Break Me (Corrupted Hearts Book 2) Read online

  “I don’t even recognize my life,” I said, feeling lost. Everything that used to anchor me—from Granny to my daily routine—was all in flux. There was nothing I could count on, nothing steady.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” Clark soothed. It was even harder to see him in the dark, plus I didn’t have my glasses. But he was near and he held my hand, which should’ve been weird, but wasn’t. “It’s been a rough week, but it’ll get better. The point is, you’re going to be okay.”

  “Am I?” I sounded pretty pathetic and Poor Pitiful Me. Which I thought I was allowed. After all, I had been shot, for crying out loud. Wait until I told Buddy. He’d probably call me some kind of superhero and let me have a 10 percent discount.

  “Hey,” Clark said, making me look at him. I could see his eyes now, he was close enough. They were red for some reason and I thought he’d probably had a hard night, too. “You’re tough. You’ll get through and be better for it.”

  Something occurred to me then. “Clark, how’d I get out of there if I got shot in the leg?”

  He shrugged. “I carried you, obviously. Pain tolerance and blood loss isn’t your thing, not that you’ve got a lot of blood in you to lose. You were out like a light.”

  My eyes widened. “You . . . carried me?” Clark. Notorious for only caring about himself and barely able to tolerate me, had actually carried me from that building.

  “Yeah and, oh, by the way,” he dug into his pocket, “Bulldog didn’t make it, but I got this back for you.” Taking my hand, he slipped a gold ring on my finger. The One Ring. “Thought you’d want it back.”

  I stared at it dumbfounded. “Bulldog . . . didn’t make it?”

  “Sorry, Ma—I mean, China.”

  My throat grew thick, but I swallowed it down, closing my hand into a fist. The ring felt cold on my finger. “It was my fault.”

  “What was? Bulldog?”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  “Oh, did you call in the assassin squad?” he asked with heavy sarcasm.

  “Of course not,” I managed. “But—”

  “And did you tell him to run off when he should’ve stuck with us?”

  “No, but—”

  “And did you pull the trigger on the weapon that killed him?”

  “He would never have been hurt if I hadn’t got him to meet us and help me.”

  “I doubt hacking is a safe profession,” Clark said. “Especially late at night in a deserted warehouse. He knew what he was risking.”

  It felt wrong to be somewhat comforted by the logic in his words, but I couldn’t deny it.

  There was a hiss from one of the machines and I stiffened. “What was that?”

  “Just the next dose of your pain meds,” Clark said. “It’s okay.”

  “When can we leave?” I wanted my own home, my own bed, and my Star Wars pajamas. “This pillow is really thin.” And I wasn’t wearing underwear, which felt really weird. I squirmed a little.

  “Here,” Clark said, adding another pillow underneath my head. “Better?”

  “’s okay.” My eyes were heavy again, but I wasn’t ready to sleep. “Need underwear.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I pried my lids open to see Clark looking confused. “They took my underwear. I can’t sleep without underwear.” Obviously.

  He got a strange look on his face. “How about a drink of water instead?”

  Oooh. That sounded good. “Yes, please.”

  Clark stood and stepped away into the blurry part of my vision. I grew anxious. Had he left? Was I here alone in the dark? In a strange place?

  “Clark?” I called. “Did you leave?”

  “Shh, no, I’m here.”

  He was back and I let out a breath. “I thought you’d gone. You’re not going to, are you?” I didn’t want to be alone in a strange place.

  “Just getting you some water,” he said, sliding an arm behind my head and helping me sit up. The water was barely cool but it tasted like heaven.

  “Thank you,” I sighed once I’d drunk my fill. He gently lowered me back to the bed.

  “I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry.”

  I was floating in a pleasant cloud of painless lethargy, the medication doing its work. It took a few minutes for me to realize that Clark was planning on sleeping on a very uncomfortable-looking chair. Guilt hit me and I struggled through the cobwebs in my mind.

  “Don’t stay here,” I murmured. “You can’t sleep there.”

  He was up and by the bed in an instant. “It’s fine. Don’t worry. Get some rest.”

  “No . . . here.” I squirmed, moving to the side of the bed. “There’s room.”

  “China, I can’t—”

  “Shh,” I slurred. “Lo’s of room. Please.” I couldn’t bear at the moment to think that the man who’d carried me from danger should be made to sleep in a chair.

  I was too tired to keep my eyes open and felt rather than saw him climb into bed beside me. He was stiff and unrelaxing, which made me unable to sleep. Reaching over, I felt for his arm and pulled it over to rest on my abdomen.

  “Clark?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you . . . for saving me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Clark?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you bother?” It was a puzzle to me. We weren’t even friends, really. Were we?

  The arm that was merely resting on me suddenly tightened, pulling me closer. “Why the hell wouldn’t I? We’re partners, you and me.”

  His arm was warm and the solid presence of his body beside me made up for the hodgepodge of my current existence. I relaxed, and his breath brushing my hair was the last thing I remembered.

  Two days passed and I was itching to get out. I’d pestered the doctor nonstop until he’d stopped coming by when I was awake.

  Clark had made regular appearances, even bringing by Chinese food for me. And not just any Chinese food. Takeout from the only place in town I used.

  “I don’t get why you only eat Chinese from this one restaurant when there are about half a dozen better ones within a five-mile radius,” he said, cracking open his fortune cookie. “You will die alone and poorly dressed,” he read. He rolled his eyes. “Nice.” He crumpled up the slip of paper and popped the cookie in his mouth.

  “That wasn’t chicken,” I read from my fortune. I stopped, looking up at Clark with wide eyes. “You don’t think—”

  He burst out laughing. “Now I know why you like this place. That was priceless.”

  He refused to let me have my laptop, saying that he didn’t trust the network where we were staying, which meant I was left to watch television all afternoon. At least I found reruns of Supernatural.

  “So I have news,” he said the next afternoon as he unwrapped a sub sandwich for me. I’d been scouring the channels for any updates on Jackson, but once he’d been arrested, they’d lost interest in the story. “But I don’t want you to get all worked up.”

  “What happened? Is Jackson all right?”

  “He’s still in custody,” he said, “They’re not allowing him to see his lawyers.”

  “They have to let him see his lawyers,” I argued, opening the sub and removing the lettuce. “It’s a constitutional right.”

  “If he’d been charged, but he hasn’t been charged with anything. They took him into custody, but are requiring him to cooperate based on FISA.”

  “FISA?” I paused in dissecting my sandwich.

  “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he clarified. “It’s basically a web of laws that’s trapped him into complying with what they tell him to do, most specifically in the area of surveillance.”

  “And if he doesn’t cooperate, they’ll accuse him of aiding terrorists and seize Cysnet.” Something else to worry about.

  “Looks like it.” He watched me resume putting my sandwich back together. “What are you doing?” />
  “They never assemble it correctly,” I said. “The cheese should go first, then the meat, then the tomato and the lettuce should be last. They put the tomato on top, which lets the bread become soggy. If they’d just put the lettuce on top of the tomato, it would be a barrier to the juice from the tomato and the bread would stay nice and dry.”

  He just looked at me, slowly chewing a bite from his own sandwich.

  “I don’t like soggy bread.” Duh. I mean, who did? Ick. “So what do we do now?”

  “Are you going to tell me what was on that thumb drive?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “I would, Clark, I really would . . .”

  “But?”

  “But, it’s dangerous.” And I wasn’t exactly appreciative that I even knew what was on it.

  “Don’t you know?” Clark said, his lips twisting in a half smile. “I laugh in the face of danger. Bwahahaha!”

  I laughed in spite of myself and his smile widened. “Yes, so I’ve heard.” My smiled faded. “But in all seriousness, I’d rather wait. I don’t want to tell you unless I absolutely have no other choice.” It was hard to say that. Part of me wanted to share what I’d found, just so I wasn’t the only one carrying the knowledge. But Clark had risked his life to save me when he’d been outnumbered and outgunned. Which reminded me . . .

  “Did you get anywhere on finding out who you killed the other night?”

  He shook his head and took another bite of his sandwich. “The place was clean when I went back. Even Bulldog’s body was gone.”

  I winced, that wound still fresh, and a flicker of regret crossed Clark’s expression.

  “How’s your leg?” he asked, in an obvious attempt to change the subject. “Your first war wound. It’s a badge of honor.”

  “It’s better than yesterday,” I said, deciding not to go into the facts that a) I hadn’t been in a war when I was shot and b) that it was hardly honorable to get shot, pass out, and have to have your partner carry you to safety. “So can we leave today? Please?”

  “Yeah, I think so. The doc says as long as you take it easy, you should be past the danger zone of infection.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Any news on Lu?”

  “Nope. He appears to have disappeared. The State Department thinks he’s gone back to China.”

  “That’s a relief. Though it’s a little odd he’d leave without pursuing that whole thing with me.” He said he’d “be in touch.” I was more than grateful he’d moved on, hopefully thinking I knew nothing after all.

  “Yeah. It is.” Clark didn’t say anything more and we finished our sandwiches before he left to see about getting me clothes to go home in. The ones I’d worn were blood-spattered and shredded.

  “How’s this?” he asked when he returned, holding up a cotton dress in a floral print.

  “It looks like something out of the 1989 Laura Ashley catalogue,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers. This is all they had in your size. You can change when you get home.”

  Gingerly, I took it. “Is it new? Has someone already worn it? Did they wash it afterwards?”

  “Again, let your OCD kick in when you get home. You do want to get home, don’t you?”

  He had a point and turned his back while I maneuvered the dress over my head, but then I had problems trying to pull it the rest of the way down. I was unable to stand on my own, so the dress was caught at my waist.

  “Are you done yet?”

  “I . . . almost. I just . . . can’t . . .” Trying to wiggle from one hip to the other, the fabric moved by fractions of inches over my rear.

  Clark turned around and I squealed, trying to cover the parts of me that still didn’t have underwear. “Don’t look!” I reprimanded him. “Turn around.”

  “Please. To quote one of the best lines ever, ‘If you’ve got something I haven’t seen before, I’ll throw a dollar at it.’”

  As I was trying to puzzle out what that quote was from, he’d lifted me and tugged the dress into place down my thighs to my knees.

  “Thank you,” I said grudgingly. “Though you could’ve been more of a gentleman and closed your eyes.”

  Clark stopped and our gazes caught. His eyes had a wicked gleam in them. “I never said I was a gentleman.”

  The huskiness in his voice and the way he held me against him made my breath hitch and my heart skip a beat. His hand was still on my thigh and the heat from his touch seared through the fabric to imprint itself on my skin.

  Time bubbled and expanded, freezing everything . . . then it suddenly snapped back into focus. Heat flooded my neck and I pushed his hand off my leg and looked away. I was absolutely clueless as to what to say, or to even understand what had just happened. My hands fluttered at my hair, wanting to tighten a nonexistent ponytail. I settled for shoving my glasses up my nose instead.

  “I’ll get the crutches,” he said, then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him.

  I took the next few minutes to get my bearings. It had to be the medication, playing tricks on my perception. Clark was being helpful and sweet—something I should be grateful for, considering how I’d seen him behave before. He was my partner and . . . my friend. Yes, if I were being honest, he was my friend, too. I shouldn’t read too much into something I didn’t even understand.

  Clark returned after a few minutes and it was as though nothing had happened. He adjusted the crutches for my height and helped me onto them, then grabbed my plastic bag of stuff and my phone.

  He opened the door and waited. I just looked at him.

  “Are you coming?” he asked. “They’re not self-propelled, you know.”

  “I, ah, I’ve never had crutches before,” I confessed. “How do you work them?”

  “Seriously. You’ve never had crutches before?”

  “No. Crutches would imply that I’d broken or sprained something doing an athletic activity. The closest time I’ve come to needing crutches was when I twisted an ankle falling down the stairs.”

  “How did you fall down the stairs?” he asked.

  “Well, I was carrying a laptop at the time, which I did a lot. But this time Oslo had left out a baseball bat at the top of the stairs and I didn’t see it.” I’d escaped with only a twisted ankle. The laptop hadn’t been so lucky. I’d been really angry at Oslo after that.

  “You’re lucky that was your worst injury,” Clark said. “People die falling down stairs.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I told Oslo, who just sneered and told me to watch where I was walking. But I got him back.”

  “How?”

  “I waited until the night before he had a big paper due, then switched his keyboard format to DVORAK rather than QWERTY. It typed gibberish and he had no idea why. He spent hours trying to figure it out and refused to ask me. Finally, he had to go to an all-night computer lab to type his paper. He got home about six in the morning and had to turn around and go right to school.”

  Clark chuckled. “Not bad for a . . . how old were you?”

  “Eight.”

  He shook his head and took the crutches from me, making sure I was supported against the bed before moving away. “Okay, here’s the general idea.”

  The next ten minutes were spent learning the finer points of how to move about without falling down. I would’ve wiped out—twice—if Clark hadn’t caught me.

  “I’m not very . . . coordinated,” I said after the second near mishap.

  “No kidding.”

  Finally, I had enough of a hang of it to feel somewhat confident enough to leave the room. Clark stuck close by me as we made our slow and painful way to the front door. Dr. Jay met us at the door and wished me well. When I passed him, I heard him speak in an undertone to Clark.

  “We’re even now. My debt is paid. Don’t come back.”

  “You need to work on your bedside manner, doc,” Clark shot back.

  I pretended not to hear and kept slowly moving forward. Clark a
ppeared at my elbow, watching to make sure none of the cracks in the pavement tripped me up.

  It was a relief to get into the car and I settled back, closing my eyes. That had been more exhausting than I thought it would be. Clark got in the driver’s seat and I dozed while he drove me home.

  I had to repeat the process when we pulled into my driveway; the awkwardness of getting the crutches in place and trying to maneuver to the front door made me feel about as natural as a giraffe riding a bike. Clark had made it look so easy.

  “Surprise!”

  I slipped and fell back, my heart lodging in my throat as I braced for my fall. But Clark was there yet again, catching me.

  Mia stared in shock, a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God! Aunt Chi! What happened? Oh no!” She ran toward me, helping Clark get me inside and onto the sofa.

  “I think you about gave me a heart attack,” I said, breathless. My heart was pounding like I’d just run the Kentucky Derby. “What are you doing here? I thought you were staying home?”

  “I was worried about you,” she fretted, her pretty face creased in a frown as she sat cross-legged next to me. “I hadn’t heard from you and social media was quiet, so I told Dad I wanted to come back. He took me to the airport and I flew in last night.” She glanced at Clark. “What are you doing here, asshat?”

  “Mia!” I admonished as Clark raised a dark eyebrow, but he interrupted me.

  “It’s okay. I’ve been called worse.”

  Still, it embarrassed me and I shot Mia a look. To her credit, she looked abashed. “What happened, Aunt Chi? What did you do to your leg?”

  Should I tell her I’d been shot? As if he could read my thoughts, Clark caught my eye and said, “It was my fault. Was practicing throwing knives and didn’t mind the perimeter well enough. Your aunt got nicked.”

  “Oh my God, you stabbed her?” She sounded more outraged than when she’d gotten a 99.9 percent on her calculus exam. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “It was an accident,” I said, grateful that Clark had been more quick thinking than I had been. “I was in the wrong place. My own stupid fault.”