by J. P. Oliver
Seeking Sanctuary
Hometown Heroes: Book 2
J.P. Oliver
Contents
1. Victor
2. Adrian
3. Victor
4. Adrian
5. Victor
6. Adrian
7. Victor
8. Adrian
9. Victor
10. Adrian
11. Victor
12. Adrian
13. Victor
14. Adrian
15. Victor
16. Adrian
17. Victor
18. Adrian
19. Victor
20. Adrian
21. Victor
22. Adrian
23. Victor
24. Victor
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Seeking Sanctuary
1
Victor
“The focus here is financial strategy.” With a creak of old wood, my weight settled as I stopped pacing, addressing the landline on my desk.
“There’s more to it than just that,” my father said, a bodiless voice in the room. “You’d be responsible for the overall financial health of the distillery, hon.”
“Think you’ll be able to handle all that, Beth?” I asked.
“No pressure” Beth’s laugh emanated from the speaker. “Guess I’ll have to, right, Victor?”
With a grin, I settled back against my desk—some old, sturdy relic from the distillery’s beginning, when this office belonged to my great-grandfather. Now, it all belonged to me, passed down from the great Markus Savage: the desk, the office, the distillery; the responsibility.
Like Beth said: no pressure, right?
“Financial director,” she hummed.
“It’s not as scary as it sounds,” I said. “And I wouldn’t be throwing you into open water all on your own. I just need the extra hands right now.”
It would be a transition for her—I knew about as well as anyone that jumping into a managerial position was a daunting task—but I trusted her in this department more than anyone else. Beth knew the family business, saw how it all operated firsthand; ran among the Maplewood offices and fermentation vats with their brass piping, tangled all throughout the building, and the long, cool underground cellars of pungent barrels full of old booze, aging to perfection. She knew it as well as I did, as well as any Savage kid did.
“Why not Zach or Dom, then?” she asked.
“The first obvious, glaring difference is that you’re the smartest out of all of them.” I paused, huffing a laugh. “That doesn’t leave this conference call by the way—”
“Oh, I’m already messaging both of them,” Beth teased. “To assert my official status as smartest in the family.”
Dad and I laughed, but the laughter devolved into a wet, haggard cough on his end of the line; he was conference calling in from home. “You’ve always been good with numbers, though.”
“Honor roll, honors classes, awards all across the board in econ and math,” I affirmed, thinking of the famous Savage Wall of Accomplishments in my parents’ house: a hall dedicated to displaying all the plaques and ribbons and little pieces of paper we’d won throughout our academic and actual careers. Beth had a lot of real estate on that wall.
“Aw, shucks,” she laughed.
“Now, I’m not saying this to be an old dick,” Dad said, “but you’ve always had good instinct for it, hon, and yet you work at the library? Is that fulfilling?”
“Sure,” she piped. “I mean, yeah, math’s the shit, but… what can I say. I’m a Renaissance woman.”
“Would you be all right with leaving the library?” Dad asked.
“Or at least going part-time?” I followed.
“I think they’d be fine with part-time,” she said. “What with all the foot traffic—well, tourists aren’t exactly itching to grab a North Creek library card, but they come in and they need people around who know the town’s history.”
“But would you be fine with part-time?” I asked. “Financial director’s a pretty big responsibility—”
“Please.” Beth snorted, and I could practically see the dismissive smile on her face. “I’ll be able to handle it, Victor.”
“With work and the wedding—”
“Yes, with work and the wedding. I’m not all on my own, I do have a fiancé to help plan it.”
I crossed my arms, smirking at the phone. “Not that you two have even set a date.”
“Details. We’re working on it.”
I hummed, relaxing as I felt the conversation shift from work to family, which was how meetings within the family usually went: business first, gossip second.
“That city slicker thinking of a spring wedding or what?” Dad asked.
The city slicker, of course, was Robert, Beth’s longtime boyfriend-turned-fiancé. He was a good guy, as far as any of us could tell. He’d endured the merciless teasing, interrogations, and vague threats to break him if he broke Beth’s heart from all the brothers and uncles—and even Mom. Robert stuck around, and even helped out last spring when Curtis and Zach were on their quest to get North Creek all kinds of historical recognition. He would be a Savage—if not in name, then in spirit.
“As long as he’s helping,” I murmured.
“We still don’t have a date picked out,” Beth sighed. “Not that either of us are in any sorta rush after what went down at Zach and Curtis’s. That was a whole new level of drama—even for us.”
I shook my head. “You got that right.”
The past year was a whirlwind. From the time it took the leaves to grow and change, our lives and our little town had changed even more. In the springtime, North Creek found itself in danger of falling prey to developers with sinister intentions; Zach, my younger brother, came home from the SEALs in Virginia, and got back together with his old flame; there were housefires and hostage situations and historical societies.
In the summer, the town was a waterfall of people—tourists come to hear all about the Savage and Cross’s tangled family histories, to revel in the preserved 1920’s charm, and to see firsthand where the outlaw, Rocco “Mad Dog” Carlino, lived his life and took his last breath. Where he died at the hands of our great-grandfather. And at the end of it, the family came together, revitalized and ready to celebrate Zach and Curtis’s marriage.
Unfortunately, more of the family showed up than we were hoping for.
“That wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain someone being back in town, would it?” I asked. I paced across the room, admiring the wall of family photos collected and hung on the wood in solid frames: pictures of the Savage-Cross family that spanned generations.
“It might.” I heard her exhale, clearly frustrated. “I don’t know. Part of me really thinks it’s better to just try and wait Winston out. He can’t hang around North Creek forever, right?”
The silence that followed was a hollow answer.
“You know him,” Dad grumbled. “He’s stubborn.”
“Runs in the family,” I murmured, stopping at the most recent photo of me and Beth, Zach, Dominic—of all the Savage children, except one.
“Yeah, and it’s about the only Savage trait he’s got,” Beth muttered.
“You shouldn’t go through life afraid of what other people might do,” Dad said. “You do what you want and if people have got a problem with it—”
“Robert wants to just have it. He knows about Winston, but he doesn’t know Winston—not like we do,” Beth said. “Fuck, I don’t know if I really even have a choice, though. He’ll probably show up no matter what I do.”
“That definitely sounds like him,” I said, turning
away from the photo.
“Plan for the worst,” Dad sighed. “But hope for the best. By the time you two get your damn wedding planned out, he might lose interest.”
“That’s optimistic,” Beth laughed.
And she was right: in matters regarding the family, Winston would never back down.
“He hasn’t contacted you since the wedding, has he?” I asked.
“He’s tried calling,” Beth said. “But I sure as hell haven’t been picking up.”
“Same with us,” added Dad. “How about you?”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek, an old nervous habit.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s tried a couple times. Keeps coming around, but there’s never much to it. Seems like he’s only trying to get under my skin for the sake of getting under my skin.”
“Typical Winston,” Beth huffed. “And the anxiety’s—”
“It’s been fine,” I interrupted, stomach twisting just a little, hands bracing against the desk. “Nothing worth mentioning anyway.”
It was a half-truth at best, but they didn’t need to know that. I’d been managing my anxiety well enough—no anxiety attacks which meant, for all intents and purposes, it was handled. The last time I had an attack was after high school, when Winston left home. Of course, with him around now, it was getting worse—it was always worse: I was feeling more anxious and overwhelmed than I had in a very long time
Winston.
The name was loaded, an immediate stop—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred—and I had the unfortunate pleasure of being the man closest to him; of being his twin.
It was strange to think I’d come into this world with him, and just as strange to know I was afraid of him. Maybe it was stupid to be. I wasn’t physically threatened by him, but I knew better than anyone he never got physical. It was his charm, his manipulations, his need for control; a mind was a delicate thing, and Winston knew all too easily how to shatter one completely.
I would know; I spent the better part of twenty years as the earliest victim of his cruel manipulations, lost and mindfucked in the shadow of his toxicity. It wasn’t a position I was looking to return to any time soon.
Conversation whittled naturally down to talk of what was happening around town: who was getting up to no good, who snuck into whose little cottage up at the hotel, who was seen back together down at the Speakeasy.
“Speaking of,” Beth laughed. “You been down there, lately, Victor?”
“Nope,” I said, popping the ‘p.’ “Been too busy.”
“It’s been fucking packed. Hard to get a game at the pool tables, Zach told me, what with all the tourists coming through now.”
Dad chuckled. “That’s good news.”
“I guess,” she hummed. “Unless you’re just a poor local trying to grab a table.”
“I’m sure it’ll slow down with school picking up for folks,” Dad said.
“I hope so.” Absently, I leafed through the first few pages of a recent order. “Kat sent me another handful of order forms for the Speakeasy. These tourists are drinking our whiskey faster than we can make it.”
“That’s good news, right?” Beth asked.
“Yeah, monetarily speaking.” I dropped the order. “But production-wise, we’re having trouble keeping up. We’ll have to expand.”
“That’s great—”
“But,” I said, frowning at the landline, plastic and white and a relic from the eighties, “the cashflow coming in from the Speakeasy won’t allow for expansion. What we need is financing.”
The line was silent.
“Well, how about a business loan?” Beth suggested.
I hummed. “Maybe.”
“It’s something to look into, at the very least,” she said. “An end we can look into. Worst case, it’s a no, and we move on. Find another way.”
Dad’s laugh startled us, bright despite the grogginess in his throat. “That’s my girl.”
“You already sound like a financial director, Beth.” Pride pulsed through me. “I’ll look into it—”
“Ah ah,” she tutted. “We’ll look into it. You’re not alone in this anymore.”
Beth was always reliable, never faltering; I don’t know how she did it.
“Uh-oh, Dad,” I teased. “What did we just make?”
“A monster, I think.”
If we were in the same room, Beth would have slapped my arm, but she couldn’t, so she settled for a nice, happy, “Fuck you guys.”
Laughter clogged the line from every end.
“All right,” Dad sighed, sounding good; sounding happy. “That’s about enough excitement for me for one day. Better get off the line before your mother starts barking. I’m sure she’s been hunting all over the house for me, so I’m on borrowed time.”
I chuckled. “Where’re you hiding out this time?”
“I wheeled myself into the guest bathroom.”
The image of my dad holed up in that cramped little half-bath was enough to make me laugh so hard my cheeks hurt. With a wave I knew he’d never see, I told him, “Go on, git. Before you give Mom a heart attack.”
As our father hung up, the laughter faded away. He wasn’t the sole source of it, but without him around, I felt the conversation silently steering itself to something more serious. I could feel it between Beth and me, even over the phone, even with the distance.
“He’s sounding better,” I offered carefully.
“Yeah. More lively, at least.”
“The treatments are probably helping—”
“Curtis said there haven’t been any changes,” Beth interrupted, the information a harsh cut despite the tenderness in her voice. She was worried about him; I couldn’t blame her. “At least, nothing major.”
“I guess no news is better than bad news.”
“Mm. Hey. Can I talk to you about something?”
My lips twitched into a deeper frown. “‘Course.”
The pause on the other end was pregnant, tense.
My pulse fluttered nervously. Somewhere else in the building, another phone rang, muffled but obtrusive.
“Winston,” she said. “I know you’d never let it happen, but we can’t let him worm his way into the distillery, Victor, I mean it—”
“I know.”
“It’d be too much for Dad to handle after everything that—”
“Beth.”
Silence.
I picked the phone up, pressing it to my ear. Like this, Beth felt closer, the conversation turning hushed and secretive.
“Don’t you think I know that?” I murmured, running a hand over my forehead.
“I know. Sorry, it’s just…” she trailed, sighing. “If he got his greedy little hands on any part of the company, it would kill Dad.”
I swallowed, knowing how right she was.
Our father was dying already—stage four cancer, pancreatic; he was receiving treatment, finally, but after a long bout of being too stubborn to even set foot in the clinic, he’d already been issued an expiration date. We didn’t need to make things worse, so Winston needed to be handled carefully.
“I won’t let him lay a finger on this place.”
“Good,” she said, conviction in her voice. “Neither will I, long as I can help it.”
My mouth twitched into a small grin.
“That Savage stubbornness goes both ways, don’t it?”
Beth laughed. “You know it.”
“I gotta get back to work—”
“Say no more,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you. Don’t forget—”
“Business loan.”
I could hear the smirk in her voice. “Business loan. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Gently, I placed the phone on its receiver, sighing.
Sliding off the desk, I walked to the wide window of my office. It didn’t point out to the wheat fields or the clusters of forest, where the green of summer was melting into the woodsy, earthy browns and oranges; instead,
it pointed out over the wide berth of the distillery floor.
I remembered standing here at my dad’s side when I was little, when my nose could barely clear the warped wooden sill. Here, I could watch it all, a captain at the helm of an old family ship: the long, crisscrossing pipes and the wide bellies of the copper stills, the black rubber mats stained sticky with whiskey, the barrels waiting to be filled, the people of North Creek who kept it all running smoothly.
It was an empire. It was a livelihood for the family, built on the backs of so many others who came before me, and who made sure this place survived even the Prohibition. And it would all be mine one day.
Another twist in my stomach.
I just couldn’t fuck this up.
2
Adrian
North Creek, Tennessee.
Truck tires dragged over the packed, fine dirt of the backroad as I turned into my folks’ driveway. I slowed, hand smoothing over the toffee-brown leather of the wheel as I saddled up behind my Pop’s ancient, rusting Volkswagen. I glanced in the rearview, back to the trailer hitched to my truckbed’s hitch—and the beautiful Harley strapped into it; my baby. Of course, I had to take her on the trip with me. I’d never leave her behind.
A few rotations of the crank, and the window rolled up.
Engine, off. I snatched up my duffel and swung out of my truck, a fading red model from the nineties—and the most reliable car I’d ever owned, picked up cheap—and just took it all in for a second.
North Creek, Tennessee.
Home sweet fucking home.
It was sure as hell different from Nashville. Where the skyscrapers made up the city’s jagged skyline, North Creek’s was the peaks and valleys of the Smokies. The leaves were already turning, but the seasons here were all different, too, in a way I couldn’t quite place.