Patrick had been the first to fall, with one bullet through the head. Dante had pulled out his Glock as he took several bullets from the shooter at close range, shielding Patrick with his larger body until he’d managed to get a kill shot in on the asshole shooter. At the time, Dante hadn’t realized it was already too late for Patrick. The bullet through the head had killed his partner instantly. Luckily, the few civilians who had been hanging around on the street during the early morning hours had scattered, leaving Dante the only one injured—Patrick and the suspect both dead.
He’d been wearing his vest, but the close-range shots had caused Dante some blunt-force trauma. However, it had saved his life, leaving him with only some cracked ribs instead of bullets through his chest. The shot to his face hadn’t entered his skull, but he did have a nasty wound to his right cheek that extended up to his temple. The bullet to his right leg had passed through the flesh of his thigh, putting him in surgery after the incident, but it hadn’t shattered the bone. The one to his left arm had just been a graze.
Lucky bastard!
Dante could almost hear his partner’s voice saying those exact words to him jokingly, but he was feeling far from fortunate at the moment. He’d been injured badly enough to spend a week in the hospital, unable to attend Patrick’s funeral, unable to say a final good-bye to his best friend. Karen and Ben had visited him after his surgery, Patrick’s wife tearfully telling him how glad Patrick would have been that Dante had survived, and actually thanking him for trying to protect her husband. Neither one of them blamed Dante for what had happened to their beloved husband and father, yet Dante couldn’t get past the fact that he wished it would have been him instead of his partner, that he had somehow let Patrick down by not being the one to die.
Survivor’s guilt.
That’s what the department psychologist was calling it, telling Dante it was common, considering the circumstances. That comment had made Dante want to send the little head-shrinking bastard across the room with his fist. What the hell was normal about wishing himself dead?
“You okay?” His brother Grady’s low, concerned voice came from the doorway of the small bedroom. “Need anything? We’re only about an hour out from landing. I thought I heard something crash in here.”
It was ironic that Dante and his siblings had always wanted to protect Grady—too often unsuccessfully—from being the primary target of their alcoholic, abusive father. And now Grady was the brother who was trying to take care of him. Every single one of his siblings had been at the hospital in Los Angeles, flying in as soon as they had heard that he was injured. But he was going home with Grady to his vacation home in Maine, a house Dante owned but had only seen briefly a few times since it had been constructed. Every one of the Sinclair siblings had a home on the Amesport Peninsula, but only Grady had actually made his house a permanent home. Dante hoped he could escape there, stop reliving the last moments of Patrick’s life in his nightmares. Right now the only thing he could see every time he closed his eyes was Patrick dying.
At the time, Dante hadn’t realized that Patrick was taking his last breath as his friend hit the ground with a gasp, his eyes still open and his head covered in blood. Now that he did know, Dante couldn’t stop seeing that horrifying vision over and over again in his mind.
They were currently in flight on Grady’s private jet, making their way from Los Angeles to Amesport, Maine. They’d be landing in a small airport outside of the city limits.
“I could use a beer,” Dante told Grady in a tortured voice, not looking at his brother as he buried his face in his hands. “Ouch! Shit!” Dante moved his hands away, the pain of the still-tender wound on his face irritated by his actions.
“Alcohol and painkillers don’t mix,” Grady mentioned calmly as he picked up the laptop from the floor. Miraculously, the computer was still working, and Grady frowned as he opened the top and saw what his brother had been viewing. “You were watching the funeral? We were all there, Dante. I know you feel like shit because you couldn’t be there. Every one of us went for you because you couldn’t.”
They all had, and the fact that his brothers and sister had attended the funeral for him while he was laid up in the hospital, to pay their last respects to a man they never even knew, touched him deeper than they would ever know. They’d stood in his place, united in their support of him at Patrick’s funeral. It had meant a hell of a lot, but . . .
“I had to see it myself.” Dante looked up at his older brother, his expression stony. “And I’m not taking the painkillers.” Maybe it was stupid, but feeling the pain of his injuries seemed to somehow make him feel less guilty that he was still alive. If he was fucking hurting, he was paying the price of still being alive while Patrick was buried six feet under.
The psychologist thought he was having self-destructive thoughts.
Dante didn’t give a shit.