Chapter Sixteen
Callum
They tied him up together, with rope they found by the side of the cabin, half-buried under the leaves but none the worse for wear. When they were sure the knots were tight enough, they stared down at him together. For Callum, it was easier than looking at Tom. A part of him felt like this was his fault—he had brought Tom and Leila here, after all, and had told them it was safe—but that wasn’t the only reason he didn’t want to meet Tom’s eyes. He was afraid of what he might see there. The savage way Tom had beaten the intruder… the crack of the man’s nose breaking under Tom’s fist… the way Tom had looked at Callum when he had first pulled him away, as if he didn’t know him… none of that fit with the Tom that Callum had thought he had come to know. If he looked at Tom right now, he wasn’t sure what he would see.
Yesterday, when he had studied Tom, he had seen a peaceful lake with unfathomable depths. Was this part of what lay in those depths?
Was it a part that Callum could accept?
Tom spoke first. “Go inside and make sure Leila is okay. I don’t want her coming out and seeing him here.” His voice was flat, empty of emotion.
Callum took another look at the man on the ground. Against his will, his gaze jumped to the man’s broken nose and the mess of crusted blood around it, and for a second the world swayed around him. He quickly looked away. “We should both be here when he wakes up.” He didn’t want Leila coming out to see this either, but he suspected it was more important not to leave Tom alone with the intruder.
Tom nodded as if he understood. That, at last, was what got Callum to look at him again. When he met Tom’s eyes, he saw… Tom. The same Tom who had given him a cup of tea two nights ago—had it really been that recently? The same Tom he had tucked in on the couch last night. He wanted this to be enough to reassure him, but he still knew he hadn’t imagined what he had seen a few minutes ago.
“I’ll go in and give her a book to read. I’ll tell her that everything is okay but she should stay inside for now,” said Callum. He hoped Tom could hear what he was actually saying—that he trusted him to be alone out here for a few minutes. He hoped his trust was warranted.
He entered Leila’s room armed with a small stack of the books he had found in his childhood hiding spot. Leila was sitting on her bed, staring down at one of the books he had already given her, but, he suspected, not seeing it. She looked up when he came in. “We have to leave, don’t we?”
“Not just yet.” Callum sat down on the bed next to her, placing the books between them. “Everything is under control. But you should stay inside until one of us comes to get you, okay?”
“They’re just going to keep coming back.” Her voice was as steady as ever, but she gripped the book in her hands harder than she needed to.
“No,” Callum said. “They’re not.” He tried to make it sound believable. He wished he could believe it himself.
She hunched her shoulders a little tighter around herself. “Let me know when we’re leaving.” She bent her head toward her book, a clear dismissal.
He wished he could stay and comfort her. But he didn’t think there was anything he could say to make her feel better, not right now. The only thing that would help was getting her safe from this threat for good, and they couldn’t make that happen yet. He hadn’t even been able to do what he had told her and Tom he could do—give them a place where they could be safe for a few days.
So he went back out to Tom, who was still standing in the same spot, watching the restrained man. The man was starting to wake up. His eyes began to flutter open as he flexed his fingers. He tried to stand, then gave a panicked jerk as he discovered his restraints. His eyes opened the rest of the way, and he glared out at them.
Callum realized he was still holding one of the books he had meant to leave for Leila. He stuck it in his back pocket, glad for the small comfort its presence gave him.
“Who are you?” asked Tom. He spoke in the measured voice Callum was used to, but in this context it sounded more dangerous than reassuring.
The man spit blood and said nothing.
Tom took a step forward. Callum hurriedly crossed the driveway to him, reaching out a hand to hold him back.
Callum studied the man in front of him. The man wasn’t anyone he knew by name, but his features did have some vague familiarity about them. Callum had probably seen him in some capacity before. Something to do with jewelry, maybe, back when that had been his father’s main game. Not the stolen stuff, though, but… something else. Not that it mattered now—it was obvious what the man’s current role in his father’s business was, and it had nothing to do with jewelry.
“You work for my father,” said Callum, not bothering to turn it into a question.
“Callum.” His mouth twisted in a contemptuous smile. “The infamous second son. The weakling. The girl.”
“You’ll want to think carefully before you say anything else.” Tom took another step forward. Callum touched his arm—he didn’t grab Tom, didn’t pull him back, but the touch was enough. Tom stayed where he was.
Standing under the gaze of one of his father’s people made Callum feel like he was back in that hated office again, listening to another of his father’s lectures. He wanted to run. He wanted to go hide inside until all this was over. But he didn’t have that luxury. And, he realized as he watched the man’s wrists chafe red from his futile struggles to escape his bonds, it wasn’t actually what he wanted after all. He didn’t want to hide—not anymore. He had watched his father send men like this after people like Tom and Leila for years. He was tired of watching it happen and pretending it was all okay with him. He wanted it to end.
So instead of running, he spoke again. “What are you doing here?”
“You know what I’m doing here.”
“How did you know where to find us?”
“When your father sent people to investigate the Italians, he told me to check his old retreat. Just in case. He thought it would come to nothing. He never thought you had the spine to betray your family.” He spat again.
“And I didn’t think he had it in him to sell children.” Callum listened to himself as if the words had come from somebody else.
“He should have sold you, maybe. Maybe then you would have had some worth to him.”
Something about the man’s voice sparked a memory. It lurked just below conscious awareness, like a word on the tip of his tongue. Metal. He had been doing something with metal. Callum had been a child then, playing in the rooms beneath the factory; the man had looked up from his work and said something to him, and laughed. It wasn’t the words that brought the memory to mind just now, though; it was the work. What had he been doing?
Tom drew Callum aside. “We can’t let him go back,” he said in a voice too low for the man to hear.
A cold knot formed in Callum’s gut. “What are you suggesting?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” said Tom. “Go inside. I’ll take care of this.”
Callum shook his head. “We can’t kill him. If we do, my father will know something happened. He’ll send people up here to investigate, and we’ll be in more danger than we were to start with.” But that wasn’t the only reason the thought of killing the man made him sick. He had left the Syndicate to get away from that kind of thing. He wouldn’t let this turn into just another version of what he had left behind.
“And if he goes back, they’ll be up here that much faster,” said Tom. “And they’ll know exactly what this man found.”
Callum knew Tom was right. But he shook his head. “You said it took more strength not to kill than it did to kill.”
Tom’s jaw clenched. “My daughter is in danger.”
Metal. The man had been twisting metal, bending it under his hands.
Again he heard himself speak as if from far away. “I have an idea. Let me try something.”
He expected Tom to shake his head, to dismiss him before he even had a chance to explain. After all, when did anyone ever trust him to handle anything of importance? Whenever he was given a task that mattered, or even one that didn’t, he invariably screwed it up. And his ideas, he knew, were never worth listening to, let alone implementing.
But Tom nodded. “All right.”
Callum hesitated. Had he heard right?
“Killing him is a last resort,” said Tom, “and I don’t like it any better than you do. If you think we have another option, do what you have to do to make it happen. I trust you. After all, you’ve brought us this far.”
I trust you. Tom had said those words last night, but Callum had known it was only the alcohol speaking. Now he was saying it again, sober, in the light of day.
Those three words gave Callum the courage he needed to step forward again.
The man laughed. It was an ugly sound, wet and grating. “Your friend with the scars is useless enough that you have to speak for him?”
But his insults couldn’t touch Callum. He had heard much worse from his father all his life. “My father is paying you for this, right?” he asked, as if the man hadn’t spoken.
“You think I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart? Of course he’s paying.”
“How much?”
The man laughed again, contemptuously. “More than the two of you can offer.”
“You didn’t always do this kind of work for my father.” Memory solidified in his mind as he spoke. “You used to do counterfeit jewelry for him. Making jewelry out of cheap materials and selling it as if it was worth much more.”
The man made a gesture that might have been a shrug if his arms hadn’t been bound. “I do what needs doing.”
“Your work was good,” Callum continued, although he would have been too young to know that much back then even if he had more than a single fragment of a memory to go on. “Do you know how much my father made from it?”
“Does this have a point?”
“If you were to get the names of the people he was selling to, you could start doing that again, without going through a middleman this time. It would be safer work than this, and a lot more profitable.” Callum resisted the urge to look back at Tom to see what the other man thought of what he was saying. Tom couldn’t help him here; he had to do this on his own. “How much would those contacts be worth to you?”
The man made a harsh noise in the back of his throat. “Nothing, because I would be dead.”
“My father doesn’t have as much reach as he thinks he does.” He had said something similar to Tom yesterday. And just like yesterday, he knew it was true as he said it. But this time it made him think about more than Leila’s chances of getting free of him. Maybe all his own fears of not being able to escape his father’s grasp had been overblown after all. How much power did his father really have to track him down? Had he been held prisoner all these years by his father, or by his own fear?
“Keep yourself hidden long enough to make a name for yourself, and he won’t be able to touch you,” Callum continued. “How much do you think you could make like that? More than you’ll get for giving us up?”
The man didn’t respond. He fixed his beady eyes on Callum, listening.
He was listening. He was taking Callum’s offer seriously.
“You’re probably thinking you could get the contacts from me, and then turn around and give us to my father,” said Callum. “I know how my father’s people think. But that man—” he pointed to Tom “—knows you’re a threat to his daughter. And if the next person who comes doesn’t manage to kill him, just like you didn’t manage to kill him, he’ll want to make sure you can never threaten his daughter again.” Callum stretched his mouth into a thin smile, one he had learned from his father. “And I know where to find you.” Another lie, but one that would be easy enough—he hoped—for the man to believe.
The man stayed quiet for a long time, so long that Callum began to wonder if he had fallen unconscious again. But just as Callum started to walk over to make sure he was still awake, the man looked up at him and gave a single short nod. “Give me the names.”
This was something Callum had no problem remembering. He had done deliveries for his father, back then, on the assumption that no one would suspect a child of carrying anything either illegal or valuable. Some of them had been counterfeit jewelry. His father had drilled him carefully on every address, along with who he was supposed to ask for when he got there. He still remembered all of it.
He went inside just long enough to dig a pen out of a drawer. Back in the driveway, he pulled the paperback from his back pocket and, cringing inwardly at the destruction, ripped the title page cleanly away from the spine. In small, careful letters, he recorded all the names and addresses he remembered. Some of these people had probably moved on long ago; others wouldn’t want to take the risk of going behind the Syndicate’s back, even now that his father wasn’t in that business anymore. But not all of them.
He hesitated before undoing the man’s restraints. He looked over at Tom; Tom nodded, taking a step closer just in case the man tried something. Callum’s fingers trembled as he released the knots. But after the man pushed himself to his feet, all he did was hold out his hand for the paper. Callum held it between them, but didn’t release it yet.
“Tell him there was nothing here,” he said. “Make up a story about how you got the broken nose. Maybe you were in a bar fight.”
The man nodded. “There were three men. I drank too much and insulted their mothers. It was a learning experience.”
Callum handed him the piece of paper. He studied it for a moment, then folded it carefully and stuck it in his pocket.
He gave Tom a wide berth as he walked back to his car. Before he got in, he turned to look at Callum again. There was no contempt in his eyes now. Instead he looked at Callum the way he might have looked at any of Callum’s father’s people. Like a partner. Like an equal.
Callum didn’t know how to feel about that.
Before he could figure it out, the man started the car, and passed the sharp curve of the driveway, and was gone.
Callum made it to the porch steps before his legs gave out from under him.
Tom hovered over him. “Are you all right?”
The world had begun to take on a surreal quality. He felt like he was watching a scene in a movie. He hadn’t had a chance to fully process until now how close he had come to dying. If things had gone just a little differently, he would be lying in the dirt right now with a bullet through his brain.
But he had survived. Because of his own plan. Because of what he had done.
He fought back a burst of hysterical laughter. “I’m okay.”
Tom sat down next to him. “Are you sure?” He placed a hand on Callum’s arm, then seemed to realize what he had done. They both looked down at his hand, and with a self-conscious expression, Tom pulled it back. Callum wished he hadn’t.
“It worked.” Callum shook his head. “He took the deal.”
“It worked,” Tom confirmed. “You saved both our lives back there—and Leila’s. Thank you.”
Callum allowed a genuine smile to spread across his face.
“What should we do now?” Tom asked. “Do we stay here, or do we leave?”
Callum looked sharply up at him. “You’re asking me?”
“You’ve gotten us this far.”
“If I hadn’t led us here, they—”
“—Would have found us in that motel,” Tom finished. “They’ve either found the room already, or they will soon. And then we would have been in the same situation, only it would have been a lot harder to deal with if we weren’t in the middle of nowhere.”
Tom didn’t blame him for what had happened. More than that, Tom trusted him to decide what to do next. Callum wasn’t sure he wanted the weight of that responsibility. What if he made the wrong choice?
But he had made the right choice a few minutes ago, and the three of them were still alive because of it.
“Okay. Um…” Callum was quiet for a moment, thinking. “We should stay. There’s a risk that he’ll give us up, or that someone else will come out here, but I think we’re still better off here than anywhere else. If we left, we would need to go to another motel, and that would involve using our real names and our bank accounts. If they’re looking for either one of us by name, that would make us a lot easier to find.”
Callum almost wanted Tom to argue. He didn’t want this to be his decision. But Tom nodded easily. “All right. We’ll stay.”
“Just like that?” The startled words slipped out of Callum’s mouth before he could stop them.
“I told you. I trust you.” Tom frowned. “And you should trust yourself. Just because your father couldn’t see your strengths doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
“We should let Leila know everything is okay,” said Callum, mostly to change the subject. He stood, then clung to the banister as his legs threatened to turn into wet noodles all over again.
“I’ll talk to her,” said Tom. “You go wait on the couch. I have something for you, and I think this is the perfect time for it.”
Was that a hint of mischief he heard in Tom’s voice? “What is it?”
“You’ll see.”