Constant

by Rachel Higginson

  So I didn’t understand the point of this box and the note. Unless he was just purely torturing me now. He apparently wasn’t finished with his sadistic game of cat and mouse. He wanted blood. He wanted revenge.

  He wanted me on my knees.

  But he wasn’t going to get it. My promise to Francesca was real. We were going to get out. We were going to survive. We were never going back to DC again.

  I read the note one more time.

  Sixes that Snitch get the Fishes.

  It was like a Dr. Seuss poem for the villains of the world, but not hard to interpret. Sixes—me and Frankie—that snitch—leave/tell/abandon the life—get the fishes—death/dead/swim with the fishes (the oldest mob line in the book).

  The box made me furious. My hands were trembling and I’d stopped gagging at the smell as I marched my way across the resort, stomping over stone trails in a warpath of fury. I reached cabin eleven in just a few short minutes and chucked the box onto the porch. It rocked back and forth but didn’t tip over. Which only made me madder.

  I was just about to storm the porch and kick the box sideways when Sayer pulled up behind me. The growl of his engine fueled my rage and I waited not so patiently for him to exit his vehicle. Jesse wasn’t with him. Who knew where Jesse was. I wouldn’t have put it past Sayer to lure the poor unsuspecting, innocent Colorado cowboy into the woods and chop him to little pieces. He was a sadistic bastard.

  “What are you doing here—” he started, but I had no time for his pretend innocence.

  “You’ve gone too far.” I swung my arm toward the box on the porch. He just blinked at me, acting as though he didn’t know what I was talking about. “You’re package came.”

  He stared at the open box, his eyes narrowing, his jaw ticking. “That’s not my package.”

  The sincerity in his voice was the final straw. I walked over to him and hit him in the chest, my hand meeting rock hard resistance. I didn’t care how strong and tough and scary he was. The note was crushed in my fist, evidence that he’d taken this game too far.

  “This isn’t funny anymore, Sayer!” I shouted in his face, hitting him again. “I’m so sick and tired of you fucking with my mind.” I hit him again and then threw the crumpled note in his face. “I left you. Fine. There! I said it. And I’m sorry I did it. Okay? Does that make you happy? I’m sorry I left you. I knew it was a shitty thing to do. I knew you would be devastated. And I did it anyway. My reasons are my own, but know this—they were way more important than your poor me feelings of abandonment. I knew what I was getting into with you when we were kids. And I knew what I was getting out of when I left. Both were worth it to me. Do you understand? Both. So I’m sorry that you hate me now. I’m sorry that you can’t let go of us or what happened or the bullshit between us. I’m sorry you’re so fucking vindictive over the whole thing. But you need to let it go!” I was shouting and shaking with anger, but then all of a sudden it drained out of me and I could barely whisper my next demand. “You need to let me go.”

  He stared at me, his jaw ticking and his eyes blazing. Pure, raw fury vibrated from him. My back was to the siding of the cabin before I knew what was happening and my hands were pinned to my sides, locked in his relentless, crushing grip before I could think to fight back.

  “Can you let go, Caro? Have you let go of us? And all the bullshit?” His body pressed against mine, trapping me against the house and his chest. It was all I could do to breathe, let alone think rational thoughts or continue my argument. His head dipped, bringing our faces closer together. I could feel his breath on my lips. His hands gentled their grip on my arms, but didn’t let go. My heart hammered so hard I knew he could feel it, I knew it mirrored his, mimicked his, chased after his. “Can you let me go, Six?”

  His mouth was on me before I could answer. Bruising, punishing… defeating me. I was so shocked I could only stand there and let him kiss me.

  But that didn’t stop him. His lips moved over mine in a way they never had before. This wasn’t the sweet, gentle familiar Sayer I’d fallen in love as a kid. This was a man that had spent five years in prison alone, abandoned, hardened. This was his shocking transformation on display. His muscled arms and broad chest. His darker, more serious eyes and the hard, chiseled jaw. This was the man that had gone through hell and survived.

  “Come on, Caro,” he growled against my lips, grasping and shaking my arms roughly at the same time. “Fight back.”

  My mouth responded before my brain could figure out what he meant. On a gasp, his tongue was in my mouth, coaxing me to kiss him, reminding me how explosive we were together, seducing me into a world I did not want to go to.

  But I couldn’t help it. Had I let him go five years ago? No. No, I hadn’t. And how could I when he was embedded so deep beneath my skin.

  Sensation rocketed through me, sparking my tattered nerves alive in a way they hadn’t been in five years. I could feel him everywhere. His hard, merciless body pressing against mine, his thick, muscled thighs cradling mine, his rough, calloused hands holding my arms. His lips against mine, fighting, warring, worshiping.

  A whimper tore out of me, as weak as my own will. And still I kissed him back. I let his tongue tangle with mine and my lips move against his and my teeth scrape against his soft bottom lip the way I knew he loved. Still, my thighs parted so one of his could wedge between mine. And still my breathing faltered and my stomach flipped and my heart tore in two.

  Divided in half by want and need, past and present, life and death.

  His thigh pressed against my core, sending desire spiraling through me. I hadn’t let anyone touch me like this in so long. I hadn’t wanted a man like this since Sayer. The intensity of the feeling was so sharp it hurt.

  He let go of my arms to wrap around my waist and pull me closer to him, pressing me against all of him, letting me feel all of him. My hands were in his sweater, clutching it for stability. But I wasn’t pulling away.

  Not even one inch.

  A car drove by on the road behind him and it was a jarring enough sound to bring us back to our senses. He set me on the ground, apparently I’d been trying to climb him. I relinquished the grip I had on his shirt. He plucked off his wayward glasses and slipped them into his pants pocket.

  But that’s as far as he went. He didn’t step back. He didn’t remove his leg from the intimate place between my own.

  His expression was cocky, full of satisfaction. “I guess that’s you letting go?”

  If I didn’t think he’d lock me in his cabin to teach me a lesson, I would have punched him in the smug face. “Move,” I growled, my throat raw with unshed tears.

  His mouth lifted in a half smile, but he raised his hands in surrender and took a step back. “It’s fine, Caroline. Don’t be so upset. It’s not you. It’s just all that bullshit between us.”

  I ground my teeth together, hating him all over again for throwing my words back in my face. I wanted him to feel like this, like I did. I wanted him to feel this awful and lost and ruined. I wanted to wreck him the way he had just destroyed me. “I feel bad for not giving you a warning before, Sayer. So here it is—your big, obvious head’s up. I’m going to leave again. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not any day that you can predict. But I am going to leave again. And this time, when I go, you’ll never be able to find me again.”

  I pushed by him, not waiting for his mean reply and headed back to the office. He didn’t try to stop me and I didn’t turn around to see if he even cared. I had other things to worry about. Like keeping my promise to leave him. And getting Francesca and Juliet out of this town and away from him and the world he belonged to forever.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took all the strength I had to get up to go to work the next morning, and I hadn’t been able to bring myself to give Sayer a wake-up call. I knew there would be consequences, because he was a vindictive son of a bitch. But they were worth it. Even Juliet saw how drained I was from having to face him every day—although she didn�
��t understand the reason why.

  “Mommy, are you sleepy?”

  I looked down at her and saw Sayer looking back at me. She had his blazing blue eyes, his expressive eyebrows, his sly smile. I hated him just a little more every time I looked at her. Their similarities used to make my chest pinch with nostalgic regret and a healthy amount of guilt. Now I wanted to kick him in the shins for lending my daughter his looks.

  He didn’t deserve her.

  I closed my eyes, trying to relax a bit but saw him there too. My thoughts strayed to him pushing me against the cabin again, trapping my hands in his, pressing his thigh between mine. His lips were all over me. Softer, slower… and this time they didn’t stop.

  “Fine,” I half shouted. “I’m fine. Sorry, Jules. I just need a cup of coffee.”

  Francesca shot me a look from the couch. She was working nights the rest of the week, so she got to lounge in her pajamas until lunch. And then she got to go to work where her ex-boyfriends didn’t stalk her or bother her or try to make out with her.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she demanded, cradling a big cup of black coffee in her hands.

  I shook my head back and forth, trying to brush off the weirdness that seemed to cling to me this morning. “Like what?”

  “Like you want to push me off the balcony.”

  Reaching for the coffee pot, I brushed off her accusation. “I need coffee.”

  “You said that.”

  God, I was losing it.

  “Are you okay, Caroline?”

  I hadn’t told Francesca about Sayer mauling me yesterday. Part of me felt like I already knew what she was going to say and I didn’t want to hear it. I knew it was a bad idea to kiss Sayer. We were so on the same page about that.

  Another part of me wanted her shocked empathy. I wanted her honest reaction that I couldn’t get past. That kiss had completely and utterly stunned me. Where had it even come from? I would have been less surprised had he started strangling me. Or pulled out a gun. Or wrestled a black hood over my head and thrown me in the back of a windowless van.

  But a kiss? With tongue and groping hands and sizzling heat? Uh, no. Until yesterday, I would have sworn with my life that those days were over between us. So where had it come from?

  It wasn’t like it was this grand gesture to get me to go out with him again. It wasn’t even a kind kiss. It was cruel and savage and completely, one hundred percent wild. There was nothing seductive about it, other than it had been a very long time since I had been kissed like that. There was nothing even remotely gentle about it. It was not a request for us to get back together. It had been a punishment of some kind.

  Although I had yet to suss out the whys and whats of it. There were plenty of other ways to punish me.

  The skanky side of me shivered in anticipation.

  That was so not what I meant, ho-bag.

  Oh my God. I needed a mental health day.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Just tired.” Turning around, I met her gaze, not even meaning to manipulate her. It was just part of it—part of who I was. “The last couple weeks have been exhausting.”

  She raised her coffee cup to me in a toast of solidarity. “Agreed.” When Juliet ran back to her room to get some toys for her backpack, Francesca walked over to the kitchen island, trying to be secretive. “Any word on new identities?” she asked softly.

  I shook my head, adding just the right amount of creamer to my coffee, turning it a rich caramel color. Black coffee was for the birds and the guilty—or so my dad used to say. Which was apparently Francesca. She preferred to chew her coffee. “Not yet.”

  “We should leave anyway,” she murmured.

  Juliet bounced around her room, looking for a doll to pack for school. I watched her from where I leaned against the island and felt my plan cracking, finger length fissures like a spider web along the edges, making it fragile and weak. “Juliet needs new records, Frankie. She needs a valid birth certificate and social security card. We could maybe make it, but how am I going to send her to school next year without some kind of paper trail. Immunization records, hospital and doctor’s records. Frankie, all the records. I don’t even know how to start the process without them. I can’t show up in a new city and not have at least birth records. They’ll call CPS. They’ll take one look at me and assume I kidnapped her from a nice, punctual, two-parent family. I can’t risk it… I can’t risk losing her because we weren’t careful.”

  Francesca made a growling noise. “So many more details this time around.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do, Caro?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to ask around at the hotel. There are some girls… I don’t think they’re students. You know what I mean?”

  “Fake visas?”

  She nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Okay. Do it. Our only other choice is to run with cash and hope we can get these particulars sorted when we land somewhere.”

  Neither of us liked that option. There were too many variables, too much potential for getting caught.

  Frankie’s hand landed on mine. “Do you think it’s just the Volkov or do you think we need to worry about the feds too?”

  Leaning forward, I dropped my voice even lower. “Frankie, I don’t know. Sayer says it’s innocent. He says he’s trying to start over. I don’t trust him, obviously. But whether or not he’s telling the truth, I do know trouble follows him wherever he goes. And if he’s hanging around here, it’s only a matter of time before trouble finds us too.”

  “How do I look?” Juliet asked from her bedroom doorway. She was wearing black and white polka dot leggings beneath a purple paisley skirt and a bright pink sweater. Her ringlet curls clung to her face thanks to the static of her sweater and she had a red rain boot in each hand, ready to slip on.

  “Beautiful,” I told her, absolutely meaning it. “Are you ready?”

  “Yep!”

  “K, kiddo, grab your jacket and your backpack and meet me by the door.”

  She obeyed and I turned around to pour my coffee into a thermos. “Ask around at work, Frankie. See what you can come up with. In the meantime, let’s keep an extra low profile. I am confident he doesn’t know about Juliet yet and I plan to keep it that way.” Only I wasn’t confident. I just didn’t have any other options. I put my hope in Sayer’s silence. He hadn’t mentioned Juliet yet. He hadn’t tried to see her yet. I had to believe that meant he didn’t know about her. He’d changed a lot over the years, but I knew him well enough to expect absolute hell if he ever found out that I’d been keeping his daughter a secret from him for five years.

  Frankie sighed, pulling her knees to her chest. “I’ll have to cancel all my weekend plans. That will disappoint so many of my friends. Oh, wait. You’re my only friend and I didn’t have any weekend plans. So, keeping an extra low profile shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Her tone made me pause. Turning around to my moping best friend I set my coffee down and gave her my full attention. “Do you regret leaving?”

  She took a deep breath and stared at her toes. “I regret who my uncles are. I regret that my mother died. I regret that my father had to die for her. I regret that I have to live in fear and that I won’t ever have a normal life and that I can’t ever just be… free of that world. But I don’t regret leaving. Not when it meant washing my hands of the bloodshed and the trafficking and the drugs. I just couldn’t… I didn’t want to be a part of any of that.”

  “If we had stayed though… do you think we could have turned things around?”

  She laughed, but it was dark and slightly hysterical. “And what? Turned them into a charity? No, Caro. My cousins would never have let that happen. If we would have stayed, I would have lost my soul to the bratva and you would still be paying off your dad’s debts. And just imagine—” She tossed her head to the side, indicating Juliet. “Imagine her life. Imagine how much they would hav
e demanded from her. We did the right thing. It’s okay to be a good person. It’s okay to fight to stay a good person. Don’t let Sayer make you feel bad for leaving. You did the best thing for your family.”

  I grabbed her hand and squeezed. “And you did the best thing for you.” She lifted her eyes, gratitude shining through. “We have each other. That’s the only kind of normal we need.”

  She nodded, but didn’t add anything else. And I got her silence. I got her mood. It was hard to live remembering everything we’d left behind.

  It hadn’t all been bad. We had a life in DC. We had family. And protection and danger and excitement. We’d been respected. We’d been taken care of.

  We’d also been sheltered from the worst of the syndicate. We were thieves. We were con artists. We didn’t have to deal in the hardcore drugs and the trafficking of women and young girls and the killing. When conflict broke out with other families or with gangs, we went into hiding. When the news reported overdoses and underage girls in strip clubs and murders, we pretended like they had nothing to do with us.

  We took the money and gifts given to us by the family and lived for each new adventure. It was crazy to think about where we would be now if I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Juliet was the wake-up call we needed to get out.

  We had been out for a long time… and we were never going back.

  I left Frankie to take Juliet to her preschool. It was only a seven-minute drive, not too far from Main Street. We held hands as we walked inside and talked about worms and bugs and all the little things on the sidewalk that fascinated four year olds. I checked her in with her amazing teachers, Miss Beth and Miss Harmony, and headed to work.

  This used to be my favorite drive. I loved leaving town and heading up the mountain, winding around the twisting roads. But now it felt like a march to my funeral. Someone honked behind me and I realized I was going painfully slow—even for mountain roads.