Ruthless Game (GhostWalkers, #9)(37)
“I know.”
It was her tone of voice—soft and dreamy, almost a caress—that got to him. She looked at him as if he were her entire world. He wanted to be, but he knew she just didn’t have any experience. A man like him, without a clue of home and family, a man born to fight wars, had no right being with a woman like Rose. He wanted to be the man in her mind, that fantasy, but he wasn’t. If she committed to him, if she married him, it was forever. He wouldn’t be walking away, and neither would she. She’d had enough of being imprisoned. Was life with him going to be anything else but a prison?
He had no answers, and he turned away, shaking his head. He drew the chair to the end of the bed and slowly lifted the sheets to check her. Small blood clots worried him a bit, but he had no idea what to do. She rubbed her stomach as the book told her to do, massaging to help everything go back in place, but her efforts were weak. He changed the pad again and helped her shift enough to allow him to change the sterile pad beneath her as well. He tried to be impersonal in his touch, but his body refused to listen to his brain.
Right now, he was with her. He could help her, and he could allow himself to believe both Rose and the boy were his. He was a cynical man, a man who felt at home with a gun in his hands, yet looking at her made him dream of other things. He wanted to be the man in her life, her hero, the man who stood for her. The man she always gazed at with that look in her eyes.
He covered her and stood up, stretching. “Rose. I don’t want to go behind your back in this, but I have to leave a sign for Mack and my unit to find us. We can’t fight everyone. I can take out the two watching us, but that will tip off Whitney immediately, and we don’t know how he’s tracking you. Are you certain you removed the tracking chip in your hip?”
She nodded without opening her eyes. Kane sighed and started to turn away, but suddenly the image on her ankle registered. “Rose, you have a tattoo on your ankle. You didn’t have that when we were together. When did you get it?” He lifted the covers once more to inspect the artwork on her ankle.
The tattoo was small, a single red rose with the stem winding around her ankle. Small thorns adorned the stem with three leaves. It was a pretty tattoo, but not something he expected of her.
“Before we escaped”—her voice was drowsy—“Whitney sent in a tattoo artist for each of us, and he put a flower on our ankles. Mari was the only one who didn’t get one; she hadn’t come back yet. Everyone else has one.”
Kane closed his eyes briefly, cursing under his breath. All the women who escaped were in danger. Whitney had an alternative method of tracking them. He had, at some point, determined anyone escaping might remove the chip from their hip, so he’d devised a backup. Something about that very detailed rose caught Kane’s attention, but it hadn’t really registered until now. The rose petals were layers, and in two places the petals were actually raised slightly. He had stroked caresses over those soft petals half the night and knew the feel of them intimately.
Whitney had found a way to weave a signal into the tattoo. It probably used satellite, which explained the hit-or-miss tracking at times, depending on where she was. Eventually, Whitney would always be able to find her. He examined the petals carefully. The two closest to the center, slightly raised, were the most suspect. When he passed his thumb over the petals, he felt tiny protrusions, almost like Braille dots. What exactly had Whitney done?
Rose stirred, suddenly alarmed. “What did he do? I like my rose tattoo. It was the only thing Whitney ever did that didn’t turn my stomach. Is something wrong with the tattoo?”
“I think it transmits to a satellite. I just have to figure out how. I wish Jaimie or Javier were here. They’re both very good with electronics.”
“I should have known.” Rose sounded disgusted. “Why did I ever think Whitney would do something special for us?”
“Because you and the others needed to believe you mattered to him as a human being. Whitney was the only parent figure you had. He shaped your lives. You all lived for his approval. He raised you. Every child seeks the approval and love of a parent. Whitney was all you had.”
Rose carefully turned over, wincing a little as she did so. “What about you? Did your parents approve of you?”
“Hardly.” He didn’t go into detail. What was the point? His youth had been spent on the streets, in alleys and creeping into Mack’s basement to sleep, his body covered in bruises when his father had managed to catch him, which was rare. He’d grown into a big kid, and a mean one. Eventually his father feared him. His mother simply didn’t care. Her only worry had been where her next fix was coming from. Mack was his family, Mack and the others.
“They weren’t very smart parents then. How am I going to get the tattoo off?”
She didn’t sound sorry for herself, and he could tell she really loved the tattoo and hated giving it up. The symbol represented who she was.
“I doubt we’re going to have to actually remove the rose. We have to figure out how to stop it from transmitting.” He stroked over the tiny little bumps. “I think the transmitter is here, in these two petals. I don’t know if it’s planted under your skin or in the actual ink somehow. I just am not savvy enough about this kind of thing.”
“Will you have to cut it out?” There was both apprehension and determination in her voice. Rose was no shrinking violet.