He glared up into the eyes of the nurse, recognition dawning as he tried to gasp for air.
“Almost got the drop on me, O’Flaherty,” Liam Bell drawled. “Impressive.”
The bed on the other side of the curtain creaked as Nick’s father moved. “What’s going on over there?”
Liam glanced over his shoulder, letting up on the pressure on Nick’s arm and incision. He reached out to the screaming machines and silenced them somehow, then pulled the green mask down his chin. A smirk curled his lips.
Nick pressed his hand to his incision, feeling blood seeping through the stitches. He curled up and rocked, unable to stop himself. “What are you doing here?” he gritted out.
“I heard you were under the weather,” Liam said, his tone entirely conversational. He pulled up a chair and sat, then gently took Nick’s hand in his, cradling the morphine clicker in Nick’s palm. He wrapped Nick’s fingers around it and pressed his thumb against Nick’s, making him push the button a few times. “Let’s just up this a little, shall we? Can’t have you in pain.”
“You okay over there, boy?” Nick’s dad asked.
“Dad, it’s fine,” Nick managed. “It’s fine. Go back to sleep.”
Liam rolled his eyes and stood. “I’ll be right back.” He yanked the curtain aside, standing in the middle of the room to look down at Brian O’Flaherty’s bed. “You have some fucking nerve, don’t you?” he said as he examined the equipment around Brian’s bed.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Just a friend of your son’s, don’t mind me,” Liam murmured distractedly.
“Bell, leave him alone,” Nick tried to say, though his voice was weak and his words were slurring and panicked. He tried to reach the call button, which had been moved out of the way to make room for the box of zombie shells.
Liam plucked Brian’s IV line between two of his fingers, then pulled a syringe from his pocket. He whistled as he injected whatever was in it into the IV.
“Liam!” Nick shouted. He reached for his own IV to yank it out, intending to get out of bed, but his movements were sluggish and his mind was growing foggier. He couldn’t manage it. His hand landed on the shotgun shells, prepared to hurl the box at Liam’s head.
“Relax, he’ll be fine. He’ll just go to sleep.” Liam tossed the syringe in a receptacle and then leaned over Brian. “I ever see you with a drink in your hand again, I’ll put a hole through your fucking skull. Understand? You don’t deserve this man as a son.”
Nick saw the anger and fear in his father’s eyes before the medicine Liam had injected him with put him to sleep.
“Wanker,” Liam added. He pulled the curtain closed again and sat down beside Nick. He batted Nick’s hands away from the heavy box of shells, then from the IV line and the nurse’s call button. His movements were extremely gentle considering he’d just jabbed the heel of his palm into Nick’s incision several minutes before. He patted Nick’s chest. “All right, then.”
Nick groaned and tried to shove him away, but couldn’t. “Why can’t you just slink off to somewhere and die like you were supposed to?”
“Well, that’s not very nice.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I knew now would be the best time to see you, since when you’re healthy you tend to punch first and discuss after you’ve tied me to something that’s not very fun.”
Nick grunted.
“To get right down to it, I need your help.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Nick growled. He tossed his head and writhed on the bed, fighting through the pain.
Liam took his hand in his, pushing Nick’s thumb to hit the morphine drip again. He held on to him this time, as if he were offering comfort.
Nick glared at him. “How could you convince yourself I’d help you do anything?”
Liam glanced at the doorway. “Because I finally have leverage over you.”
Nick’s eyes darted toward the door.
“You and the Doc, yeah? Never saw that coming.”
“You hurt him and you’re a dead man. I’ll hunt you down and make you suffer, I promise you that.”
“I accept those terms. And . . . I am suitably intimidated by the violent declarations of an otherwise gentle man. The thing is, I’m going to need your help. The details are a bit fuzzy yet, but rest assured it is something you and only you can assist me in doing. And when the time comes, I’m going to need you to mobilize without questions and without your nasty habit of being morally opposed to . . . things.”
“Things?”
“You know. Stuff.”
Nick’s breathing was growing more labored, and it was harder to fight past the morphine to keep his eyes open. The only reason he was even still conscious was pure hatred.
Liam smiled kindly at him. “You help me on one simple task, and then you and the Doc sail off into the sunset together. You refuse, and I finish the job New Orleans started with that hole in Doc’s chest.”
Nick squeezed his eyes closed, gritting his teeth against the mere notion. He thought he might throw up.
“Do we have a deal?”
Nick shook his head.
“Say no to me, O’Flaherty, and I go downstairs right now and off him. He’s in the cafeteria sitting beside a window. Perfect head shot from across the street. Can you imagine Tyler’s face with the doc’s brains spattered all over it? I imagine he’d be quite devastated.”
Nick curled onto his side and covered his eyes with his hand. He hated himself for doing it, but he clutched at Liam’s hand harder as pain and grief wracked his body. “Okay,” he whispered.
“We have a deal?”
“None of them come to harm,” Nick said. He looked up at Liam, desperate. “I do whatever you want and you leave them all alone. Give me your word.”
Liam smiled fondly. “I always liked that about you, O’Flaherty. You were the one Sidewinder who actually meant it when you said, ‘I promise.’ You have my word. Do I have yours?”
Nick glared at him, the molten hatred threatening to burn right through his heart. He managed to get the word out anyway. “Yes.”
Liam smiled brilliantly and patted him on the cheek. “There’s my white knight. Now, surely I mustn’t remind you that anyone you tell about our little arrangement will come to a sticky end.”
Nick could do nothing but grit his teeth and glare up into Liam’s ice-blue eyes.
“I’ll be in touch. Speedy recovery and all that,” Liam drawled, smirking like it was some private joke. Then he pulled another syringe from his pocket and put Nick out of his misery.
Zane tossed his badge and keys on the counter and shoved the door shut behind him. The days at work seemed to be getting longer, the responsibilities weighing heavier. He wasn’t sure how much longer he had the will to stick this through. The only thing keeping him there was the very real threat that still hovered over everyone and everything he loved. He had one more battle to fight.
And then he was ready to sleep in with his lover, to curl up on a Sunday and watch football, to read a fucking book without wondering when he’d be called into work.
“Ty?” he tried. The house was still and quiet. The Mustang hadn’t been parked in the back, so Zane was pretty confident Ty wasn’t home. The disappointment was striking.
He shrugged out of his jacket and began thumbing through the stack of mail on the counter, but a small box sitting there caught his attention. He set the mail aside and picked up the box. It was black with a simple white ribbon on it. A notecard tucked into the ribbon read, “Open Me Now.”
Zane smirked. It had almost become a joke between them, Ty’s many and varied ways of asking Zane to marry him. Zane almost dreaded the day he was convinced to say yes because then the attempts and the fun of saying no would stop.
He slid the ribbon off the box, still smiling and shaking his head. Inside was a purple velvet bag, and when Zane peered inside he found a wide silver band. His stomach flipped as he shook it into his palm. It wasn’t shiny or new, and it had obviously been handmade. Etched into the side were numbers Zane quickly recognized as latitude and longitude coordinates.
“Oh God, Ty,” he whispered. He was chuckling as he pulled out his phone and punched the coordinates into his GPS. It gave him directions, telling him the location was less than half a mile away. At least it was close.
Zane grabbed his coat and slid the ring onto his right ring finger. It was a perfect fit. He walked several blocks toward Fell’s Point, then turned where his phone indicated and began searching for somewhere that looked like it was supposed to be his goal.
When he found his destination, it was not what he was expecting. The only reason he even knew he was there was because Ty was sitting on the front stoop, waiting for him.
Zane peered up at the three-story building. It was brick, with white trim that was flaking and falling off to reveal green underneath. The front door was covered with stickers and graffiti, and the glass had been covered up with paper grocery bags. A torn black and orange For Sale sign was taped to it.
The windows all boasted corbels and hand-carved wood, but they were visibly rotting. The basement steps on the sidewalk led to a dark hole that may or may not have been home to vagrants at night. The only thing that could be said for the building was that it probably had an incredible view of the harbor from the back, and that Zane’s lover was sitting on its concrete steps.
Zane snorted as Ty stood to meet him. He held up the ring and wiggled his finger. “I can’t say this is your best attempt.”
Ty grinned. He turned and tapped the For Sale sign. “I bought it.”
Zane’s smile fell, and he glanced up at the dilapidated building again. “You what?”
Ty pulled the door open. It was unlocked. “Come on.”
“Ty, you bought this building?” Zane stuttered as he followed Ty inside. “With what, Monopoly money?”
Ty’s laugh echoed off the empty interior. Inside, the building didn’t look much better. There was an old bar that stretched the length of the narrow front room, and in the back were steps going up and what may have been a storeroom with a rear exit.
Ty lifted his hands and turned to Zane, smiling almost shyly.
Zane gaped at his surroundings. “I’m . . . confused.”
Ty patted the bar. “It used to be a bar.”
“I see that.”
“It has two stories upstairs. It needs complete renovation, so we can gut it and do whatever we want to it.”
Zane glanced up again, imagining all the work that would take. Ty without a job and without any leads on the mole was beginning to be a scary prospect.
He turned back to Ty, still waiting for when this would turn into a good idea.
Ty was still smiling gently. “You see, no matter what we do to the row house, we’ll always know it was mine first. We can’t cleanse it of that and make it truly ours. But here we can start fresh. Build whatever we want.”
Zane bit his lip, nodding. “Okay. What about this level, though? It’s still a commercial district.”
“I realized the one thing Fell’s Point didn’t really have,” Ty said, his voice sincere and hopeful, “was a bookstore.”
Zane’s stomach flipped. He loved old book stores. Loved the smell of them, loved to walk through them, loved sitting in them and reading in a ratty old chair. Ty had known that from the beginning, from the day in New York City when he’d gamely followed Zane into a bookstore and sat there as Zane browsed.
Ty’s lips twitched. “And we could sell black market orchids from the back.”
Zane’s breath left him. He was standing in the middle of the craphole building Ty had bought him, and suddenly he could see what Ty was truly proposing. A life where neither of them carried a gun. A life where Zane could sit in a bookstore all day, could know that Ty would be there when he went home, right upstairs. A life for them, together. A future. Ty wanted them to cut and run.
Zane thought he had experienced love before. Thought he had known what it felt like to be the center of someone’s world.
He had been wrong, because it had never felt like this.
Ty squared his shoulders and straightened himself. He cut quite the figure, his steady presence overpowering the dusty surroundings. His voice was quiet and clear. “Will you marry me, Zane?”
“Yes.”
Ty laughed, and his shoulders slumped with relief. He moved toward Zane, reaching out to hook his finger through the bullet hole in Zane’s jacket and pull him close. “Thank Christ, ’cause I was out of ideas after this.”
Zane laughed with him, the sound echoing off the bones of their future home, ringing in a new chapter in their lives like the bells of a cathedral. Their laughter was still echoing off the walls when Ty took Zane’s face in both hands and kissed him for all he was worth. They wrapped around each other, clinging to the promise of the life they could have.