by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin
“You want me to find him?” I say without thinking.
What the fuck, Arden? You going to kill this girl’s ex?
She looks to me, and I don’t miss her quick glance to the rifle. She is far too observant for her own good, and she knows what I mean as much as I do, even if it is a ridiculous notion.
“No,” she says quietly, “I don’t think that’s really necessary.”
I reach out and grab her fingers.
“Sorry,” I mutter. “Reflex.”
Oh great – that makes it sound so much better.
She actually flinches a little, and I might not have even noticed if I wasn’t holding her hand.
“I won’t do anything,” I promise.
She nods.
“I would never hurt you,” I add. It’s so fucking important to me she knows I would never, ever do anything to hurt her, and I have no idea why.
She nods again.
“I know.”
“Come back?” My fingers grip hers a little tighter. I want the words to sound like a demand, not a question. “After you see your mom, you can come back here.”
I want it to be a statement…a charge…an order…but my own bizarre feelings of insecurity win out.
“You don’t have to-”
“I want you to come back here,” I interrupt. I need her to understand, even if I don’t.
“Why?” Her voice is so soft, I can hardly hear her.
I don’t know how to answer.
“Because,” I finally say. I look into her eyes, hoping she’ll find meaning there since my words are so inadequate.
Lia sighs and reaches up with her free hand to run it through my hair.
“How long will you be here?” she asks.
“I don’t know. It could be days or weeks. I just don’t know.”
“I need at least a couple of days with my mom.”
“Take them,” I tell her. “Just come back when you’re done.”
She stares at me for some time without saying a word but finally nods her head. I don’t know if it’s meant for me or if it’s just the way she is confirming her own decision to herself. I don’t care – she’s agreeing. Nothing else matters.
“All right, Evan,” she says softly, “but only on one condition.”
“Anything,” I say. Again, all brains have left me.
“Tell me your full name.”
“Lieutenant Evan Nathanial Arden.” No brains whatsoever. Maybe the doctor who did my psyche evaluation and said I couldn’t serve anymore was right.
Brains become completely irrelevant as she smiles at me again.
“Okay,” Lia says with another smile. “I’ll come back to you.”
Chapter Four
Accepted Fate
Odin sits next to the open window of the truck, so I have Lia sandwiched between the two of us. I like it. I like it way too much, actually. Odin seems to have accepted her, or at least decided she smells enough like me now that it doesn’t matter. He licks her hand when she pets him and even nuzzles her neck with his nose, making her laugh.
The journey is quiet, but I hold her hand in mine and place them both on her thigh. It is a two-hour drive to Tuba City, and the nearest bus station where she can get a ride the rest of the way to Phoenix. I want to take her to see her mother myself, but she makes it clear she wants to do this alone, and I know I can’t really leave my station for the extended trip. At least I will be able to get some gas for the generator and some supplies.
I watch her legs as they move up the steps of the bus and wonder when they will be wrapped around my waist again. Lia turns back and gives me a smile that doesn’t touch her eyes, and I return the sentiment. Then the doors close, and she is gone.
The drive back to the empty house is a blur – too uneventful to bother committing to memory. Even if it had been more exciting, my mind is too preoccupied to bother with it. Every thought points to her, and it’s more than a little maddening.
When I walk in the door, I am followed closely by Odin, carrying his rubber bone in his mouth. He tries to engage me in play, but all I see is the empty bed with the sheets shoved down to the floor. I take a deep breath, hoping I can still find her scent in the house, but it’s too faint, and I’m probably only imagining it.
Get your shit together, Arden.
I walk back outside and fire up the generator. Dinner is grilled cheese and half of a bag of salad I got from the store next to the bus station. I fire up the netbook PC as I munch on Romaine lettuce, cabbage, and carrot strips without any dressing. All they had in the little convenient store was the brand I hate, and there wasn’t any Italian dressing at all. My email eventually loads as I’m on my second helping.
Pizza Hut – teasing me again. God, I would love a pizza right now.
I’ve won the Bank of Europe lottery. Is there a Bank of Europe?
Alienware would love to have me buy their new gaming machine.
And one more message.
Sender – Roger Moore.
Subject – none.
Body of message – come back.
The message was sent twenty-nine hours ago – I haven’t checked messages since early yesterday. Roger – or rather, Rinaldo – would assume I had received the message and left by now.
I swallow hard and close the PC.
A thousand thoughts run through my mind, and I can’t catalog them all into any semblance of order. I told her to come back, but when she gets here, the place is going to be empty. I can’t hesitate to leave and head back to the city – I just can’t. I have no phone number or any way to contact her. I didn’t even consider it, and if she thought about it, she apparently didn’t think it was necessary to give me her phone number.
Ride my cock for hours, yes, but not give me her fucking number…
Even if she had given me her number, I still don’t have a phone to use in the first place. Not until I get back to Chicago, and there is no way I am going to ask her to come there. If I want to, I can have her found – there can’t be that many Lia Antonio’s with a mother living in Phoenix. I can certainly locate her mother at the very least, but then I wouldn’t know what to say to her.
I’m trying to make excuses. I know what I’m doing and tell myself to cut that shit out. I don’t lie to myself. It’s pointless and destructive. I already know what I have decided because there really isn’t any other choice. I’m not going to bring that girl into my life. No way in hell. The very notion is ridiculous, and I was probably just a little bit insane when I told her to come back here. It could never last.
There’s a small duffle bag underneath the card table in the kitchen, which I haul out and deposit on the bed. My clothes go into it – the dirty and the clean. The netbook goes in there, too, as well as my spare pair of tennis shoes and Odin’s bone. I reach over and grab the rifle, quickly dismantling it so it fits inside the duffel. I take a quick look around the place to make sure nothing important has been forgotten, and there they are.
Her panties – the ones I nearly tore off of her last night – wrapped up in the sheets on the bed. I reach over and untangle them, then place them deep inside the duffle bag.
I have to leave her something.
I briefly consider leaving her my boxers but shake that thought from my head quickly. Her little lacy underwear is seriously sexy – boxers are not. There really isn’t anything I have I can leave for her, so I am stuck with the ultimately lame. I dig around in the “catch all” drawer of the kitchen until I find some paper and a pen. I sit in one of the folding chairs at the table and stare at the blank page.
What the hell can I even say?
I had to leave, but thanks for the great fuck?
I can’t leave her my address. I don’t have a phone number.
I can’t tell her to come and find me in Chicago.
With shaking hands, I write a single word on the paper and then place it in the center of the bed.
SORRY
I take a step back, and
a glint of silver catches my eye.
There is a quarter lying next to the pillow.
Reaching over slowly, I pick it up in my hand and hold it tightly, transferring the heat of my palm into the metal. My throat constricts, and I swallow past the lump before I open my fingers and let the coin drop next to the piece of paper.
Turning quickly, I grab a couple bottles of water for the road and head back out to the truck. I spend a moment dismantling the wires attached to the battery and rolling the wire up into a tight, round loop. I bend down to pick up the dog dish and a bag of kibble, throw them and the duffle into the back of the truck, and whistle. Odin appears from around the house, races towards me, and a few minutes later we are heading down the road.
As I steer the truck down the drive, it feels like someone reaches through my back and grabs hold of my heart, ripping it through my body and yanking it back to that tiny, hot little house. I keep swallowing, but it doesn’t stop the burn in my throat.
Odin whines and noses at my arm. I look over at him and wonder what he sees when he looks at me. He noses my arm again, then licks my hand where it grips the steering wheel.
“Thanks, buddy,” I say in monotone.
He whines again.
“I can’t do that,” I say softly. “I can’t do that to her.”
With my eyes staring toward the spanning horizon, I push thoughts of her from my mind, burying her memory in the darkest recesses of my brain. I wish I could have explained it to her – told her it was for her own good, but there was no way. Anything I said would either be a lie or too dangerous for her to know.
So I drive off.
Odin at my side.
But otherwise alone.
The End
Otherwise Occupied
USA Today Bestselling Author
Shay Savage
Copyright © 2013
Shay Savage
All Rights Reserved
Dedication
To all the Evan Arden lovers out there.
Special thanks to my team – Chaya, Holly, Tamara, and Chanse Lowell for their tireless efforts in getting this book to production!
Chapter One
Hired Relief
It’s fucking raining.
Again.
It wasn’t that I minded the wet or the cold – I really didn’t, but it screwed with my aim and I was still trying to get back into the boss man’s good graces. I couldn’t really afford to miss. Against my better judgment when it came to an easy escape, I had put myself a little closer than I liked to be for this sort of job. I had to be sure to be successful, and if it cost me my life…well, that was better than failure at this point.
With my left eye closed, I looked through the scope of my Barrett M82 rifle. The crosshairs focused on a set of double doors made of glass and metal. The doors led inside of an office building, and there was a large “space available” sign over the entryway with a phone number to call if you wanted a thousand square feet, which was just right for your office needs. If you were to call the number, someone would answer, but you’d find there wasn’t really any available space.
Not unless you had the right connections – preferably Russian, quite probably illegal Caspian Sea caviar, and definitely heroin. Those connections might get you a little corner office, but they would not, however, endear you to Rinaldo Moretti – my boss and sole owner of all the Moretti businesses. Some of those businesses were even legal.
Well, one of them was.
Sort of.
I shifted my hip and stretched my back a bit. I had been in the same position for a good seven hours, and I was hungry. I brought a couple of protein bars with me, but they were long gone. This job wasn’t supposed to take this long, and I was getting frustrated and annoyed. I forced my breathing into a slow, regulated pace.
Frustration and annoyance were not my friends, not when I was on the job. I needed to keep my shit together long enough for my target to walk out the door and die.
Maybe the weather was causing a delay.
I reached up with my hand and tightened the cloth around my forehead. It was doing a decent job of keeping the rain from my eyes, but it wasn’t helping with the whole comfort level. I didn’t stop watching the door as I adjusted the bandana – never that. I had to be quick, efficient, and deadly.
No fuckups.
The last fuckup nearly cost me my life and had ended with me exiled to the desert for months, and that was just for killing the wrong guy. Missing the right one would be a lot worse. Of course, I couldn’t hit or miss him if he didn’t show up where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there.
“Calm, Arden.” I blinked as I realized I was actually talking out loud to myself. Not good. I didn’t like that shit, so I clenched my teeth a bit to remind myself not to do it again.
Everything had been perfect up until this point. After a week of scouring the Chicago city skyline, I had found the perfect building with the perfect view of the front doors. No visibility from the street directly below and nicely shielded from view of both the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Observatory. I only needed to be patient until…
…there he was.
I had no doubt the man in the grey trench coat was my target, though I had never met him before. I had studied his picture for hours yesterday to be sure I wouldn’t make a mistake. I’d probably been through his family photos more often than his wife had.
I blinked once, placed the crosshairs in position, and smoothly pulled back on the trigger.
Only a muted thump could be heard as I sent the bullet down the barrel and into his left eye. Before he hit the ground, I was already back away from the ledge of the building and disassembling my rifle to shove it into a gym bag. I moved the clothes around inside to cushion the metal and make it undetectable from the outside of the bag and then headed swiftly to the rooftop entrance.
Three minutes later I was on the other side of the building, out the door, and then taking the stairs into the parking garage across the street. At the top of the garage was a gym where I held a membership, and I made my way to the locker room inside. With my bag padlocked into a locker, I hit the Nautilus equipment.
It felt good to work out a bit. I had been slacking.
All thoughts of Thomas Farmer, chief board member of Electro Industrial (now deceased), vanished from my head by the time I had done my third set of weights. If it sent the right message to others about which crime lord you should align with, I might get a bit of a break, and Moretti might put me back on my normal pay scale.
Probably not.
Sweat replaced the rainwater in my hair, and after I’d done a rotation on the Nautilus, I went for the treadmill. From the front counter, there was a chick there who kept giving me the eye. She even brought me a towel when I finally got off the machine. She’d done the same thing the last time I was here, but I didn’t see her do it for anyone else.
“How was your workout, Evan?”
“Fine,” I replied. “Thanks.”
Great – she even bothered to look up my name.
She was twenty-four or twenty-five, five-foot-seven, blonde, and she had recently gotten a haircut – the ends were crisp and blunt – but she didn’t like how it had turned out. She was trying to pull off a little ponytail for a hairstyle that was far too short, using a rubber band from around a newspaper. She didn’t normally wear it that way, or she’d have one of those scrunchie things.
The first thought in my mind regarding her hair was to agree – it was too short. It also wasn’t dark enough. She didn’t have that classic Italian beauty look I preferred.
Preferred?
I wasn’t actually aware I had a preference, and I considered this as I gave her a smile, a quick thanks, and then headed to the shower. While the water poured over me, images of long, smooth dark hair – almost black, but not quite – and matching dark eyes flooded my mental vision. I could almost feel her smooth skin against my palms.
I shook water from my
head and quickly changed my thoughts.
I was probably going to have to change gyms even though I had only recently joined this one. I didn’t need anyone paying attention to me, remembering me, and hitting on me. It was too bad, really, since the place was big enough to have a short wait time for the machines. Oh well. I could always work out at the gym adjoining my apartment, but the wait time for a treadmill meant spending half the day there for a sixty-minute workout.
Home again.
My apartment was a high-rise building right near the Chicago River. My boss owned the place, and it came with the job, so I didn’t have to pay any rent or anything. It was a nice perk, though I would have preferred living in the country somewhere. I had never lived in the country, but I always thought I would like it – open spaces for target shooting and enough room for Odin to run around and chase squirrels and shit.
I nodded at Pete, the security guard, as I walked by. I had no idea what his last name was, but he was on Rinaldo’s payroll. He smiled back at me, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes like it usually did.
I glanced over him and quickly took in other changes. He was usually dressed pretty nicely, but on this day his normally ironed shirt was wrinkled, and the tie didn’t match. His eyes were a little bloodshot from either lack of sleep or possibly actual crying – I couldn’t really tell the difference.
It made me wonder if the wife had left him or if he left the wife, and then I decided it was probably the former. He had a kid, too – a young one not yet in school. I wondered if she found out about who he worked for and walked out. I wondered if I’d have to kill him.
Or her.
Maybe the kid.
Nah, probably not. Rinaldo was a businessman, and killing a kid rarely achieved anything that couldn’t be achieved just as well by killing the parent.
The elevator dinged, and I pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. My apartment was the perfect location as far as I was concerned – right on the corner of the building, up high enough for my rifle to be very effective from a distance, and just two stories above the adjoining building. If I needed to get out via the balcony, I could. I usually took the elevator up and the stairs down but not for any particular reason. I was used to doing little things like that to keep myself in shape, and it was just a habit.