Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 136(@200wpm)___ 109(@250wpm)___ 91(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 136(@200wpm)___ 109(@250wpm)___ 91(@300wpm)
Sitting beside him at the breakfast table, it was strange as he seemed quieter than usual. Not that Elias had ever been considered chatty, but there was something different about him.
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“If someone finds out I let a guy live, they will think I have gone soft.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said, hoping that would make it better. All it did was make Elias shake his head.
All too soon, he was standing with his breakfast half finished. “I’ve got to deal with work.”
He kissed the top of her head, and like so many other breakfasts, without a word, he was gone. Winnie looked down at her own food and whatever appetite she had was long gone. She didn’t have the stomach to eat. Elias was angry and she had caused that.
He had tried to help her, and in doing so, it might have made him look weak. She made her way toward the kitchen and started to clean off the plates. She didn’t bother loading up the dishwasher. All she wanted was the distraction of using her hands, and not thinking about everything else. It had been a long time since she saw him that angry. In all the years they had been married, he never stormed out.
After she cleaned the dishes, she didn’t want to be under the guard’s watchful eye. Whenever Elias left the house or the apartment, which is where they were now, one of his guards stepped in to keep an eye.
She escaped to her beauty room, where she sat down at the vanity mirror and just … breathed. Tears filled her eyes as she thought about Elias. He was angry at her. There was no mistaking the way he felt. Running fingers through her hair, she wasn’t tempted to distract herself from the pain, which as the hours ticked by, began to increase. The makeup that surrounded her didn’t even feel good.
Elias had treated her like a queen. He’d given her a home, comfort, everything she could have hoped for. What had she done? Made him angry and potentially look weak. All because he cared what she felt.
The hours ticked by.
She didn’t leave her beauty room to have lunch. She stayed inside, and instead used it as an excuse to clean up. The pain in her shoulder intensified, and she slowed down.
It had already gotten dark by the time she heard a commotion outside. By commotion, it was simply Elias talking to the guard that had stepped in to take over for him.
She looked at her room, which was already clean. It had been clean when she started, and it was exactly the same now. Just things put in different places, and she would probably change them around in a short time. Waving her hand at them all, she quickly made her way out to find Elias at the dining room table. He had bags filled with Chinese food. She recognized the symbol on the bag, and the scents were amazing. She still didn’t feel hungry, but she hadn’t eaten since the little she had at breakfast.
“Hey,” she said.
“I got dinner.”
He wasn’t smiling at her. There was no laughter in his eyes. The man she had known the last couple of months seemed to have disappeared, and she hated it. Regardless of what she thought, Elias had a way of doing things.
“Don’t think about me,” Winnie said.
Elias looked up at her.
She took a deep breath. “When you’re doing business. Don’t think about me or what I think. You have been doing this a long time, and you don’t need to worry about what I think.” She moved closer to him. “I don’t want you to think you’re weak or a horrible man. You do what needs to be done, and I can’t stand the thought of someone … hurting you because they think they can.”
For several seconds he just looked at her and then he nodded.
“I took care of it,” he said.
And he started to hand out the Chinese tubs. Winnie expected to feel something—guilt, remorse, anger—but she felt none of that.
Elias knew what he was doing, and she was never going to allow herself to interfere again.
****
Elias had weighed his options and decided he couldn’t allow the shooter to live. Not only had he attempted to kill him, the son of a bitch had gotten his wife. She had to have surgery. Only minor surgery to retrieve the bullet, but it was still surgery, nonetheless, and that pissed him off.
If anyone heard that he allowed himself to be shot at and let the shooter go free, his streets would be chaos. He wouldn’t allow that to happen.
He also didn’t like what Mansell had said. Winnie was a weakness to him, and he couldn’t allow that weakness to spread. He loved her. That scared the shit out of him, because he had not loved anyone before. Love had never entered the equation.