to scowl at him as I set down my bag and approached the bed, but it wasn’t easy. His blond hair stood up in tousled spikes, his green eyes sparkling with the vitality that was all Vigo. The nurse must have taken off his hospital gown to check his wounds because he was slipping his arms back into it, and the sight of his inked chest did all kinds of things to my body thatwere totally inappropriate in a hospital setting. He looked like a mischievous imp.
A hot one. The kind that would tempt you to do all kinds of dark and dangerous things.
“Harassing? Who’s harassing?” he asked. “She loves me. She said I was blessed!”
“She said you need to rest and you know it,” I said, sitting on the edge of his bed.
I reached over to help him with the hospital gown. My fingers grazed his bare skin and a current of heat traveled from my fingertips to my center.
He groaned a little. “I like it when you get me naked a lot more than when the nurses do it.”
