Page 164 of Dirty Hit
“I know,” he answers nonchalantly.
I wait for more, but all I get is silence.
“Are we… going somewhere else first?” I try.
“Yeah. Home.”
My pulse stutters. “My home is—”
“Where I can see you,” he cuts in, still calm, still driving, eyes fixed on the road. “Right now that’s the only definition that matters.”
“Dominic,” I try again. “We’re going to my apartment. My place. With my bed and my bathroom and my cat and no murder ghosts in the walls.”
“Your cat is not at your apartment,” he says, eyes on the road. “Jericho is at the cottage.”
“You kidnapped my cat?”
“I relocated him,” he retorts. “He’s mad about it, but he’ll live.”
“You can’t just steal someone’s emotional support animal, Dominic.”
“You can’t call him that when he spends every night trying to smother you in your sleep,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Point is, you’re not going back to that building without me. I can’t be in two places at once. So, you and the cat are with me until I say otherwise.”
“Wow,” I say. “That sounded less like a suggestion and more like a kidnapping charge.”
He cuts me a sidelong look. “You almost died. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
The tone kills the joke in my throat. I sink back against the seat, clutching the discharge papers in my lap a little tighter. It should feel smothering; it does. It also feels safe in a way that scares me more.
When we pull up the gravel drive to the cottage, Jericho is already in the front window.
Somehow, that annoys me more than anything. My own cat, betraying me to go live with my… whatever Dominic is now. Boyfriend feels too soft for a man who killed his own motherin front of me. Partner feels too clinical. Owner feels too on the nose.
“I can’t believe you catnapped him,” I say.
“He got in the carrier voluntarily,” Dom replies. “I shook the treats once. He came. That’s consent.”
He’s at my side before I can argue, helping me out of the car, one arm banded carefully around my waist, taking more of my weight than I want to admit I need. The steps up to the porch feel like a mountain. I grit my teeth and let him guide me, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and not collapsing in a pathetic heap.
Inside, the cottage smells like home.
Jericho is on the back of the couch now, claws buried deep in the fabric, shredding a cushion with intense, vindictive concentration. The second he sees me, he abandons the carnage and launches himself across the room, landing with surgical precision on my lap as soon as I sink down onto the sofa.
“Ow,” I wheeze, as a paw lands a little too close to the fresh wound.
“Get off the patient, menace,” Dominic says, reaching to scoop him up.
I put a hand out. “No, he’s fine. He’s mad at you, not me.”
Jericho proves my point by hissing at Dominic and digging his claws into my thigh instead of my stitches. I wince and scratch under his chin.
“Traitor,” Dom mutters at the cat. “I saved your idiot. Show some respect.”
The rest of the day is a blur of overprotective bullshit.
Dominic hovers—that is the only word for it. He brings me water, adjusts my pillows, checks my meds schedule like he is prepping for surgery every time the clock flicks to the next dose. He reads the instructions twice and glares at the pill bottles like they might attack me.
“You need to eat,” he says, standing in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed, watching me pick half-heartedly at the soup he heated up. “You have to give your body something to work with.”
