by Cindy Skaggs
Fifteen minutes later, he’d taken his verbal abuse and gotten things rolling. Dez was out and Victoria was in. All part of the cover. Not that the agent in charge knew about their past involvement. Stiles wasn’t happy as it was, but if he knew the truth, he’d go apeshit.
Blake strolled down the wrecked hall to her room, his tension increasing as he neared the door at the end of the hall. After he’d called the team and rearranged the plan, after risking his career, would she ditch him? Running was her specialty. He’d bet money she had cash and a go-bag somewhere in this monstrous old house, but he’d told her the absolute truth. He’d follow this time, and he’d never lost a trail. Not once.
He eased the door open with his boot. The bed was tossed, slit like the furniture in the other room. Pieces of a shattered mirror glittered among the shredded strips of vibrant fabric. A jewelry case was smashed, with assorted pieces of jewelry flung from one side of the room to the other. Behind a door in the back of the room, sobs sounded.
Crying? Victoria Calvetti did not cry. He slipped his gun from the holster and approached the back doorway with caution. The door swung into the bathroom. Blake peered through a gap and saw her on the floor, blood on her hands.
A semi parked on his chest. He looked back to ensure the room was clear, then went in, gun up. The large bathroom had a glass-lined shower and separate tub, empty. No closets. The room was empty, save Victoria on the floor. He circled to get a better view.
The sight defied description. His stomach lurched. Victoria knelt next to an eviscerated cat. The thing was stiff, blood matted to orange fur. In her hand, a bloodstained knife. The stench of death filled the room. Lunch tried to crawl back up his throat.
Victoria looked at him with red-rimmed eyes, tears streaking down her cheeks. “I didn’t want a cat,” she said softly. “I made him come inside. Out of the cold. Safe.” She hiccuped the last word.
He holstered his weapon, knelt in front of her. “Darlin’, put down the knife.”
Palms up, the knife nestled in her left, she stared at the blade, tears dripping from her chin. “I didn’t see at first. Came in. Started packing a bag. Got everything, turned to go. It was— He was—” Hiccup. “Nailed. Up there.” She motioned to the bathroom door.
A knife hole punctured the back side of the bathroom door. Blood dripped down, pooled on the floor near the wall. Someone placed the cat for maximum affect. It wasn’t noticeable at first glance, only after you got inside, closed the door. She’d never get the wood clean, would never enter the room without remembering the cat crucified against the door.
She wiped her nose with the back of her free hand, smearing blood and tears and snot. “I didn’t want a cat.” Anyone who knew her wouldn’t recognize her. Face bare, curly hair frizzing around her face, green eyes red-rimmed, blood and tears streaking her nose and cheeks. And she was so out of it she didn’t know or care.
The last time he’d seen her like this was when they were both in college. Their affair had been a secret, her choice, and the cloak-and-dagger thing had made the relationship exciting. Months into it, she’d shown up at his doorstep like a zombie, like she didn’t know what day it was. He’d been lost. She hadn’t said a word, just fell into him. She cried herself into a migraine. He’d found her medicine, forced a pill down her throat, cleaned her with wet washcloths, probably only half clean at the time. He’d been working on panic and adrenaline. He’d never seen a girl cry.
It was bitter truth that his mother never cried. Oh, she’d ranted and railed against every injustice, perceived or otherwise, but she’d never cared about anything or anyone enough to cry like she was broken. With Victoria, Blake had skipped classes for close to a week, kept her holed up in his room, shades drawn until she’d snapped out of the funk and told him her mother was dead from complications due to childbirth.
Here she was again, crying like she was broken over a cat she didn’t want, clutching a blood-covered knife. She’d probably destroyed any evidence, but he needed to preserve what he could. He reached out, gently wrapped a hand over her wrist. “Drop the knife.”
Her eyelashes glinted with droplets of tears as she looked up at him. Pain drew lines on her pretty face. Anger coiled in his gut. He’d punish the man responsible for her pain. He turned her wrist, heard the knife clatter to the tile, but he never took his gaze off her. “We’ll get whoever did this, Victoria. My word on it, but right now, we need to get out of this house.”
Killing a cat was personal. It sent a damn strong message. The bastard wasn’t going away. Blake rose, pulling her with him. He drew her to the sink, washed her hands, and dried them. He wet a washcloth and cleaned her face. She stood like a child while he cleaned, which told him more than any words how losing the cat affected her. The mess in the house and the torn-up furniture were nothing. Maybe the damage had made her angry. It definitely made her feel out of control, which she didn’t like one bit. She’d kissed him because of it. She’d needed to take back control.
But this? The cat? Finding the cat had gutted her in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible. Maybe there was a piece of the girl he had known once locked under her rock-hard exterior. Thinking there was any innocence left in her was dangerous. Hopeful. A lot of time and experience had passed between them, and young love wasn’t something you ever got back.
He rinsed the washcloth, watched the red slide down the drain in a bloody vortex. He turned off the water, squeezed the cloth. Victoria grabbed the cloth and finished herself. Her eyes hardened as he watched. While she applied makeup, he went to the kitchen, found a box of Baggies, and returned to the bathroom. Victoria swiped on some lipstick, finalizing the polished look she wore like a mask. There was no evidence of the girl he’d once known.
He bent, bagged the knife, hoping some crumb of evidence remained.
“I know you have to keep the knife.” She glanced around the room, as if finally realizing someone might have planted a bug. Someone might be listening. So they could witness her pain.
He bit down to keep the anger inside.
“I want it back. You want me to go with you right now, fine, I get it. But I want the freaking knife.”
“We’ll talk,” he said. They’d talk when he was sure no one was listening. Whatever Victoria had gotten into, it was big. She wasn’t going through it alone. Someone had left an unmistakable message. Who? And how far were they willing to go to get what they wanted?
He maneuvered Victoria out of her house and into his truck. She’d fought him over leaving her only mode of transportation, but the people who destroyed her house likely had access to her car. He didn’t have time to make sure it was clean. After checking her luggage for bugs, he loaded the bag in the truck and moved her away from the scene of the crime. He’d called and given further direction to the cleanup team. Warned them about the freaking cat. He wanted the house back to normal, to make things right.
Right now, though? He needed information. He had his own issues, his own operation to contend with, but he wasn’t leaving Victoria in the wind, which Agent Stiles, his superior on the task force, objected to. Strongly. Stiles called him an insubordinate son of a bitch with a death wish. Blake didn’t care, and he wasn’t ready to dissect his reasons. Without conscious thought, he drove to a dive bar they’d frequented in college. It was early for the party crowd, so only a few college kids sat at the bar. He led Victoria to a booth in back and squeezed in beside her. Without asking, he ordered them both a glass of scotch and waited for the waitress to bring them.
Victoria downed it like a shot of tequila. Her eyes watered, and she sucked in a breath. He followed suit, and damn but it burned going down his throat. His stomach immediately warmed. He held up two fingers to the waitress. “Two more, and water.” The girl returned minutes later, set the glasses down, and left them in peace.
Victoria took a sip this time, letting the smooth liquor linger on her tongue. “What are you, Blake?”
“You’re a smart woman. Do the math.”
She twirled the scotch glass between her hands. “What you are is an idiot.”
“You used to be better are small talk,” he said, but he couldn’t stop the smile he felt as he stared down at her. “Where’s the flirtation and the charm, woman?”
“Are you saying I’m not charming?” She batted her lashes at him. “You, sir, are no gentleman.”
“Never claimed to be.”
She shrugged her dainty shoulders. “We’re miles past small talk, dear heart. You cleaned blood off my face. Not another man alive has seen me cry.”
But he had. Twice, and it was two times too many.
“That moves things to a whole new level,” she said, eyes hard. “I’m not settling for half truths. I’ll ask once more, and if you don’t answer, I’ll walk. What are you?”
He took a drink, let it linger on his tongue, warming and soothing. He finished with a sip of water. “I was a narcotics cop in Denver, but it was like snipe hunting. We never found the real deal, no matter how long we stayed out. For every low-level dealer I put away, a bigger player walked. Half the time, we didn’t know the bigger players.”
“So you went undercover?”
“Not at first. I knew Logan from high school and we reconnected at a conference.”
“And he convinced you to go to the dark side.”
This time, he didn’t stop the smile. “Only you consider it the dark side, darlin’.”
“But you did join the Feds?”
“Something like that.”
“Task force?” she asked.
He nodded. Admitting it was breaking his oath, risking his place on the task force, his security clearance, and any chance he had at redemption, but Victoria understood the workings of law enforcement as well as or better than most cops. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“The Feds will suck you dry. Satan would have been a better choice. At least you’d know the deal in advance and have it in writing.”
“You really don’t like the Feds, do you?”
“Why should I?” She quirked a shaped eyebrow at him. “The U.S. Attorney’s office has done nothing but make my life more difficult.”
“They’re not the ones trashing your place.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “I told you my deal. Time for you to pony up. What happened to your place? What had you running to my club?”
“Who said I was running from anything?”
“Blood, snot, and tears don’t lie. What is going on with you?”
Victoria stared down at the amber liquid in her nearly empty glass. “I got cocky.”
Not exactly what he expected, but he sensed a deep hurt and more than a little fear in her words. “Darlin’, you were born cocky. Tell me something I don’t know.”
She continued to stare into the glass as if lost in her own head. “Do you know what happened last year with my brother?”
Nick Calvetti had taken over the family business when their father died under suspicious circumstances. Half the bureau figured Nick had his own father whacked and the other half figured it was an attempted coup from the second-in-command. No one knew to this day who killed the old man, but it brought on a new reign of terror from the Calvetti family as Nick put his stamp of power on every aspect of the business. He was highly intelligent and ruled like Hitler. Most of the men who died during his reign were by Nick’s own hand. He was an evil bastard, but Victoria had outsmarted him.
“It took me close to a year to plan it all, and I still couldn’t plan for everything.”
“You took some serious risks.”
Victoria had orchestrated her nephew’s kidnapping, using it to agitate a power struggle that ended in her brother’s death.
“Did you plan for Nick to die?”
“I’m not sorry he’s dead.”
“Which didn’t answer my question.” The arguments about Victoria were mixed. Many on the task force thought she was as twisted as her brother. She was devilishly smart, avoiding direct involvement by manipulating her then-lover into doing the dirty work. They could have tried her for conspiracy, but with her coconspirator MIA, they didn’t have enough evidence, and in the end, the U.S. Attorney’s Office wanted to move on to something meatier. Something they had a ghost of a chance of winning. The vacuum created by Nick’s death left a hole that they filled with Blake and his club, a ripe target for money laundering.
Blake didn’t hold with the evil genius view of Victoria. It didn’t mix with the memories of a girl he’d known once upon a time. “Why did you do it?”
She drank down the last swallow of scotch. Pain contorted her lips. “I needed Sofia free.”
Need, not want. “Why?”
“It was my fault. After my mom died, Nick came out to check on me. Met Sofia.” She shook her head, sending her curls into a frenzy. “I didn’t see it. I was so tied up in my life, in—”
“Me,” he finished for her.
“You, me, my mother’s death. I got so tangled up I didn’t see Nick’s fixation on Sofia until it was too late. I knew even then it was up to me to get her out.”
The question he’d had for years was suddenly as clear as her empty glass. “Which is why you cut me off.”
She closed her eyes. “No one else was getting drawn into the family. Not because of me.”
He’d gone to a dark place when she disappeared. Spent too much time in this hole-in-the-wall bar drinking one too many glasses of cheap whiskey and getting pissed at the world. And she thought she’d been saving him. Just like she’d saved Sofia. “What you did with Sofia was dangerous.”
“It worked.”
“All’s fair in love and war?” he asked.
A frown marred her smooth features. “Nick was a psychopath. Sammy C was hell-bent on power. They would have taken out half of Manhattan to destroy each other.” Shaky fingers rimmed the edge of the whiskey glass. “No one gave two cents about Eli, and no one sure as hell cared if Sofia lived or died.” She grabbed the glass tight as if she wanted to throw it against the wall. “Sofia is my best friend. I got her involved in my dysfunctional family. Like it or not, the plan forced Nick and Sam to deal with their garbage instead of using the people around them, destroying lives in the process.” Her voice lifted a notch and she shoved the glass across the table to clatter into the wall. “I got results, sweetheart, so don’t you dare judge me.”
“I’m not judging.” He maintained an even tone where hers was off the charts. “Logan gave me the rundown. Eddie filled in the rest. I know what went down the last night.” Nick and Sammy went at each other. Both ended up in body bags. “It could have gone the other way, and you know it.”
Victoria turned. Her eyes rounded much as they had when she’d seen Eddie at the club. “You dirty—” From her corner of the booth, she pushed against him, her movements frantic, trying to shove him out of the booth. “Eddie’s an informant, isn’t he?”
Chapter Six
“Why would you use an old man—” Vicki sputtered. Of course Eddie hadn’t gone to work for a rival family. He’d been looking at jail time for his involvement in Nick’s organization. The night Nick died, Eddie had held an FBI agent—Logan—at gunpoint. The Feds pressed the advantage, using him like a piece of meat in a bear trap.
“Use? Do you have a clue as to what that old man has done in his life?” Blake’s smooth demeanor vanished. “Eddie has more than a few sins to atone for, and for your information, he came to us.”
“To you?”
“To Logan. After the fallout from your brother, Eddie was pending charges, and he made a deal. He wants out.”
“And the Feds convinced him to give his last pint of blood for the greater good.” She rubbed the aching pulse in her skull. Eddie had practically told her the truth the other day by her car. He didn’t have a pension. Working with the Feds was his pension plan.
Blake dug a hand through his hair. “Your brother was looking to expand ope
rations here.”
“Colorado?” she asked. She hadn’t heard the slightest whisper of such a thing.
“He’d had several meetings with a person of interest. Eddie was there. He was the inside man we needed.”
Which family? Obviously, the one Blake worked for, the one tied to his club, but she hadn’t paid much attention to the Rocky Mountain Mafia. They hadn’t been on her radar, but it made sense. As long as Nick had to visit Colorado to see Eli, he might as well bring his one-man crime wave with him. He was as pragmatic as he was sick.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to think rationally. It didn’t help to get angry. Eddie was a grown man. He’d made his choices. She was a planner and a plotter, so she understood Blake. Understood his need to win, maybe even understood the way he’d manipulate people—Eddie—to his advantage, but she had some guilt over her inability to protect Eddie. She hadn’t found a way to get him out of the life at the same time she’d freed Sofia. “Obviously you want the man at the top of the food chain. What organization do you work for?”
He shook his head. “Your turn, darlin’. What brought you to my door?”
The buzz from the scotch wasn’t enough to slow the spark of panic. It was easier to think about Blake’s situation instead of her melodrama. “What can I say? I was feeling nostalgic. I came across your address, and I just had to stop by.”
“Bullshit.”
His phone buzzed. He turned it to look at the display. He answered with a snide, “What?” He closed his eyes, nodded, muttered terse, one-word responses. “Fine. We’ll be there in twenty.”
“We need to go.” He tossed some bills on the table and grabbed her hand. The warmth spreading from his touch could be blamed on the two glasses of scotch, but she couldn’t control what she couldn’t face. The attraction between them was wicked. Had been from day one. The kiss in her kitchen had been off the charts. She’d pushed him to get him on board, but he hadn’t needed much of a push. They didn’t need an excuse. The chemistry was nuclear, and fate had brought them together. If she trusted the bad omens, she could trust this. They were meant, at least for this little slice of time. She’d ride it like every other wave in her life, because sooner or later, they all crashed.