Page 58 of Sexting His Assistant

She cups my cheek briefly with warm fingers. “You’re safe now.”

I almost ask her if that is true. Instead, I nod.

Behind us, footsteps pound down the corridor.

I turn just as my brother appears in the doorway.

Misha Hale fills the room with the kind of presence that usually makes people straighten before they know why. He is thirty-nine now, sixteen years older than me, and still built like the angry teenage boy who decided the world was not allowed to touch his little sister without permission. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with our father’s strong nose and our mother’s brown eyes, though his are harder than mine. There is always something restless about him, something coiled beneath the surface, as if even when he stands still, he’s preparing to move.

His dark coat is open over a black shirt. His hair is wind-tossed, his jaw shadowed, and his eyes go first to Luka’s shoulder, then to my bloodstained hands, then to my face.

“Nina,” he says. One word.

Everything inside me cracks. “Misha,” I breathe.

He crosses the room in three strides and pulls me into him so hard I almost lose my balance. His arms close around me, warm and crushing and familiar, and for the first time since the first shot rang out in the garage, I let myself shake.

His hand comes to the back of my head.

“You’re hurt?” he asks against my hair.

“No.”

“Look at me.”

I pull back.

He grips my face gently but firmly, turning it from side to side, scanning for injuries the way he used to check my knees when I fell as a child.

“I’m not hurt,” I say. “It’s not my blood.”

His eyes flick to Luka.

Luka’s watching us now, bare to the waist, blood streaked across his skin while Doctor Mirov works a pair of forceps into the wound.

Misha’s face tightens. “What happened?” he asks.

Luka answers before I can. “Garage breach.”

Misha’s jaw clenches. “Who?”

“We don’t know yet.”

The doctor moves. There’s a small, wet sound.

I nearly gag.

Luka’s fingers tighten once on the mattress. That’s all.

Doctor Mirov drops the bullet into a metal tray. The sound it makes is tiny.

But I’ll hear it for the rest of my life.

Misha’s arm stays around my shoulders. “You were supposed to protect her.”

The room goes very still.

Luka looks at him. “I did,” he says. His voice is flat. Cold. Unapologetic.