Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(87)
I shook my head in the negative and he hefted me up while wrapping an arm around my back. We both looked at where Roark lay still and lifeless, a bullet hole decorating the center of his forehead.
“Seems anticlimactic after everything he put you and the people of this city through.”
I disagreed, but I had just spent the last hazy moments getting beaten with pipes and fists. “He died on the ashes of the empire we took from Novak. Seems oddly appropriate.”
Packard snorted as we hobbled toward the door. “I’m just glad it’s over, and though I’ll never officially admit it, I’m glad I’m the one that fired the shot. I screwed up with Roark. Evens the scales back a little in my favor.”
I sighed. This was the Point. It was never over and our scales were always out of whack in the opposite way anyone wanted. I shuffled, jumped, and stumbled with his help out of the warehouse to where I could hear sirens wailing. We were headed toward the back of an open ambulance when I heard my name. I saw her dark hair in the crowd and growled at Packard when one of his guys grabbed her to keep her back from the chaos and crime scene.
He ordered the fed to let her through and she ran at me like the hounds of hell were chasing her. She hit my chest hard and almost took all three of us to the ground. I was covered in blood, not all of it my own, and she didn’t seem to care. She kissed me all over my face and helped Packard get me the rest of the way to the ambulance. She was talking a mile a minute, her eyes wide and shiny with relief and unshed tears. I slumped down and grabbed her cheeks so I could hold her face. I kissed her to shut her up and because I had to. I was alive. She was alive. The good guys were battered but victorious.
“You didn’t wait.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face in the curve there. “I’ve been waiting for something good and right in my life forever, Titus. I wasn’t going to wait for it for another hour. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk you.”
“Thank you. I’m so proud of you for knowing what to do, for taking care of me.”
She nodded against me. “I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted you to see that I do trust you, trust the system. I wanted to show you more. I wanted to take care of you the right way.”
I squeezed her and winced as she brushed my knee. That sucker was shot. It looked like a basketball and was the same color as her dark blue eyes.
“Any choice you make to take care of me is the right choice, Reeve. I love you.”
She hiccuped against the side of my neck and I felt the tears start to fall. “I love you too.”
I ran my hand up under the heavy fall of her hair and wrapped it around the back of her neck. I gave her a little squeeze and whispered into her ear as a uniformed paramedic started to make his way over to us. “I need to tell you something.”
“Anything.”
“You never had anything to do with your sister’s boyfriend getting killed. He owed Novak money for drugs. He already had a target on him. Novak manipulated you, used you like he did everyone else in the Point. You’ve never been a killer, Reeve. You aren’t a bad person. You can go make things right with your folks and let go of some of that responsibility you let control you.”
She pulled back and looked at me stunned. She fussed at the paramedic when he asked her to move away so he could get to my injured leg.
She slowly shook her head and took my hand. “No. I’m still the same, Titus. Regardless of whether I had a hand in it or not, I’m glad Rissa’s killer is dead, and I would’ve killed Conner. I still want to now seeing how badly he hurt you. I won’t make that choice again, I know I can’t and still keep you, but I still want to. I don’t think it makes me a bad person. I think it makes me a survivor. If it’s me and someone I love or a bad guy, the bad guy is going down and I won’t feel guilty for that anymore.”
I leaned over and kissed her. “You are a lion tamer.” Fearless and always willing to dance in the dark with the monsters and animals that wanted to eat her up. No wonder my beast loved her. She wrinkled her nose at me.
“Can’t it be Beauty and the Beast? I think I like that better.”
I wanted to laugh but I groaned instead as they told me they needed to move me to a gurney. It really hurt but it was tolerable because my girl was there to take care of me.
Like she always was. I might bleed for everyone else. Fight to the end for this town and those that I loved that lived here, but this woman . . . she would bleed for me and never ask for anything in return. There was nothing more than that. This is what my love looked like in the Point: a girl that could take care of herself and anyone else she cared about . . . and God help anyone that got in her way.
Chapter 19
Reeve
THE GARAGE WAS BUSY when I walked through it. It was noisy and smelled like oil and gasoline. I got a few curious looks from the different guys that had their heads buried in engines or that were working on various other parts of the car but I didn’t pay any attention to them. They all knew I was with Bax’s brother, and as long as they wanted to keep breathing or stay out of jail, they kept their opinions to themselves.
I knew Bax was somewhere in the cavernous compound. I had called Dovie earlier to ask her where I could find him. She told me he was going nuts sitting at home, and since the contraption holding his jaw in place had been removed, he went back to work. She sounded frustrated and I knew exactly where she was coming from. Though Titus’s injuries were less serious than Bax’s in the grand scheme of things, he was still laid up with a broken knee and some busted ribs. The cop was a terrible patient and he was making me insane with his bad mood and surly attitude while he thumped around the house in his cast. My personal opinion was that the rest was good for him. He deserved some time off after everything he had been through, but Titus wasn’t the kind of guy that unwound. He stayed coiled tight, listening to his police scanner and constantly on the phone with his fellow cops talking about work and unsolved cases. Even hobbled and banged up, the guy was a force to be reckoned with, and the same could be said for Bax.