Betrayed (6 page)

ALL TOM HAD SEEN WAS THE KNIFE.
One glimpse of that faint glint of light reflecting off that shiny, jagged blade and he had launched off of his scraped-up, aching, exhausted feet and aimed for the bastard's wrist.

There had been no time to consider the absolute absurdity of it. No time to wonder how he could possibly be opening his own front door on another deadly crisis—another millisecond between life and death after the entire harrowing nightmare he and Natasha had just returned from in the Caymans.

They'd finally found their way home from Loki's endless succession of horrors and death traps, and all Tom had wanted to do when he'd opened that door was to sit in a chair for at least three legitimately calm minutes. Just three minutes before he voluntarily reentered hell. Three minutes of holding his beautiful daughter. Three minutes of sitting at a simple wooden dining table with Natasha instead of in a torture chamber or a prison cell or even a turbulent flight back to the States. Three minutes to take a look around that table and see the woman he'd fallen in love with safe at home and her daughter and his daughter seated together like sisters. A family. That's what they could have and
should
have been building right there in that house. That's what he had so hoped to come home to. An honest-to-goodness family. But that was utterly impossible as long as one particular family member continued to breathe.

Tom had honestly thought he might have found three decent minutes to dream about a new future instead of obsessing over his deadly and tiresome past, but one glimpse of that knife and he knew….

To expect three minutes of his life without Loki was to expect too much.

So there had been no time to wonder whether or not his lifesaving reflexes would kick in. The fact was, they already had. Tom was on lifesaving autopilot at this point. As was Natasha. So neither one of them had thought twice when they opened the door and saw a man in black crushing one of their daughters to the floor and raising a knife in the air for a quick and brutal kill. They had simply reacted.

Tom took to the air and aimed for the knife, terrified to even know who he was trying to save. Was it Gaia trapped under the man's legs? Was it Tatiana? If Tom and Natasha had opened that door three seconds later, would they have walked in to find one of their children stabbed to death, lying in a pool of blood with a knife through her chest? It was nothing short of a miracle that they'd walked in when they had. But that made sense, Tom supposed. He knew that it would take more than a few miracles to defeat Loki. He'd realized that years ago.

He rushed forward and grabbed onto the man's wrist from behind, knocking the knife from his hand and ramming his shoulder straight into the center of the man's spine, forcing an excruciating howl out of him as he knocked him against some object he couldn't see and rolled him flat against the floor.

Natasha ran in right behind Tom and jumped down to the girl's side. Tom shot a glance at to Natasha and saw her shoulders slump forward. He couldn't even tell if her gesture had been one of relief or anguish. He looked down to the girl's face, and he realized…it was Tatiana he had saved, not Gaia. “Is she all right?” Tom called to Natasha, grabbing onto the assailant's wrist and twisting his arm painfully behind his back.

Natasha didn't waste a moment. She frisked her daughter for potential injuries and then pressed her fingers to her neck. “No wounds,” she announced, sounding on the verge of tears as the words fell quickly from her lips. “She's
alive,
Tom. She's out cold, but she is definitely alive.”

Tom breathed an internal sigh of tremendous relief. He immediately understood what must have happened. The mystery object that the man had hit wasn't an object at all. It was Tatiana's head. That was why she was out cold. The bastard's knee must have smacked straight into her chin as Tom tackled him off her. Out cold but alive.
Miracle number two.

Tom turned back to Loki's hired dummy and drove his face into the cold wood floor. “You hear that, you son of a bitch? She's alive. You screwed it up. You know what Loki does to people who screw things up? It's a hell of a lot worse than what you were going to do to her. I can't wait to—”

Tom should have known better than to gloat. It wasn't even like him. He was just so utterly at his wits' end with Loki and every one of his brainless, spineless, reptilian henchmen. But one tiny moment of hubris and he hadn't seen the punch coming. Or was it a kick?

Somehow the hooded thug had managed to twist his entire body over and kick Tom in the face, whipping his head against the corner of the dining table. The sting was like nothing Tom had encountered in years of service to his country.

“Tom?” Natasha shouted. “Are you all right?”

A vicious wave of vertigo crashed over Tom's head, spinning the entire room into circles within circles. He clutched at his wound and tried to shake out the roller-coaster ride in his brain. “I can't quite…”

The man in black took this chance to leap up from the floor and slip away from Tom. Tom swiped out his arm to catch the thug, but he missed by a mile, still trying to get his bearings straight. He could see Natasha rising to her feet through his wavy fish-tank vision. She whipped her gun out from inside her coat.

“Freeze,”
she hollered, double gripping the gun and thrusting her arms forward. But the thug was no slug. Not by a long shot. Tom watched in utter shock as he leapt high up into the air and snapped his leg forward with a pinpoint flying kick straight into Natasha's face. The gun flew from her hands as she went rocketing backward, falling headfirst into a coffee table and shattering every glass-and porcelain-framed picture on the table.

Tom snapped to attention instantly, jumping to his feet. Dizziness gone. Confusion gone. There was no way one of Loki's pathetic clansmen was going to overpower two of the CIA's top agents. He clamped his hand around his gun and whipped it forward, targeting the man's shoulder to put him out of commission so he could cuff him for questioning. But the thug was moving too fast.

Tom squeezed off three quick shots, but the man had already leapt and rolled under the dining table. Tom dropped to one knee and tried to spot him under the table, but he was already moving again. He shot out from under the table and rolled for the dark hallway that led to the bedrooms.

“You okay?” Tom double-checked with Natasha as he started for the hallway.

“I'm
fine,
” she announced, clearly furious with herself for letting her daughter's attempted murderer take her down and get away.

Get used to it, Natasha,
Tom thought.
Trust me, I know the feeling, and it doesn't get any better. You just have to get back up and fight him. Again, and again, and again
…

Natasha made a move for the hallway, but Tom shook her out of her rash need for instant vengeance. “No, stay here,” he insisted. “You stay here and protect your daughter. I've got him.”

Stay here and protect your daughter.
Such simple advice. Such an obvious prescription for safety. Why was it so easy to see when it was someone
else?
When the hell was Tom going to come to his senses and take his own advice? Stop falling into every one of Loki's wild-goose chases and just stick by his daughter at all times?

This time it will be different,
he swore to himself as he streaked down the hall.
This time I'm going to stick by Gaia and never leave her side again. That is that.

But that thought only led to a far more pressing question he hadn't yet considered in all the chaos.
Gaia.
Where the hell was Gaia?

The
last two years have made me despise hospitals. I mean, I'm sure everyone despises hospitals, but I doubt they had to go through what I did every time I set foot in St. Vincent's. So to speak.

Three words:
monthly spinal tap.

Monthly.
I know of no pain equal to that of a spinal tap…because there is none. Honestly, it had reached the point where all I had to do was come near a hospital hallway and my back and limbs would literally start to throb with pain. It was the ultimate in behavior modification. I never wanted to go within thirty yards of another medical institution. That's why I insisted on doing most of my physical therapy at home. Anything to avoid another trip to the hospital.

But that all changed today. As of today, I have hereby established an overwhelming affinity for hospitals. I honestly felt like kissing the walls of St. Vincent's, and I don't really care how sick that sounds. Because today, something damn near glorious occurred in that pasty and depressing white room. And yes, a part of me feels guilty as all hell for saying that, given the nightmare Heather has been through. But the glorious might never have happened otherwise. Heather would never have been so completely honest if it weren't for what she'd been through, and then she never would have brought everything out in the open.

Maybe all those butt-annoying people who used to tell me that “something good always comes from a tragedy” weren't as full of crap as I thought they were. I mean, now that I'm walking again, I can guarantee those people that walking beats the chair, hands down, but still, I guess sometimes it takes a tragedy for something to change for the better. Sometimes it takes a tragedy for the truth to come out.

Today, sitting across from Gaia in that hospital room, I finally saw the truth. I saw it in her eyes. And I heard it in Heather's story. I
felt
it.

Gaia is still in love with me. She still loves me. She never stopped loving me.

This whole treating-me-like–a-plague thing…is all about her uncle. I know it now. After hearing everything Heather had to say and watching the way Gaia looked at me, I'm positive. She's just being
Gaia.
She's playing the goddamned hero again. She's been staying away from me to protect me from him, not because she hates my guts, but because they are going after anyone who's even remotely close to her.

I bet Gaia's uncle was behind my shooting, too. He's obviously capable of a hell of a lot worse. He was probably the one who sent that gun-toting asshole after me.
Of course.
That makes perfect sense. That's when Gaia turned on me, right out of the freaking clear blue sky. Right after she'd seen me get shot at. No, I should rephrase that.

Right after her uncle tried to kill me.

And that's when I lost her.

Who
is
this guy? Gaia's uncle. Why is he such a sick bastard? What the hell happened to him as a kid? And why hasn't the son of a bitch been locked up or just plain
put down?
After what he's done to Gaia, and to Sam, and to Heather, and to
me,
for Christ's sake. Why don't they just put him out of his misery? That's obviously the only way anyone is ever going to stop him.

I should have done it. I should have just ripped into him that day I watched him sniffing around school for Gaia. I could have ended it right there, and then Heather would have been absolutely fine and Gaia and I would
still
probably be in bed. If I ever get the chance again…I swear to God, if I ever see him again, I'm not going to hesitate. I don't know what I'll do to him, but I guarantee he won't be standing when I'm done.

But I'll have to deal with that
then.
And I'll be back to visit Heather in the hospital tomorrow and every day after that. And I'll do whatever I can for her, whenever she needs it. But right now…Right at this very moment, I'm not thinking about tomorrow or the next day. Right now, all I'm thinking about is Gaia's gorgeous profile set against the ugly white walls of a hospital hallway. And what a complete idiot I've been. I was right not to trust her freakish change of heart in the first place. The world
isn't
that cruel. People
can't
fall out of love with you in fifteen minutes.

It's really no different than what happened with my legs. Here I was walking around on crutches for I don't even know how many extra days, maybe even weeks, thinking I couldn't use my legs. Like I was glued to the ground without my crutches or something. But it turned out I wasn't really glued to the ground at all. My legs were just standing there, waiting for me to fix my screwed-up head, waiting for me to dump all my subconscious fears and take control. And it's the same with Gaia. I've been sitting here moping around, believing all the fearful voices in my head telling me I'd lost her, telling me I'd never even had her in the first place. But the truth is, she's been there the whole time. I just need to dump my fears and go back to my instincts. That's what I have to do.

Because if there's one thing I've learned after two years in that chair and watching Heather laid out on that hospital bed, it's that there is no time in this life to listen to those fearful voices. I need to move forward, and Gaia is coming with me. I will not stay glued to the ground. That is not going to happen.