VINCENT (Dragon Security Book 2)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Me, too. We can go for walks every morning.”

  I nodded, trying not to look toward Olivia’s room, trying not to let her know that something was happening behind her. I stepped toward her and held out my hand.

  “We should go now. We can pack a bag and—”

  “No. I have clothes for you already. I bought them after I saw that woman come to your house. She’s a bad woman. She wants to hurt you.”

  “Who does?”

  “That woman.” She picked up her gun, her hand sliding down the stalk like she was touching the arm of a lover. “I’ve seen her picture in the papers. She runs some sort of security firm.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was here after the cat. After I tried to warn you with that cat. She was here with the police.”

  “She’s trying to help me, Beth. But I can call her now, tell her I don’t need her help anymore.”

  “Good. I don’t like her.”

  I nodded. “I’ll call her. Just give me the gun.”

  Beth immediately tensed. She raised the shotgun, pressing the stalk to her shoulder. Looking down the barrel of that gun was probably the most frightening thing I’d ever done. Vincent stepped into the doorway of Olivia’s bedroom, just three or four feet from Beth. I must have given him away somehow; I must have moved my eyes the wrong way. Beth swung around, somehow managing to fire the shotgun as she did. Vincent dove behind the wall as the plaster shattered into tiny pieces. I cried out, but Beth didn’t stop. She grabbed my arm and pulled me back, nearly falling through my bedroom door.

  Once again I heard the lock engage.

  “That was stupid!” she screamed. “Why did you have to do that? Why couldn’t we have just gone?”

  “I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t know he was there.”

  “You did. You knew it all along. You betrayed me!”

  “No, Beth…”

  She was holding me, her arm grasping my upper arm so hard that my fingers felt numb. I might have dropped the stake but for my determination to not let her win. Even as I tried to calm her down, I lifted my arm and slammed the piece of wood into her upper thigh, the feeling of resistance and then the sickening pop as it smashed against bone forever ingrained in my muscle memory.

  I let go and dove toward the closet the moment she began to scream. The door shattered over my head, showering me with pieces of wood and plaster and God only knew what else. I cried out, pressing my hands to my ears.

  The bedroom door burst open. It was so chaotic, everything seeming to happen at once. I was falling, pieces of the closet doors falling all around me. Beth was screaming, the gun exploding with its final shot. And the door burst open, and Vincent was there, already firing his handgun. Beth fell backward, landing in the center of my bed, that stake sticking up out of her thigh like a strange sort of replica of the Eifel Tower.

  Hayden rushed in behind Vincent, another man, his gun raised, behind him.

  We all sort of stared at Beth for a long minute. Vincent was the one to approach her finally. He touched her throat just as she began to moan.

  “Call 9-1-1,” he muttered. And then he was kneeling in front of me. “I told you to stay in the closet.”

  “I know.”

  He groaned, his hand moving carefully over my face. “You’re going to hurt for a couple of days.”

  I didn’t know it, but a couple of pellets from the first shot had imbedded themselves into my shoulder. And splinters from the closet door cut and stabbed my arms and my face. But, in that moment, I didn’t care.

  “You’re okay?”

  Vincent chuckled softly. “I’m not the one who confronted a crazy woman.”

  I touched his face, his chest, looked him over for wounds. But there wasn’t a mark on him.

  “I’m okay,” he whispered, moving close to me, his lips just brushing my ear. “We’re both okay.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned into him, suddenly too exhausted to respond.

  The last thing I remember about that night was Vincent carrying me out the front door to the ambulance. I caught sight of Beth on a gurney, blood staining the white sheet they’d pulled over her.

  “It’s over.”

  Vincent brushed a piece of hair from my face. “It’s over.”

  Chapter 18

  Megan

  “I think it’s time to have a discussion about the rules under which we operate out of this office,” I announced, watching my assets lounge against desks and walls, looking for all the world like a group of supermodels waiting to have their picture taken for a military calendar. Hayden was smiling at some pretty monitor, that charming smile enough to make the poor girl forget where she was. Marcus and Cole were leaning against the far wall, Dominic staring at the screen of his phone like I wasn’t talking. And Vincent, sitting at an empty desk at the front of the room, his face as expressionless as ever.

  And Dante. He was standing just inside the door, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  “We provide security. That requires that we spend a lot of time with our clients, sometimes in intimate situations that could blur the line between professionalism and romance. You will refrain from crossing that line. Do you understand?”

  Hayden groaned, catching my eye from across the room. “Does that include the friends of our clients? Or daughters?”

  “Yes. I can’t have my men going around breaking hearts. This is a serious business that deals with serious situations. You will conduct yourselves accordingly. Understood?”

  Everyone nodded or muttered a “yup”—including Vincent. And then he stared at his fingernails as if he had nothing better to do than worry about his manicure.

  “Now, we have several assets who are behind on their paperwork. You know who you are. If you could get that in by the end of the day, I would greatly appreciate it.”

  There was a little grumbling, but no other response.

  “Okay. Get to work, boys.”

  I headed out of the room, but Vincent grabbed my arm.

  “I have a personal issue that just came up. Would it be a problem if I take a few days off?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He was gone before I could ask for more information. I watched him go, then my eyes were drawn to Dante. He was watching me with this smoldering look, his dark eyes as mysterious to me now as they’d ever been.

  I was in my office less than a minute when he stuck his head in.

  “Can we talk?”

  I gestured for him to enter. He hesitated a second, then entered, pulling the door closed behind him before he took a seat in one of the chairs in front of my desk.

  “My friend with the NYPD sent back a report on your brother’s accident.” He set the files I’d given him on my desk. On top he set a single file folder that was so thin there was no way there was more than a few slips of paper inside. “He concluded that it was simply a tragic accident. No one else was involved.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  I snatched the file up and opened it, finding myself staring at a well-documented summary of the accident complete with drawings.

  “Where’s the reenactment?”

  “He didn’t think you’d want it since the findings weren’t what you expected.”

  “No, I want it.”

  “I’ll call him and arrange for him to email one.”

  Dante stood and tapped his knuckles on the stack of files. “For what it’s worth, maybe it would be better for you to let this go. Sometimes an accident is just an accident.”

  “But you don’t know all the details. You don’t know that my brother was investigating something that might have involved terrorism.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I don’t know everything. But I see a good woman tearing herself apart over something that she can’t change. Even if you prove that the accident wasn’t an accident, it won’t bring your brother back.”

  “But maybe it’ll offer his son a better legacy than the one he has now. And maybe we’ll fi
nally finish what he started.”

  “Some things are better left alone, Megan.”

  I looked up at him. “I appreciate your help, Dante. But I don’t want your advice.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I watched him walk away, the disappointment so palpable that I felt like it was this weight sitting on the center of my chest, refusing to allow me to breathe. I was really hoping this would be the break we’d needed.

  “It didn’t pan out,” I told Cole sometime later. “He didn’t find anything.”

  “How could he not? Even Hayden said there had to be another car involved.”

  “Yeah, well, Dante’s guy thought it was just a single-car accident.”

  “No fucking way! If it was that easy, why did they come after Amber?”

  “There’s more to it, Cole. And we’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “We will.”

  Chapter 19

  Vincent

  I sat in a rental car, staring up at a house I’d be welcome inside of a million times in the past. But not anymore. My face was the last face the people who lived here wanted to see. I don’t know why I was here.

  A new letter had come just after we managed to stop Beth Harrington. This one was…different. The tone was almost desperate, the accusations less accusations and more pleas. I don’t know. I’d read them—each and every one—each time they came. But I was with Quinn for two weeks, so I didn’t. Maybe that break, maybe that new perspective, allowed me to see what these letters really were.

  A cry for help.

  I took a deep breath and walked slowly up to the front door. I rang the bell with a quick jab of my finger against the button, telling myself that I had to do it fast so that I wouldn’t change my mind. I could hear footsteps; I could even imagine Lupita’s face as she came to open the door.

  Lupita. The maid.

  “Mr. Vincent!”

  She smiled so brightly, her arms tossed out to her sides like a woman who’d just been given the best surprise of her life. She smelled familiar when I hugged her, like apples and cinnamon.

  “Are they home?”

  She immediately tensed, the happiness disappearing. “They won’t want to see you.”

  “I know. But I had to try.”

  She looked at me for a long second, then nodded. She stepped back and gestured for me to come inside.

  The living room was filled with pictures. Sydney as a baby, Sydney learning to walk, Sydney on her first day of school. So many pictures that it was almost overwhelming. A scene from a nightmare. It had always been this way though. The only difference was that there used to be pictures of me, too, standing beside Sydney before the prom, laughing at the beach, holding her the morning of her graduation.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I turned and found myself face to face with an older version of Sydney. Her mother, Paulina. She’d aged twenty years in the last five. Her hair was gray now, her eyes haunted. She’d stopped wearing makeup, stopped bothering with dressing for the day. She was in a thin bathrobe that hid little of her sadly emaciated body.

  “I got your letter,” I said, pulling it out of my back pocket. “I’ve gotten all your letters.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve read them all. And I kept them in a drawer in my footlocker.”

  “Good.”

  “But this last one…it’s different.”

  She shook her head. “They’re all the same. You killed my daughter. I don’t want you to forget that.”

  “Do you think I could? I loved her, Paulina.”

  “But everyone saw you fighting. They heard her tell you about that boy at Harvard.”

  “She told me she kissed another boy. But then she told me that she loved me and she’d never love anyone else. She told me that it didn’t matter.”

  “But you were angry.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was hurt. But that wasn’t what we were fighting about that night.”

  She shook her head, turning away from me to pick up a framed picture of Sydney taken the summer before she went off to college.

  “We were fighting because she wanted to drop out of school. She didn’t want to be so far away from me anymore.”

  Paulina shook her head again.

  “We fought because I told her that she should stay. That it was what she was destined to do.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “She was angry that I didn’t agree with her the way she thought I would. She told me that I didn’t love her enough, that if I did, I would beg her to stay. And I told her that the opposite was true.”

  Paulina turned, tears streaming down her cheeks. “She’s dead.”

  “It was an accident. She was drinking. She missed the curve and I overcorrected trying to keep us from going over into the embankment.”

  She shook her head, her thin shoulders shaking with her sobs. I should have gone to her; I should have consoled her. But she’d given something away in her letter that kept me rooted to the floor.

  “You should have let her stay home,” she’d said in her letter. “You should have welcomed her desire to stay here in San Diego with you, with us. You should have supported anything she wanted to do.”

  She knew. Sydney must have told her what she wanted to do, and she must have known about the other boy. She must have known it all. Yet, she let me take it all on my shoulders all these years. She let me take the blame for something we all shared the blame for. Equally. Even Syd.

  “I loved her,” I said. “I loved her more than anything in the world. She was a part of my life for so long I couldn’t remember me without her. I would have done anything to make her happy. But I didn’t kill her. I’d rather die myself than hurt her.” I brushed a single tear from my cheek. “It was an accident. And now…it’s time for me to move on. And it’s time for you to stop blaming everyone but her.”

  I walked away without waiting for a response. I really didn’t expect one. I’d come to say what I needed to say and that was all that mattered.

  But I never got another letter.

  ***

  Los Angeles was not everything people say it is. It was hot and crowded and dirty. I drove to Van Nuys, where my father worked in his brother’s bodega, and cruised the streets, trying to remember the excitement I felt as a kid when we would come here for visits. It just wasn’t there. I found myself thinking of another place, another child, another woman. There was somewhere else I’d rather be. But I hadn’t seen my family in too long.

  I pulled to the curb in front of a short, squat Spanish cottage and cut the engine to the rental. The car immediately began to heat up with the air conditioning gone. For early fall, it was still very warm.

  Faces appeared in the windows and doorway of the house as I unfolded myself from the sedan. I understood now why Megan preferred SUVs.

  “Vincent?”

  My mother, a lovely, petite woman who’d somehow managed to deliver four children without permanent damage, ran out to the sidewalk to greet me. Then my brother and my sister, Callie. I had to admit, it felt good to welcome the embrace of my family.

  “I called you, you big lug,” Callie said, slapping her hand against my arm. “You need to learn to return phone calls.”

  “I did. I left a voice mail, but I guess you were preoccupied.”

  She blushed, then held up her hand. A small, perfectly round, diamond solitaire rested on her left ring finger.

  “Congrats!”

  “The wedding’s in December. You’ll have to come.”

  “I will.”

  “And bring whatever woman put that big grin on your face.”

  It was good to be home.

  Chapter 20

  Quinn

  I sat near the front beside other parents, most of whom were bored and staring at their phones during most of the performances. But I was paying attention, clapping for each class even though my Olivia wasn’t going to be on stage until the end of the performance. She’d been so
nervous on the drive over here, asking over and over again if I thought she would do well. She must have asked twenty times. And when she wasn’t asking that, she was asking about Vincent.

  “Will he be there?”

  I didn’t know.

  We hadn’t seen Vincent since the night Beth broke into my house. When I called Dragon Security, they told me he’d taken personal time. I didn’t know what that meant, but I was pretty sure it meant that the temporary part of our relationship had finally come into play.

  I ached deep inside. I missed him. I’d never missed anyone like this, not even my father when he disappeared sometime between making me dinner and preparing breakfast.

  I pulled my camera out of the heavy case and set it up for video. Olivia was about to come on stage.

  We’d done her hair in simple ringlets and pulled it all back with a ribbon. She was wearing a pink dress that didn’t make her look washed out—which was unusual. She was radiant, this huge smile on her face as she crossed the stage to take her place in the front. The music began, and I held my breath as I watched her through the camera, hoping that she wouldn’t forget the words as she had a few times at home. But she sang like an angel, the words just flowing from her lips.

  I’ll be your candle on the water.

  My love for you will always burn.

  I know you’re lost and drifting,

  But the clouds are lifting.

  Don’t give up. You have somewhere to turn.

  It was a beautiful song. And there was something about the lyrics that just seemed appropriate. As stupid as it might sound, tears began to burn in my throat as I watched my daughter perform this incredible song.

  It was over before it began. All the fuss and preparation and she was only up there for three minutes. I sat back and watched part of it on the small monitor on the back of the camera, smiling at the way she stared into the audience, this huge, slightly apprehensive, expression on her face.

  We were going to be okay, Olivia and me.

  I’d decided that I was done with the porn industry.