Free Lincoln Hospital (Trauma #1) by Cassia Brightmore

first.  Since this was his heavier week at work, she’d been handling most of the cooking all week.
    Confused at the silence that met him, he set the bouquet of flowers down on the counter and wandered into the living room. Finding nowhere there, he headed upstairs.  The house was eerily quiet, but he brushed it off thinking it was his imagination after a long shift at the hospital.  Thinking she might have wanted a nice hot bath after a long day herself, he opened the door to their bedroom.
    “Babe? Are you—” he broke off at the sight before him and letting out a roar, rushed into the room.  Hannah was sitting straight up on their bed, hands and feet bound and mouth gagged, tears streaming down her face as she tried to scream from behind the sock stuffed in her mouth.  Enraged, he charged towards her not noticing the frantic shaking of her head.
    A searing pain in the back of his head had him crashing to the floor as he was hit with a metal object from behind.  Hannah cried harder and her muffled screams got louder as Cian rolled to his side with a groan.  Looking up, he had a split second to shuffle across the floor out of the way as their assailant brought the crow bar down again, missing him by inches. He managed to get to his knees and tackle the other man to the floor where they rolled over the carpet in a flurry of legs and fists.  He got a few good hits in but the attacker outweighed him by at least one hundred pounds and hit like a sledgehammer.  He took a blow to the nose that had him crashing onto his back and seeing stars.
    When he was finally able to sit up, he froze.  The man was standing with a gun to Hannah’s head, staring hard at him.  The fact that his face wasn’t covered told him that it was no normal robbery and that had Cian scared shitless.
    “Okay, now just hold on.” He tried to gain his feet and grimaced when his head spun.  That damn hit really did a number on him. “Just put that down and tell me what you want.  Anything you want is yours.  You want money?  Name your price.  Just please, don’t hurt my wife.”
    “Anything I want?  You can bring my brother back from the dead?  You got that kind of power, huh, tough guy?” He jammed the barrel of the gun hard into Hannah’s temple, ignoring her whimper of pain.
    Cian inched forward again and the man cocked the gun.  “You want to stay right there, tough guy and don’t fucking move or I swear to God you’re going to be wearing her brains.”
    Swallowing hard, Cian held up his hands.  “I’m not moving, I’m co-operating.  You’re in charge here, I understand that.  I’m sorry about your brother, really I am, but I don’t know how to fix that for you.”
    “Ain’t no fucking fixin’ it!  It’s her fucking fault!” He grabbed Hannah by the hair and dragged her over to his side of the bed.  “Your fucking cunt of a wife sent him to prison and they fucking killed him in there.  Knifed him over and over like he was a damn pig.  He was my brother; he didn’t deserve to go out like that!”
    Hannah’s eyes met Cian’s and she pleaded with him to help her, the terror she was feeling written all over her face. Feeling powerless, he wanted to lash out so bad he could taste it.  To rip her away from him and tuck her into his side where she would be safe.
    “I’m sorry.  I really am sorry about your brother, but the blame belongs on the person that killed him in prison, not on us.  They are the ones you should be angry with, not my wife.  She would never have wanted anything to happen to him; look tell me...what was his name?  I bet she will remember the case if you tell us his name—she remembers every single case.”
    The attacker looked skeptical for a moment but then his facial features smoothed out and his dark green eyes lost a bit of their edge of rage.  “His name was Roy Combs.  He was only twenty-one.”
    Cian looked at Hannah and she nodded slightly, indicating that she remembered