Caped and Dangerous - Isabel Jordan Page 0,40

Rio was still groaning and looked uncomfortable as hell, his color was getting better. His lips were no longer blue and she was pretty sure that…

Tink. Tink.

Yep. Both bullets had just been pulled from his body and were now sitting in a small puddle of bloody goop on Rio’s eco-friendly bamboo floors.

Holy. Fuck.

Greer couldn’t even bring herself to blink as she watched Rio’s wounds start to knit themselves back together. And when he took a deep breath, like he’d been underwater for way too long and had just surfaced, Greer sucked in an equally deep sympathy breath right along with him.

After another twenty seconds (Greer knew it was exactly twenty seconds because she was counting every breath Rio took in that time), Bryn pulled her hands away and popped her eyes open to look down at him.

“Oh my God,” she said, looking and sounding as shocked as Greer felt. “I did it! I healed him!”

Greer couldn’t even nod. She was still too dazed. “You did. You really did. Kid, that’s the power you’ve been working on?”

“I mean…yeah…but I hadn’t tried anything like this yet. I healed a couple of bruises and scrapes I got while training last week, and I fixed a dog’s leg—he got hit by a car—at the animal shelter. I was going to try and fix your knee next, but…” she trailed off, gesturing to Rio, who was now looking up at her with wide, awed eyes.

He propped himself up on his elbows and Greer couldn’t hold in a sob of relief. This was real. He was really OK.

Rio cleared his throat and said, “Nightingale.”

Greer frowned in confusion, but Bryn’s face fell. “Oh, shit,” she said, her voice thick with distress. “I messed him up, didn’t I? I must have fried his brains or something. I knew I should’ve practiced on more dogs first.”

Rio closed his eyes and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “No, dumbass, you didn’t fry my brains. I said Nightingale. That’s you. It’s your superhero name. Like Florence Nightingale? The social reformer and founder of nursing? Plus, it’s a pretty bird, so I thought you’d like that angle, too.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, a second later, once it really sank in, she added, “Oh, that’s so much better than Plan B!”

Greer couldn’t help but bark out a laugh. “It’s definitely better than Plan B. You earned it, kid. You did good. Really good. And I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. You’re going to be a great superhero.”

And with that, Greer yanked the kid in for a hug.

“But I thought you didn’t hug,” she said on a wheeze as Greer squished the air out of her lungs.

“I do today.”

“This is really heartwarming and all,” Rio said, “but now that the crisis is over, can we talk about how we’re going to get even with the fucker who just shot me?”

Greer pulled away from Bryn and met Rio’s gaze. “Oh, hell yeah. This all ends today. The genetic engineering, the evil plots, the crazy gunmen on the loose…I’m over it.

And I know exactly what to do next.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

WHEN GREER LET herself into his penthouse and slammed him up against the wall this time, Killian was pretty sure he wouldn’t be getting the same happy ending he got last time.

“Talk,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

He glanced down and frowned. “You’re covered in blood. Were you hurt? What the hell—”

She shifted her hold to his throat and tightened her grip enough to make him uncomfortable, but not enough to keep him from talking. “It’s not my blood. It’s Rio’s. He almost died tonight because of you. Because of what you’ve been doing.”

“Declan?” he asked. “Declan came after Rio?”

“Yeah,” she spit back at him. “He did. And I couldn’t keep him safe because I had no idea what the fuck was going on. Like an idiot, I had him tracking down an escaped lunatic from some kind of sick, demented chemistry experiment.”

Killian swallowed hard. Well, as hard as he could with her hand around his throat. “I wanted to tell you. I tried to tell you this morning.”

She laughed, but it was a mockery of her usual laugh. Her real laugh. “Maybe you were hoping to get me into bed one more time before I found out the truth. Is that it?”

Now that pissed him off. “It was never about that with us. Never. I love—”

Her grip tightened, this time choking off his declaration along with his air supply.

“Don’t you say that,” she said,