Chapter Twelve
“What do you think, Caro?” Gus asked, still grinning like the foolish idiot he was.
I met his gaze and told him the truth. “I think you’re showing off.”
“This is quite the impressive collection,” Jesse added neutrally. He could sense the obvious tension in the room. But he was a civilian, a nice guy that only knew nice people. He could not fathom the bad blood between us or the origin of the priceless items in the room.
Normal people didn’t automatically assume everything surrounding them was stolen. Or that the girl they had a crush on used to work for the Russian mafia and had the reputation of being a high-class thief. That was fantasy to the everyday person. Fiction.
Gus shrugged. “Honestly, I inherited most of it.”
I blinked at him, still shocked at his unabashed arrogance. “Is that so?”
“The lady everything originally belonged to up and died.”
“She died?”
Gus held my gaze, “Well, she’s dead to me.”
I rolled my eyes and turned to Sayer, hopefully appealing to a more levelheaded moron. He held his hands in the air and walked further into the room. “We’re not here to pick a fight, Six. We’re hoping for your opinion. We’re wondering how much this is all worth?”
The door clicked closed with a sort of ominous finality at the same time I said, “I don’t know why you think I’d know the answer to that question.”
The room went dark, and a red light came on over the door.
“What the hell?” Jesse asked.
“Oh, no,” Gus sighed, not sounding worried in the slightest. “Sayer, you forgot again.”
The previous dread flared through my belly. Holy shit, this was the moment! Goodbye, cruel world. “Forgot what?” I asked all even tones and false bravado.
“The security system,” Sayer explained, his voice sounding like it had been dragged across a gravel road. Now that his face was cast in shadow, I imagined a raging monster coming to life inside him. A monstrous beast fueled by the love of his life disappearing, abandoning him to prison and crime and hell. “We’ve taken special measures to keep this room secured, but the door has been acting funny since we got the system installed. It keeps locking us inside.” He let a heavy pause settle over us. “The only way to get out is for someone to open the door from the other side.”
I ground my teeth together to keep from screaming in frustration. “You’re kidding.”
Sayer’s face was cast in darkness, but I felt his gaze crawl all over my skin. “Afraid not.”
My mind spun, desperate for an exit. This was a recipe for disaster. If Gus and Sayer weren’t planning to murder us, then I didn’t want Jesse finding out any of my secrets. Fine, if we were being held at gunpoint or Sayer had handed us two shovels and ordered us to start digging our graves, I might have fessed up to Jesse. He would have a reason to know then.
But since Gus and Sayer had yet to start screwing on their silencers, I decided to spare Jesse the information that would likely lead to his later demise. Yes, it was dangerous for Juliet and me, but also for him. If the bratva had come back into my life, I needed to do whatever it took to save Jesse from that world. I needed to do for Jesse what I couldn’t do for Sayer all those years ago.
“Call someone,” I ordered, pointing at the desk phone. “Call your hostess.”
“The line isn’t set up yet,” Gus answered.
Son of a bitch. I stormed over to a phone and picked it up. Sure, enough there was nothing but empty sound. I made a fool of myself crawling around on the floor, groping in the darkness to test the jacks. Then I did it to the second phone. Nothing.
Kneeling in the middle of the office in my little black dress, I remembered my cell phone. I yanked open my clutch and pulled it out. No service.
“Are you serious?”
Sayer leaned forward on one of the desks, his bigger, brawnier arms flexing in the glow of red light. Where had that muscle come from? “Dead.”
I shook my head, hating that I was so easily distracted. “Wh-what?”
“Dead serious,” he clarified. “That’s not going to work down here.”
“Damn it.”
“Eventually, they’ll notice we’re missing,” Gus said. “Maybe.”
“Hopefully,” Jesse echoed. “Has this happened before? Will they realize you’re locked in down here?”
The guys shrugged, turning their attention to me rather than Jesse.
I felt them circling like a pack of lions. Like a pack of angry, starving, asshole lions. What were they doing here? And why had I walked so stupidly into their trap?
I was not a naïve gazelle hanging out at the watering hole. I was a lion in my own right. Queen of the fucking jungle.
They couldn’t have known I would show up here on opening night. Let’s operate under the assumption that they moved to this town with the express purpose of confronting me. They wouldn’t have opened up a business if they planned to kill me tonight.
If this was a hit job, they would have found me, rolled into town and grabbed me, finished the job and then left again.
No, they were up to something. This was a con. And obviously a long one. Another one of their games.
They were here for a reason. Yes, the reason was probably me. Or Francesca. But either way, they weren’t going to hit and run this one.
Which meant their cover was as important as mine.
“Serendipity, right, Caro? That we would run into each other here of all places.” Sayer tapped the desk with his knuckles. “After all this time.”
Serendipity was the name of one of our old cons. We would run into each other in the middle of a party and make a big scene, hugging, laughing, I would start to cry. Then we’d ask someone to take a picture of us, and while I was showing them how to use my phone, I would steal their wallet or their hotel key card or whatever.
“Yep,” I mumbled, struggling to stand again in my too short skirt. “Serendipity, Sayer.” Only this time I was the mark.
Jesse reached out his hand and I took it, grateful for the help to my feet. He seemed to sense something was wrong, because he pulled me close to him and dipped his head to ask, “You okay?”
“Claustrophobic.” I blurted. It was a lie. “I’m starting to freak out.” Truth.
Gus plopped into a leather chair and spun around in it. “Relax, kids. Someone will notice we’re gone soon enough. In the meantime, let’s catch up.”
No. Not happening.
Using the darkness to my benefit, I scratched my head in a stressed-out way and moved over to the door. Jiggling the handle, I checked out the lock. Whew, not complicated. A simple enough mortise lock. Automatic, but not impossible.
I turned around and pressed my back against the door, bending the bobby pins I’d just retrieved into the right shape. Ideally, I needed something more substantial than bobby pins. I wanted my set of curtain picks or at the very least skinny Allen wrenches.
Now that my fingers were busy, I felt like I could relax a smidge. Besides, I needed a little misdirection for Jesse’s sake. “It really is good to see you guys after all this time. How’s everybody else? How are your parents, Gus? Atticus?”
“My dad passed away four years ago,” Gus responded with short, clipped consonants. “I thought you knew that.”
“I didn’t know.” There was true emotion in my face and heaviness in my heart at his words. I truly had not known.
Gus had hated his dad. Ozzie was a real and true asshole. But I still felt sympathy for his loss. Maybe even more so because he had never had a good father or someone that really loved him. Maybe I felt it more for him because I knew what it was like to be used by my father and thrown into a world I wanted no part of.
“Sorry to hear that,” I told him sincerely, even if I disguised it with a brusque response.
“Yeah, well, I’m not,” Gus muttered. I realized I had taken him out of his mental game, made him emotional when he hadn’t wanted to be.
“What about Atticus?” I asked, pushing buttons I knew would continue to throw him off. Or at least I hoped they would. “What’s he up to?”
Gus and Sayer shared a look. I knew they hadn’t meant to give themselves away and were counting on the darkness to disguise it, but they didn’t quite manage. Before I could say anything the lock clicked open behind me and my hand slipped on the handle, thrusting it open before I was ready.
I laughed openly. I still had it! Bonus, when the door opened, the lights came back on. I wasn’t prepared to see every stolen thing surrounding me again, but it was so much easier to keep an eye on Robin Hood and his merry band of one when I could see them.
Jesse stared at me. “How’d you do that?”
“I just pulled on it. The door wasn’t locked.”
“Yes, it was,” Gus insisted. “It’s been locking me in here all week.”
“Well, this time it wasn’t,” I argued. “As soon as I put pressure on it, the thing opened right up. Crazy, right?” I slipped my bobby pins into my purse and hoped nobody noticed my hair was a little looser than before.
Gus stood up, pretending to be super surprised. “I tried it. It was locked. Seriously, Caro, how did you do it?”
Were they trying to catch me in a lie in front of Jesse? Silly boys. Tricks were for kids. I had moved onto something called illusion. And I was so much better at it than these two circus clowns.
“You must not have tried hard enough.” I gave him my best sympathetic smile. “Good thing I was here to save the day.”
He stared at me. “Good thing.”
“Well, we need to get going,” I told Sayer and Gus, mustering up enough courage to look them both in the eyes. “I have, er, Jesse and I have other plans to get to. It was nuts running into you though. Here. In Frisco.”
Sayer’s glare was all over Jesse, and I wasn’t convinced we were going to make it out of here alive after all. “You guys have other plans?”
His words had a hard edge to them, the double blade of a knife. He sounded jealous, but I knew that was wrong. Sayer didn’t reveal his emotions or let them slip out accidentally. If he wanted me to hear jealousy, then he had done it for a purpose. He was setting a trap, laying the foundation, engaging the mark. Making me question every decision I’d made in the last five years and doubt myself.
No, Sayer wasn’t jealous. He was playing his game.
I grabbed Jesse’s hand and tugged him toward the staircase. “Bye, guys,” I called after them. “Thanks for the tour.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jesse called back as I all but dragged him up the stairs.
We made it to the sidewalk outside before I found the courage to speak. “That was weird, wasn’t it? Was it just me or did you think that was super weird?”
Jesse looked down at me, coming to a stop on the passenger side of his truck. His lips twitched before letting go of a charming smile. “That was really weird,” he agreed. “I think those guys are on drugs, Caroline.”
Laughing at his assumption, I shook my head. “Drugs? Really?”
“Well, you explain it. Then getting locked in that basement office? I thought one of them was going to pull out an ax and start chopping us into pieces.”
I had expected a version of that scenario too, to be honest. But Jesse didn’t need to know that. So instead, I laughed at his joke and told another lie. And another lie. And I continued building the stack of cards that had always been my life. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. Sayer and Gus are mostly harmless. I think bumping into me surprised them.” Taking a steadying breath, I said the one truth I knew would make sense to Jesse. “Sayer used to have a thing for me, you know, back when we were kids.”
“Ah,” Jesse nodded. “That makes sense.” He leaned forward, forcing me to look up at him. Our bodies were perfectly aligned even though we weren’t touching. I could feel his body heat, see a million stars overhead framing his handsome face. I could smell a wood burning stove and crushed autumn leaves and fresh mountain air. And this moment was perfect. This would have been the moment that had pushed me firmly into head-over-heels territory with Jesse.
Only Sayer was back. And here. And in my town and very suddenly my life. And… the moment fell flat.
I didn’t know if Jesse sensed me pulling away or if he never intended to kiss me anyway, but he pushed through the moment by reaching around me and opening the door. “I don’t think your friend’s thing for you is in the past. He seemed pretty into you still.”
It wasn’t possible to take those words seriously. For so many reasons. Anger bubbled inside me, like lava trickling down the side of an active volcano. Slow, constant and destructive. Like all of my feelings for the past five years.
But I couldn’t share any of that with Jesse. Instead, I shook my head and waited for Jesse to move around the front of the truck and climb in. “Thanks for being a good sport tonight. Sorry, our plans were kind of derailed.”
He turned to me, leaning back against the door. “Do you still want to grab a bite to eat?”
I let my gaze float over Jesse, appreciating him and his friendship and the Colorado cowboy he was. He was all solid muscle and tall, unrelenting frame. I pictured him on one of his horses, cowboy hat on his head, looking like he belonged on the cover of a grocery store romance novel. I should want to go to dinner with him. I should want to finish this date.
But after crashing into my past like it was a brick wall and I’d been driving a hundred miles an hour, all I really wanted to do was go to bed.
“Don’t hate me,” I whispered, just barely making the excuse audible. “But that whole ordeal kind of wore me out. I don’t think I’d be any fun at dinner.”
Jesse leaned forward, his eyes deepening with concern. “That’s okay, Caroline. I can take you home.”
His simple acceptance made me feel even worse. “Sorry, Jesse. I… Well, to be honest, I used to have a thing for Sayer too. We ended badly. Seeing him tonight?” I turned and stared out the windshield at The DC Initiative glowing in the night, alive with movement and people and all the ghosts of my past. “I had hoped I would never see him again.”
Jesse sat there for a few long minutes, watching me watch the gallery. I couldn’t find the courage to look at him again, to let him see the raw emotion spilling out of me. It was too much. All of it was too much.
And what I wanted to do—take a hot bubble bath and psychoanalyze every single jaw tick and raised eyebrow and minute detail in an investigative report of what the hell Sayer Wesley was up to—I couldn’t do. I didn’t have time to get lost in the past or even deal with the present. I needed to think about the future.
I needed to think about Juliet. And Francesca. And I needed to figure out how the hell to get us out of this town.
Jesse drove me back to my apartment and walked me to the lobby door. We said goodbye as friends, and I hoped we would be after the weirdness of tonight wore off. I took the elevator up to my floor and let myself in.
Juliet and Frankie were asleep on the couch while movie credits played on the TV. The lights were dim save for the small spotlight above the sink. The windows were open, letting in the cool autumn breeze.
I moved over to the kitchen sink, lifting my face to the smoky air that floated through the open window there. It curled around my face and caressed my hair before sinking into my skin, grabbing hold of my bones and reminding me of how much I’d let this place get into me. I’d let it change me. Save me. And now the thought of leaving it, this city, this life…
It hurt.
I hurt.
I threw my clutch on the counter and noticed the note immediately. I would try to figure out when exactly he’d slipped it inside later. I had been paying attention the entire time. As soon as I saw Gus, I was hyper-aware of his movements and Sayer’s.
The white corner of the paper stuck out of the side pocket, proof that they still had the skills to pull some things off.
I pulled out the note and found Sayer’s familiar handwriting. Ache and anger bloomed side by side.
I know this is going to be difficult for you, but don’t leave town, Six. Not if you know what’s good for you.
I made a groaning sound. Cliché much, Sayer?
“What’s that?”
I sucked in a sharp breath and stifled a scream. I hadn’t heard Francesca approach. She was just very suddenly there, looking like a horror movie apparition with her sleep-wild hair and smudgy eyeliner.
Her brows drew down over how I huddled against the counter, cradling the loathsome note I wanted to burn. “They’re here. They found us.”
She tugged the note out of my hand, her finger ice cold as it brushed mine. “Who?”
I met her terrified gaze. “Sayer. Augustus. They’re here. They opened the gallery.”
She looked down at the note, reading it and rereading it and rereading it. “No.”
“I saw them, Frankie. I talked to them. They locked Jesse and me in their basement office and—”
She held up a hand. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”
So I did. I told her how the art gallery was amazing and how Jesse and I were having a great time when suddenly Gus showed up. I told her about Sayer and how he’d changed and how he hadn’t changed. How I’d unlocked the basement door and how Jesse totally picked up on the ex vibe between Sayer and me. And then finally, how I found the note.
“But we’re going to leave anyway, right?” Francesca demanded. I could see the wheels turning in her head. She was counting her money and pooling our resources. She was driving through Colorado to Wyoming and up to Montana and maybe straight on to Canada. She was crumpling the note in her hand, already dismissing it. “Caroline, tell me we’re going to leave anyway.”
“Y-yes, of course. Obviously. Frankie, we’re leaving. We can’t stay.”
“But.”
I rolled my eyes. “But we can’t leave tomorrow. We have loose ends that need to be tied up, and we need to get our resources—”
“Caroline, that’s not our deal. We promised each other that if we ever got a whiff of the brotherhood sniffing around, we would be gone. No attachments. No reasons to stay. We’d just get up and go.”
I felt her frustration. It was the same as mine. And she was right! We needed to go. We needed to go fast. For Juliet’s sake.
But. There was always a but. “They’ll follow us, Frankie. They found us this time, they’ll find us again.”
“Caroline,” she hissed.
“They opened a gallery. Okay? They’re not here to kill us. They wouldn’t have set up shop in our town if they had come to handle us. They’re meeting business owners and spreading their names around town. They’re stockpiling witnesses and leaving all kinds of money trails. Frankie, I don’t know why they’re here, but it’s not to kill us. At least not yet.”
Her eyes bulged. She looked like a porcelain doll standing in the middle of the kitchen in her silk pajama shorts and tank top. She had that delicate eastern European look. Russian genes that should have given her a career in modeling. But her looks meant nothing to her. Her family history and genetics meant even less. The only thing Frankie cared about was her freedom.
Fuck everything else and the whole goddamn world.
“If we’re going to leave, Francesca, we have to do this right. We have to pull everything. We have to take everything. We have to start completely over. New names. New identities. A new country. New everything. Give me a week to get it all together. Two tops.”
She glared at me. “And what about Juliet? This is a bad idea, Caro.”
I waved the note in front of her face. “What would you have me do?”
She turned away from me, chewing on her thumbnail. “Does he know?”
Realizing she was staring at the couch where my daughter was stretched out and sleeping soundly, I had the strongest urge to take everything back. We wouldn’t wait. We would leave tonight. We would run tonight.
“No,” I whispered, but I felt the truth in my words. I didn’t know how I knew that he didn’t know, just that I was right. I felt it in my bones, in the depths of my soul. Sayer came to play a game with me. If he had known about Juliet, he would have come to wage war. “Not yet.”
Frankie nodded, accepting our plan, even though I knew she didn’t want to. Without saying another word, she disappeared into her bedroom, and I had no doubt she spent the rest of the night packing and repacking her go bag.
As for me, I scooped Juliet into my arms and took her to my room. I tucked her under my covers and then kept my eyes on her the entire time I got ready for bed. Finally, I crawled next to her and pulled her into me. Breathing in the sweet smell of her shampoo, I finally let myself relax.
Sayer didn’t know about her.
Sayer wasn’t going to find out about her.
I would dodge him for a week, get my assets together, say my secret goodbyes and then leave.
Forever.
Except when I closed my eyes I saw the words from his notes, the ones calling me out for my past sins, the ones throwing my necessary decisions in my face.
I know this is going to be hard for you…
He had no idea how hard it was for me to leave DC five years ago.
And he had no idea how hard it would be for me to leave Frisco now. And not just because I loved this sleepy little town.
Sayer Wesley was back in my life. And for better or worse, I was going to leave him all over again. Only this time I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to survive it.