Chapter 30: Recognize Me
The world shrank to the scent of cordite, the copper-tang of his blood, and the tight, furious lines of Beth’s face as she shoved him into a leather wingback chair in the library.“Hold still, asshole!”
Her voice was a low, seething command, all business. The elegant sniper from the roof was gone, replaced by a woman with wildfire in her eyes and practiced, brutal efficiency in her hands. She ripped open his black cotton shirt with a clean tear, the buttons pinging off the hardwood. The bullet had grazed the fleshy part of his left deltoid, a deep, angry furrow that wept blood steadily.
He hissed as she poured amber liquid from a crystal decanter directly onto the wound. It wasn’t whiskey; it smelled medicinal, harsh.
“What is that, gasoline?” he gritted out, his knuckles white on the armrests.“Something better. Shut up.” She didn’t look at his face, her focus entirely on the damage. Her fingers, usually adorned with sleek manicures, were now smeared with his blood, probing the edges of the laceration with a clinical detachment that was more shocking than any tremor.“Clean through-and-through.You’ll live. Won’t even lose the arm, though you don’t deserve it.”
From a mahogany desk drawer—not a first-aid kit, but a polished antique desk—she produced a sterile suture kit, the kind you saw in field hospitals.She threaded the needle with swift, certain motions.
“Since when do you stitch people up, Montgomery?” he asked, his voice strained. He was watching her, fascinated, the pain a distant secondary concern.
“Since I decided I couldn’t rely on anyone else to do it right.” She didn’t give him warning. The needle pierced his skin, and he jerked, a muscle in his jaw feathering.“Christ. A little warning?”
“You want a lollipop and a bravery sticker too?” She pulled the suture through, her movements tight and precise. “You stood in front of a bullet for me. Don’t expect me to thank you for it.It was a stupid, theatrical risk. If they’d been aiming center mass, you’d be decorating my Persian rug with your brains right now.”
Despite the fire in his shoulder, a slow, genuine grin spread across his face. The room still echoed with shouted orders from Clyde outside, the distant groan of an SUV speeding away, but here, in this bubble of violence and her rage, he felt a bizarre, perfect calm. “There she is.”
Beth paused, the needle held aloft.“What?”
“That’s my Beth.Yelling at me for almost getting killed. Not the ice queen. Not the sniper on the roof.” He winced as she tugged the thread taut.“Just you. Mad as hell.”
Her gaze finally flicked up to his, her green eyes luminous and fierce in the lamplight. For a fraction of a second, he saw it—the terror that had flashed through her when he’d been hit, the raw, unraveling fear that had propelled her from the roof to his side. Then she walled it off again, her expression shuttering. “You’re delirious from blood loss.”
“I’ve never been clearer.” He reached up with his good right hand, capturing her wrist before she could make another stitch. Her pulse hammered against his fingers.“You were magnificent up there.Terrible. Beautiful.”
She froze, a statue of conflicted fury.“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Acknowledge the truth?You’re not just playing in my world, Beth. You were born for it. The precision, the cold calculation, the nerve.” His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “All those years I tried to keep the darkness from touching you… I was protecting a phantom.It’s in you. It always was.”
She wrenched her hand free, but the movement lacked its earlier violence.“Finish this,” she muttered, nodding at his shoulder.
He let her work in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds their breathing and the crisp snip of the scissors as she cut the final thread. She smeared antibiotic ointment over the neat row of stitches and taped a gauze pad over it with a final, definitive pat.“There. You’ll scar.”
“I’ll add it to the collection.” He rolled his shoulder, testing the pull of the sutures.It hurt like a bitch.It was perfect.
The library door opened.Clyde stood there, his shirt sleeve torn, a smudge of grime on his temple. He looked from Beth’s bloodied hands to Damien’s bare, bandaged chest, his expression unreadable.“Three down. One got away in a vehicle we didn’t have covered.Clean operation.Professional. No identification.”
Beth stood, wiping her hands on a towel she’d produced from somewhere.“Vega’s people?”
“Not his style.Too blunt. This was a probe. Testing our defenses, our response time.” Clyde’s eyes settled on Damien.“They focused fire on the east wing after the first shot. Where you were staying.”
A cold weight settled in Damien’s gut, cutting through the warmth of Beth’s attention.The shot that had clipped him hadn’t been random.Beth understood instantly. Her spine straightened, all residual softness vanishing.“They were targeting him. Specifically.”
“It appears so,” Clyde said, his voice gravel.
“Which means,” Beth continued, her tone turning glacial, “they knew he was here. Which means we have a leak.” Her gaze swept from Clyde to the open door, beyond which the ranch lay in a state of heightened, silent alert. “Someone in my house talked.”
Damien stood, the movement making his head swim for a second. He reached for his ruined shirt, discarded it, and walked to the French doors leading to the garden. The floodlights were off now, the property returned to a deceptive, watchful darkness. “It wasn’t a leak.”
Beth and Clyde both looked at him.
He turned, the shadows carving his face into something ancient and merciless.“It was an invitation.Vega knows I’m here. He sent them to remind me he can reach me, even in your fortress. And to see what you’d do.” His green eyes locked onto Beth’s.“He saw. He knows now.”
Beth absorbed this, her mind clicking through the implications. The adrenaline was fading, leaving a hollow, cold clarity. Her inheritance wasn’t just a title or a portfolio; it was a bullseye.And Damien, by standing beside her, had stepped directly into its center.
She walked to the sideboard and poured two fingers of the actual whiskey. She didn’t offer one to Damien. She downed it in one smooth swallow, the heat searing a path through the ice in her veins.“Alright,” she said, placing the glass down with a quiet click. “No more probes.No more games.” She looked at Clyde.“Lock it down.Full protocol. No one in or out without my direct authorization. Scrub the communications.”
Clyde gave a sharp nod and left, closing the door softly behind him.
The silence in the library was profound, thick with everything unsaid and the new, more dangerous reality taking shape.Beth finally turned to Damien. His bare chest was a map of old violence and new bandages, a testament to a life lived on the edge of a blade.Her life now, too.
“You can still leave,” she said, the words offering an exit he wouldn’t take.
He crossed the room until he was right in front of her, close enough for her to feel the heat radiating from his skin, see the flecks of darker green in his irises. “You know I can’t.”
“This is what it means,” she whispered, almost to herself.“If we do this.If we… try. It’s not just us in a room anymore.It’s this.Always. The blood, the leaking secrets, the watching the shadows.”
Damien lifted his good hand, careful, and brushed a strand of her dark, wavey hair behind her ear. His touch was infinitely gentle, a stark contrast to the carnage of the hour.“I told you on the balcony. The truth is on the table.My truth is you. The rest is just geography.”
She leaned into his touch, a minute surrender that felt more intimate than anything they’d shared in years. The fight wasn’t gone; it was banked, turned inward, forged into a different kind of resolve.
Outside, a coyote yipped, a lonely sound in the vast Texas night. Inside, they stood in the quiet ruin of the evening, the future a wide-open chasm in front of them, dark and inevitable and theirs to face—together.