“You sure as hell did have a choice—you do have a choice, Erin. You gotta remember that,” he said, advancing on her. She came up against the dresser and stopped short, but he didn’t stop until his face was right in hers. God, he’d never seen her so scared, and that pissed him off even more. “You can’t give up all the power to them. That’s the first step to losing everything. No matter what happens, you always have a choice. Your choices may be pretty shitty sometimes, but they’re always there.”
“What choice?” she argued back. “The choice to let my mom die?”
“That’s their choice, not yours,” Zander said. “Your choice is how you want to do the deal. How much danger you’re willing to put yourself in, with people who have already proven that they don’t play by any rules. You have no control over whether or not they kill your mom and her boyfriend. You never did. That’s completely their ball game. You got that?”
“But I have the money. I have what they asked for. All I have to do is do what they want, and—”
“No, Erin,” Zander said, and now he did reach out, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. Any ordinary woman would have cried, but Erin just stared at him, blinking furiously, her mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. “No. If you do what they want and only what they want, they still could go ahead and kill you, me, and their hostages, too. They are not playing by our rules. I told you. The second you give up control to them, any control, they will seek to take more. And then more still. Right now you have enough cards to make this work. You’ve got the money they want, and you’re in a more or less safe location with a lot of people and activity. Those are all good things. But you’ll blow all of that if you just give away every card you have to them—agreeing to meet them alone, off-site, with nothing but yourself and a bag of money for protection.”
“But I have you for protection!” The words seemed ripped out of her, and Zander firmed his grip on her shoulders, staring at her. “I have you, and my mom doesn’t. She just—”
“Your mom got herself into this mess all on her own,” he said, his words low and steady. “To get her out, you need to do this exactly the way I tell you to. Or we leave right goddamned now.” Zander set her away from him and wheeled around, scooping up the blue backpack and shaking it at her. “I’ll walk right out of this hotel, out of this hellhole city, and out of this country with all your money, and then you really will be screwed. Is that what you want?”
She just stared at him, her mouth now open. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”
“The hell I wouldn’t!” Zander shot back. “My job down here is first and foremost to keep you alive. If we get your mom out in the process, great. But that’s not my primary goal and you need to keep that crystal clear.” He threw the bag back down on the bed, stalking over to the slider door again. Angrily, he shut the drapes, plunging the room into darkness. He flipped on the light switch, but didn’t turn back around. “You’ve got. To do this. My way,” he said, trying to keep his breathing measured. “That’s the only possible shot we have at coming out of this okay.”
There was a long, heavy silence. Then Erin said, “Fine.”
Zander’s shoulders dropped, a tightness in his chest easing that he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying around. He heard Erin exhale and sink down on the bed, but as he turned, she got up again, snagging her phone and tossing it onto the pillow, before she pulled the comforter off the bed and shoved it to the floor.
Zander looked from her to the jumbled sheets. “What the hell was that for?”
“They don’t wash them,” she said, her words toneless. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. “They don’t wash them every time, not like they do the sheets. I hate hotel comforters.” As he blinked at her, she changed tracks again. “They wanted us to come out tomorrow. That means they are—they were, anyway—ready to make the deal happen. They aren’t just trying to lure us down here to kill us or whatever. At least they weren’t, I don’t think.”
“They’re still not. If they wanted to kill us, Erin, we’d already be dead.” Erin flinched, but Zander kept talking. “We just have to wait for them to contact us, and get them to come here. That’s it.”
“But how do you know if they’re going to—”
Erin’s anguished words were cut off by the shrill blast of her phone.
Chapter 15
Erin picked up the phone with tremulous hands, but Zander was right in front of her, staring at her. “You ask them to meet here. Or anywhere around here. One city block, no more.”
She nodded and clicked the phone on. The voice that filled the room was steady and assured, not angry, but no longer warm¸ either. “Your parents are very eager to return to you,” the man said, and Erin closed her eyes for just a second, firming her resolution. Zander was right about this. She knew he was right. She’d brought him down here for a reason. She felt the pressure of his hand on hers and her eyes snapped open again, locking onto the warm, steady gray strength of his.
“And I am very eager to have them back,” she said, and her voice didn’t even sound like hers. It was also calm. Resolute, actually. In addition, it seemed like the men holding her mom didn’t know that the man with her wasn’t Erin’s dad. That little detail strangely gave her comfort now. The captors didn’t know everything. They were fallible. Even if just in this small way.
The long silence was broken by the man on the phone. “The cafe at your hotel opens out onto the side lot. Tomorrow morning, be there at nine A.M., with the pack containing the money clearly visible on the table with you. I will have your parents in a vehicle in the parking lot. You hand over the money to the man I send to you, your parents will be released.”
Erin’s eyes darted to Zander’s. He didn’t look happy, but he nodded.
“Yes!” she said, the moment his head moved a fraction. “Yes, yes, of course. That sounds good, we can do that, we’ll have the money, yes—”
The phone clicked off, indicating that the call had terminated.
Erin slumped down again onto the bed, only this time Zander was there with her. “You did great,” he said, gently taking the phone out of her hand and sitting down beside her as he looked at it. “This number is useless. Don’t expect them to call back with the same phone tomorrow.”
Erin looked up at him, startled out of her numbness. “Call back? Why would they call? They said we’d just have to be there at nine. Be there and do the…handoff.” She’d begun to tremble, she realized, and Zander put his arm around her, drawing her close. She tried to resist the comfort of his presence, to tell herself that it was all just part of his job, to keep her strong, keep her upright, until they could get out of here once and for all. But he was so steady, so sure, that she leaned against him, her shaking only getting worse.
Zander’s voice was even. “They might call with additional instructions,” he said. “They might call just to fuck around with you. You’ve got to be ready for that, and not back down from your insistence that they bring your mom and her boyfriend here. The bar setup is not ideal—I don’t like the plan of just letting someone come up and take your money without you for sure getting your people back. But we can work that out as things go down tomorrow. The important thing is that you stay safe.”
“Safe.” The word came out a little more harshly than Erin intended, and her lips twisted. Zander didn’t let her simply gloss over it, however. He turned to the side, and his other arm came up against her, so that her back was against his chest, and she was locked in the circle of his strength, his arms a fortress around her. That didn’t change the impact of his next words, hitting her like a blow.
“What did your mom really go to jail for, Erin? And for how long?”
She closed her eyes. How could he have known? But Zander was an implacable presence, and she suddenly didn’t want to lie anymore. Not right now, not about this. Surely this was something she could share with somebody—especially somebody who was risking his life to help keep her mother, not only out of ye
t another stint in an institution, but alive.
“My mom is a nurse, so it’s not jail where she’s ended up usually, it’s rehab. She’ll go along fine enough, keeping it together, and then something will set her off—some trigger that pushes her onto a bender. She’ll miss work, she’ll claim illness, emotional distress at the death of my father—whom we haven’t seen in twenty years, mind you, so we don’t know if he’s alive or dead—and sooner or later she’ll wind up in a treatment facility, getting all cleaned up and ready for polite society again. Then she’ll get out, get another job somewhere where they don’t look at your records too closely, and it’ll start all over again.”
“But you said she’s a nurse,” Zander said. “Don’t they check their credentials more than most?”
Erin shrugged. The heat from Zander’s body radiated around her, making her feel safe. Protected. “You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. If she ended up at a major hospital, then sure. But for the smaller institutions, or home health places, she passes well enough. She’s got forged papers if the question comes up, and if they persist, she just keeps moving.”
“Hell of a way to live,” Zander said. She felt him tilt his head above her, as if something new had just occurred to him. “That’s why you moved in with your grandmother,” he said. “For a more stable upbringing?”
Erin fought the wince. “Something like that,” she said. “But Mom never really went away. Even during my high school years, I’d cruise along for a couple months without hearing anything, and then I’d get a call out of the blue. From a hospital, an employer, occasionally from the cops. And it would always be the same kind of thing: Mom was in trouble; Mom had gotten other people in trouble; Mom wasn’t being safe. I’d go to her, try to talk to her, give her what money I could. That’s what she usually wanted, really. Me to talk to the administrators wherever she was working, to provide some sort of a character reference. And failing that, then she usually asked for seed money to start over again.”
“But where did you get the money?” Zander asked. “Your gran?”
Erin shrugged. “I helped Gran clean houses all during the school year, just not as much as the summer.” Not as much after she’d met Zander, either. The two of them had slipped into the easy rhythm of girlfriend and boyfriend, when everything had seemed perfect until those few, shocking times when it wasn’t. When Zander would get reckless and dangerous and practically screamed to the world that he was up for any stupid risk it could throw at him, and Erin would shut down, seeing her mother in front of her eyes all over again. “I gave her what I could. Each time it got a little harder,” she said, “but I gave her what I could.”
—
“I bet that was difficult.” Zander tightened his arms around Erin, and he leaned down to brush a soft kiss on her hair, the fresh, clean scent of her mixing with the intensity of her emotion, the pain and anger and guilt. Erin had always been a quiet girl, content to live life on the fringes, to watch others race around wildly while she stood off to the side. She was the careful one, the perennial designated driver, the responsible student and conscientious worker. He’d never had any idea that she was covering up something as monumental as a deadbeat mother all that time.
The idea that Erin had been carrying such a huge burden on her back, unwilling or unable to trust anyone, shook him harder than he expected it to. All he could think of was the night that had ended it all between them. The night that everything had gone so bad that there was just no coming back from it. For years, he’d blocked it out of his memory, but it still had a way of eating away at the walls he put up, like acid burning away at his resistance when he wasn’t looking. And now, holding Erin, he could almost feel the final barriers crumbling, forcing him to see that night once more, to relive those moments that had filled him up with such fury that he didn’t think he’d ever break free of it again.
—
The moment he’d lunged for the cops, he knew it was all over. Knew it while it was happening, like he was watching someone else fuck over his own life even worse than it already was. For chrissakes, he was already going to be nailed for drag racing, why add assault on an officer to it? But he didn’t care. He’d had to do something. Lash out at someone, just to stop the screaming inside his own brain.
It’d helped too. The cops had reacted with an efficiency that stopped just short of beating the shit out him, wrenching him around and shoving him up against a patrol car, grabbing his arms back hard and snapping thick metal cuffs on him like he was some sort of criminal. The pain and rough treatment had helped calm him down. Zander stood now with his hands cuffed—cuffed!—but they hadn’t stuck him in the car, at least. They’d let him stand there and watch as they talked to Erin with their official little notebooks, while Kevin was loaded onto the stretcher and into the ambulance that he really didn’t need, Zander knew he didn’t need, but none of that mattered now.
His dad was going to go absolutely apeshit over this. William Frank James had made full-bird colonel just two months earlier, and you would’ve thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He was proud and stern and ready for action, home over the summer, off and on, as Zander prepared to ship out to West Point. West Point, where all his own dreams were supposed to come true.
The reality of where those dreams were really going struck him anew just as Erin broke away from the cops and strode over to him. She always did have bad timing that way, wanting to fix shit before it had a chance to get over being broken.
“Zander?” Even her voice sounded weak. Weak and pathetic, and Zander pinned her with a glare so filled with anger that she froze. He’d looked up from pulling Kevin out of his Mustang and had seen her with the phone, and a part of his brain had known that arguing with her was futile. She’d had eyes only for the mess that was Kevin’s face, her own face white with fright, her mouth hanging open like she’d never seen blood before.
“Why in fuck’s name did you call the cops?” he said now. He thought he was talking normally, but a cop all the way over on the other side of the Point looked up at him with a frown, and Zander dialed his voice back. “Jesus fucking Christ, Erin, the cops? Really?”
“I…I didn’t mean to call the cops!” she said, her words tumbling out in a rush. “I called for an ambulance! Just an ambulance!”
“Yeah, well, where there are ambulances there are cops, Erin,” Zander said. “Wasn’t I handling it? I mean, did you miss the fact that I had Kevin on his feet, had checked all his vitals, and that all he needed was to get cleaned up and all of this would have ended?”
“I’d already made the call by then!” Erin almost wailed. “All I saw was the accident and Kevin with—there was so much blood! His car was smoking, Zander! I didn’t know!”
“How couldn’t you have known? Who does that? My girlfriend sure as shit doesn’t do that, doesn’t rat me out to the goddamned cops just because she’s scared stupid. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me tonight?”
“What?” Now Erin did look stricken. “What do you mean? Kevin’s fine, right? You said he’s going to be fine, I don’t—”
“Erin, I fucking got arrested,” Zander exclaimed, her bewilderment only serving to piss him off further. He half-turned and shook his cuffed hands at her. “You don’t get arrested and go to West Point.” Now his words were not quite human, more like the furious howl of a wounded animal as reality crashed over him again. “That’s not how the army works!”
“Zander, no! It’s not that bad! It can’t be that bad!” Erin’s eyes were as wide as saucers now, and he could see it all in her face. The guilt, the remorse, the huge wellspring of pain. But none of that mattered two shits to him, because she’d so completely fucked him over it took his breath away. “Zander,” Erin implored, and he whipped his gaze back to hers, his eyes hot and bitter.
“Just get the fuck away from me,” he snarled. “Get away and stay away. And go find somebody else’s life to fuck up, would you? Because you well and truly have already jacked up mine.
So thanks a lot for that, Erin.” He was almost spitting his words now, and her look of absolute horror sliding into cold, frozen detachment before his very eyes somehow made him feel better, though his sneer was harsh and unforgiving. “Thanks a fucking lot.”
—
No wonder he didn’t like to think about that night. Zander’s breathing was shallow as he held Erin now, his heart pounding, even as he tried to get his body back under control, tried to release the grip that long-ago night still had on him. He remembered everything he’d seen in Erin’s eyes like it was yesterday—had never really stopped seeing her face as she’d absorbed all of his anger like a physical blow.
Only now he saw more. Now he saw the pain and loss that haunted her, the constant fear of screwing up—of not doing the right thing, being the right thing, because maybe if she did everything perfectly, everyone else would do what they were supposed to do, too. Now he thought about her as a young teen living with her grandmother because her mom liked to go out and get trashed when she didn’t feel like being responsible anymore, leaving Erin to fend for herself—until her mom needed her to clean up one mess or another. What kind of life had that been to live?
In his arms, Erin sighed, and he kissed her hair again, but her body felt so warm, so pliant, that he knew he couldn’t leave it at that. She was practically shimmering with unspent emotion, the tears he knew she had to have inside her refusing to fall. He shifted his body and she turned to him, the movement so natural, so right, that when he saw her face tilted up toward his own, he did the only thing he could do, really. The thing he wanted to do every time he saw this woman, no matter how much she infuriated him, or how long he’d worked to get over her.
He leaned down and brushed his mouth over hers.
Erin’s sob was lost beneath his lips, full and throaty as she reached up and placed one small hand on his chest, the other one curling around his neck. He deepened the kiss and she seemed to go loose in his arms, her body just as ready as his was, and when he slid his hand under the edge of her T-shirt, she sighed and shivered, her skin superheated in the cold room and seeming to brand his palm.
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