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Wiri sensed Logan’s presence before he saw him.
The air in the room seemed to crackle and fizz as his ethereal mana connected with Wiri’s. Phoenix stiffened. She’d been talking about Ted’s arrest, but the words faded on her lips and she hung her head. “He’s coming,” she whispered. Her eyelashes fluttered. “Do you want me to stay?”
He shook his head to mean no, although a sliver of cowardice craved her solidarity.
Logan appeared in the doorway within seconds. His aura occupied the room without entering, sucking out all the oxygen and leaving Wiri breathless. He looked up to find his uncle observing him. He tried to gauge his mood, anticipating and mitigating, his brain performing cartwheels as it searched for excuses and reasons. Perhaps even the odd lie.
Wiri swallowed as Phoenix rose. She leaned forward in her father’s eye line and placed a gentle kiss over Wiri’s lips. He held his breath and tensed. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered.
Logan dipped his head to enter the room, more through habit than necessity. Wiri clasped his fingers over his stomach and fixed his gaze on the ragged stitches poking from his middle finger. He’d hated every second of his time in the water tank, but it was nothing compared to facing Logan. Disjointed sentences piled through his mind, all of them pleading and none of them helpful. He swallowed and waited for Logan to speak.
He didn’t.
Wiri looked up to find him leaning against the wall, arms folded and watching him. He’d been here before and his heart pounded, rebelling against the sickness of familiarity. A litany of childhood mischief rose into the forefront of his mind. Logan never raised a hand to his children.
He didn’t need to.
His disappointment was more than enough to reduce the worse offender to tears.
Logan Du Rose saved his violence for those outside his family. He never shat on his own doorstep.
Wiri cleared his throat. “Please, can you pass me the water?” he asked. His voice sounded raspy, as though he’d swallowed a million razor blades.
Logan settled his weight back onto his feet. The heels of his worn cowboy boots clicked across the floor. Scarred hands lifted the flimsy mug, hands capable of wringing a man’s neck.
If he wanted.
He held out the drink and Wiri took it. “Thanks,” he managed. His head ached as he moved it from side to side to track the straw as it evaded his lips. Finally, he sipped the water, buying himself time as it slid down into his stomach.
Logan waited and took it back from him, his fingers brushing Wiri’s as he accepted it into his hand and placed it back on the table. Then he dug his thumbs into his jeans pockets and stood next to the bed, waiting with the effortless patience of someone who had a lifetime to waste.
Wiri caved.
He didn’t want to, but he’d been here before. Too many times to count. He possessed enough of Kane’s genetics to have spent his childhood sailing very close to the wind. His redeeming factor was the lack of cruelty which drove his father; eventually to his own death, just when his life had finally become wholesome and worthwhile. “I know you’re angry with me.” He mumbled the words, hearing the self-defeat in their echo. Shaking his head, he forced himself to face Logan like a man worthy of taking away his first born. “I love Phoenix.” The sentence held a crystal clarity which seemed to ring in the air like a gong.
Logan pursed his lips and said nothing. His silence offered Wiri enough rope to hang himself. But exhaustion and morphine nipped at the fringes of his energy, sapping the frayed remnants he still possessed. Wiri sighed and picked at the raggedy stitches on his middle finger. To his surprise, Logan hauled a visitor’s chair across the floor with a hiss of its plastic feet on the linoleum. He sank into it with a sigh. “Hana always warned me,” he admitted. He ran a hand across his eyes. “It’s not like I don’t know how you feel. I met Hana when I was fourteen. We didn’t even speak, but I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.” He folded his arms and stared at Wiri. His grey irises sparkled, as dark as the inside of the water tank. “Why didn’t you come to me or to Hana? Why run?”
Wiri let his head fall back against the pillows. He’d asked himself the same questions many times. He formulated the words into a sensible sentence, hindered by his foggy, anaesthetic addled brain. “Scared,” he admitted. “We didn’t want to acknowledge it at first. I dated other girls, and we skirted around it. Then we ended up right back where we started.” He blew out a ragged breath and remembered the kiss on the edge of the graveyard. Their ancestors had watched them step across a hidden line in the whenua. He’d sensed their elation. Wiri pushed himself up with one hand. “Phoe gave me a bracelet.” Panic seized him as he searched his wrist and found it gone. “Where is it?”
Logan leaned forward and his firm grip on Wiri’s shoulder pressed him back against the bed. “The nurse gave Hana a bag of your stuff. It’s probably in there.” When he felt Wiri acquiesce, he sat back against the chair with a bump. He gnawed on his lower lip. “We’ve been worried sick about Phoenix.”
Wiri exhaled. He nodded against the pillow. “I know. She meant to call you, but then everything went wrong.” He lifted the sheet to peer at his thigh. The hospital gown ended at his knee and he yanked it up high enough to discover a transparent plastic plaster. A gaping hole showed beneath it. Blood seeped against the plastic as though trying to escape. He frowned and his stomach churned. “They didn’t stitch it closed?” His voice wavered. Someone had shaved the hairs from his leg and myriad raised lumps of skin surrounded the entrance of the bullet like a crater rim. A black bruise began at the site and snaked outwards like mountain tributaries. Wiri followed the curvature of his thigh to the back and his fingers probed a matching covering on the other side. He winced at the realisation he’d arrived at the hospital without undies.
“You were lucky.” Logan sniffed as though containing his emotion despite his expression remaining blank. “The bullet missed the bone and major artery. Mark got another surgeon in to repair a tendon and some cartilage.” He jerked his head towards Wiri’s midriff. “Apparently you broke a bone a few days ago, but left before they could let you know.”
Wiri nodded and thought back to the night in the hospital. Jet had smuggled him out at his own request. “Is there a cop here?” he asked. “A blond guy.”
Logan nodded. “He’s wandering around with a bloke dressed as a vicar. It looks like a fancy dress parade.”
Wiri smirked. He imagined Jet’s dismay at Logan’s easy dismissal of his ego. Logan swallowed and Wiri forced himself to meet his eye. “The cop says it wasn’t your fault. They got the guy who shot you.”
Wiri gave a slow blink and smothered a yawn with his hand. “What do you want from me?” he asked. The question gave him relief, even though he hadn’t yet heard the answer. But there arrived a sense of clarity with everything coming out into the open. Bearing the secret for most of his life had been a weight he wasn’t equipped to carry. He flattened his lips and stuck his chin in the air. “As long as Phoenix wants me, I’m not going anywhere.”
Logan exhaled. He lay back in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. “I don’t like it.” He spoke the words Wiri had always known. They cut deep, just like he expected. The emotional wound burned more than the bullet hole.
“Because it’s me? Because you hated my dad?” Wiri’s voice wavered. He started as Logan recoiled.
“No!” His head jerked back in shock. “No, Wiri. We’ve raised you like our own.” Doubt crept across his face like a returning tide. “Haven’t we?”
“Yes.” Wiri nodded, the action laboured. He couldn’t raise the accusation of being a cuckoo, because Logan had never levelled it at him.
Only at the other boy.
The one who almost got Hana killed.
He shrugged. “You raised us as brother and sister. We figured you’d hate it.”
“I do hate it.” Logan ran a hand across his chin. He dipped forward and leaned his forearms along the length of his thighs. “But not for the reasons you believe. It’s because of the past.”
“The haemophilia?” Wiri said it out loud, although they rarely did within the Du Rose household. The disease occupied air space alongside them, lurking at family gatherings and threatening every outing with its opportunistic blood loss and misery.
“Maybe.” Logan sounded unsure. “I don’t know. Hana says it’s my hang up and I shouldn’t place it onto you. Our family spent centuries being insular, and it destroyed them in the end. My father and mother were first cousins, and it became a tangled mess.”
“Not because of their blood!” Wiri’s voice rose with more power as he protested the tainting of his ancestors. “Because of their behaviour. They blurred the lines. We won’t.”
Logan dipped his head and stared at the linoleum between his boots. The grey pinpricks in his hair created a salt and pepper effect against its black origins. Handsome and imposing, he lost nothing with age. He represented the best of the line, the kaumatua of his family. Wiri ached for the fracture he’d caused in their relationship. “Perhaps,” he acknowledged. Though he didn’t give the answer the certainty, which Wiri craved.
