She sat in the middle of the bed, her legs drawn up, arms hugging her legs, head resting on her knees, Player restless beside her. She slept in the guest room right next door, but each night she had to come in and put him back together. When the pain was so bad it woke him, he would hallucinate.
She made a sound of denial and hastily covered her mouth, not wanting to disturb Player when she’d just gotten him back to sleep. It wasn’t a hallucination. She wished it were. She knew Maestro and the others thought it was. They even laughed sometimes, or smirked.
Player’s illusions always seemed to start with something to do with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Torpedo Ink members thought it was funny and seemed to have good memories of that time in their childhood. That didn’t in any way jive with how Player felt when the White Rabbit suddenly appeared or any of the other Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland characters began to manifest in his mind.
Zyah’s instincts told her that if Player had protected his fellow members from knowing that his illusions could become reality, then she shouldn’t say anything to them either. She didn’t understand what was going on, and until she did, she needed to stay silent and figure it all out.
One of the many problems was that the longer she was with Player, sitting with him, getting into his head and sharing his mind, even just to heal him, the stronger the connection between them became. She didn’t want or need that. She didn’t want to know about his past. She knew it humiliated him to have her know.
The good part about having Player in their home was that a member of Torpedo Ink was always there with him. Always. That meant her grandmother was protected night and day. She also knew that not only did someone stay inside the house with Player and Mama Anat, but someone was outside as well. That gave her great relief and allowed her to work at the grocery store without constant worry that someone would break into the house again and hurt her grandmother.
She didn’t worry too much about Player during the day because Steele spent a great deal of time with him, healing his brain injury. As far as she was concerned, he couldn’t heal it fast enough. Not because she was being selfish and wanted him gone—that wasn’t it—but because seeing him in such terrible pain was horrific, and watching that throw him into his childhood nightmares was even worse. She couldn’t share those things with her grandmother. She didn’t have anyone she could talk to about it. The more time she spent with Player, the more he was finding his way into her heart—and that wasn’t a good thing.
Zyah eased her legs off the bed, careful not to wake Player. This time had been particularly bad. It had only been a week since he’d been shot. She kept reminding herself that wasn’t a long time to recover, but it felt like forever when she was so afraid for him. When she cared so much. Too much. She pressed her hand to her throbbing head as she made her way into the hallway. She had a headache now from crying.
“Zyah?” Savage’s voice came out of the darkness.
She liked him. She knew she shouldn’t. Violence swirled around him. He was covered in it. Sometimes it swallowed him. But there was—that voice. That genuine caring that couldn’t be faked, not when she could read people when she was barefoot like she was. Savage cared. His eyes might be ice-cold and scary deadly, but he cared, whether he wanted anyone to know it or not. And the way he was with Anat—that couldn’t be faked. He was always so unfailingly gentle.
“I’m all right. Sometimes he breaks my heart. He’s in a lot of pain, and I can’t take it away.”
Savage saw a lot, and he seemed to have a really good bullshit meter. She had to be careful to be truthful, even though that wasn’t the only reason she had cried.
He stepped close to her but didn’t touch her. Those piercing blue eyes of his could chill her to the bone. They could also see far too much.
“We’re used to pain, Zyah. He’s going to get through this.”
She nodded. “Thanks for being so good to Mama Anat. She really hates being confined to her bed. She can’t get from the bed to the chair, and she said you put her in the chair yesterday so she was able to move around a little bit. That meant so much to her.”
He shrugged, drawing back into the shadows. “It was no big thing. She wanted to make cookies and some other kinds of baked goods and needed to get into the kitchen. She’s a little thing, so it was easy enough.”
Zyah’s eyebrow shot up. “She baked? With her broken arm?” Her grandmother hadn’t said a word about baking. There hadn’t been any baked goods in the house. Not one single cookie when she came home.
Savage was silent for a moment. Too long of a moment. She tipped her head back and moved closer to the shadows so she could see him, not letting him disappear. “She had you baking those cookies, didn’t she?” Her grandmother could get anyone to do anything. She was pure magic. “She talked you into letting her walk you through the recipe, didn’t she?”
Savage had one hip against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest as he regarded her coolly. He didn’t answer, just kept looking at her like he might do her in if she persisted in the conversation. Zyah didn’t know whether she could keep a straight face or whether she should even bother trying.
“I’ll bet you had flour all over you,” she taunted.
He didn’t blink. He just continued to stare at her.
She grinned at him, quirking an eyebrow. “Did she make you wear an apron? She does that because she doesn’t like a mess in her kitchen.”
Savage didn’t so much as change expression. As opponents went, he was good. Really good. Zyah could imagine her grandmother having great fun with him. There was no sound to warn her, but she knew they weren’t alone in the hallway. Her neck hairs tingled, giving her a warning prickle. That had to be another member of Torpedo Ink, or Savage would have reacted. Savage and Destroyer were usually the two partners, so she took a stab at it.
“She has frilly aprons. You could have worn the one with the sunflowers and Destroyer the one with the bluebonnets all over it. You would have looked so cute, especially if you got flour all over the aprons. I’ll have to ask Mama Anat if she happened to get pictures of you both. She loves to use the camera on her cell phone.”
Mama Anat loved to use the camera, but more often than not, she had it pointed in the opposite direction or up at the ceiling or down at the floor.
Destroyer stepped around her. “This woman is trying to blackmail us with damaging photographs, Savage?”
“There’s no proof,” Savage denied.
“There’s proof,” Zyah said.
“Anat had the camera pointed toward herself,” Savage said in his perfectly expressionless tone.
Zyah laughed quietly, always cognizant of Player asleep in the other room. She didn’t want to wake him. It was so like her beloved grandmother to have her cell phone out and recording and the camera pointed in the wrong direction. But it also proved Zyah was right and Savage and Destroyer had baked cookies because Anat had asked them to. She would have given anything to see the two men following her grandmother’s instructions.
“I knew you baked those cookies for her.”
“What cookies?” Savage asked. “There aren’t any cookies.”