She nodded. “I don’t have any choice. I can’t live knowing he’s out there, carrying on with his life while my mother is dead and my sister hates me.”
“It would be dangerous, you know that. It would mean seeking him out on his own territory. He’d keep himself surrounded by his own men—the same men who came in shooting up Tony’s place the other day.”
“I know that, but what choice do I have? If I run, I’ll spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”
“If you don’t, you might die.”
Her lips thinned. “What do I have to live for?”
I tried not to experience a pang of pain at her words. “You have me.”
“But I still have to learn to live with myself, with what I did. I’m not sure I know how to do that, especially if he’s free. Maybe I thought that with him in prison, it would bring me some kind of closure to the whole thing. I guess I’d hoped Nicole and I would be able to build some bridges. I can’t see that happening with our father out and carrying on as though it never happened.”
“It’ll get easier over time.”
She glanced at me, and I saw the pain in her eyes. “Will it? I’m not so sure. I don’t know if I can ever bring myself to live with this.”
“Then what’s the alternative?” I asked softly. “I don’t want this to turn into a suicide mission.”
She gave a sigh that twisted my gut, and turned to face out of the passenger window. She hadn’t answered my question. Did she really not want to live? It was stupid of me to feel hurt by her response. What she’d gone through and the damage that had caused had happened long before I’d met her. But the idea of living in a world without her in it almost broke me. For the first time in my life, I’d opened myself up to someone, only to discover I wasn’t enough to make her want to keep going.
I glanced back over at her. Her normally caramel complexion had drained of color.
“Hey, are you—” I started, but she shook her head.
“Stop the car.”
I pulled over, receiving blasts of horns from behind at my sudden stop. I’d barely made it to the curb when she slung open the door and leaned out and vomited on the road.
“Are you okay?”
I found her a tissue in the glove compartment and handed it to her to wipe her mouth.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “I must have picked up a bug a couple of days ago. Then with all the stress … I guess my body just isn’t reacting well to it.”
“I guess not.”
A small bottle of water was also in the compartment. I didn’t know how old it was, but I figured it was better than nothing, so I twisted off the lid and handed the bottle to Vee.
She rinsed out her mouth, spitting to the ground, and then drank some of the water. “I’m fine. I promise,” she said. “I feel better now that it’s out.”
“Okay, as long as you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
She yanked the door shut again, and I pulled the car back out into the traffic. We drove in silence, me casting anxious glances over at her. This all felt like too much. Yes, I had access to some things that could help us, but I worried it wouldn’t be enough to achieve what she wanted. She might have better knowledge than anyone about her father, and also the house where she’d grown up, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy to get in there and kill him. His guard would be well and truly up. Plus, she wanted to go and warn her sister, and I didn’t think she had good things planned for Tony the Hound either.
We reached the building where the luggage storage was housed. A sandwich shop rented out the bottom of the building, while the floors above were used for the luggage storage. The place rented out storage space in hours, days, weeks, or months. I’d taken the longest option, using a story about traveling abroad a lot for work and not wanting to cart everything around with me. They didn’t ask too many questions—happy just to have the regular business.
I recognized the woman in her fifties, her dark hair graying, who manned the desk. She looked up as I approached and gave me a warm smile.
“Ah, Mr. Stafford. Welcome back to New York.”
I gave my most charming smile. “Thank you. Just here to collect a few things.”
“No problem at all.” Her gaze darted to Vee standing behind me. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll bring your case down.”
We waited until she reappeared, hauling my belongings. The suitcase was a large, hard case in gray, with a combination lock at the top, like an oversized briefcase.
I suddenly remembered the series of numbers that had come back to me while I’d been in the hospital. I hadn’t known what they’d related to when I’d remembered them, but I did now. They were the code to get the case open.
“Do you have a private area we can use?” I asked the woman. “I need to check the contents before we leave.”
She gave that bright smile again. “Of course. My office is right this way. Please come through.”
We followed her into a back room. “I won’t be a moment.”
She gave me another nod, then left us to it.
I worked the numbers into the combination lock and then unlocked the suitcase and folded it out. Inside were the normal things you’d expect to find—several changes of clothing, a toiletries bag, and a pair of black dress shoes.
Vee stared at the contents. “How’s that supposed to help us?”
“Just wait.”
I removed the material inlay of the case from one side then slid my fingers down the edges of the case’s hard shell. My fingers found what they were looking for and I flicked a couple of hidden catches, and the inside of the case came away in my hands. Beneath, carefully embedded in shapes cut out of an inlay of foam, were two handguns and several spare magazines of bullets.
“Holy shit,” Vee breathed. “I never would have known.”
I repeated the action with the opposite side of the case. Here were documents this time, two fake IDs, a bundle of cash, several credit cards to go with the identifications.
“We’ve got enough money to go,” I said, pressing her again, though I doubted I would get a different answer. When Vee’s mind was made up, she wasn’t one to be swayed easily, but I had to try. “I have enough contacts to get you some new ID as well. Just say the word and we’re out of here. Your father will never find you.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. You go if you want to, but I can’t walk away knowing he’ll have gotten away with what he did.”
I reached out and threaded my hand in her hair, pulling her in to kiss her mouth. The kiss was slow and sweet, and the coils of desire wound tight inside me. I wanted more, but I knew this wasn’t the time. I broke the kiss and touched my nose to hers. “I’m with you all the way.”
She fixed her eyes on mine. “Why?”
“I already told you. I love you. I’m not going to let you do this alone.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips, but she still didn’t tell me she loved me in return. Had my girl built her walls so high around her heart that she was too afraid to admit to her feelings, or did she simply not feel them?
I couldn’t answer that for her.
Pulling away, I packed the suitcase back up to take with us. I didn’t want the woman who worked here coming in and asking about the weapons the case contained.
“So what now?” Vee asked.
“We go back to the motel room and make a plan. Do we even know if your father is out yet?”
She shook her head. “The lawyer said his paperwork was being processed. It would only be a matter of hours, though.”
“So it would make sense for us to go to your sister first.”
“What about Tony?”
“We made a mistake last time by trying to be reasonable with him. This time we need to go in with the attitude of kill or be killed. Take no prisoners.”
Her jaw tightened and she nodded. “That fucking bastard tried to strangle me in my sleep. I woke up and his han
ds were around my throat, and I couldn’t breathe. My lungs felt like they were going to burst—I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything so painful.”
Her words reminded me of how I felt when I’d been underwater, desperate to take a breath. But the thought of his hands around her throat angered me more.
“I guess we both have a reason to pay him back, then.”
“He’s not normal,” she said. “I don’t think either of us would win any awards for being in touch with our feelings, but him …” She visibly shivered. “I don’t know. Something’s not right about him. He’s utterly cold.”
“He’ll be even colder when he’s dead.”
We left the building and went back to the car. Vee was utterly focused on her own battle—on killing the men who were fucking with her life—but I had my own worries. I didn’t want to tell her, knowing she didn’t need any more mess in her life. When my memory had returned, so had the events leading up to the point where I’d met Vee. If things had gone to plan, I would have avoided coming back to New York, at least for any length of time. It was a big city and easy enough to get lost in, but not easy enough. I was lucky it had only been Harvey who had spotted me in the newspaper. Someone wishing me harm rather than help could just have easily turned up for me.
I remembered why I wasn’t supposed to be in New York. Why I’d planned on keeping moving.
“Everything okay?” Vee asked, pulling me from my thoughts. “You seem a little … distracted.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just thinking things through.”
I debated telling her, but she had so much else to worry about, I didn’t want to land more shit on her lap.
Her eyes narrowed at me. “And what are you thinking?”
I twisted my lips as I put my thoughts together for her. “The shooting that was happening when I got you out of Tony’s place will have left both Tony’s men and your father’s men weakened. I bet they both lost people and ammunition. I’m wondering if we can’t use their hatred of each other against them somehow. Have them waging a war on each other, without you and your sister being caught in the middle.”
“I don’t see how that could happen without me and Nicole getting caught up in it all. Are you talking about using us as bait? Of getting them to fight over which of them gets to either kill us or bequeath us with a life of violence and being used?”
“I’m not sure, Vee. I’m just thinking out loud. I just wish we could get them to kill each other so we didn’t need to get involved.”
“They’d have done that already if they were going to.”
“Yes, but I think this situation has already made your father do things he wouldn’t normally. Sending a car full of men to a rival’s home to shoot the place up isn’t normal behavior, even for a gangster. He’s starting a war right there.”
“Would he have known that the case was going to be thrown out when he ordered that to happen?” she wondered out loud.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps that was his last ditch attempt to have me killed, figuring that would end the case, and then when that didn’t work, he got one of his men to tell the cops he’d been present at my mother’s death.”
“Yeah, sounds like he was getting anxious.” I let out a sigh. “You know, if you are no longer able to testify against your father, there is nothing keeping you here. New York is a dangerous place, not just for you, but for me, too. I should never have come back to the city. Harvey told me about something that had happened before I met you, and when he told me, I couldn’t remember. People want me dead, too, Vee. I have plenty of money. We can just leave. Get as far away from here as possible.”
“What about my sister?”
Anger swelled up inside me. “Fuck your sister. You’re always thinking about Nicole, but when does she ever think about you? She went behind your back to Tony. She looks at you as though she hates you.”
She winced at that, and I regretted my words.
“She does hate me,” Vee said. “She watched me shoot our mother. I hate me, too, so I can’t blame her.”
“What happened wasn’t your fault. I’d have liked to have seen what would have happened if she was put in the position that you were.”
“We’d all be dead,” she said simply. “Nickie would never have made the choice, and our father would have killed all three of us.” Then she gave a small laugh, though it contained no humor. “Actually, no, that’s not true. She’d still be alive. He would have killed me and my mother, and left her alive.”
I looked at her curiously. “When he put that gun in your hand, and asked you to choose, why did he make you choose between your mom and your sister, if he loves your sister so much? Why not just make you shoot your mom?”
“Because he knew I wouldn’t have done it. He knew I would never have chosen her, and he knew I would have made the choice to save her. If he hadn’t put her in that room that day, I probably would have just let him shoot both me and Mom. He’d never have forgiven her for cheating on him. It wasn’t just a matter of having his pride hurt. He had a certain expectation surrounding him about how he handled a betrayal of that magnitude. People knew about it before he did—including me. He had to prove to people that he was as coldhearted as a person could get, someone who would stop at nothing to make a point. And that’s exactly what he did.”
“Jesus, Vee. Your father is a piece of work.”
“Yeah, he sure is, and that’s exactly what we’re going to come up against.”
Chapter Twenty-four
V
X drove us back to the motel.
We’d checked in for a week, thinking at the time that I was going to need to stay in New York for a while because of the trial. Of course, that wasn’t going to be an issue now, but it was good to know we had a place to go back to. I wondered if people were searching Harvey’s place yet, if he’d been reported missing or dead. We were still driving his car, which we needed to do something about very soon. It was bound to land us in trouble. Same with his phone.
I said as much to X.
He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. The only reason I haven’t done it already is because Harvey didn’t have any close family. The only people he had around him were work colleagues, and not showing up at work for a day or two probably isn’t going to get anyone too worried yet. Of course, if his body’s found, we’re in a whole other game, but I was hoping we had luck on our side for once. Now we’ve got the stuff from the luggage storage, we’ll go and rent a car legally. No one will know the name of the new ID, where people would have known the name Lee Mason, which is the one the doctors and police called me after I was pulled out of the water. There’s still a chance the wrong person will have seen the newspaper article—the same one Harvey found me by—and use the card and name trail I’ve left across the city to track me down.”
I frowned. “Wrong person, as in Tony or my father?”
He hesitated then said, “I pissed off plenty of people before you and I met, Vee. It’s not as though my life was all sweetness and light before you came along. Don’t forget that.”
Was he implying I was making everything about me? I guessed he was, and he had a right to. I had made everything all about me. I had never felt like I’d had much choice.
He pulled the car into the parking space outside of our room. I climbed out of the car, and he got out from behind the wheel.
“Vee, wait.”
Something about his voice made me stop in my tracks. “What’s wrong?” I looked over at him, my eyes widened. He lifted a hand to stop me, but continued to stare at the door of our room.
“I think someone’s been here.”
“What?”
“The door is open a crack. I can see it from here.”
Unexpected fury rose up inside me. “What the fuck?”
Why couldn’t people just leave us the hell alone for even a minute? All I’d wanted was to be able to collapse on the bed for an hour, and process everything that had
happened, and now I couldn’t even do that. I was mad. Fucking furious. With my shoulders squared, nostrils flaring, and jaw tight, I stormed around to the trunk and popped it open. X’s case sat in the back. I tried to open it, but then saw it had a combination lock.
“Open it,” I demanded. “Now.”
“What are you doing, Vee?” he hissed at me.
“I want a gun. If someone is still in there, I’m going to blow his fucking head off.”
“Vee …” He warned.
“Do it, now. Or I’ll go in there empty handed and claw the fucker’s eyes out. You know I will.”
He saw I wasn’t kidding. He popped open the case and put a clip in the handgun before handing it to me. He took the other one for himself. We should have brought the ones we’d taken from Harvey with us. Whoever had broken into the room most likely would have taken them, assuming they weren’t still in there. I hoped they were. After everything that had happened, I had revenge and fury boiling through my veins, and I wanted nothing more than the sweet satisfaction of watching someone’s brains splatter across the white painted wall.
Holding the gun at my side, and not caring if anyone saw and reported me, I stalked past X to make it to the partially open door first. I felt X move up behind me, his body pressed close to my back. He held his own weapon.
“Ready?” I said. “One, two, three …”
I kicked open the door and we both stepped into the room, our weapons aimed. My gaze scoured the small space. It had been ransacked—every drawer yanked out of the chest and thrown to the floor, the bedcovers torn off, the mattress flipped. Even the crappy prints that had been framed and hung on the walls had been pulled down.
X and I shared a glance and he jerked his chin toward the bathroom. That was the only place whoever had done this to the room could be, though I had a feeling the person was long gone. Even so, we couldn’t take any risks, so we approached the bathroom door, each of us taking a side of the door frame. We lifted the guns again, and X mouthed the countdown at me this time. One, two, three.
He kicked open the door and stepped into the small space, ready to fire if necessary.
Warped (The Mercenary Series Book 2) Page 14