Chapter Twenty-Three
Caroline
Present Day
Three hours later, I woke up with Juliet in the crook of my arm that was now thoroughly asleep and tingling painfully. I wiggled out from beneath her and rolled my head around on my stiff neck.
The twenty-four hours Juliet was with Atticus had been the worst day of my life. The worst. I still hadn’t fully processed the fear, agony and bone-deep exhaustion I’d suffered through. Losing her put things into perspective for me. Our time together was precious and should be cherished. I appreciated that there were bigger issues in the world than matching socks or picking up toys. And I needed to tell her I loved her every thirty seconds until the day I died.
The one thing that didn’t change was how uncomfortable it was to sleep with a child. She was so little. How was it possible she took up so much room? And all the blankets?
I needed a chiropractor after only a few hours with her.
Sitting up in bed, I watched her sleep for a few minutes and tried to relax in that calm beauty. She was so peaceful. So naïve to everything this ugly, dark world wanted to use to hurt her.
My heart felt heavy in my chest, too heavy for my broken body to support. I couldn’t even sit up straight. The heaviness was too much to bear.
I pressed my hand to my mouth and tried to stop my chin from trembling. It was the precursor to tears and I didn’t want to shed any more of those. At least, not tonight.
There was too much to do and no time to lose myself in the pain of the past. Even if it had invaded my present, even if it had taken my spirit hostage and waged war on everything I thought to be real and true.
He’d tricked me. Sayer had manipulated me. He’d lured me into the bratva and then made it his life’s mission to keep me there.
My long list of sins could be credited to him, to the syndicate I hated being a part of. Finding out I had a choice in the matter was the worst kind of heartbreak.
I thought back to that night when I was ten years old. Had I known I was making a deal with the devil, I wouldn’t have been so goddamn cocky about it. All I had wanted was proof that he’d been made. I wanted to see his tattoo. I thought I’d been getting an even trade. I thought I’d even been doing a kind thing for him.
After all, he was the one that had to live with his decision to be Russian mafia for the rest of his life. Getting his necklace back from Atticus was the least I could do.
To think I actually blamed myself for his ill fate.
God, I felt sick. I’d felt guilty my entire life for what I told him the first time I met him. All I had wanted for him was to survive. I’d wanted to see that he was okay.
And in return, he’d made me join him. He’d pulled me into the madness with him.
I brushed at stray tears and tried harder to pull myself together.
Would I give up those years though? Would I give him up if I had the chance to start over? Would I give Juliet up if it meant a different life?
No.
Never.
What did that mean?
I had no idea. I didn’t have the energy to sift through my feelings and figure out what I felt for Sayer after everything that had been confessed.
What I really needed was space. Time. Distance. I needed to figure out what I wanted and how I needed to move forward.
Even more than that, I needed to get out of this city and back to the life I’d worked so hard to build on my own. My heart ached for Frisco, for Maggie’s on the Mountain, for the simplicity of living a quiet life with Juliet and Frankie.
If I was honest with myself, truly honest in a way I didn’t want to be, I could admit that aside from Juliet’s kidnapping, I hadn’t totally hated these past few days. Even the FBI heist was… fun. I realized I was stupid to think that since there would be hell to pay for it, but I couldn’t help it. There was a part of me that enjoyed the thrill of the game.
That excitement had been stripped away from me now that I knew the truth, now that I realized I had been the mark the entire time.
Squinting at the clock, I tried to make sense of the number three. It was the middle of the night. Nobody made good decisions at this hour. But I couldn’t wait a second longer. I had to get out of here.
I held up a pair of boyfriend jeans and snarled.
Too soon. I wasn’t ready to face real pants yet.
I settled for my leather leggings, a black sweatshirt with a peplum ruffle at the bottom and my motorcycle boots. If there was ever an outfit that said chic runaway, this was it. Using skills from my past, I moved about the room in absolute silence, skipping makeup altogether but attending to other necessities like brushing my teeth and applying deodorant.
I left Juliet sleeping to track down Frankie. Obviously, I wouldn’t leave without her. She was anxious to get out of this city anyway. Each day we stayed here made her more and more restless. She still hadn’t seen her uncles. And even though I knew she didn’t want to, this was a rip the Band-Aid off kind of situation—she wanted to get it over with.
The apartment was silent as I stepped into the living room. I had every intention of going straight to Frankie’s room to grab her, but I was sidelined by Sayer’s sleeping form.
He was sitting up again, like the first night I’d found him. His legs were stretched in front of him and his arms were folded over his chest while his head rested awkwardly, bent at his neck. He had positioned himself right in front of his bedroom door in a leather chair that he’d dragged over from next to the couch. A guard caught sleeping on the job.
I stood there staring at him for endless minutes, trying to make sense of the hammering emotions beating their way through me. The anger had worn off, leaving a gaping gash of sorrow in its wake.
It wasn’t so much what he had done, I decided. It was that he never told me. That I had to find out from Atticus of all people.
And worse, Sayer had never planned to tell me. He would have kept that secret his entire life.
I wanted to call him a liar, to call our entire relationship a lie… but I’d only be lying to myself because I knew both things to be false.
Yes, Sayer lied for business, for his profession, to me when he thought my safety was an issue— like when he’d gone to prison. But he didn’t lie to me regularly. Maybe the information he shared was ambiguous. Maybe he was mysterious. But he wasn’t a liar.
And yes, our relationship was rocky at the time, but it wasn’t entirely a lie. I loved Sayer. I loved him with everything in me. My love for him was possibly the most honest thing about me. It had nearly killed me to leave him five years ago.
And it would certainly kill me this time to do it again.
Not to mention what it would do to Juliet…
What did that leave me with?
Anger over something he’d done when he was thirteen? When he’d been desperate and living on the streets and in need of someone to take care of him?
With his eyes closed and the hardness about him stripped away, he still looked like he needed someone to rescue him. He reminded me so much of the boy that I’d met in that fateful back alley fifteen years ago. He looked lost again. Troubled. He looked desperate and broken and in need of fixing.
And oh, how my heart split with the desire to help him.
I wanted to pick up all of his shattered pieces and put him back together. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold him tightly against me. I wanted to promise him that everything was going to be okay and that I would never leave him again.
But how could I say any of those things when it was exactly what I planned to do?
“Was it all really so bad?”
I blinked back tears and realized he’d woken up and caught me staring at him.
Struggling to compose myself, I looked away, out the window at the city that had raised me, then destroyed me. “Don’t ask me that.”
“Why not? Because you can’t admit the truth? It wasn’t that bad, Six. It was good. Fucking amazing.” He leaned forward, and I flinched. I thought he might have been readying to stand but at my reaction his hands rubbed his knees and he relaxed back into the chair. “I didn’t take your life away. I gave you a new one, a better one.”
“You’re so full of it,” I spat, trying to revive the blazing anger I’d felt only hours ago. “You take away my freedom, my choice? And then call it a gift? Get over yourself.”
He jumped to his feet, uncaring about my reaction this time. My back was against the wall in the next second and his hands were planted on my waist, caging me in.
“You first,” he growled. His lips were on mine before I could slap him, kissing, taking… claiming what he thought was his.
“Sayer,” I protested, pushing at his shoulders.
His lips moved to my throat, leaving me to gasp for air. “I’m sorry, Caroline,” he said when I was getting ready to yell at him. “I’m so fucking sorry. If I could change what I did, I would. In a second. You have to know that I was a stupid thirteen-year-old kid and I thought I had finally found the thing I had been looking for my entire life. I thought you were a gift from God because of the shitty life I’d had. My angel in the alley. My savior. You didn’t just change my life, Six, you gave me a brand new one. You resurrected me. You saved me. And all I wanted to do, all I still want to do, is spend my life loving you… worshiping you… giving you everything you gave me and more. I didn’t do it to trap you. I did it so that I could spend the rest of my life with you.”
Tears streamed down my face and my entire body tingled in a war against itself. Could I trust him? How could I not? Could I forgive him? How could I not? Did I still love him?
How could I not?
“I didn’t want this life,” I hiccupped, grasping at whatever was left of my outrage. “I never wanted to be a thief.”
Sayer pulled back, meeting my eyes with the most intense gaze I had ever seen. His eyes had never been more deeply blue. “You were a thief before I met you. I didn’t make you do that. And I didn’t turn you into a liar. I will take responsibility for what I did, and Six, I plan to rectify that. I plan to spend the rest of my life making sure you never have to do any of that ever again. You and me. Forever. Not the Volkov. Not the game. Just the two of us and our family. That’s all you have to do for the rest of your life.”
My entire body trembled. His words were healing. I was relaxing and bending back into this man that I could not stop loving. No matter what happened or the lies in our past, no matter what we had ahead of us or what we had to face before we left this city, I would never stop loving him. Never stop living for him. “No more secrets?”
His hands cupped my face, his thumbs brushing away my tears. The way he held me made my soul ache with tenderness for this man that had been to hell and back more than once, who had big aspirations in this crazy life of ours, but gave everything up just to be with me.
“No,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Never again. You are my everything, Caroline. My reason and hope and total existence. No more secrets. No more lies. No more anything— only you and me and Juliet. You are the life I’ve always wanted, the one thing I have worked my entire life to have. There is nothing I want more than you and our daughter. Nothing that could sway me away. I love you, Six. I have always loved you. I will always love you.”
I closed my eyes as his truth and promises washed over me. They sank deep into my bones and smoothed all the jagged pieces of me. They healed and fixed and binded me to him all over again. “I love you too,” I confessed, another piece of absolute truth that had no shadows of deception in it. “I have always loved you.” I pressed my lips to his, savoring the taste of him mingled with my tears. “I will always love you.”
His arms were around me in the next second, holding me against his chest tightly, but at the same time, carefully, as if I was a fragile thing he was afraid to break.
From the first moment he came back into my life, I didn’t know what Sayer and I were doing, only that we were a part of each other’s lives again. Nothing else had made sense. I didn’t know what to do with my mistrust or my insecurity, or the years of pain and brokenness between Sayer and me.
Now I knew.
We were together. We would always be together. You could argue that we had never really been apart. I hadn’t broken up with him. I hadn’t ever ended us. Probably because I knew we could never end.
We’d both made mistakes. Sayer wasn’t a perfect man and I wasn’t a perfect woman. I wasn’t blameless in the history of our beautiful mess.
And besides, it wasn’t how we started that mattered… it was how we ended up.
There had never been anyone for me other than this man. He was mine. And I was his.
Right when I’d decided to take this man on the couch again, his phone went off, the ring startling us both.
I jumped, sucking in a sharp breath that wasn’t enough to calm my racing heart. “That thing always goes off at the most inconvenient times,” I growled.
He glanced down at it on the coffee table. “For someone that used to be a hardened criminal, you are awfully jumpy these days.”
“I’m out of practice.”
He grinned at me. “Let’s keep it that way.”
I had just enough time to smile at him adoringly before he reached for his phone. It stopped ringing as soon as he touched it.
Then it started ringing again. He quickly silenced it but frowned when he looked at the screen. “It’s Gus,” he said.
“Answer it. It might be important.”
“What?” he barked at Gus. I watched the color drain from his face and his eyes grow tight with worry. “She’s not.” He listened some more, and looked up at me. “Caroline, go check and see if Frankie is here.”
I didn’t hesitate. I ran to her bedroom and threw the door open, hitting the light switch at the same time. Her bed was empty. Her room looked untouched from earlier.
“She’s not here,” I yelled at Sayer. What did that mean? Why was Gus calling at three-thirty A.M. looking for her?
I returned to Sayer as he was asking, “Do you know where they would go?” It was torture to listen and only be able to hear one end of the conversation. Was Frankie missing? Had something happened?
What the hell was going on?
“I’ll be right there.” He listened again and cursed under his breath. “Get Cage… Yeah, well, get him anyway… See you in twenty.”
“Where’s Frankie?” I demanded as soon as Sayer clicked off the phone.
He met my gaze and held it, trying to cushion the blow of his words with empathy and concern. My stomach felt sick as a sharp pang of déjà vu hit me. This must have been what I looked like when I told him Juliet was gone. This was the agony he had been through.
And now he was the one tortured by a phone call that would haunt him for the rest of his life, just like mine.
“Gus thinks Atticus took her,” he said in a gentle voice. “She was staying at his place tonight. He thought he heard her scream, but by the time he got to her, she wasn’t there. He can’t find her anywhere and she’s not answering her phone.”
Adrenaline jumped in my veins and I suddenly felt very awake. I shook off the remnants from Sayer’s confession that made me blissfully sluggish and emotionally overwhelmed and became the fighting force I needed to be.
“How do we find her?” I demanded. I pulled a ponytail holder from my wrist, using it to pull my hair on the top of my head. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to get her back,” Sayer growled. He walked over to the kitchen sink and splashed his face with water. Then he started digging around in the cabinets until he found two hand guns with ammo. He set one on the counter for me. He looked at me, gauging me with his eyes. He had become the man I knew from my youth again. He was vibrating with danger and murderous intent. “Do you want to go?”
I glanced back at his room where our daughter slept on his bed, completely oblivious to the danger surrounding her. When I turned back to him, I could have sworn I saw his internal struggle etched in the lines of his face. He didn’t want me to go. He didn’t want to put me in danger. “Why are you asking me?”
He dipped his head and let me see all of his truth. “I’ll never take away your choice again, Caro. Never. If you want to go, go. If you want to stay with Juliet, stay. It’s up to you though. This is your decision.”
I chewed on my bottom lip and weighed pros and cons. I wanted to get my friend back more than anything. In another world it would be hard to believe that Atticus would kidnap two people in the span of a week, but not in the world I lived in. Not in this filthy town.
I also had Juliet to think about. I wasn’t a rush-into-the-burning-building kind of girl anymore. If something happened to Sayer and me, that would leave Juliet an orphan. And in this town, I didn’t want to think what would happen to her if she was forced into the system—the same system Sayer fled as a kid. I didn’t know if Mason would find her or if Atticus would take her again. I didn’t know if she’d end up like Sayer on the streets or Sayer in foster care, and I couldn’t stomach either idea.
No, I couldn’t leave her. Not even for my best friend.
I would send the best team of men I knew were capable of getting her back. But I could not leave Juliet to run off after Russian mob members.
It might kill me to sit back. It might actually kill me. But I couldn’t leave my daughter.
“I need to stay with Juliet,” I whispered to Sayer, struggling to get the words out.
He nodded. “That’s a brave decision, Caro.”
My eyes watered. “It doesn’t feel brave.”
His expression softened, and his gaze glistened too. “I think any time a parent sacrifices their own selfish desires for their children is brave and admirable and sacred. I know you’re worried about Frankie, but you’re doing the right thing for Juliet. That makes you the best kind of mom.”
Coming from Sayer who had firsthand experience with horrific parents, I found myself completely moved by his sincere words. “I love you,” I whispered again because it was the only thing I knew how to say.
Half his mouth tilted. “Good.” He pulled a shoulder holster out of the cabinets and tucked the guns in the right places. Time had softened some of the harsher moments of my past and I had muddled the memories of using weapons and the reasons for needing them. Seeing Sayer handle them again made my skin crawl.
“Be careful,” I told him, desperate for him to come home in one piece.
He shook his head. “I’m not going to be careful. I’m going to get Francesca back. And then I’m going to end this once and for all.”
I struggled to swallow the lump in my throat and nod at the same time. Of course he couldn’t be careful in a situation like this. I knew better than that, but his brutal honesty made me almost wish for lies.
Almost, but not quite.
“Okay,” I whispered. While my entire body shook and trembled and wished for this all to be over.
“I’m not going to kiss you.” I had to clutch my shirt with both hands to keep from going to him. “Because I’m going to come home and kiss you. Yeah?”
I felt myself nod, but I couldn’t make myself say words.
“I’m coming back, Caro. There is nothing on this fucking planet that can keep me from you.”
Now that I believed.
He shoved his feet into shoes and walked out the door to meet Gus and Cage. I heard him bark Luca’s name from the hallway. Conlan would be next. And probably Ryuu Oshiro too. Atticus had no clue what he was up against. He had no idea that Sayer still ran this town. He had no idea that he had already lost.
I turned around and crawled back into bed with Juliet. I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep, but I needed to be close to her, needed to feel her with me. And the mama bear inside me couldn’t help but stand guard over her.
A half hour later, the front door opened and closed, echoing loudly through the quiet apartment. I realized I hadn’t locked it behind Sayer. “What did you forget?” I asked as I sat up in bed.
“You.”
My heart stopped, and my skin turned to ice. Everything inside my body started screaming at once and I instinctively looked for a place to run. To hide my daughter.
“Atticus,” I hissed as I faced him fully. He was flanked by two bulky looking men, all of them were holding guns. Realization slammed into me so hard I struggled to breathe. “You were waiting for Sayer to leave.”
“I’ve been waiting for Sayer to leave,” he answered, his eyes darkening with evil and anger. “And your hired muscle and my fucking brother. It’s taken some time to get you alone, Valero. But here you are. Alone and unarmed. Ripe for the picking.”
“Frankie was what? A decoy?”
His upper lip curled. “Frankie is mine. Your daughter was a decoy.”
My heart remembered how to beat, kicking into a sprint in my poorly equipped chest. “What?”
“Let’s go,” he said instead of an explanation. “It’s time to make the traitor suffer.”