Chapter Twenty-One

Eli

I knew it was hard for Nina to see me knock Marvin Hershel out, and I knew it was hard for her to wrap her head around the idea of truly betraying her father, but I needed her to commit firmly to me now. If she couldn’t do that, then I would have to swear her off. It might require a twelve-step program, but I would have to do it. I couldn’t trust a loyalist to Jon-Pierre Gusteau in my bed, especially his own daughter.

Nina wrapped her pea coat more tightly around herself and drew her eyes up to mine. “I don’t want you to go to those headquarters,” she said, voice firm and thoughtful. My eyebrows drew together in a frown. What the hell did she mean, she didn’t want me to go to the headquarters? What the hell was all of this for if I never breached his goddamn fortress? “There are other men more equipped who follow certain protocols and—”

“Jesus, Nina, give it up!” I said, throwing my hands into the air and then burying them back into my hairline. How could she still be so naïve? “We don’t have that kind of time! You know who else has protocols and equipment? Your fucking father. He has been preparing for some fed-up local to challenge his shit ever since he started building it. All he has to do is realize that I’m coming for him, and everything will move and change. The proof will disappear. The building will go up for sale. You can’t keep protecting him, Nina, unless you like what he’s doing. Unless you want him to keep doing it. Because that’s what you’re doing when you protect him. You protect all this.” I spread my hands and gestured at the disgusting alley.

“You keep saying that my father is a monster, but he’s never laid a finger on me,” Nina sniffed. “The only one I’ve seen actually hurt someone else is you, Eli.”

“What about my fucking window? Your robbed store?” I gripped her shoulders harder than I meant to, I was so zealous about my point. She had to see the danger she was in if she continued to trust that man. “Nina, the fact that JP hides his bullshit from you doesn’t mean that he’s innocent. It means that he has spent a lot of time building a flawless façade. It’s that mask. You know it. Deep down in your heart, you know he wears a mask. But the man underneath is still a monster. He will hurt you if he has to.”

Nina swallowed. Her deep blue eyes fixed on mine and held there. “What about you?” she whispered up at me. “Would you hurt me if you had to?” Her eyes shone brightly, and it stabbed at my heart. Was she on the verge of tears? Bright eyes could cry so easily. “Because right now, you seem every bit as wild and crazy as my father.”

My grip on her arms loosened, and my heart pounded hard enough to make even my face throb. “Never,” I rasped. I brought a hand to her cheek and scraped my knuckles tenderly down her jawbone. “Even if you tell me now that you are Nina Gusteau, Princess of Darkmont, and you tell me now that you’re going to JP to tell him everything about me. Even then, I’d let you go. I’d let you seal my fate.”

“Oh, Eli.” Nina brought her cold hands around my neck and drawing me down to her. Our lips crashed and tumbled together, all over each other in an instant, like an explosion. My bun came out and her hands were in the shag at the nape of my neck. My tongue dove into her mouth and tasted her, hungry. An erection thundered to life in my pants, and my arms fastened around her, gripping her hard against my body. She whimpered softly inside my mouth.

“You’ve got to get inside,” I whispered, running my palm up between her thighs and under her skirt. The heat wafting off her pussy was incredible. “You’re freezing.”

“I feel hot,” she breathed against my neck.

“Then let me get inside,” I growled. “I’m fucking freezing.” My hand slid into the crotch of her panties and barely ghosted against her slickness when Shaky Handgun grumbled and shifted, slowly waking up against the pipe where he was tied.

Nina gasped, and I begrudgingly pulled my hand out of her panties and slid it into hers, tugging her from the alley. “Come on. It’s not safe out here.”

By the time we returned to the apartment above Toasty’s, the urge to immediately fuck had thankfully passed. Nina’s raw sex appeal had been a skewer through my investigation, blotting out all the other important information. We didn’t have time to gallivant in my bed like two teenagers. Not now, anyway. Maybe later.

“I want you to stay here until I get back,” I told her, flipping the lock pointedly behind us. “We don’t have much time before JP learns everything that happened tonight, but it will hopefully still be enough time for me to get in and out of the headquarters.”

“You can’t go there right now,” Nina insisted with a scoff, like it was obvious. “You know the weekend is his busiest time. He’s going to be at Redhead until late tonight, Eli. You have to wait, or you’re going to walk right into him.”

“Maybe that’s what I want,” I snapped, even though I knew that clashing head-on with JP would probably be as damning to my mission as letting old Uncle Marv run to him. That didn’t make this stupid fact any less true. I would have loved to run into JP anywhere. A dark alley or his own corporate office—any time and any place would suit me.

“You were the one who was trying to talk to me about strategy back there in that alley, remember?” Nina said. “What kind of strategy is going to your enemy’s fortress while he’s there? Even cat burglars don’t do that, and those jobs only take one night to complete. They didn’t work on that for four months. Promise me you won’t barge in there until well after midnight, and I promise you that I’ll stay in this apartment until you get back.”

I grimaced. Damn it. Nina was right, and that was a fair trade. I had paid attention to every detail for four months, and I couldn’t be brash and rush headlong into danger now that I was so close to obtaining that hard evidence. I wasn’t totally invincible. Some caution could save my life.

“All right,” I muttered. “Fine. You win.” I reached down and tugged my shirt overhead, intending to change into all black before infiltration much later tonight. I turned away from Nina and cast my shirt into the pile of dirty laundry on top of my washing machine.

Nina gasped softly behind me, and I paused.

At first, I wasn’t sure what she had seen that was so upsetting. To me, this was daily life.

Then I remembered.

My back.

It had been covered in tattoos for years, and not for no reason at all. Many of my tattoos covered painful scars.

But I had a large tattoo on my back, and even though it was a long pillar of color, it still didn’t do much to disguise the cigar burns and belt welts on my shoulders.

“The Virgin Mary,” Nina breathed, probably embarrassed by her reaction to my scars. Probably trying to seem like the tattoo was the reason she’d gasped.

“In honor of my mother, Mary,” I told her. “I got it after she died.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to open the washing machine and act like this was a regular, normal conversation about my dead saint of a mother. “She was a devout Catholic all her days.” I dumped the dirty laundry piece by piece, wrenching the knob to start the water. It poured down and helped me to disguise how tight my throat was. “She tried like hell to turn me into one, too. Didn’t work.”

“You still say ‘Jesus’ a lot,” Nina’s voice came from behind me, warm and comforting as velvet. Her hands traced over my back and gooseflesh rose up everywhere that she touched.

“I don’t think that ever made her feel better,” I said with a half-smile.

Nina’s lips gently pressed against one of my scars, and I exhaled. I tried hard not to let anyone see my bare back, and no one had ever touched these scars, had ever tried to give my body the emotional healing it needed. Her hands smoothed over my abdomen from behind and she whispered, “I love you, Eli.” This time she didn’t take it back. “I love you, and I want to live with you here. No matter what.” Her breath tickled my back and she promised me, “I’m on your side.”

I twisted and scooped my arms up over her back, burying my hands into her hair and clutching, pulling her mouth open and invading her completely. My dick pounded. I needed her now, but I knew we had to wait. We had all the time in the world when this was all over, but for now, tonight, we had to keep our heads clear.

“I love you, too,” I breathed against her mouth. We kissed again, hot and wet and almost fitful, like our mouths were fighting each other. I wanted to be inside her, and I knew she wanted her pussy to suck me off again. We had a few free hours before it was late enough to break into Redman Corporation. “Give me the keys to your place,” I told her. “I’m moving you in tonight.”

Nina reluctantly fished her keys from her purse and passed them to me. “Don’t get in trouble,” she warned. “Maybe I should come with you.”

“You already promised me you wouldn’t leave this apartment without me tonight,” I reminded her. “I’m holding you to that, bright eyes. I need to keep you safe. This is a bad night for wandering in the city. You know that.”

An hour later it was almost ten, and I had an idling U-Haul parked on the side of the street. I left the furniture and filled the back of the van with everything else. If she needed the chaise lounge and the vanity mirror and the ballet barre, we would send professional movers to retrieve them. But I wanted her to have everything else she would need in order to never come back.

I was holding a duffel bag crammed with the last of her nighties and her bras and panties and all the other delicate accoutrements, all silk quickly wrinkling, when there was a loud, perfunctory knock at the apartment door.

I froze. Was I paranoid, or did I even recognize that fucking knock?

“Nina.” JP’s unmistakable voice bled through the wood. My jaw clenched. My fists clenched. He was here. On the other side of that door. Looking for Nina. His tone was lilting, calming. He was still trying to win her over, but he was losing his grip on the situation. That much was obvious.

If he saw me here, his meltdown would be total and complete, and I fucking wanted to open that door and say, “What’s up, Pops? Nina’s not here right now. In fact, I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

“Nina, darling, open up,” JP called again. More knocks. “Let’s talk. I feel like you need a good talk to see things more clearly.”

I slowly advanced on the door, putting almost no weight onto my heels. I didn’t want him to hear the creak of a single floorboard, though I didn’t know if Masters Heights ever creaked. I placed my hands on either side of the peephole and peered through it.

Sure enough, Jon-Pierre Gusteau stood in the lush corridor, smirking in a fine suit and small blond ponytail. He always had that air of control, of grace, like a dancer. It was what I remembered most vividly about him. It was what made people impossible to convince of his abusive tendencies. They could never see the man behind that porcelain mask.

JP paused, and then added, “You fired Will, Nina. You know you can’t do that. I need him there for his accounting skills.” His cool blue eyes flicked to the peephole. “I know you’re in there, sweetheart. I can see you looking at me.” He twiddled his fingers and smiled. “Let me in. Let’s talk like adults.”

“It’s not Nina,” I said.

JP’s eyes bulged, and his teeth ground together. I could see the stress fractures running up and down his face instantly. The mask had slipped.

“Eli,” he growled. “What the hell are you doing in there?”

“Taking Nina somewhere she can truly be free,” I snapped. JP rooted in his suit pocket for something, and I assumed it was a gun. “You’re going to shoot through a doorway in Masters Heights?” I challenged him. There was no way he could be that foolish. He controlled Darkmont, but he didn’t control all of Hinton.

“Don’t need to,” JP sneered, extracting a plain white card and waving it in front of the lock. The sound of sliding metal followed as the lock unbolted. “I’ve got the key.”