Do or Die Reluctant Heroes

by Unknown

  Ian widened his eyes at her, and she quickly added, “Or maybe not with Berto. Maybe I got that wrong and … I’m so sorry.” She was aiming her words now at Vanderzee. “This is really awkward because we haven’t been properly introduced on account of the fleeing-for-our-lives thing. I mean, you know I’m Phoebe. Dunn. And I’ve heard Eee call you Vanderzee, but is that your first name or your last? All I know for sure is that you knew Ian before I did, that you used to be friends, and that you’re amazing. A real hero.”

  The Dutchman laughed, smiling back at Ian in the rearview mirror.

  And Ian saw exactly where this was going. He knew exactly what was happening—and he couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. Georg Vanderzee was falling in love with his wife.

  “I love her,” the Dutchman proclaimed, just as Ian knew he would. “Please call me Georg. And to be honest, we’re not that far from my rental. I’ll put the car in my garage—I have people who will take care of it, too. It’s not a problem. In fact, I’d prefer if my people handled it. You and Phoebe—a very pretty name for a lovely lady—can get cleaned up. We can all have a drink to celebrate our adventure and our newfound friendship. And we can talk about this lucrative opportunity you mentioned. I happen to have a project of my own that’s going to pay out quite nicely, but it’s temporarily on hold, so funds are tight. Depending on your time frame, this could well work out perfectly for all of us.”

  Perfectly was not the word Ian had in mind. He must not have been able to hide the muscles jumping in his jaw, because Vanderzee glanced at him in the mirror again, and said, “My house has top-of-the-line security. Your bride will be safe.”

  “Well, that sounds great,” Phoebe said.

  And Ian had to nod, forcing a smile as he attempted to incinerate her with his eyes. “Oh, yeah. It sounds great.”

  It was late December, and the abundance of Christmas lights and decorations added an unnecessary garishness to Vienna’s elegant beauty. The sparkle and natural glitter of the freshly fallen snow on the rooftops should’ve been enough.

  Aaron had met his brother here once before, during the summer, and although he now missed being able to stroll through the cobblestone streets in the warmth of the evening, the city was still pedestrian-friendly. With his collar up and his scarf around his neck, he was ready for anything.

  Well, almost anything.

  “Aaron. Hi. Yeah. It’s me. Shel?” The strapping young man said his own name as if he were the one who was uncertain about it as Aaron stood, frozen in place, and stared.

  It had been nearly four years since he’d last seen Sheldon Dellarosa. Three years, ten months, and twenty-nine days, to be precise.

  This version of Shelly was taller, broader—nearly four years older. The boy had become a man.

  He was wearing a military uniform beneath his overcoat. Like Aaron, Shelly was now a Marine. Unlike Aaron, Shel was an officer. A first lieutenant.

  Aaron didn’t know whether to salute—or to shit or maybe even go blind.

  “Crap, I knew this was a mistake,” Sheldon said. “But when I saw you leaving your hotel, I thought … why wait. Except I should have, because here we are now, standing in the street, in the snow, and it’s awkward, and you’re probably going somewhere.…”

  “To get dinner,” Aaron said. “Sir. I’m going to get dinner. Ian—he’s my brother. I was supposed to meet him, but he’s been delayed.”

  “I know Ian’s your brother,” Shel said. “Did you really think I would forget that?”

  “I really have no idea, sir,” Aaron said.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “You’re supposed to say At ease, Sergeant, and even then, I’m supposed to call you sir.”

  “You’re still mad at me,” Sheldon realized. “Really mad. About that email. Oh my God.” He started to laugh.

  “You think it’s funny? Fuck you, sir!” Aaron turned and walked away, heading back to the hotel because his appetite had just vanished.

  But Shelly followed him. “No, wait, I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s … Ah, God, Aaron, the worst thing would’ve been if I’d spent all this time searching for you, and you didn’t even remember me. And if you’re still this mad, then maybe you’re also not over me, maybe …”

  Aaron stopped and spun back around, and Sheldon nearly crashed into him. “I’m over you, douchebag,” he said, his voice low. “I was over you in a heartbeat when I found out just what a coward you are—”

  “It was good, wasn’t it,” Shel said, standing his ground, chin up in that manner that was still so familiar, “what I wrote in that email? It had to be good. It had to be convincing. If you tried to get in touch with me—at all—you were dead. Berto told me if I talked to you again, if you so much as called or tried to come see me—he’d tell my father, who would kill you. And he meant it. If my wanting to keep you from dying makes me a coward? I’m a coward. You’re right.”

  Aaron couldn’t listen to this. Sheldon’s words were everything he’d hoped and prayed that he would hear throughout that first year of boot camp, of training, of going to war. He’d even left his high school email account active—it was still there, hanging in cyberspace. The same one that Sheldon had used, time and again. He’d checked it just yesterday, but it still held only spam in its inbox. If Sheldon truly had searched for him? He hadn’t tried very hard.

  Aaron now did the only thing he could do. He turned and walked away.

  But Sheldon followed, again hustling to keep up. “Can you please at least give me three minutes. Just three minutes—”

  “I thought we both just agreed that you’re a coward,” Aaron said. “I’m not sure what else you can say—or do—in three minutes—”

  “I didn’t email you,” Sheldon spoke over him, “because Berto hacked your account—double​adoublen@​zoomail.​net. I knew if I tried to contact you there, he’d know. And I couldn’t risk him coming after you, just to spite me.”

  Aaron blew past the entrance to the hotel. He didn’t turn in, he just kept going, waiting until they were past the uniformed doormen to turn to Shel to say, “So I’m just supposed to believe that one of the smartest people I know took four fucking years—”

  “Yes!” Sheldon shouted over him. “It took me four fucking years!”

  Sheldon, who rarely raised his voice, and who had, in all the time Aaron had known him, never dropped the f-bomb, was shaking with anger. Or maybe it wasn’t anger. Maybe it was the agony that remained in the aftermath of a shattered heart. Despite years of hiding from it, of pretending that the wounds had finally healed, Aaron still felt it, too.

  “You let me down, too, you know,” Sheldon said, his voice a whisper now, as his eyes filled with tears. Still, he held Aaron’s gaze as he kept going. “I went up to Cambridge even though my father wouldn’t let me accept that scholarship to MIT. He wanted me to go to school in Tampa, and Berto turned the screws, so that’s where I went. On paper, anyway. They dropped me off at my dorm and I pretended to unpack, but as soon as they left, I took the bus to Boston.” He exhaled hard. “Because I hoped you’d be there, waiting for me. I hoped you’d realized that I sent that email under duress. You know, I hung out on campus for a month, Air. I slept in shelters when I could, and on the street when I couldn’t. Even though I knew you weren’t there when I didn’t find you that first day. I gave you a month, in case I was wrong.”

  Dear God. After getting that email, Aaron had given Shel all of ten minutes.

  “I knew you’d join the Marines,” Shel said. “So I joined, too. By then, my father and Berto were actively looking for me. But once I signed up, there was nothing they could do about it. They couldn’t touch me. From that aspect, it was great. I was finally safe. And I thought once I was in, it would be easy to hack into the computers and find you and … Well, I was wrong about that. But once I did finally find you, I kept getting screwed because our leave didn’t line up. Until now. So, yeah, it took me this long. But I never gave up.”


  And there they stood, just looking at each other.

  “I’m not sure what you want,” Aaron finally said. “An apology, or am I supposed to just, I don’t know, fall into your arms?”

  “I guess I was hoping we could start with dinner,” Sheldon said. “Although your falling into my arms was always part of the fantasy. Unless you’re seeing someone—”

  “I’m not,” Aaron said. “I was. For a while, but I broke it off. Because he wasn’t you.”

  Shelly didn’t try to hide his hope from his eyes. He just let it show, let it shine out from inside of him, the same way he’d done all those years ago, when they were both still kids.

  And then there wasn’t anything left to do but fall into his arms. Except they were standing there, on the sidewalk of a busy city street. Still, Aaron reached for Shel, and Shel all but leapt at him, and God, it was better than any fantasy he could have imagined.

  Aaron tried to make their embrace as manly as possible, aware of the passersby eyeing them curiously, even as he felt the glacier inside of him begin to melt as Shelly breathed his name. “Aaron, I’m so sorry.”

  Aaron lifted his head to look into Shel’s eyes. “I’m sorry, too.”

  This entire surreal experience had been one surprise coming on top of another, and Aaron could barely catch his breath. Especially when Shelly smiled. It was that same mix of hot and sweet that Aaron had adored. “I forgive you,” Shel whispered, and then iced the WTF-cake by kissing Aaron. Right there. On the mouth. In the middle of freaking Vienna.

  When Shel pulled back, he was out of breath but he was grinning. He didn’t look around; he clearly didn’t give a shit if anyone had seen them. “It’s been a long time, and I know we’ve both changed—how could we not’ve,” he said as he straightened his coat and cover, as if kissing a fellow Marine were something he did every day. “I mean, yeah, it’s freezing, and you still aren’t wearing gloves, but … You’re different, I know it, and I am, too. But I think you’re going to like me. I like me—much better now. And I want to get to know you. So come on, Sergeant Dunn, let’s go have dinner, and do this right.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Aaron said as he followed Sheldon.

  Who looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Well, okay,” Shel said. “So that’s gonna be hot.”

  Aaron laughed as he tucked his hands into his coat pockets. He would’ve liked to hold Shelly’s hand, but really, just walking beside him was more than he’d thought he’d ever have again. “Yes, it is,” he agreed.

  And after three years, ten months, and twenty-nine days of being frozen and barely breathing, Aaron’s heart started beating and his life began again.

  * * *

  The Dutchman lived in a spacious rental house on a large, flat, fenced-in plot of land in a development that had been built on the site of a former grapefruit grove. Most of the trees were still in rows, which shouldn’t have been visually appealing, yet somehow oddly was. Or maybe anything would have looked outrageously beautiful to Phoebe, after surviving both an attack by a kill squad and a high-speed car chase.

  The fear that she’d felt when realizing that Ian had been shot had been replaced by relief that was nearly as immobilizing. When she’d finally gotten a look at his wound and saw that he wasn’t going to bleed to death, the wave of thankfulness that swept over her had been extreme.

  But now they were met in the Dutchman’s garage by a small army of bodyguards who were not happy at all about the bullet holes in Vanderzee’s car—or the fact that their employer had been in danger. Still, he waved them off and led the way inside.

  Phoebe followed on shaky legs as the Dutchman took them into the enormous, pristine house. As they trooped into the kitchen, he spoke in another language—Farsi?—to a pair of female housekeepers who worked it, hard, to avoid eye contact even as they leapt into action. One of the women raced ahead, through the house and up a flight of stairs to what their host called his guest suite.

  As Phoebe followed, Vanderzee led her and Ian into a private sitting room with a bedroom beyond it.

  Like the open and airy first floor, the rooms were decorated in 1990s groovy-Florida-grandma. Heavy on the aquas and pinks, with an overabundance of whimsical dolphin statues. Phoebe let herself love them all, completely, with just the faintest dash of irony. And why shouldn’t there be space in her new-and-improved not-dead life for an albino dolphin who winked while tail-walking on an end table?

  The silent housekeeper carried a pile of fluffy white towels in with her, slipping through the door into the bedroom, heading for the attached bathroom.

  “There’s a first-aid kit under the sink,” the Dutchman told them, “and robes in the closet.”

  Phoebe turned to look at him, realizing that although they’d just survived a life-threatening situation together, everything had happened so quickly that she would not have been able to pick him out of a police lineup.

  “How about some rags or older towels?” Ian asked, smiling his thanks at the woman as he went through the bedroom so he could look into the bathroom. Phoebe heard the familiar screech of metal on metal as he pushed back a shower curtain. “I’m afraid I’m going to make a mess.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the Dutchman said, dismissing the housekeeper with a nod.

  Georg Vanderzee was not quite as tall as Ian, and far less broad. In fact, his build was very similar to Ian’s brother Aaron’s. Without Ian standing immediately nearby to compare, Phoebe would’ve thought of them both as muscular—and they were. Just not as. This man’s hair followed the not-as rule, too. Like Ian’s, it was thick and wavy—just not as. The Dutchman had glimmers of red in his brown, and it looked as if he’d added highlights, to make him appear even more fair. He might’ve been handsome, with his straight nose, strong chin, beautiful olive-toned skin, and exotically colored green-brown-gold eyes. But there was something about the set of his mouth or maybe it was the oddly chilly distance or flat disconnect in those eyes that made him look … off.

  “Your making a mess is the least of my concern,” he continued.

  Or maybe the man was fine—just not as fine as Ian—and Phoebe’s imagination was running rampant since she knew Ian not only didn’t like Vanderzee, but hadn’t wanted to give the FBI any details of their previous encounter. And that made her suspect that Ian hadn’t wanted to recall awful memories of how he’d been forced to watch as the Dutchman tortured puppies.

  Or worse.

  Vanderzee now turned to Phoebe and smiled. Nope, he was not fine. He was definitely creepy. “I’m counting on you to let me know if your husband needs additional medical care.”

  Her husband. Ian had returned from the bathroom, and she glanced over to meet his gaze just long enough to confirm that, yes, he was still pissed about that little detail. “I trust him when he says he’s all right,” she said.

  “I’m glad to hear that, since trust is paramount in any lasting relationship.” She’d heard the Dutchman speaking a variety of languages while driving their getaway car. But his English was close to perfect, with just a hint of northern Europe—Germany or perhaps Holland—in his faintly British vowels. That should have been sexy, but instead, coming from him it was, again, creepy. “I’ll let you get cleaned up,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

  Still, when Phoebe said, “Thank you so much, for everything,” she was sincere. Whoever this man was, whatever he’d done in the past, however oily his smile and odd his eyes, today he’d helped her get Ian away from four men who’d wanted, badly, to kill him. And for that she was grateful.

  He smiled again as he bowed, very slightly—yikes—and closed the door behind him.

  Phoebe turned to find that Ian had moved. He was now standing right beside her. “If I hadn’t seen him in direct sunlight, I might be thinking vampire,” she said.

  Ian spoke over her, completely ignoring her attempt to break the awkwardness with a Buffy joke. “Why don’t you get into the shower first?” He pulled her with him into the bed
room, where the decor was less dolphins and more palm trees and—double yikes—decidedly sinister monkeys.

  “I’m not sure I need a shower,” she said. The dolphins returned in the bathroom, which was surprisingly small and old-fashioned, considering the rest of the house. A single sink with a small bead-board cabinet, full mirror covering the wall above it, a medicine cabinet sticking awkwardly out above a toilet with a fuzzy cover on the lid, a tub with a bedolphined shower curtain, more dolphins on the walls. “I think the blood is only on my sweatshirt—”

  He cut her off again. “It’s also in your hair.”

  “Really?” Phoebe leaned forward to look at herself in the mirror, but of course she couldn’t see the back of her head. What she could see was Ian using the very same mirror to get a look at the wound on his shoulder. “I’m not much of a paramedic,” she said, and he met her eyes. The look he gave her was so intense, her voice trailed off. “But if you tell me what to do, I can try to bandage …”

  Phoebe knew, just from the way he was looking at her, that he was trying to communicate telepathically. But what was he telling her? That Vanderzee was a vampire? No, that was almost as absurd as the idea that this generically decorated rental house was somehow bugged or—

  Really?

  She looked at Ian harder, narrowing her eyes in a silent question.

  “Why don’t you take a shower,” he said again, quietly, his eyes never leaving hers. “Mrs. Dunn.”

  That was what he was telling her, wasn’t it? By calling her that while the Dutchman wasn’t around to overhear them …?

  Of course, maybe she was now completely paranoid, and there was no hidden message in the way Ian was looking at her. Maybe she smelled bad, and that was sheer annoyance on his face and nothing more—Phoebe knew that she’d royally pissed him off by promising to stay in the van and then showing up inside Henrietta’s. And then she’d put the cherry on top of the bullshit pie that she’d baked, by telling the Dutchman that she was Ian’s wife.…

  But in case there were cameras and microphones or whatever, she chose her words carefully. “I know you’re mad at me, but there really was no other option—”