Lydia
“Please, honey, please, Lydia. Don't. Your mother will be real upset if you do.”
He looked so pathetic laying there. Beaten, whimpering, no longer a monster or a psychopath. Just a beaten, wounded old man, hiding in fear from his daughter. Crazy? Sure. But sick, too. His brain rotted by drugs, by paranoia, by age.
Memories of growing up, of him bouncing me on his knee, giving me my first taste of beer, and his laughing at my disgusted face when I tried a sip. Being fourteen teaching me to drive, even though mom didn't want me to learn for another year. His bad jokes over the years. Holding me as I cried after my first boyfriend, Randy Simmons, broke up with me, telling me Randy didn't deserve me. Him kissing the scrapes on my knees after I fell off my bicycle, then putting me back up on the seat, because strong girls got up and kept going. The three of us – mom, me, and him – all taking the boat down to the coast, sailing the gulf.
He'd been a decent man once. Not necessarily a good one. Probably never that. But he'd been a good father for a long while, for whatever that was worth. I remembered that much, at least, from the time before the craziness rotted his brain and turned him against me and my mother. I growled. I tried to pull the trigger, tried to murder him. But it wasn't who I was. Even after all the hard years I'd been through, with all the swindles I'd had to pull off, all the men I'd outwitted, I'd never had to kill anyone.
I wasn't a murderer. I wasn't like him. I never would be.
“I can't,” I said, tears forming in my eyes, blurring my vision. The barrel of the gun wavered before I let it fall loose at my side. “I just can't.”
Kort stumbled up next to me, pulled me into his arms.
“We'll just leave him,” I said. “Leave him so the men can have their go at him, take his money, his drugs. They'll pick him apart now that Tyson is dead and can't control them. They'll see how weak he is.”
Kort nodded slowly as I pulled back from him. He turned to leave, to go back into the Warehouse. Beside us my father tried to get up, to crawl to us, but he stumbled and fell in a heap, wheezing. He rolled over to his back, his eyes just staring blankly at the ceiling.
“Wait,” I said, pulling at his shirt. “We can't go back up there!”
“Where should we go?” he asked, his face pale, a dazed look in his eyes.
“Down to the dock,” I said, pulling back the way the old man had been taking me originally. “His sail boat is down there. We can just slip away.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Let's go.”
I got up underneath his arm and he put as much weight on me as I could bear.
“Lydia, honey!” he called out from behind me. Kort and I stopped in our tracks.
“What?” I growled as I turned back to him. “What?” I realized then that he had something in his hand. I patted my pockets, checking to see if I still held the detonator.
“You know I was a boy scout, honey,” he said as he held up a second detonator, his thumb already on the trigger. “Always come prepared.”
Together, Kort and I watched, helpless, as he cackled and pressed the red button. A second later his wicked laughter was drowned by the sounds of explosions from deep within the compound.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kort
The ground shook as the ANFO and C4 went up somewhere, probably on the far side of the compound. More quakes as more explosions went off, shaking me and Lydia both as dust fell from the ceiling.
“The boat!” Lydia screamed, grabbing my hand and dragging me off, down the tunnel.
I glanced back over my shoulder, my head woozy. I thought I was hallucinating – I saw a ghost, Milo standing over the madman Joey Banks' body, nodding to me in approval as Lydia and I made our way from those tunnels. My friend’s ghost followed after me as we left, whispering to me how happy he was that I was getting away from there in one piece. That he was happy I'd found a woman I could care for, and that I was getting out of this racket.
“Xander'll think you're dead,” Milo told me as we rounded another corner and light began to show at the end of the tunnel. “He'll never figure it out.”
“Come on,” Lydia screamed as more explosions rocked the tunnels. “Just a little farther, baby! We can get out right there!”
I stumbled over my feet, almost went down. Milo and Lydia dropped beside me, helped me struggle back up. “Thanks, Milo,” I grunted.
“Milo?” Lydia asked, then abruptly shook her head, clearly deciding it didn't really matter right then. “Kort, let's go!”
We hit the rear door at a shuffling run, the bright light piercing our eyes as more explosions went off behind us, rolling like the most insane thunder I'd ever heard. The ground shook again.
I glanced around at the little dock that poked out into the tributary, at the boat there. “Can you . . . can you sail this thing?”
“Of course,” she said. “He taught me how.”
She got me on board as she untied the boat from the dock and pushed it off. I collapsed onto the deck, my face staring up to the sky. Plumes of smoke rose hundreds of feet in the air, so high into the sky that no one would ever be able to ignore this place ever again. Milo's face came into view one last time, leaning in over my vision.
“Don't worry,” he said as more explosions went off in the compound we were quickly leaving behind, “you'll live. And, Kort?”
“Yeah Milo?” I asked the sky.
“Thank you. I can rest easy now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You're welcome.”
“Kort?” Lydia asked. “Are you talking to me?”
“No. Just a friend.”
And then I closed my eyes.
Epilogue
Lydia
Six months sailing on a boat ought to drive anyone a little crazy. And yet, six months later sailing with Kort and I felt like I could live my whole life with her on the water. As I dropped anchor in the little cove for the evening, I knew I'd made the right decision. No more running, no more hiding. Just living and sailing. Kort and I still checked in on dry land every couple weeks, and we'd followed the news after the Warehouse went up in a ball of flames, but no one ever mentioned us, and no one from his outfit ever came looking for him.
I relaxed in the cockpit of the boat now, a romance novel spread on my lap while Kort rummaged around below deck. I didn't need the romances the way I used to, I'd had enough adventure to last me a lifetime. But they were still fun to read. My man came clomping over the deck on his bare feet and came into the cockpit, bottle of chilled champagne in one hand and two flutes in the other. He'd switched to just board shorts with no shirt, and his tan was rich and dark, making his smile somehow even brighter. Scars crisscrossed his body. A few old were old, but many were new – still purple, and reminders of what we’d escaped.
“Champagne for the lady/” he asked, a smile dancing on his lips as he began to pour a glass of bubbly for me.
“Well, don't mind if I do,” I said, putting my book aside and taking the offered flute.
“You know,” he said as he finished pouring his glass and set the bottle aside, “it's amazing how this boat seems to have everything we need.”
“Really?” I asked with a grin. “Because I can think of one unnecessary thing here, especially since I got my new load of novels.”
“Oh really?” he said, leaning back against the cockpit wall, his eyebrow raised. “What that might?”
“You,” I teased, rising from my seat and pressing my body into his, running my hands over his naked chest and abs. “You can still barely sail, and you eat more than twice your body weight.”
He laughed as he pulled me into his arms, his hands finding my lower back and beginning to massage my sore muscles. I lay my head against his chest, just listening to his even breathing and the thump-thump of his heartbeat.
He reached into his pocket and rummaged there for a moment. “One thing I did find down there, in a secret compartment,” I leaned back a little and looked up at him, then down at his hand, at the little box resting in his palm, “was something that might not be absolutely necessary.”
I looked back to his smiling face, then back to the box as I covered my hand with my mouth.
He opened it up, revealing a diamond ring. It was beautiful, a solitary stone on a band of gold, at least a carat.
“Would you?” he asked.
“Do you even need to ask?” I grinned up at him, threw my arms around his neck. “Yes! I'd love to!”
He pulled my lips to his, kissed me again, long and deep. As we kissed, he pulled first one hand behind my back, then the other. I wasn't sure what he was doing, but I didn't struggle or fight his strong arms. He reached into his pocket, and there was the sound of metal rubbing on metal as he reached back behind me, his tongue now pushing into my mouth.
I felt the cuffs as they locked over my wrists, securing them together. I shivered a little at the memory of the first time I'd had these on, of those nights in the motel.
“Found one other thing down there, too,” he replied with a sly grin.
The cove grew darker as he stripped me of my clothes. The quarter moon rose as we made love. We weren't finished till well after it went back down.
THE END