Chapter Six
Caroline
Present Day
When I reemerged from my bedroom, Sayer, Gus and Cage were standing in a huddle in the living room, speaking in hushed tones. I eyed them suspiciously but let them have their final words. Obviously, I wanted to know what they were talking about. Obviously, I suspected they were talking about me. But doubt and suspicion had nearly crippled me. And right now, I needed to be full speed. I couldn’t let the past or the present muddle my mind. I could ask questions after I got Juliet back.
“If we fly to DC, is there a possibility we’ll beat Atticus there?” Frankie asked on her way out of the bedroom.
“That could be a good thing,” Gus said. “We would have a chance to set up, figure out what’s going on.”
Cage crossed his arms over his chest and looked between us. “Do you have any allies left in the city?”
“A few.” Sayer moved toward the door, opening it while pinning me in place with a hard look. “And you have your dad.”
I tried to swallow around the lump in my throat. “I wouldn’t exactly call him an ally.”
Sayer dropped his head, staring at his feet. “No, he’s never been that.”
Fresh nausea washed over me and I felt like crying all over again. I had moved to Frisco to be the parent my dad never was, to protect my child from the life I had never been sheltered from. And yet, I was the reason she was thrust into the evil underworld that could destroy her. I was just like my dad was now.
I looked around at my apartment one last time. It was impossible to ignore the sinking sensation that this was the last time I would see it, the last time I would stand in the middle of the room and call it home.
DC was a black hole that was likely to suck me inside of it and then rip me to shreds, tearing me into itty, bitty, unrecognizable pieces. I’d fled the city without looking back, afraid that the mere outline of it would turn me to a pillar of salt.
I was the last one out the door, flicking off lights as I went. If Juliet wasn’t the reason I had to leave, nothing could have gotten me to leave the safety of this place I called home. That was probably why Atticus took her. She was the one and only reason I would ever set foot in that godforsaken city again. She was the only thing that could get me to leave my safe haven.
Sayer held the door for me and waited while I locked it. “I need to swing by the restaurant and grab some things.”
I avoided his eyes, remembering the last time I was with him in his restaurant. Had that only been hours ago? “You don’t need to go back to the cabin?”
“I have a bag at the restaurant that will work.”
A go-bag. Seems like I wasn’t the only one that liked to be prepared. “Okay. I left my purse there anyway.” He nodded and we joined the others in the elevator.
“How many cars are we taking?” Gus asked on the ride down.
“I need to run back to the Initiative and set up some management to keep the place running while we’re gone. Do either of you need to get anything?” Sayer asked the two men.
“I came prepared,” Cage answered.
“I’ll need to run back to my hotel,” Gus said. “I can meet you at the airport.”
“Frankie go with him,” Sayer ordered. “Keep him focused.”
“I’m fucking focused,” Gus snarled.
Sayer held his glare. “No weapons. We’ll get them there.”
Gus shrugged, and I had to do a double take at the flash of unrestrained rage in his expression. I blinked at him and it was gone, the cool, laid-back expression he always wore was firmly in place. In fact, whatever traces of that furious beast prowling just beneath his skin were gone completely, making me question whether or not I had imagined it.
Cage rode with us to the restaurant and surprised me by walking inside when I had expected him to wait in the car. I followed Sayer to the bar, Cage at my other side. With both men as big and strong as they were, I felt like I had a security detail with me.
Maybe I did.
Maybe Cage didn’t feel that I was safe either.
Or maybe they were both afraid I’d run again.
Sayer walked over to the bar and called for Cass who was busy with a customer. Without looking at him, she held up a finger and finished taking the order.
When she turned toward us, she dropped the towel she was holding and stumbled back a step. “Joshua?” she gasped. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Joshua? I turned to Cage, who had a stone-cold expression on his face. “Hey, Cass.”
“You two know each other?” I asked, feeling protective of my friend as she was clearly unnerved by Cage’s presence.
Cage’s lips twitched. “A little bit.”
Cass seemed to compose herself. She lunged forward a step and growled out, “Fuck you. We have a kid together.”
This was Max’s dad? This was the asshole that had left Cass and abandoned their child? My respect for Cage disintegrated into thin air. I took a step back from him, visibly taking sides with my friend in her nonexistent war.
Cage glanced at me, but didn’t respond to Cass’s accusation.
“I need to leave town for a few days,” Sayer told her, cutting into the icy tension between Cass and Cage. “And Gus is coming with me. We need someone to run things while we’re gone. Can I leave you in charge?”
Cass’s eyes went wide and she stared at Sayer. “You want me to run the restaurant for a few days?”
“Maybe longer. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. Do you think you can handle it?” Sayer shrugged as if this wasn’t a big deal, as if he was asking her to water his cactus while he went on vacation. “You can call or text with questions. You’ll have to deal with the trucks every morning and be here to open. Gwen can close for you though.” Cass seemed hesitant, so Sayer added, “I’ll pay you double.”
She struggled to swallow but eventually nodded. “O-okay. Yeah, I can do that.”
“Thanks, Cass. I’ll owe you one,” Sayer said, then turned to lead me to the basement.
I glanced back at Cage who didn’t follow. “I’ll wait here,” he told me under his breath.
Cass whirled around and gave him her back. Well, that should be fun for the two of them.
Sayer and I made our way to the basement office. Our things were right where we’d left them. The Leighton was still propped against the wall and my purse still sat packed with my stolen possessions.
He noticed it immediately. “What was your plan there?” He pointed at my purse, an arrogant smirk lifting one side of his mouth.
“To leave town,” I told him honestly. I was too tired to play games.
The dry amusement left his face and his blue eyes turned glacial. “You’re serious?”
“Someone sent me fish guts, Sayer. I was getting threatening packages. You opened a restaurant and started stalking me. I knew Juliet and I were in danger. I knew something terrible was going to happen. I just thought… I thought you were going to be the cause. And even stupider, I thought I had you under control.”
He took a step toward me, and I retreated. I didn’t know what he wanted or what he was going to do, but instinct flared low in my gut, telling me to run. I’d been too brutally honest, too open. He was still a barely leashed beast and I was poking at him with a short stick and not enough sense to know when to stop.
“What did I do to you to make you distrust me so much, Six? What was the thing that turned you against me?”
“Sayer…”
“I want to know,” he bit out, all fury and fire.
I chewed my bottom lip, deciding what to tell him. He brought his hand up and planted it on the wall next to my head and I realized he’d trapped me there, cornered me without escape.
“Fess up, Caro. I’m tired of defending myself against sins I didn’t know I committed.”
“I asked you to leave with me, to give Mason what he wanted. And you wouldn’t.” The words were fragile as they left my lips. I’d only shared them with Frankie, the night we left DC. I’d never spoken them out loud again. They hurt just as badly now. Cut just as deep.
I had thought he was on my side, my partner through everything. He had promised he would never leave me, that it was him and me against the whole damn world and it would always be that way. But he’d lied. He’d refused to leave the brotherhood. He’d chosen them over me.
The air rushed from his lungs, concaving his shoulders and leaving him with a defeated expression. “The last time I saw you… you knew then?”
My hand settled on my abdomen. “I’d just found out I was pregnant. I was terrified. I needed you. But you… you chose them, Sayer.”
He shook his head. “No.”
I stood up straighter, held his gaze with more courage. “I wouldn’t have left you for any other reason. Trust me.”
“I can’t,” he growled, his voice pitching low, deep and full of pain. “I can’t trust you, Caroline. I can’t believe a goddamn word you say. I’m starting to wonder if I ever could.”
“They threatened me,” I bit back. “They were in my apartment. Roman, Dymetrus, Aleksander, Atticus, even my dad. They were there when I got home that night. They threatened me to get to you. And I had… I had our baby to think about. It wasn’t just my life I had to think about. I had Juliet to protect. I asked you for help and you wouldn’t give it to me. And then… Listen, I did what I had to do to keep our daughter safe. I didn’t leave you because I wanted to leave you. I left you so your child would have a fighting chance of escaping that hell.” My head dropped, the fight whooshing out of me. “A lot of good that did. She still got dragged back in.”
His body turned to stone, stilled until I couldn’t tell if he was even breathing. “Is that why you didn’t write to me?”
“I couldn’t give them another thing to hold over your head… another reason to hurt you or the people you loved.”
His voice turned into a whisper. “People…”
“Sayer, I…”
Pushing away from the wall, he turned back to grab a phone charger and a few things from his desk, tossing them into a leather carry-on. “We should go.”
“Wait, I feel like—”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
Okay, then. The conversation that I shared all my secrets and he gave nothing away was officially over. I glared at the back of his head for three more seconds before I picked up my purse and returned the stolen items back to him. Frustrated with him and losing our daughter and my entire goddamn life, I practically threw the priceless items in a haphazard pile on his desk.
I glared at them, irritated that I had to leave them with him. They were like this metaphor for my life. I was giving him something that should have been mine, something I worked incredibly hard for and yet it still remained his. Like my life. Or my heart.
Although returning the goods to Sayer didn’t make them any less stolen. I at least had a rightful claim to my own heart.
No. That wasn’t true. I’d given over ownership of it a long time ago. I’d given it to him for safekeeping. I’d let him have it completely. And now I would pay the consequences of that decision, good or bad, for the rest of my life.
He couldn’t give it back to me even if he wanted to. Deep down I knew that it was his forever. I would never recover from loving him. And I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to.
Mission accomplished, with Sayer’s go bag and my purse in hand, we stepped outside of the office so Sayer could turn the lights off and lock the door.
“The lock does work?”
“When I want it to,” he answered quietly.
Suspicion cut through me, sharp and shocking, bringing my worst fears to light. “You set a trap for me.”
“One that took you forever to walk into.” He lifted his gaze and looked at me from beneath dark eyelashes. “I dangle millions of dollars of possessions in front of you and you do nothing about it? Do you understand the very real anxiety I had every day I left this room unlocked?” His chin jerked higher, his blue eyes glittering with something dark and hot. “You drive me insane, woman.”
A smile tempted my lips but I was too worried about Juliet to give in. “Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.” He leaned forward and half his mouth kicked up. “It doesn’t matter, Caro. The fun is in the chase.”
We shared a look that caused me to flounder for something to say and he ate me up with a smoking hot look that sent butterflies tailspinning through my chest.
Just when I’d decided to clear my throat to break up the tension, he inclined his head toward the stairwell. “Let’s go.”
As soon as we reached the main dining room again, Cage moved to meet us at the front door. I had known him for a total of one hour, but in that entire time his facial expression hadn’t changed once. He had this stoic seriousness about him that gave confidence he took his job very seriously. As we piled into Sayer’s Jeep again, his expression still hadn’t changed. He was as straight-lipped, tight-eyed and square-jawed as usual, but there was something darker in him as well, something bristling with agony and determination.
“You okay?” I asked him as we buckled in, me next to Sayer, him in the backseat.
His green eyes lifted and gave nothing away. “Fine.”
Only he wasn’t fine. Although I didn’t think he wanted me to be able to tell that he was emotionally distressed. Too bad for him I grew up around hard men. I had made it my job to know how to read them, what to expect of them, see beyond their masks and armor to what they were really thinking. I used to think I was really good at it.
Until that day with Sayer in the prison, when he hadn’t been willing to leave the bratva for me. I thought I had known him well enough to believe the best about him. I had been wrong. And I was still sorting through the wreckage of my mistake.
“So your Max’s dad?” I hedged, tiptoeing through the minefield willingly.
His eyes flashed. “Yeah.”
“He’s a sweet kid,” I told him. “He’s in preschool with Juliet. They’ve been in daycare together since they were babies.”
Cage’s jaw ticked. “I know. That’s how I found you.”
My curiosity turned gritty with bitterness. I glared at Sayer. “You ask your PI’s to relocate for you? I hope you offer a good benefits package.”
Sayer’s lips twitched like he was holding back a smile and my irritation jumped up three more levels. “I had a couple PI’s working for me, Six. All over the Midwest. Cage found you first.”
“My office is in Denver,” Cage supplied. “Obviously I spend a lot of time here.”
I speared him with a glare. “Cass said you trashed her apartment. She said you don’t want anything to do with Max.”
Cage’s attention dropped to his hands. “Her apartment was trashed. I didn’t do it. But I guess you could say I was responsible for it happening.”
“I don’t understand.”
He lifted one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “You do what I do long enough and you make enemies. That’s the nature of my business.”
His mood, his expression, his unsaid words clicked into place in my head, like a puzzle finally taking shape. “You stay out of their lives to protect them.”
He turned away from me, looking out the window as the Jeep navigated impossibly black, twisting roads. “Don’t tell them that. Cass has worked so hard to hate me. She should get to keep that.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and faced forward again, unsure what to think of the man that was helping us find Juliet. Did he believe that? Did he think abandoning his family was better than being with them?
“Stop harassing our guest,” Sayer chided me, reminding me that I had in essence done the same thing to him.
“I’m only being friendly,” I argued, sounding the opposite.
He made a sound in the back of his throat and turned the music up. The rest of the drive to the Denver International Airport was silent. Sayer checked us in under our current aliases since airport security would catch us on camera anyway while I waited for Gus and Frankie to arrive. Eventually we rejoined as a group.
We handled airport security like the pros we were and made it just in time to catch the flight that would take us back to DC.
Local police wouldn’t be expecting us to leave this quickly and in Frisco they didn’t have the staff to put pressure on us to stay. They would figure it out soon enough and be pissed, maybe even put out a warrant for our arrest, but we would already be gone. If we ever got to come back here, we would have a lot of explaining to do, but for now none of that mattered. The only thing I cared about was getting Juliet back. Local PD could deal with it.
In an effort to distract myself, I texted Maggie a vague explanation that Juliet had been taken and I was on my way to get her, and a similar text to Jesse just so he wouldn’t worry. I wanted to believe he cared enough about the two of us that he might do something rash if I didn’t cut him off at the pass. Even though I knew by now whatever was between us was over. And to be honest, it had never really started. I had tried to use Jesse to fill the hole that Sayer had left. But I could admit now how foolish I was.
There was nothing that could fix what Sayer had broken or fill the gap he left except Sayer himself. There was no substitution for him. No moving on. No getting over. Jesse would have always felt like a consolation prize after losing the love of my life and I thought he might have already known that. We had been over since he took me to the DC Initiative opening night when I’d run into Gus and Sayer for the first time.
But I texted him anyway. Just because the two of us were a nonstarter, didn’t mean I stopped caring about him as a friend. He was a great guy. He just wasn’t for me.
Unable to face their sympathy, I ignored all Maggie and Jesse’s fast responses and probing questions by turning off their notifications. I would fill them in when I got home with Juliet. Or I would never see them again because we didn’t make it home. One or the other…
My stomach turned at the thought of going back East, to the one place I swore never to return. My skin prickled with nervous sweat and my vision blurred with the rage poisoning my blood.
I would kill them for taking Juliet. And then I would kill them again for making me face my past without my permission. This was a trip I didn’t want to take. Every fiber of my being screamed in protest, digging in their heels and fighting the reality of what was happening.
Juliet. Juliet. Juliet. I let my daughter’s name become the soothing mantra I needed to motivate my stubborn body. It worked. I managed to get on the plane. I managed to sit down next to Frankie and put my head between my knees. And I somehow managed to endure the long flight toward the unknown.
Seven hours later, after a short layover in Dallas, we landed at Reagan National. We walked outside together, a unified force of destruction. My feet touched DC dirt and I sucked in the East Coast air with reluctant anticipation.
Home.
I was home again. After all this time.
This city had raised me, molded me to be an expert criminal and hard as hell fighter. This city had been my salvation once upon a time. And my demise.
And now I would destroy it.
Or, in a more likely scenario, it would destroy me.