by J P Barnaby
After a long discussion with his mother on the things that he had a shot at not burning, they stopped by Publix on the way back to the house.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” he asked her, almost halfhearted because he really wanted to spend a little time with Aleks.
“Didn’t you just say that you hoped you didn’t poison him? No, thanks,” Charlotte laughed. He loved that she’d started to get her easy laughter back with their financial burden off her.
“That’s a fair point. Good thing Hannah is staying with you.”
“What are you going to do, Thomas?” she asked with a glance over her shoulder at Hannah in the back seat. She was playing with her phone and not paying attention to their conversation.
“I don’t know. They said they would be in contact. I guess we’ll just wait and see what they want.”
“What if they want you to do something”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“illegal.”
“Then we’ll do it. We have to. We have to keep her safe, Mom.”
“Even if it sends you back?” she asked. The silent words to prison were implied.
“Aleks will take care of Hannah,” Thomas said, more sure of that than just about anything in his life.
“What if he doesn’t?”
“I can’t think about that.”
“Why don’t you call Gerry Sorenson? He can help you.”
“Mom, I hacked into PCI-compliant servers at Polytech International. He put me in prison in the first place. I’m not interested in his kind of help.” He looked out the window, hoping the conversation was over.
“I just feel so helpless. I thought we were done with that feeling.” His mother turned onto their street. She glanced at him, but he didn’t have an answer.
A black town car sat at the far side of the drive, the Jag parked behind it. His mother pulled up at the head of the circular drive behind both cars. Aleks must have work company. It annoyed Thomas, but that work paid for the medication in his pocket, so he put that negativity away and grabbed the bags from the trunk.
The door opened as they reached it, and Wes scampered outside, white as death.
“Wes, is Aleks okay?” Thomas asked, grabbing his arm as he got closer. He didn’t even know Aleks had been expecting Wes.
“Don’t go in,” he whispered under the pretense of giving Thomas a short hug. “It’s the men that brought the envelope.”
He didn’t stop moving once he’d delivered the hug and the message, but jogged out toward the street. Wes checked his phone, and Thomas guessed that he had an Uber on the way. Fear clung to him like sweat, and he wondered how much Wes knew. Then his brain screamed that he needed to find a way to get Hannah and his mother away from the house.
Thomas squeezed his mother’s hand.
“You need to take Hannah and get out of here now. Just get in the car and go,” he told her as he reopened her door and escorted her into the car.
“Is it them?” she asked and put the key back in the ignition.
“Yes.”
“Come with us, Thomas. Just get in the car.”
“I can’t. I’m not going to walk out on him.” He handed his mother Hannah’s medication, making the point of what Aleks had done for him, what they owed him.
“Please be careful and call me later.”
“I will, Mom. I love you.” He turned when he saw her stricken expression with those last three words. He picked up the bags and strode into the house. He held tight to the handles to keep his hands from shaking. In the living room, on the couch he and Aleks had picked out together, sat a man in a dark, sleek suit. Two others stood near the fireplace, one with a hand moving toward his jacket while Aleks sat just feet away in a wingback chair. The men had a hard look about them, not the pampered type of businessmen he was used to seeing with Aleks. Thugs playing well-tailored dress-up.
Thomas dropped the groceries just inside the living room door and waited for the men to say something. He had a lot of experience with waiting.
“So, you’re the whiz kid?” The man on the couch spoke first, sitting back to lounge as he put his shoes on their expensive marble cocktail table.
This wasn’t the question Thomas had expected, but he answered it anyway. “Depends who you ask.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Thomas said without a hint of humor. Why were they tap-dancing around shit?
“Your boyfriend here was just telling us about how you found our little washing machine.”
Thomas didn’t believe for a second that Aleks had told them anything. “He’s my husband.”
“Whatever. You’re pretty clever, Mr. Aberthol, but not clever enough to see the little trap.”
Thomas went still. “A worm. That was the extra code. And it sent you a message when the file was accessed.”
“Way to catch up.” He smiled tightly, like his skin had stretched too far over his face.
“Who are you?” Thomas took a step toward Aleks, but the man shook his head, and he stopped.
“I’m sorry, how rude of me not to introduce myself. You can call me… Mr. Cash,” he said with a chuckle. Even his mirth came out as an intimidation.
“Like Johnny? Is that why you dress all in black?” Thomas asked. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want the man to think he was afraid. Because he was fucking terrified. But guys like Mr. Cash wouldn’t respect a wuss.
“Your prison bravado is useless here, Thomas. May I call you Thomas?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “We’ve got you by the balls here, man. Just do what you’re told and neither you nor your little girl will get hurt. Capisce?”
“Look, Aleks just wanted to know what happened to his father. We don’t know who you are or what kind of operation you’re running, and we don’t care. We just want to get on with our lives.”
“Now see, your father had a similar attitude,” he said, his eyes on Aleks. “We tried to show him that it was in his best interest to help us. Unfortunately, he just couldn’t get with the program.” The man paused, holding Aleks’s gaze, waiting for the words to sink in. They had killed his father and admitted to it without hesitation. These were men who feared no one.
“You’d like to get with the program, wouldn’t you, Mr. Sanna?”
When Aleks didn’t respond, the man raised his eyebrows at the goon closest to Thomas, a man all in black. Black hair, black eyes, black shirt under a black suit, and a black expression. Before Thomas could take a breath, the man jerked him back by his shaggy hair and punched him full in the face. Pain exploded across his cheek and he went down hard, narrowly missing the console table. Thomas heard sounds and a scuffle, but he couldn’t see anything. He only saw stars and an image of Hannah with her own nosebleed.
See, honey, Daddy gets them too.
“What the fuck do you want from me?” Aleks screamed. Moments later, Aleks was at his side, a hand on his hip. Aleks had put himself between him and the men—like that would help.
“We want you to stop fucking your boyfriend here every other Saturday morning for about six minutes. We want you to click a couple of buttons and then go on about your day. Do the crossword, take the little girl to the park, take up knitting for all I fucking care. Just turn off the goddamn software for six little minutes. Do that, and we’ll put the little girl through a PhD at Harvard.”
“We don’t need your money,” Aleks spat.
“No, but you need an incentive to keep your fucking mouths shut. Sending Pretty Boy here back to prison for money laundering, bought and paid for, is a very good reason. If no money changes hands, you could say we threatened you, which, of course, would be a lie. But who’s gonna believe an ex-con when he says he’s innocent?”
“Fine,” Aleks said, his voice thin and dead.
“Fine, what?”
“Fine, I’ll turn it off. Just leave my family alone,” Aleks mumbled, his arms still around Thomas.
“See, now that’s all we ask,” t
he man replied with a flippant shrug.
“Will you please leave now?”
“One more thing,” the man said as he rose. “We’ll be transferring the money to your account during that window. So if you decide to sleep in one morning, the feds will be your new special alarm clock. Get me?”
“Yes.”
The man in black kicked Thomas’s leg on his way out the door, but they left. All of them. Finally. The door snicked closed with a quietness at odds with their absence of refinement.
“Are you okay?” Aleks whispered, his voice shaking as hard as his hands.
“Yeah, I got into a couple of fights inside. I’ll live.”
Aleks helped him stand, and he looked down at the ruin of his shirt. “Not that long ago, blood all over my shirt would have meant no food for the next few days so I could buy a new one,” Thomas noted, remembering Hannah’s nosebleed on his only suitworthy shirt.
“You won’t ever have to worry about that again,” Aleks whispered into his hair.
“Nope, but now we have a whole different set of worries.”
“I’m so sorry, Thomas. If I’d known—”
Thomas stopped Aleks with a hand on his chest. “You didn’t do this, Aleks. Your father did.”
“But I dragged you and Hannah into it. I put you at risk.” Aleks’s voice rose to a level that might have been called hysteria.
“And you’re saving her life. Besides, there’s not jack shit we can do about it now except what they want.”
“You don’t think we should involve the police, then?” Aleks got to a knee, pulling Thomas up with him.
“No. I’m sure your father probably tried that too. Besides, I’m just as guilty now. Those were government-certified compliant servers I broke into. The bank finds out, and that’s another federal crime. Even if we work with them, we’re talking about organized crime here. You know what happens to people who rat out the mob?” Thomas stood, a little shaky from the head shot and the residual adrenaline.
“Witness protection,” Aleks sighed. “And that sounds like something out of a bad movie, ratting out the mob.”
“It does. But I don’t think they let you take your billions into witness protection. Then what happens to Hannah?”
“So we do it. We do what they want. We need to get your mom and Hannah into a hotel. A very public hotel.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.” Thomas sent his mom a text to check on them and then walked over to the forgotten groceries toppled near the door. After scooping everything back into the bags, he picked them up and headed toward the kitchen. He dropped them on the counter.
“What’s that?” Aleks peeked into one of the bags.
“I picked up stuff to make you dinner.” Thomas smiled at him, a shier smile than he was used to giving. He didn’t know why the thought of making dinner for his husband made him feel awkward. Hell, even the words made something twist inside him.
He glanced up, and the look of wonder in Aleks’s expression untwisted it just a bit.
“I’d love that. Though I’ll admit, I don’t have much of an appetite.”
“Me either, but it will give us something to do.”
Aleks unpacked the two bags into the kitchen while Thomas grabbed a bottle of Tylenol off his desk in the downstairs office. He popped a couple into his mouth as he passed the kitchen island, and Aleks offered him a half-empty bottle of water. Only after he swallowed the pills did he think about how weird it was to drink after someone else. But then, it was probably no different than kissing.
Kissing.
They’d been doing that a lot in the few days since their hasty marriage. Exploring each other, feeling the other out, as they rekindled the friendship they’d had all those years ago. Thomas recognized the sweet, slow burn of need when they touched. He’d never been in love before, but he was starting to wonder what it felt like.
“Have you been teaching yourself to cook?” Aleks asked, bringing Thomas out of his thoughts.
“Nope.” He grabbed the second bag and emptied it while Aleks pulled everything out of the first. As Thomas inventoried the array of ingredients spread out on their kitchen island, panic peeked out of the back of his mind and slapped him on the side of the head.
“This seemed much easier when my mother explained it.” Thomas picked up a deli container of squishy white cheese and couldn’t ever remember having that in lasagna.
“Would you like some help?”
“What, are you going to hire me a chef?” Thomas asked with a half smile.
“A real Italian chef would laugh at deli ricotta and boxed pasta. They make their own.”
“Wait, you can make your own cheese?”
“Someone has to do it.” Aleks chuckled as he turned and hit a few buttons on the oven. It lit up with the number 350, and they were on their way.
They worked in comfortable silence for a while, Aleks frying up Italian sausage while Thomas cut up the vegetables for a salad. It was methodical work that required little thought, and that was what Thomas needed right then, little thought. He’d told Aleks that their current situation hadn’t been his fault, but he’d always had trouble with blame. God gave Hannah cancer, then Richard got him arrested, and of course the FBI was to blame for his constant unemployment. Even his mother, in the darkest of nights, found her share of his disapproval for her selflessness. It annoyed him that she never got anything for herself.
Most of all, he hated himself because it was all his fault.
“We could run,” Aleks said, half to himself as he started a pot of water to boil. “I give my job to someone else, sell my shares of stock, and then we just get on a plane. We could go anywhere—Paris, Rome, even Santorini.”
Thomas sighed down at the salad. The slightly wilted leaves sighed back at him. Everything seemed so tired.
“First, running makes you look guilty. Second, Hannah’s medical team is here. How do we get her consistent medical care as fugitives? And they would find us, Aleks. If these guys can hack into banks and leave untraceable worms, they can follow our digital footprint wherever we go.” He added the butchered tomatoes to the bowl and grabbed a cucumber.
“The one time in my life I wish my father were here,” Aleks muttered. He turned off the burner and used a slotted spoon to scoop the sausage onto paper towels.
“His plan didn’t work either,” Thomas reminded him gently as Aleks dropped the drained meat back into the pan.
The silence returned, heavy and awkward as Aleks poured sauce into the meat and stirred. Water splashed onto the hot burner as it came to a hard-rolling boil in the pot.
“I don’t feel like waiting for lasagna.” Aleks turned abruptly and grabbed the box of lasagna noodles Thomas had picked up at the store. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago. He came back with a box of spaghetti noodles and unceremoniously dumped them into the water. Only half the sticks of pasta were submerged in the water, but Thomas didn’t say anything.
With the salad finished, Thomas took a seat at the island and watched as Aleks took over. It didn’t seem so important right then that he’d wanted to do something special for Aleks. The shadow of threat loomed heavy and dark over the kitchen; little else seemed significant by comparison.
Thomas sliced up the loaf of pillowy Italian bread and watched Aleks stir the pasta, taming it all underneath the water to cook. While he was growing up, his mother had always just broken the strands in half with her hands, heedless of the bits of exploding pasta on the stove or the floor.
Finally, after a long, pregnant silence, Aleks pulled the pasta, drained it, and dropped it in the sauce. Thomas put the plates and silverware on the island. They rarely ate in the formal dining room. Hannah liked the island because sitting on the high barstool made her feel like a grown-up.
He missed her already. The days coming up without her would be longer than some of the days he’d spent in prison. Rattling around this house without a princess play session to distract him would drive him mad. He wi
shed he’d had the presence of mind to copy that fucking folder off the server so he could at least examine the code that had sealed his fate.
If he could just trace the worm back to its original source… then what? It wasn’t like they could send it to the authorities. How would he explain where he got it? They couldn’t just storm the castle—what, two geeks against the mob?
He hated feeling trapped. He hadn’t even felt this trapped behind bars.
He and Aleks were halfway through the meal before he came out of his thoughts. Shoving pasta into his mouth on autopilot, he hadn’t realized he’d been absent. Aleks seemed to be pretty absent himself, staring into his plate of food like the answers sat hidden beneath layers of sauce.
They cleaned up together, as they always did. Thomas wiped off the table and brought all the dishes to Aleks to load the machine. Deep in his gut, Thomas had to admit he liked the domesticity of it. He liked cooking together and being domestic together, taking care of Hannah and the house. It had only been a couple of days, and they hadn’t really settled in yet, but he felt comfortable. Maybe they weren’t a couple, but they were at least good friends.
Good friends who’d fucked.
Once.
They hadn’t had sex since their wedding night, and lying in bed together the past few nights had become awkward. Thomas had to jack off in the shower after lying next to Aleks all night, but he wouldn’t initiate. He didn’t want to show how badly he wanted to try being fucked by Aleks. It made him a nervous and excited bundle of nerves.
Right then, though, he wanted to. After the confrontation today, he wanted that comfort. He wanted the distraction.
He wanted Aleks.
The sound of the dishwasher starting brought Thomas from his thoughts. They stood across the kitchen, just looking at one another. Aleks had shadows under his eyes, and Thomas couldn’t imagine what his face looked like. It felt like a dozen bees had stung his cheek, making it swollen and prickly. When he couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Thomas headed for the stairs and Aleks followed.
He spent a long time in the bathroom, washing his face and inspecting the bruised skin, brushing his teeth, and changing into sleep shorts. Thomas took another couple of Tylenol, washing them down with lukewarm water from the tap. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and then headed back into the bedroom.