From the lines just starting to form at the corners of his eyes and mouth, I estimated he was in his late thirties. And he hadn’t had the easiest of lives. The bottom of his left ear was ragged with missing flesh. I couldn’t tell from this far away what’d done it, but it’d obviously been an unpleasant situation.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice just as deep and gruff as I’d expected from his appearance. It was a familiar voice.
“You were at the crash,” I said. The big guy who’d reached me first, who’d offered his medical training. I hadn’t been able to make him out well enough between my blurred vision and the rain to recognize him on sight, but that commanding voice was unmistakable.
He nodded, taking a slow step forward. “That’s why I’m asking how you’re feeling. You collapsed on us, and we weren’t sure what to do, since you were pretty insistent on not going to the hospital. I hope you can forgive me for not being willing to leave you lying in the road. We brought you back here, and I’ve patched you up.” He nodded to my wrist. “It’s just sprained, not broken.”
“Fantastic,” I said tersely. The sarcasm wasn’t polite, but I didn’t see any need to put on a friendly front with this guy. He was making it sound as if I’d fainted, but I hadn’t felt dizzy beforehand. Had the crash caught up with me suddenly… or had he and his friends messed with me somehow?
But as long as he was playing the good guy, I could play along a little too. “To answer your question, I’m a bit sore but otherwise fine.”
“That’s good to hear. There wasn’t much I could do for your ribs.” His gaze traveled over my chest, but without any trace of a leer, and then back to my face. “I’m sorry—you must be pretty confused. If you didn’t catch my name last night, I’m Julius.”
The nickname I most often went by when dealing with anyone outside the household fell from my mouth automatically. “Dess.” Sometimes I had other aliases for a specific mission, but Dess was my all-purpose public name, just a shorter version of Decima. Noelle said it was always best to have one you could respond to easily, naturally.
Julius moved another step closer, and it took every ounce of my willpower not to shoot forward and knock him to his knees so I could dash past him. If I even could knock him over. He was bigger and probably stronger than me, all my training aside, and I was in pain. I still didn’t know what exactly he was up to.
“Dess,” he said, testing the name—weighing it for who knows what. As he said it, he cocked his head to the side, and a flicker of deeper recognition sparked inside me.
Maybe it was the tone of his voice or the way the light hit the chiseled planes of his handsome face at that angle, but I had the abrupt sense that I’d seen him before. And not in a bad way. The tug of emotion inside me felt almost reassured by his presence and his authoritative stance.
What the fuck? I must have been more shaken up by the crash than I realized. I mentally shook myself and studied him surreptitiously. The sense of familiarity remained, but I couldn’t place him.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was figuring out his motivations: had he and his friends really been playing hero, or had they knocked me out and dragged me here for some nefarious reason? And if the latter, did that reason have anything to do with the massacre in my home?
“What were you doing there last night?” I asked abruptly.
Julius blinked and gave me a quizzical look. “We were heading back here after a party at a friend’s house, and we saw you hit that telephone pole. We’re not the types to just keep driving when someone’s obviously in trouble.” He paused and reached behind him to pick up something he’d left by the door. My tote bag.
My gaze tracked it as he held it up, my fingers itching to grab it. It looked as full as it’d been when I’d left, but that didn’t mean it had anything except my clothes and that stupid stuffed tiger in it.
“We were actually wondering if you were in more trouble than just the crash,” Julius said, his voice dipping lower. Something about the assured baritone sent a whisper of heat over my skin that I almost… liked?
Focus, Decima.
Julius was still talking. “When we checked you over for ID to try to find out who to call to let them know where you were, we didn’t find any, but we did notice this stuff.” He pulled out one of the necklaces and then waggled a roll of cash. “And you’ve got blood on your shirt even though you don’t have any cuts on you. What happened to you before you got into that car?”
“I don’t really see how that’s your business,” I said, like a regular person who had nothing to hide but wanted their privacy would. Right? I didn’t have enough practice at being a normal person to be sure, but the response felt reasonable. “Thank you for stopping and helping me, but I don’t know you, and I’d really like to get out of here now.”
Julius contemplated me, his gaze curious but penetrating. I met it, narrowing my eyes and daring him to question me further.
The way he effortlessly held my gaze drew up another unexpected feeling in my stomach that fluttered and multiplied. The strength that he exuded, both literally and with his mere presence, called to a part of me that had long remained dormant. This was a man who got things done.
But what was he going to do with me?
The question didn’t unnerve me as much as it should. Julius folded his arms over his chest, and the movement brought up his sleeve to reveal a pointed shape that was part of one of his tattoos creeping over his bicep.
Were we playing some kind of game of cat-and-mouse where neither of us was showing all our cards? I still couldn’t tell what his intentions were, and that made me hesitate to make any aggressive moves.
If this was a game, he probably figured he was the cat in it. Ha. I doubted he could possibly imagine how many men like him I’d taken down in the past several years.
Julius offered a casual shrug. “I just want to be sure we’re not sending you out there into some kind of danger. It’s hard not to worry, considering the state we found you in. Or maybe we should be worried about whoever you got this hoard from.”
Oh, it wasn’t me who was in danger. It was the people who’d massacred the household and made the grave mistake of leaving me alive, and when I figured out who they were, they wouldn’t know what hit them. Every feeling I’d experienced as I held Julius’s gaze faded, replaced with the same steady rage that would continue driving me until I completed this mission successfully.
If he wanted a story, I’d give him a story.
I blew out a breath as if I was frustrated with the situation. “Fine. If you insist on knowing—my boyfriend won that crap in some stupid poker game. He was so drunk he passed out, and I saw my chance to get away, and I just—I grabbed it and ran for it. Things haven’t been so great between us for a while.”