Silver Lining Read online

  SILVER LINING

  Skye Warren

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Overture

  Books by Skye Warren

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elijah

  My father was the first man I killed.

  He wasn’t the last. Combat means seeing death up close and personal. I know the smell of death. The taste. The feel of it weighing down the air. It’s heavy as hell.

  Death turns the SUV I’m driving into a pressure cooker with me and Holly inside. Every bump on the road threatens to set us aflame. “You’re going to be okay,” I say, and my voice doesn’t crack. I sound confident and sure. It’s a fucking lie. “You’re going to make it.”

  Plenty of times in my life, I’ve wished for death to slip a silent knife into my back.

  Quicker that way. Cleaner. Easier.

  Not now. Not when Holly is blinking in the passenger seat, her pretty brow furrowed as she looks down at the heart-colored stain spreading across her shirt. She doesn’t know yet. Not on a conscious level. Adrenaline is flooding her body, shutting down higher thinking. She doesn’t know one of the colonel’s men shot her.

  She doesn’t know the bullet tore through soft flesh.

  She doesn’t know she’s dying.

  “Stay awake. Just stay the fuck awake. That’s all you have to do.” Stay alive.

  The sound of the tires on pavement, the roar of the engine, they barely register as sound. Not after gunshots in the small, enclosed space of her apartment. I led her there from my abandoned-church-turned safehouse like a lamb to the slaughter. No, not exactly—I taught her how to shoot a gun before that. I left out the lesson about knowing the odds. Three armed enemies. One Holly. The math doesn’t work.

  She makes a sound that could be a question—awake? Then her head lolls onto her shoulder. She’s passed out from the pain or the shock. Or sleeping. That’s a nice thought. I can imagine her resting in the passenger seat instead of bleeding out.

  The air gets heavier. Thicker.

  I want to get out from under it. I want to breathe. But my lungs can’t expand against the pressure and anyway there are things to do. We’re two blocks from the church safehouse, where we should have stayed after I kidnapped her. Maybe forever.

  Instead I have a limited amount of time to make a phone call.

  None of my brothers will do any good right now. None of them can talk to me. That would only put them in danger. Yes, they’re tough sons of bitches. Our father would have killed us if we weren’t, but even they can’t fight the whole of the United States government.

  There’ll be sirens soon, and when they stop, there will be other government operatives moving in the shadows. The person I need right now doesn’t mind the darkness.

  Dax answers on the second ring. “You better be on your knees with a firing squad behind you, if you’re calling me. That’s the only way I’m going to forgive you for going off the grid for two goddamn years. I thought you died. Or got married.”

  “I’m driving hot,” I say between gritted teeth. “Heading toward the Meatpacking District. Got a friend with a GSW. Need medical assistance.”

  “It’s the second one, isn’t it? You got fucking leg shackled, didn’t you?”

  “If you want out, tell me now. I’m in real deep, and anyone near this will end up on a goddamn government watch list for the rest of their lives.”

  “I would be offended if I wasn’t already on it.”

  Fair enough. Dax is part mercenary for hire, part arms dealer. That’s the kind of company I kept before I met Holly, before I brought my brothers back into my life to protect her. For all this time, I tried to go straight. To do honest government contracts and security details. To be the man my brothers believe me to be.

  That ended tonight.

  I give him the address to the safe house. I’ve never given this information to another person, not even my brothers. His response is to hang up on me. He’ll be here soon.

  The church looms in the night, ominous and empty, a black hole in a shitty part of town. There are no lights as I kick the SUV over the curb and behind the building. It’s mostly memory that guides me through the brick enclosure to the secure garage.

  Steel doors slide open on well-oiled hinges.

  Only when they close behind my tail lights can I finally take a deep breath.

  You’re going to be okay, I think, but I don’t know whether I mean Holly or myself.

  I gather up Holly’s listless body out of the passenger seat. She’s breathing. Such a faint movement. So fucking important. I cradle her head against my shoulder and carry her downstairs to a cot. I put a hand on her chin and shake. “Wake the fuck up.”

  She doesn’t.

  I head up the stairs for the first aid kit. One. Two. Three.

  Around the corner, to the dusty office. Four. Five.

  Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.

  Nine seconds I leave her alone, and then I stop counting. There’s work to be done if she has any hope of survival. She’s exactly where I left her, arms curled up under her chin. I pull them away and rip her shirt in two, the fabric giving way to pure rage, exposing her pretty bra and the bloody wound on her side. I spill the first aid kit onto the foot of the cot and rip out sterile gauze. I’d clean the wound but there’s too much blood. Have to stop the bleeding first. She groans when I press my big palms over the gauze and push hard.

  Pressure. We need steady pressure. Her breathing is shallow, barely perceptible. And I’m only breathing through force of habit and circumstance. My habit is to keep exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide even when I’m under enemy fire, and Holly is still alive.

  For now.

  More steady pressure. Her face is bone-white. The fire of her blood reaches my palms through the gauze. She needs an emergency surgical team, not battlefield first aid. I curse at the red liquid and focus my whole being on keeping what’s left of her life in her body.

  If she pulls through.

  It won’t just be murder. It will be treason. An electric urge moves through me and I ignore it. I can’t move her now. Can’t get her out of the country now, can’t save her unless she lives. Can’t do much of anything, except this.

  I’m going to run out of gauze.

  There’s nothing else in the church aside from old wool carpet. Nothing up there is going to help me. Not the old prayers whispering in the ceiling. Not the abandoned pews.

  And not God, if he’s even there.

  Dax arrives seven agonizing minutes later, one hand on the strap of a black backpack slung over his shoulder. He assesses the situation without flinching. That’s why we’re friends, me and Dax. He’s seen the darkest shit this world has to offer, including a beautiful woman dying.

  He drops the backpack to the cool stone floor. “Sitrep?”

  “A single gunshot wound. One entry. One exit. I think it hit—” My throat clenches hard. A tiny piece of steel polymer ripped through her internal organs at a speed of two thousand feet per second.
The fact that it went clean through is a good thing. It’s a question of kinetic energy. Of physics, but it’s not enough. “I think it hit her liver. She’s not coughing blood.”

  She’s barely breathing, but I don’t say that out loud. He can see for himself.

  He pulls his medical shit out of the backpack and drops things one by one in the empty spaces around Holly’s body. Holly. Not her body. She’s still inhabiting her body. It hasn’t been abandoned yet. Dax checks her pulse. It’s the neutral touch of a medical professional, and still, his fingertips against her skin make my teeth grind together. I’m like a wild animal backed into a corner. Only a matter of time before I bite.

  Holly turns her head, her lips forming words that make no sound.

  Dax is the one with the medical knowledge, but I’ve seen enough as a soldier. Enough to know that her odds are unknown right now. Incalculable. The bullet might as well have been a roulette ball around a wheel. It’s a goddamn gamble. People get shot through the heart and live. They got shot through the liver and die. There’s no logic to be found.

  I have both palms splayed across the gauze, across Holly’s side. My hands feel inadequate for the job set in front of me. Other jobs in my life have seemed bigger. Killing my father. Burying his body. But now those things are painfully, uselessly small.

  They were nothing in comparison to this.

  “I can’t fix a bullet wound blind, Eli. Gonna have to move your hands.” A sharp look in my direction. “Move your goddamn hands.”

  It’s urgent. I know it is. It’s a goddamn emergency. But how am I supposed to stay sane without my hands on her? Without being able to feel that she’s warm and alive?

  I give myself to the count of three, then gently lift my hands away.

  Dax shoulders me out of the way, taking up all the space on the side of the cot. My bloodied hands hang uselessly at my sides. I should go wash them, but I can’t. I’m stuck here, staring, past the event horizon of a black hole. Couldn’t look away if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. She doesn’t react to the pinch of the needle. The goosebump sensation of superstition tiptoes up my back and grips me around the back of my neck. If I keep looking, she’ll stay alive.

  “I don’t see a wedding band,” he says, and it takes me a second to catch. The fight or flight response taking my body only allows for things like violence and fear.

  “We aren’t married.”

  “She say no?”

  “I didn’t ask her.”

  “What the fuck’s taking you so long?”

  What the fuck is taking me so long? Was I waiting for her to be shot? Was I waiting for her to bleed out in my arms? The reality is that I didn’t have a life, didn’t have freedom when I was beholden to the colonel. She knew that. That’s why she shot him, to free me, but that’s the thing. He owns me even in death. Lieutenant Colonel Mark Jefferson owns me for eternity. He’ll take her away from me without drawing a single breath.

  “Come here and clean this up.”

  Something hard untwists in the vicinity of my spine. Soldiers are men of action. They’re not meant for standing around during battle. And this, for all it looks like a back alley operation, is a battle. Holly’s fighting for her life. A fresh acid guilt burns through me. If it weren’t for me, the colonel never would have come after her. She never would have fired that gun. She wouldn’t be bleeding out on a safehouse cot in front of me.

  My heart keeps beating while Dax stitches her up.

  Holly’s does too.

  Dax has efficient hands. He’s seen worse than this. So have I. I’ve caused things worse than this, but never to a civilian. Holly isn’t a soldier and she shouldn’t have been shot.

  And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t slipped a diamond into her bag years ago. There’s no going back. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.

  That’s the truth. The truth that digs in and hurts, even now. I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. I would still put that diamond in her bag, even if I knew she’d end up shot, even if I knew she’d end up kidnapped and hurt and dying in a church basement. I would still do every terrible thing if it meant knowing what she tastes like and what she feels like and what she sounds like.

  Dax gives her a syringe of hardcore antibiotics.

  There is no God in this church but there’s a man with no qualms about operating outside a license. Close enough. A short eternity later he straightens over the cot, and it’s only then that I notice the color returning to her cheeks.

  Color.

  Relief is a freight train. A tsunami wave. If I wasn’t so used to standing up I’d fall to my knees, me, Elijah North, a trained killer and an aching, open wound.

  Dax puts his fingers on Holly’s neck, his brow furrowed, and takes stock of her pulse. Then he steps back from the table. For a horrifying instant I think he might pronounce the time of death, but instead he takes me by the arm and turns us away from the cots as if we’re stepping outside of a real hospital room. My heart stays behind on that goddamn cot while Dax finds the bathroom and soaps up his hands.

  He gives me instructions for the medicines he’s leaving, as efficient and professional as any actual doctor. The information is so commonplace, like Holly’s going to live and there’ll be a future after all. “I’ll handle it,” I tell him, like I’m any other guy at a hospital bedside, waiting for the nurse to step out so he can take over.

  Dax shakes his hands out over the sink and glances around. The bathroom is nothing fancy, nothing nice. It’s half-abandoned, like the rest of the church. “New place?”

  I glare at him.

  “Watch your back,” he says, because this is what he always says. The words unknot something at the pit of my gut. Holly deserves better than Dax, and better than me, but at least we have someone.

  Back in the room, he slings his backpack onto his shoulder and steps out like he’s just gotten word on his pager that it’s time for rounds.

  And I go to Holly’s bedside. It’s the only conceivable place for me to be in the world. My hand curls over hers before I know what I’m doing, before I can think about it.

  A moment weighs itself down with silence broken only by her breathing. The rhythm is steadier now, but that doesn’t mean she’s healed. It doesn’t mean she’ll walk out of here okay. Nightmare scenarios line up and hurl themselves into my skull one by one, crowding in close, filling the room.

  I must stay like that for hours. Maybe days. Time is meaningless without her.

  She squeezes my hand. It startles me from my dark stupor.

  I hold my breath, frozen, waiting. Her eyelids flutter, almost like she’s dreaming, and then she opens them, blinking into the light.

  Holly swallows once, twice, and licks her lips. The sight of the pink tip of her tongue on her bottom lip is more of a miracle than anything this church has ever seen. And when her eyes meet mine, I could almost believe there was something holy here once.

  “Where am I?” Her thumb traces a lazy circle on the back of my hand.

  “You’re in hell, sweetheart. Welcome back.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Holly

  Some people wish they were mermaids. Some wish they weren’t. But it’s not the being that’s the problem. It’s the becoming that kills you. The transition, when flesh tears apart and reforms, when electricity runs through the invisible seams in your body. White-hot pain scorches me, and I twist my body in the fire. It might only last seconds or it might be an eternity in the roiling, beating, panting ache. The ache is relentless.

  The pain becomes a constellation. Small pinpricks of hurt in the black sky of my body. Hanging there with sharp metal pins that dig in and hold tight.

  They’re too far out of my reach to touch.

  The stars turn to embers, sizzling at the dark fabric behind them. It’s too late to put them out, and then all of them light up at once in a roar of fire and flame. A dragon—it must be a dragon. It’s as reasonable as becoming a mermaid, and I can feel him there, his hulkin
g presence taking up all the space in my mind.

  I can’t get away. Can’t move my legs, can’t move my arms. You need muscles to sit up and mine won’t engage. Even my own body won’t save me from the danger. The threat is here. The threat is me. Somehow, I set this into motion, I thought this dragon into being, and now—

  The dragon breathes again.

  Fire consumes the stars and bleeds out into everything that’s left of me.

  It’s a hot, obliterating pain, and sweat beads on my skin, on what remains of my skin. If I could open my mouth I would scream but the scream is burned away in a rush of wet heat. My body tries to get away, it tries so hard, but I’m too close to the dragon. I’d give anything for water. Cool water on my scales, on my legs, water to put it out, put it out.

  I pray for the cool spray of the ocean. For rain.

  Rain doesn’t come.

  Instead, I sink down into fire. A strangled animal noise comes from somewhere above me, beyond me, and it sounds familiar. Like my voice. But it can’t be, because I don’t have a voice anymore. I don’t have anything but the pain.

  The pain is everything. I’m nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Nothing for a long time. Long enough that I hear a jagged drumbeat. The dragon’s heart?

  My heart.

  It takes an eternity to think of my heart. My heart, which beats. My lungs, which draw air into my body. A new source of pain locates itself in my jaw. Well, that’s what you get for gritting your teeth. In the still-dark of my mind I peek out the corner of my eye for signs of the dragon. No new flames light the space, only the hazy-red glow of the burned places.

  The red gets brighter, and brighter, and brighter until finally I recognize the shade as light through my own eyelids. It adjusts itself off to the side of me.

  Curiosity seeps in at the margins. A lamp to light someone’s way? Maybe. Maybe not.

  I’m sure I’m not moving. I’m sure now that I’m not a mermaid, not in the water, not even upright. Lying down. Lying back. How I got here is a mystery. Is this how a mermaid feels after she’s made the change, the sand rough on her newly formed feet?