Chapter Eleven: Holly

Color me psychotic, but I didn’t think I’d sleep after nearly getting a bullet to the head and having to dig out said bullet from a man’s chest. I was wrong, though. I do sleep. I sleep hard. Nothing in the world could wake me up.

Except daylight. Daylight is the only thing that can come and crash the party.

When daylight forces me to wake, I yawn and try to stretch—but for some reason I can’t move. I open my eyes and see the top of the sofa, and my brows crease. I try to move again, and this time I feel the large presence behind me, AKA the reason I couldn’t stretch.

Right. I asked Kane to sleep with me last night after the whole assassin incident, and he agreed. I then assured him we were fine, that we didn’t need a barricade in between us. I thought we were both adults and could handle ourselves as such.

Judging by the strong arm wrapped around me and the large presence spooning me from behind, I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

At first, when I realize it’s Kane behind me, that it’s his arm wrapped around me, I tense up. I don’t know what to do. Having him comfort me while I was having a panic attack is one thing, but this? This is on its own level.

It’s intimate. It’s closeness for a whole different reason, and because of that it’s not something I’m used to.

Ignoring who the man is behind me and how he shaped my life, I never let a man hold onto me like this. I’ve hooked up, sure, taken what I wanted from guys when a certain itch overtook me that I just couldn’t scratch myself, but never this.

Never, ever this.

If it wasn’t Kane behind me, it’d be better. Hell, even with it being Kane behind me, it’s still nice. Feeling his warmth, the steadiness of his breathing behind me; it’s almost enough to make me close my eyes and drift back off to sleep.

Almost is the operative word there.

“Kane,” I say the man’s name as I try to shimmy his arm off me—but that thing is locked in place. His arm drapes over my side, curling up toward my chest, where he hugs me closer to him and keeps me there. He doesn’t respond, but I hear him groan a groggy sound behind me, so I say his name again. “Kane.”

He sounds absolutely delirious when he asks, “What?” Alas, as he asks the question, he pulls his arm tighter, which means my back presses even harder against his chest.

“It’s time to wake up.”

“No. Just a few more minutes.” He then does something I’m not expecting: that arm around me moves so his hand can grab the sheet, and he pulls the sheet up and over both our heads, thereby blocking out the sunlight somewhat.

And then? Then that blasted arm wraps around me again, like it never left.

He’s awake. Awake and talking to me. A part of me immediately wonders if he’s aware of who he’s snuggled up against.

“Do you even know who I am?” I ask him in a whisper. Now that we’re underneath a blanket, it feels wrong to speak at a normal volume, for whatever reason.

Kane makes an affirmative sound, and then he nuzzles against the back of my head as he whispers, “Little killer.” His weird nickname for me, and it tells me he indeed is aware that it’s me he’s spooning fiercely.

Maybe he can shut off his mind and pretend everything is fine, but I can’t. The man who killed my parents thirteen years ago is behind me, cuddling with me, and someone tried to kill me last night. Nothing here is fine.

“Kane, we need to get up,” I say, and as I say it I start squirming. My intention is to worm my way out of his grasp and get up—everything is harder given the fact my feet hurt and I’m pinned between the sofa’s back and Kane’s wide body.

A few seconds pass, and then Kane’s arm moves. The next thing I know, his hand curls around my hip and stops me from squirming. His body shifts behind me. “If you keep wiggling that ass, we’re going to have another problem.”

The moment it dawns on me what he means, I stop squirming. Getting him hard is the last thing I want to do—it’s the last thing I want to feel poking me from behind, too. Out of all the things I imagined doing to this man when I finally got a hold of him, knowing the size of his dick wasn’t ever one of them.

In the end, I don’t say another word. At this point, if Kane wants to keep sleeping, there’s nothing I can do to stop him. He basically has me trapped. The sad thing is, if he was literally anybody else in the world, it wouldn’t be a bad place to be.

I don’t know how long we lay there, beneath the sheet Kane pulled over our heads, but it has to be at least another hour. I’m pretty certain I hear him drift off behind me; his breathing becomes more steady and the hand on my hip lessens in its intensity. That said, he doesn’t let me go. He keeps a good hold on me, even when he’s unconscious.

Laying there for so long with Kane, my hatred takes a back seat as my mind drifts off to last night. Everything that happened, everything that was said. He told me he came here to drink himself to death and then walk out of this cabin and never come back. That’s why he didn’t bring a phone; he was going to kill himself, so why bother bringing it?

And me… what I told him. It’s not something I knew before. It literally hit me right then. All these years I knew I might never come back once I went off on this mission, and I kept telling myself that I wasn’t afraid to die.

A lie. A lie that, regardless of how many times it was whispered, never turned true.

Kane wanted to die and I didn’t. How’s that for a joke?

As I lay there, I try not to think of last night’s realizations, but without filling my mind with those truths, all that’s left to think about is how Kane’s body doesn’t feel horrible behind me. If he didn’t kill my parents, if he wasn’t the villain in my origin story, I wouldn’t mind this. It’s actually kind of nice.

That is not something I will ever admit out loud.

After a long while, Kane eventually stirs once more—and this time he gets up. I don’t move right away. I let him pull his hand off me and roll to his other side, hear him groan as he gets off the sofa bed. I’m pretty sure he mutters something under his breath about how he’s too old to be sleeping on one of those damned things, the damned things being the sofa bed.

Hey, I might be twenty-three, but the sofa bed doesn’t help my back out, either.

I’m slow to sit up and stretch while Kane digs through my food and grabs us both a protein bar along with some water. He tosses mine my way and then sits down on the chair to eat and drink his. The room is a little cold, the fire nothing but embers, but the man is more focused on refueling.

I take a sip of water from the bottle first, and as I do so, I watch Kane. He practically stuffs the whole bar into his mouth and then chews, nothing elegant or mannerly about him. Not that there should be; the man is an assassin. To say he’s rough around the edges would be an understatement.

His blue eyes stare at the fire, but I can tell he’s somewhere else. Maybe he’s remembering last night and regretting telling me everything he did. Or maybe he’s wishing he would’ve let the other hitman finish the job.

I decide to break the silence and say, “You didn’t stay on your side last night.” Maybe if we both ignore the whole bearing-our-hearts thing, we can move on.

“The pull-out’s fucking small.” As if that’s his excuse, as if that’s any excuse.

“Ah, so you’re aware of what you did, then. Are you also aware that you spooned me like there was no tomorrow? That you put an arm around me and held me in place so tightly I could barely move a muscle?”

Kane’s gaze moves to me, and the look on his face tells me everything. “I…”

“In fact, I tried to get us up a while ago, and you refused to. You pulled the blanket over our heads just so we could cuddle a bit more.”

He frowns at me. “No, I didn’t. The spooning and the arm—fine. I’ll give you that, but I didn’t pull the blanket over our heads. You’re making that up.” I can tell with the vehemence behind the words he genuinely believes it.

I’m not cowed by his denial. “And when I tried to get us up by moving, you grabbed my hip and told me that if I kept wiggling my ass we’d have another problem.” I lift my brows and wait for another denial.

“No,” he says quickly with a shake of his head. “I don’t remember any of that. You’re bullshitting me.”

“Why would I lie?” When he only glares at me, I add, “What? Is the man who wanted to die afraid of admitting he got a little handsy? That maybe he wanted something else besides death for once?”

Kane leans back in his recliner. The look on his face could kill. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t constantly throw that in my face.”

I tear open the wrapper and bite into the protein bar. “And why shouldn’t I?”

“You’re right. You can throw it in my face all you want, but I could throw shit right back at you, little killer. Remember that panic attack you had? Yeah, me too. Add that and the fact that you told me you’re afraid to die, and I don’t think you make such a good wannabe killer after all.”

“Fuck you.”

“I saved your life last night. You should be grateful to me. Hell, you should be nice to me.”

Glaring hard at him, I growl out, “I thanked you.”

“Yeah, once. Is that what your life is worth? A single thanks? I’ll remember that next time.”

I have a comeback ready, but it’s his final words that trip me up into a stunned silence for a minute. It takes me longer than it should for me to gather myself and ask, “Next time? You think there’ll be more?” The mere thought of another man trying to kill me fills me with dread.

Kane nods, solemn. “Yes. That man… he wasn’t from the Guild, which means he was hired by someone else. I doubt he’ll be the only one. If he was from the Guild, things would be different.”

“How do you know he’s not from your assassin’s Guild?”

“He attacked you knowing you weren’t alone in the cabin, which means there was a chance of a witness—something we’re instructed to avoid at all cost. It means he didn’t care about possible witnesses. He didn’t care about the possibility of having to kill more than just his target.”

I pick at the blanket around me as I mumble, “I was a witness. Thirteen years ago I was a witness.” I don’t want to look at Kane when I say it, but my eyes are slow to meet his intense stare, and my heart skips a beat for whatever bizarre reason.

“You were a child,” he whispers. “And you weren’t supposed to be there.”

Biting the inside of my cheek, I know talking about that night thirteen years ago won’t get us anywhere. Something else hits me. “Wait. How do we know he was after me and not you? Maybe your Guild heard you wanted to kill yourself and decided to send you off.” That might be a plot in a movie, but hey, it’s a possibility.

“He could’ve walked right by you and went to me if I was his target, but he didn’t. He stopped when he found you. And let’s not forget when we were fighting, he tried very hard to aim his gun at you instead of me, up until the end there. His goal was you, not me. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. Besides, the Guild doesn’t care about its members, not unless they’re currently on a job. In our free time, we can do whatever we want… including kill ourselves, if that’s what we want to do.”

I don’t say anything to that. He’s right, as much as I don’t want him to be. When the two were wrestling and beating the shit out of each other, the newcomer really tried his best to aim that gun in my direction and pull the trigger.

Kane sighs, and as a result his wide shoulders go up and down once. “We’ll need to prepare for another attempt on your life. That means we should both stay awake tonight just in case another shows up. I don’t think any would dare come in the daylight; any hitman worth their bullets would stick to the cover of night.”

“Okay,” I mutter. Can’t say I’m excited about the prospect of staying up tonight, but his logic makes sense. Plus, he knows more about this shit than I do. He can take the lead.

How sad is it that my life is basically in Kane’s hands a second time?

“Listen,” Kane says, drawing my attention back to him. “Everything aside, I meant what I told you last night. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. If they want to, they’ll have to go through me—and no one has ever been able to go through me.”

I know he’s trying to be comforting, but the current situation is anything but.

He leans forward on the recliner, resting his forearms on his knees. “We do need to discuss a few things, such as who knew you’d be here over the holiday. We won’t be able to leave the cabin until the storm subsides and the roads are clear, so it’ll be a while, but once we do, it’ll be smart to confront the one sending these men to you and end the matter for good.”

Kill . He means it’ll be smart to kill whoever’s responsible.

When I don’t say a word, he asks me, “So who knew Holly fucking Cooper was coming to this cabin in the middle of nowhere?”

I think about it. “No one.” The look he gives me tells me he doesn’t believe it, which makes me say, “I don’t have friends I tell all my plans to, and you know that I don’t have any family anymore. My grandparents are all dead and I have no siblings. It’s literally just me.”

He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, like I’m irritating him or something. “Think harder. There has to be someone. Hitmen don’t just pop up out of nowhere like daisies. We’re sent by someone every single time. Someone had to have known you were coming to this cabin specifically.”

I frown as I run my hands through my hair. “No! There’s no one—” I pause, and it’s that pause that clues Kane into the fact that a person did in fact just pop into my head. “Well, I guess there is one, but there’s no way he’d hire assassins to kill me.”

Kane’s interest is plain on his face. “Who?”

“Uh, his name is Howard Giles. He’s been my guardian for the last thirteen years, ran Cooper Enterprises until I was old enough. I told him I was going away for the holiday, but I didn’t tell him this cabin specifically.”

“Maybe he bugged your devices and knew what you were doing while you were doing it.”

Shaking my head once, I say, “No. There’s no way. We might not always see eye-to-eye, but he took good care of me. And, you know, if he wanted me dead so he could run the company again, why wouldn’t he have hired assassins five years ago when I turned eighteen? It doesn’t make sense to do it now.”

“It could be he wanted to wait until a decent amount of time passed so it wouldn’t look fishy and fingers wouldn’t automatically point at him,” Kane offers up an explanation, and as much as I hate to admit it, it makes sense.

But… no. I just can’t believe Howard is capable of something like this. I mean, if Howard is the one behind this, then…

My world spins, and I suddenly feel like throwing up the bar I just finished eating. “If it’s Howard… do you think he’s the one who hired you to kill my parents?” If this is true, then the last thirteen years of my life were all lies.

“I’m not privy to that information, but it would make sense. Cooper Enterprises is huge, and a man with ambition can be a dangerous thing. People have killed for less. I suppose if another hitman comes, we should do everything in our power to restrain him so we can ask. Not working for the Guild, he should know a lot more about his employer.”

So our plan is now to take the assassin alive so we can interrogate him. Just a normal day here in this stupid cabin.

I’m slow in swinging my legs off the bed, and I gingerly place them on the floor. My fingers curl around the metal edge of the pull-out. Nothing I do can change the uneasy feeling that nestled deep within my gut the moment I thought about Howard.

Did I live with the man who ordered my parents’ hit for thirteen years? Was my rage at Kane completely misguided? If it’s true, if it’s Howard… he’s the one I should’ve been training to kill, not the man sitting a few feet away.

Kane is the weapon, after all, nothing more. He’s the bullet in the gun. He needs someone to point the gun and shoot.

“You all right?” Kane asks quietly. “You look like you want to be sick.”

I smile, but it’s bitter and sad, not a true smile at all. “If it’s Howard, then… then I really have nobody. I have no thing. If it’s him, I spent all this time hating you when I should’ve hated him. He was right there for thirteen years, I could’ve—”

“You didn’t know, and we still don’t know for sure, so let’s not jump to conclusions until we have proof.”

I want to believe him. I want to hope for another man or woman at the heart of this, but the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am, the more depressed I get. My heart feels tight in my chest, the possible betrayal like a knife digging into me, piercing me in a way nothing else could. It’s a heavy block in my chest, a weight that makes it hard to breathe.

I think what’s left of my heart is breaking.