Designed for Murder (Killer Style) (15 page)

The rope gave before the words came.

She flexed her fingers as she looked up at him, an emotion he didn’t understand watering her eyes. “I told you to stay away, but you came anyway.”

“I don’t always follow directions.” He flipped the knife closed and stuffed it back in the hidden pocket, needing to do something with his hands that didn’t involve touching her. He was afraid if he did, he’d never let go. “Somebody told me I should try being impulsive sometimes.”

“I’m glad.” The tears spilled over. “You saved me.”

It was too much. He couldn’t stop himself. If he never let go again, so be it. Carlos stood, pulling Mika up with him and gathering her in his arms. It could have just been coming down off the adrenaline rush or that connection between them wouldn’t go away no matter how hard he fought it, but she wrapped her arms tight around his waist and buried her face in his chest.

He couldn’t offer the words, but he could give her this. He could be her constant.

“I hate to interrupt, folks.” A paramedic popped up in his peripheral vision. “But you’re bleeding profusely, sir, and we need to get you checked out right away.”

Mika jumped back. “Oh my God, you’re hurt.”

“And so are you, ma’am. If you’ll go with this paramedic here.” He pointed at a woman in a blue uniform carrying what looked like a plastic toolbox the size of a house. “We’ll get you both straightened right out.”

Just the idea of being separated from Mika was like someone taking a buzz saw to his sternum and ripping out his still-beating heart. “No, I’m not leaving—”

“Carlos.” She put her hand on his arm and smiled up at him, tears still fresh in her eyes. “It’s okay. Let me go.”

He didn’t miss the implication in her words. She didn’t just mean for him to let her go to the hospital. She meant for him to let her go for good.

“It’s for the best,” the paramedic said.

But it couldn’t be, not if that meant losing Mika.

Chapter Sixteen

“It’s not about the dress you wear, but the life you lead in the dress.”

—Diana Vreeland

F
lat on his stoma
ch, his silver knight costume sliced up the back and his bare ass up in the air, Carlos gritted his teeth at the sharp pain of the needle repeatedly piercing his skin. Mika was here somewhere, but they wouldn’t let him see her, insisting that he had to get his butt stitched up first.

“Can’t you sew faster?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.

The doctor shook his head. “Not unless you want some kind of gnarly scar where the bullet grazed you.”

“It’s my ass; I don’t care what in the hell it looks like. I need to get out there.”

He had to find Mika before she left. He hadn’t gotten to apologize. He hadn’t gotten to tell her he loved her. If she walked out those hospital doors before he got a chance to talk to her, there was a good chance he’d never get to again.

Fuck this. His ass would heal with or without stitches.

Ignoring the doctor’s protests, he got off the emergency room bed. The needle hanging from the unfinished stitch pinched his butt cheek with each step, and his whole ass burned as the topical numbing medicine wore off, but he didn’t care. He had to find Mika.

P
owered by anxiety and frustration, Mika completed her billionth lap around the hospital’s emergency department waiting room and glared at the woman sitting behind the admitting desk who’d already refused three times to provide an update on Carlos. The last time she’d asked, the woman had arched one perfectly waxed eyebrow in a non-verbal
fuck you
and then proceeded to ignore Mika.

“Hospital waiting rooms are hell on earth, honey, but poking the devil doesn’t make it any better.” An old woman sitting in the first row of uncomfortable seats waved a knitting needle at Mika. “You’d better sit down before that woman up and kicks you out of here.”

Her feet froze to the linoleum floor and she gulped. “Do you think she would?” She had to be there when Carlos came out.

The old woman snorted. “Do pigeons always shit on a nice clean car?”

Determined not to miss Carlos, Mika took the seat next to the woman and settled in for a long wait. The paramedic had assured her during the ride to the hospital that Carlos’s gunshot wound wasn’t serious, but what if he’d been wrong? Her hand flew to her throat as she swallowed past the emotion squeezing her throat closed at the thought.

“No use trying to cover it up, honey.” The woman let out a low whistle. “Those marks around your neck aren’t going away anytime soon. What in the world happened to you?”

Where did she start? Feeny’s? The muggings? Those last moments when she thought she was going to die and all she could think about was Carlos? The vision of him as her white knight was what had lessened the terror of those last few moments.

They’d pushed each other away enough. It was past time they pulled themselves together.

“Forgive me, dear,” the woman said as she patted Mika’s knee. “You don’t have to tell me what happened if you don’t want.”

“It’s okay—at least it will be,” Mika said, confident her happily-ever-after would be walking through the emergency department doors at any moment. “It all started when I fell in love with a man who asked me to dance.”

A
hospital volunteer stood beside a goodie cart at the nurses’ station, her eyes wide with shock as she took in Carlos’s surgically shredded knight costume. The nurse sitting behind the intake desk just shook her head as if love-crazed men walking around in a LARPing knight’s costume with their bare ass hanging out the back was par for the course.

“Mika Ito. Do you know what room?” he asked.

“She’s been released,” the nurse said.

He didn’t think. He just ran, sprinting past the curtained-off treatment areas and through the automatic doors leading to the waiting room. It was filled with people. Worried moms holding young children on their laps. Tired men who looked like they’d been sitting in the hard plastic chairs for most of their lives. Older people who knew enough about hospitals to bring their knitting with them. Then he spotted her halfway between the water fountain and the exit.

“Mika, wait,” he yelled, drawing everyone’s attention his way—not that they could miss him in a silver knight costume split up the back. He felt like an ass, but he only cared about one person in this room: Mika. “I was wrong.”

She shook her head. “No one imagined Josh—”

“Not about the case. About you. About us. About the future we could have together.” He ignored the giggles and whispering from the crowd and focused on Mika, the woman he couldn’t let walk out that door. “For the past year, I’ve been running away from anyone and anything that mattered to me because I couldn’t face losing everything all over again—until I met you. I fought it so hard, but I can’t keep my distance from you. I thought I had to push you away to save you. That had been so easy to do with everything and everyone else, but I couldn’t—can’t—do that with you. Love doesn’t work that way. You said back at the park that I saved your life, but really you saved me. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to show you how much I love you. You are my heaven.”

“We need to stop hurting ourselves for past sins,” she whispered, her quiet words easily carrying across the suddenly silent waiting room.

The ache in her voice tore him to shreds. “I know and I’m trying. With your help, I believe I can—we can.” Any more words failed him as soon as he saw the tears shining in her eyes, and he promised himself right then and there that these would be the last tears she ever shed because of him.

“Carlos—”

“No.” He held up his hand. “Let me finish. Please.”

He weaved his way through the chairs to her side. She’d ditched the white wig and Silver Queen costume and stood in oversize hospital scrubs the nurses must have given her to replace her torn clothing. A weary exhaustion permeated the air around her, but there was something else, too. Hope.

He reached out and pulled her into his arms, marveling at how their bodies fit perfectly together.

She looked up at him and the world stopped spinning. There was only the two of them, and it always would be, and that was more than enough. “The stakes are pretty high here.”

“But so is the reward,
mi cielo
.” Love. Family. Forever. It was everything he’d lost hope of ever having until Mika had come into his life.

He brushed his lips across hers. “Now tell me you love me, too.”

“You’re pushy,” she teased.

“No, I’m a guy whose ass is hanging out of a silver knight’s costume in front of an entire room full of strangers because I knew if you made it out those doors I might never see you again.”

She raised herself up on her tiptoes, her body sliding up his and igniting all sorts of thoughts that a man in a paper gown shouldn’t be having. “And that would be bad?” she asked, her lips just inches from his.

“That would be hell on earth.”

He’d been through that already; he’d never turn his back on his heaven again. Neither of them was perfect, but they were perfect together.

“I love you,” she said.

It was all he needed to hear. It was all he
ever
needed to hear. He kissed her with every bit of love he had in him as the waiting room erupted into whoops and hollers of appreciation.

Epilogue

“Dress to please yourself.”

—Iris Apfel

Six months later…

C
arlos blocked the glare of the setting sun with one hand and hustled across the street toward the neon sign reading:
Feeny’s Bar
. He was late meeting Mika, but with any luck she’d already ordered him a beer and saved him a seat.

A couple of neighborhood guys walked out just as he reached for the door. They gave Carlos’s plain black T-shirt and jeans a quick once-over.

“Watch out,” one of the men said. “Nothing but a bunch of weirdos in there tonight.”

“It’s okay.” Carlos grinned. “I’m one of the weirdos.”

He laughed at the man’s shocked expression and walked inside the dimly lit bar. Feeny’s was packed with knights and elves, trolls and ogres, knights and warrior princesses. Ever since Mika’s Silver Queen court had discovered the hole-in-the-wall bar, the place was packed every Sunday night with costumed clientele. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, the owner had special ordered mead from a local brewery for the post-LARPing crowd. But Carlos wasn’t interested in any of the mead-guzzling crowd. He was on the hunt for a silver queen.

Suddenly, a pair of arms wrapped around his waist from behind and the all-too-familiar scent of Mika’s spicy perfume teased him. “You, sir, are underdressed,” Mika said against his ear.

“Sorry about that.” He pulled away long enough to turn around so he could face her in all of her Silver Queen glory. “The stakeout went longer than expected.”

“You’ll be forgiven, since you look so damn good in those pants.” Her hands wandered down his back to cup his ass.

He dipped his head and brushed a kiss across her lips, wishing like hell they weren’t in a crowded bar right now. “I look even better out of them.”

“Believe me, I know.” Mika looked up at him through her thick eyelashes and stepped closer so that there wasn’t a millimeter of space between them. “I love seeing them on our bedroom floor almost as much as I love you.”

“Does that mean we can leave now?” Their apartment was only a few blocks away. He could have her naked and moaning before the Silver Queen’s court even knew she’d left the bar.

“Before we even dance?” She stuck out her bottom lip in a playful pout.

Carlos looked around at the standing-room-only area near the old-fashioned jukebox. “There’s still not a dance floor.”

“When has that ever stopped us before?” She slid her hands around to his chest and glided them up until they were clasped loosely on his shoulders. A slow song started, its power chords lifting over the constant chatter of the crowd. “I dropped my quarters in that jukebox as soon as I saw you strut in. I couldn’t help myself. You’re so much fun to tease.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to get my revenge.” Swaying to the music in the middle of a shoulder-to-shoulder group of still-costumed LARPers, Carlos lowered his head and kissed Mika like she was his heart, his salvation, and his redemption all in one—because she was. “I love you,
mi cielo
.”

She laid her head on his chest, right above his heart. “And I love you right back.”

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Avery Flynn
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