Leverage (The Mistaken Series)

by Nancy S Thompson

  The last item to go was my G&L acoustic, secondhand, but my first and favorite, and very rare. The guy who’d bought it was a lucky sonofabitch. I imagine he probably thought I’d stolen it. But I didn’t have time to haggle. I grabbed the cash and headed home, calculating I had nearly a quarter of what I owed Greg. It was a decent down payment, enough to get him off my back, at least until I talked to Ty and, hopefully, his buddy, the fed.

  I planned out what to say to my mom and Ty on the way home and was feeling a bit more upbeat. I thought I might even keep a ten for myself and take Katy out for Japanese. She seemed to really crave that stuff lately. And a night out together would be good for us both. I had a smile on my face when I unlocked the front door, imagining how she’d react when I asked her out. I couldn’t even wait ‘til I was through before I shouted out my plans.

  “Hey K?” I called out as I hung my jacket in the entry closet. “What d’you think about teriyaki for dinner?” I closed the door and walked toward the living room. “I gotta a few extra bucks—”

  “Money just burns a hole in your pocket, now doesn’t it, Mr. Maguire?”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard that voice.

  Holy shit. Greg.

  “What the fuck!” I yelled and stepped into the dimly lit room just as the light popped on.

  There he was with his goon, Janek, sitting on my crappy sofa, with Katy in between, her arms secure in their hands. She was shaking all over, her hands clamped together and pulled tight into her chest, and her hair hung like a stage curtain, obscuring her face.

  “Greg…please…just—”

  “Just what, Mr. Maguire? Are you here to save this poor damsel in distress? Pull her from the clutches of your evil nemesis?” he said as he gave Katy a jostle.

  She cried out and tipped her head back, and her hair fell away from her face. I sucked in a loud breath and charged three feet into the room, until Jan pulled out his knife and stuck it into the cushion next to Katy, all the way up to its brass-knuckled hilt.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr. Maguire. Mr. Janek here’s been itching for a little fun. Your friend, the busboy, proved quite unfulfilling, I’m afraid.”

  “Steve? Y-you killed Steve? But…why? He did what you asked and brought me in.”

  Greg pressed his lips together and sighed. “Yes, well, that information right there is reason enough. Loose lips and all.”

  I tried to swallow, but the lump in my throat refused to go down. I didn’t know how to respond. So I tried to put Steve out of my mind for the moment and focus on Katy.

  “Okay, I…I get that you’re angry, but…she has nothing to do with this. Just…let her go, all right? You’ve already got me. There’s no reason to hurt her any more than you already have. I get the message, loud and clear.”

  Greg pulled himself up straight, his mouth open, affronted, as if I’d just insulted him. “Excuse me? You think we did this to your beautiful young mother-to-be?” he said, forcing Katy’s chin up higher, exposing her bloody nose and tear-stained face.

  I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes, trying like hell to hold myself back.

  “You wound me, Mr. Maguire, and have proven to be a poor judge of character. We didn’t do this. She did it to herself.” He lifted a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. Beneath it laid a mirrored tray with a straw, a razor blade, and two lines of a white, powdery substance.

  My hands flew to my head and I dropped to my knees. “Oh Jesus, no. What’ve you done? For God’s sake, she’s pregnant! Oh my God, the baby.” I rocked back and forth as nausea rolled through me, chanting, “Please, God, don’t do this. Don’t do this. Please, please.”

  Greg let go of Katy’s arm and stood. He walked out from behind the coffee table and crouched down next to me, his hand on my shoulder. “My, you’re awfully stressed-out, Mr. Maguire. All this worrying, it’s not good for you,” he said with a shake of his head. “And it’s certainly not good for an expectant mother. I mean, if she’s capable of this,” he added, indicating the drugs, “God only knows what else she’ll do. She could do anything, really.” He gasped and brought his hand to his mouth. “Perhaps she’s even suicidal.”

  He picked up the razor blade and held it out, twisting it around, examining it. I stared at him, speechless, incapable of putting two words together.

  “You mustn’t leave things like this hanging around, Mr. Maguire. You wouldn’t want her to, I don’t know, maybe cut herself or something. Why, that would be terrible. Or maybe…” he said as he put the blade down. He faked-gasped one more time and looked me deep in the eye as he pulled something from his inside coat pocket. “Maybe she’ll jump out the window. Like…like Leo.” He raised his chin and pulled a cap down onto his head—a San Francisco Giants baseball cap. “You remember Leo, don’t you, Mr. Maguire?” he said with a wink.

  And that was it, the moment it all clicked into place, the feeling I had the day we first met. It was Greg up on Leo’s balcony that night.

  I was right. Leo had been pushed. And Greg had been the one to push him.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hannah

  Blessed sunlight—the real thing, not the usual filtered gray—sliced between the shuttered slats on my bedroom window. My eyelids glowed from within, a soft but vivid red, the color so intense, it woke me with a pleasant nudge. I breathed in deep and let out a long sigh as my eyes fluttered to adjust. I smiled, remembering the dream I’d just been pulled from, Tyler and I making love outside in some exotic place I couldn’t identify, not that it mattered. All I cared about was us, that we were together again, in each other’s arms. I closed my eyes again and reached for the memory as it tried to flit away.

  I could still feel the smooth warmth of Tyler’s skin, the way his muscles rippled hard and lean beneath my fingers. I felt his arms around me, holding me tight, yet careful not to lay his weight against the child tucked safe within my womb. And his mouth… It covered my face in seductive kisses, first along my temple, then across my forehead and down my nose, along my cheek to the edge of my jaw and down the column of my throat, making me gasp and wriggle beneath him.

  He chuckled and moved his mouth to my ear where his tongue skimmed along the ridges and dove into the valleys. I squirmed even more as chills ran through me and goosebumps sprang up along my flesh. I felt a chill as his weight lifted away, and I looked up into the most startling blue eyes I’ve ever seen, the color of the South Sea, calm and serene yet thoroughly aroused. Dozens of little creases sprang like sunbursts from the outside corner of each eye. God, I loved that about him, and couldn’t help but smile back, for just an instant, until the length of him pushed deep inside me. I threw my head back and gasped as I arched my back, yielding to the pleasure and demanding more.

  With my eyes shut tight, my head thrashed from side to side. I panted and reached for myself as I reveled in the memory of the dream. I moaned, clamoring for that moment of release I so desperately needed, that I hadn’t felt in so many weeks, so excruciating, so intense. I tried to find it. I sucked in a deep breath and tried to hold on to the memory—Tyler’s arms, his breath, his warmth, his weight—until he started to fade, his body dissolving into a hazy nebula, only to scatter as if blown by a strong wind.

  And then it hit me.

  Ty wasn’t here. We had not made love. He wasn’t touching me. I could not feel him.

  I was alone.

  The impact of that hit me like a spear through the heart. Pain sliced into my chest and exploded out my back. I felt impaled, unable to move. The heat of my delusive lovemaking evaporated, and I grew instantly cold as sweat condensed over my skin. But the worst of it was how completely empty I felt, like my soul had been hacked from my body. I began to cry, long, hard sobs that made every muscle ache and my throat constrict to the point where I could hardly take a breath or even swallow.

  With every ounce of strength I had, I rolled onto my side and faced Tyler’s empty spot next to me. I hadn�
��t made the bed since the day he’d walked out the door. His place was just as he’d left it, a long indentation where his shoulder and hips had sunk into the mattress. I reached out and grazed my fingers over it, imagining the body that had left the impression. That only made the tears come harder, the pain more intense.

  I grabbed his pillow and buried my face in it. His scent was so strong. I filled my nostrils with his essence, inhaling him deep into my lungs and holding him there until I knew he was infused into every cell. Oh, how I remembered that scent! It made me recall those days years ago after Ty had first left me, when the FBI had whisked him away.

  I’d been so lonely then, so wholly heartbroken. Utterly abandoned and destroyed. I thought I’d never survive, but in the end, I didn’t have to, because he came back to me. We’d been given another chance. And yet, here I was again, with all those same feelings. It was unbearable.

  But this time, I couldn’t blame it on circumstances outside my control. I had driven him to it. I was responsible. It was true, Tyler had pushed me to a dangerous precipice, a line in the sand, but I had chosen to cross it, and brazenly so. Why did I do it? Why had I pushed him? And even then, after I’d slipped the proverbial knife into his back, I’d twisted the goddamn thing! Told him Roman would do what he seemed unwilling to. It was heartless and cold. But I’d been so angry, felt so betrayed.

  He should’ve told me about Leo and Katy. He should’ve trusted me. But no, Tyler had been keeping secrets, had put my son at risk, and told me it was to protect me and our baby. I’d heard that before in the stories he’d told me of his first wife, Jillian. It was too much the same, way too similar. I’d sworn long ago that no one would ever have that kind of control over me ever again.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  I tried to fix it though, many times. I’d called Ty, apologized, told him I didn’t mean it, even though, at the time, I had. And he knew I had. That was the problem. He knew, no matter what I said, no matter how many times I denied it, that I thought he was ultimately responsible for all the terrible things we’d endured—Jill’s death, my kidnapping and assault, and Nick’s death, even the accident that took the lives of his parents and sister. I’d essentially tied the entire tangled mess in a neat little bow and laid it at his feet. And now that horrible snowball of events was melting, and we were both flailing, near to drowning in the flood of its aftermath.

  Crushed under the weight of a perfidious first marriage, I had vowed never to be marginalized again. Perhaps I mistook the protection Tyler offered as a barrier rather than a buffer. I knew damn well Ty would never intentionally put me or Conner at risk. He’d already proven he’d give his life for me, and, in place of me, my son.

  The realization of how completely our marriage had been shattered ran through me like poison, settling in my stomach with a corrosive burn. I could taste it in the back of my throat, smell it pushing up through my nostrils. It made me nauseous and dizzy. Suddenly, bile erupted into my esophagus. I clamped a hand over my mouth and bolted for the bathroom where I emptied the remainder of what little I’d eaten the night before into the toilet.

  Wave after wave of spasms gripped my body as I heaved, over and over. When the seizures finally ceased, I slipped down and lay on the cold tile floor, my body weak, shivering, and covered in sweat as I wrapped my arms around my burgeoning belly and stroked the taut flesh.

  I exhaled a long deep breath. “Two and a half months to go,” I whispered to my sweet Nicole. “Let’s hope Mommy can bring your daddy home.”

  And there I lay, practicing my breathing, in and out, trying to soothe myself as best I could, and worried what would happen if I couldn’t somehow fix the all damage I’d done.

  CHAPTER 24

  Tyler

  I woke with a start, my heart thrashing in my chest. I bolted upright and threw my legs over the edge of the sofa as I scrubbed the grit of sleep from my eyes. Nearly impossible when I’d hardly slept, and it wasn’t the damn sofa that made it so, either, though the fact it was a foot shorter than me certainly didn’t help.

  No, it was Hannah who kept me up late then haunted my dreams like a ghost. But she’d felt so real. Her hands, her lips, her body sheathing mine—so bittersweet—because no matter how true the memory, I knew it wasn’t real.

  My joints popped when I stood, and I groaned as my muscles protested the sudden stretching of my limbs and back, not to mention my neck, which felt perpetually twisted at a ninety degree angle. But even the discomfort, as bothersome as it was, couldn’t chase away the unease that flittered through my stomach like butterflies.

  That feeling had become a permanent fixture in my core as of late, like there was all this extra room inside me now. I felt incomplete, half of me missing, and what remained couldn’t function on its own. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation. I’d been here before, and all the old habits and cravings associated with that came into sharp focus, while everything else pushed to the periphery and blurred.

  I kept a small collection of liquor in the corner of my construction trailer, for those times when the client came by to celebrate the completion of a project or the granting of a long-embattled permit. I kept one bottle half-filled with water, my own little secret. No one ever questioned it. They all assumed it was vodka. But tonight, it stood empty, while the others danced temptingly before me like harem girls beckoning me to peek beneath their veils.

  Come to me. I’ll help you forget. You know I can. I’ve done it so many times before. It doesn’t have to hurt anymore. Just take a drink, one small sip...

  That voice clamored so loud, I couldn’t even remember pulling the stop from the decanter, or pouring the tequila into the stubby lowball glass. But there it was, my old friend, the amber devil, staring me in the eye after all this time.

  How many times had I heeded its call, had I given in to the temptation to simply not feel? Because that was it, really, what brought me to this point, that pain, that loneliness, that undeniable knowledge that I had destroyed everything most precious in my life.

  I feared that knowledge and ached to reject it in the quickest way possible. The amber devil had always granted me that wish, and oh, how I wanted it to yet again. For just one moment, just an hour, just this single evening. I wanted that drink. I needed that drink.

  I peered down into the devil’s face and saw my past reflected back at me, all the weeks and months I’d spent drunk, scheming my vengeance, releasing my wrath against an innocent woman—Hannah. And then there was Nick, my troublesome little brother, who’d kept everything a secret in order to protect me. He’d sacrificed his life in our father’s name so that I might live.

  And that pretty much summed it all up. I was half a man without Jill. I was half a man without Nick. And now, half a man without Hannah. What did that make me but a speck of humanity?

  I tried to reconcile that with the man I once was, before I ever married Jill or Hannah. I relished my independence back then, which was why I’d tried so hard to disengage my brother from my life. I’d wanted to find out what it was like to be just me, on my own, with no one else to shape the boundaries of who or what I was. But over time, Nick and Jill had become enduring components in my life, and most certainly maneuvered the tools that cut and contoured the man I’d become.

  After dealing with the crap that had consumed my world following their deaths, I thought I’d finally pulled myself together, and with Hannah a daily reminder of both my failings and my resurrection, I believed I’d come full circle. But no, I hadn’t. I was living, breathing proof you could never truly leave your past behind. It clung like a shadow, at times unseen, but never farther than my reach, always dark, forever uncontainable.

  That’s what looked back up at me from that glass—that shadow.

  My past.

  “Fuck!” I screamed and hurled the glass across the room.

  It shattered against the trailer door so hard, it atomized in the stark morning sunlight. I sunk to my knees on
the dingy beige carpet. No matter how much time went by, I’d never be able to shed the weight of the terrible things I’d done. How could I possibly expect Hannah to bury that all away? We could either allow it to divide us or acknowledge and live with it.

  I didn’t want to go back to that man living separate from those around him. I wanted to restore, as fully as possible, what I used to have with the one person in this world who knew and accepted me, sins and all, who saw the flaws and loved me just the same. I only prayed she could get past this last offense. I’d abandoned her before, twice. It had nearly broken her then. I hoped it wasn’t too late, now, and I could somehow put the pieces of her heart back together again.

  Without even changing my shirt, I grabbed my keys and jumped into my truck. The drive home from my jobsite trailer in North Seattle seemed interminable with hectic morning commuters and more start-and-stop school buses than I’d ever seen before. Every single one of those fifty-seven minutes felt more like an hour, giving me more time than I wanted to think about how stupid I’d been to leave Hannah.

  Besides missing her, I could’ve put her at even greater risk. I still didn’t have any solid information on Katy or Leo, or know if they were somehow connected to the Bratva. Everyone was suspect as far as I was concerned, even our overly friendly next-door neighbor. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t like the way he looked at Hannah, with his moony eyes and stoop-shouldered posture, like he was purposely trying to appear non-threatening. But I knew better. I’d caught a different look that morning he’d watched us through the kitchen window. He was weaseling himself into Hannah’s life. I didn’t want him to have the opportunity to offer himself up in my stead one more time.