by Megan Crane
She couldn’t afford to get sick.
But who was she kidding? She already had all that mess in her blood. She couldn’t outsmart her own genes. Or outrun them, either. God knew, she’d tried, and here she was again. Not just in Boston but underneath it. Walking toward the destiny she’d escaped a decade ago.
Maybe the lesson here was, there was no escaping. Not really.
Escaping would have meant living a real life. Not hiding, walling herself off, pretending not to connect with anyone or anything. . . .
She tried to shake that off. It was too late now.
Eventually she came to the door on the far end of the subterranean hall that crossed the main street Sharkey’s sat on and veered south, taking her down to the corner she’d crossed aboveground. She paused there, refusing to let herself shake.
She could be still. She could breathe. She could make herself do it.
Caradine had watched Isaac and the rest of them turn to stone at will, though as she tried it now, she quickly realized it was another thing they must have trained hard to do. Because every part of her felt alive and electric and buzzing with what she was choosing to call anticipation.
Not panic. Not terror.
She put her hand on the door and tried to prepare herself.
Because she still didn’t know who she expected to see on the other side. Nasty, vicious Francis, who would probably have become far worse than her father if he’d had the time? Or a member of her own family—her own blood—who had always been pretty horrible on his own?
Nothing can possibly be worse than drawing this out any longer, she snapped at herself. You need to get out there and do what you came here to do.
One way or another.
Because she might have a new family in Alaska, but she needed to do what she could to protect the only part of her real family she had left.
I would go and do whatever had to be done if I could, Lindsay had said in Hawaii. But there’s Luana.
And Luana deserved to be free of the Sheeran family in a way Caradine and Lindsay never had been.
But when Caradine cracked open the door and stuck her head through, there was nothing but another basement. There were boxes piled against one wall and enough dust in the corners to make her nose tickle, but mostly there was nothing but a latticework of pipes above and a concrete floor below.
And the clatter of her own heart, thick and hard, in places like her thumbs. Her ears. Her throat.
She wiped her suddenly damp palms against her thighs and kept walking, crossing the room and skirting the ominous drain in the middle of it. She made it to the other side and opened another door to find herself in a stairwell. She vaguely remembered it, mostly because Danny had been so boneless. And obnoxious. Calling her and Lindsay names as they’d tried to rouse him enough to help them get him up the stairs.
It had never occurred to her then that she might look back on another dark and squalid Sheeran family night as if it had been innocent. Fun, almost. But compared to her other family memories, dragging her wasted brother around with Lindsay felt like a happy, bonding, nostalgic experience.
Something worth laughing about on a porch in Hawaii.
Caradine really, really wanted to get back to that porch someday.
She walked quietly and carefully up the stairs to the first floor and tested the reinforced steel door she found there. The handle moved when she tried it, so she pulled it open—
And then everything happened too fast.
There was a hand on her throat, and it hurt. But even as she processed that she was hauled forward, then slammed back against the wall so hard she lost what little breath she had left. Especially with her feet just off the ground, letting gravity do the work of choking her out.
Caradine knew what to do. She knew how to fight choke holds. She’d worked on this with Everly, Mariah, and others in Grizzly Harbor. Blue had taught them how to duck their chins and raise their hands, and she did both now. But she didn’t let herself enact the rest of her actual training because she didn’t want to show her hand.
Even when the hand at her throat tightened.
She couldn’t help but move her chin a little more then, and tug with her hands to free up her airway. She tried to focus on the man before her.
And for a long moment, she stared at him while he sneered. While her vision narrowed.
But no matter how much or how hard she stared, despite losing her air, she couldn’t make the face in front of her make any sense. It wasn’t Francis. It wasn’t Jimmy. It wasn’t anyone she knew.
“Who are you?” she managed to wheeze out.
The hand around her neck loosened slightly. Caradine could already feel where the bruises would come in, but she told herself getting to worry about bruises was winning. The alternative was death.
But he didn’t tighten his grip again. He lowered her instead. Her toes found the ground, and that was better.
It was even better when he took his hand off her throat.
And watched, his eyes glittering, while she coughed and fought to breathe freely.
Caradine wiped the moisture from her eyes, swallowed a few times and ignored how raw her throat felt, then straightened.
He was still sneering.
“You should’ve stayed out there in the middle of nowhere, Julia.” His voice was half a sneer, half a growl. It shocked her. “You should never have come back home.”
The shock reverberated through her as she took him in, this man with a stranger’s face. A different nose. A different chin. A shiny bald head.
At a glance she would have sworn she didn’t know him.
But she did.
Those terrible, dead eyes alight with a certain malicious satisfaction. The middle-aged paunch he hadn’t had ten years ago, but reminded her a little too strongly of another ghost. And that telltale red roll on the back of his neck that she’d spent far too much time staring at in places like the parish church.
She bet if she lifted his handprint from her face, she’d recognize that, too.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” she said, though her mouth felt swollen and talking hurt. “You look a little bit different, Jimmy.”
Far behind her brother with his new face, two other men in ominous suits stood near a set of glass doors that Caradine knew led out to the street. It couldn’t have been more than ten yards, but it might as well have been ten thousand miles. She had a sudden, irresistible image of herself running for it, crashing through the glass, rolling out into the street . . .
But that wouldn’t do much besides hurt her.
Ten years ago this had been the lobby of a down-market office building that opened up into a dead-end alley, not a main street. It looked even shabbier than she remembered, which suggested it was unlikely any offices would empty out and accidentally help her. And there would be no one out in that alleyway. No pedestrians cutting through to get somewhere else.
No one and nothing but her, which was what she’d planned.
But that didn’t make it feel any better now that it was happening.
“I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” her brother said, and it was weird and creepy to hear his voice come out of the wrong face. Like a horrific puppet show.
Caradine had always hated puppet shows.
“I don’t want to hear it again,” Jimmy warned her. “Jimmy Sheeran died with the rest of his family, including you, ten years ago. Best you let him lie.” He smirked. “Caradine.”
She wanted to claw that name out of his mouth. Instead, she concentrated on the pain in her face and kept herself from reacting.
It helped that he clearly wanted her reaction.
“What name do you use these days?” she asked him, as if he hadn’t threatened her.
“Brian,” he said, with that malicious edge to his voice that made everyt
hing inside her curdle. “Brian Jones.”
“How creative,” she said, and got another smack for it.
This time she tasted copper, but she was glad. It helped her focus.
“There are supposed to be two of you,” Jimmy said. “You think I don’t know you’ve been traveling together?”
“Lindsay’s dead,” Caradine said flatly.
Because that was the most important part of this. That was the gift she could give her sister, and it was why she’d left Alaska Force behind, because she knew Isaac would never have okayed this. And no matter what else happened, if Jimmy believed Lindsay was dead, he would stop looking for her. Luana would be safe. This madness would stop here.
Caradine was not her mother. She had no intention of sacrificing herself needlessly the way Donna had always liked to do. But if it had to happen, this was as good a reason as she could come up with.
A thought that made her stomach cramp, but she ignored it.
“Bullshit,” Jimmy snarled.
Caradine glared at him. “What’s the matter? You don’t think bad things can happen unless you do them yourself?”
She’d expected him to hit her again, but it still hurt. A hit was a hit. The force of it took her by surprise, but she rolled with it as best she could. She let the tears spring into her eyes, and did nothing to wipe them away when she looked back at him.
“Lindsay picked up some bad habits over the past ten years,” she said, and let the tears spill over. “It was horrible. She kept saying she would quit, but she never did.”
She’d spent a lot of time on the plane ride crafting the appropriate death for Lindsay. She figured linking it to Phoenix was her best bet. Whoever was responsible for what had happened there would have known that the people he’d killed—or had ordered killed—were junkies and dealers. It made sense to loop it in now and tie it all up in a bow.
“She overdosed,” Caradine said flatly. “It was awful.”
Jimmy didn’t react to the news of his sister’s death. He studied Caradine instead, until she couldn’t tell if her skin crawled from the pain or that look in his eyes. “You don’t look like a junkie, Jules. Just the same dumb bitch.”
“I’m tired of running,” she told him, still letting the tears drip down her cheeks. “I don’t know how you found me, but it felt like a sign.”
“The freaking Internet,” Jimmy told her with entirely too much satisfaction. “There was a picture of someone who looked like you in a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, thanks to some old friends of Mom’s on a stupid cruise. It got around and it eventually got to me. Figured I’d light it up and see what came out, just to be sure. And here you are.”
Caradine had always hated social media on principle and this didn’t help. But she tried to look tremulous and hopeful, not revolted. “I want to come home.”
“Home.” Jimmy hooted. “What home do you think there is to come back to? You’re a ghost. You died a decade ago and you should have stayed dead.”
“Come on,” Caradine whined. Actually whined, which made her want to hit herself in the face a few times. She would never know how she didn’t make a fist. “You don’t know what it’s like. Always looking over your shoulder. Always waiting for something to burst into flames like it did. It was almost a relief, if I’m honest, that you found me. I always knew you would.”
She thought that was laying it on a little thick, but then again, it wasn’t entirely untrue. Having her past catch up to her after all this time was like tearing off a scab. It hurt, but there was a relief in it, because it justified all that running.
And if she remembered her brother right, it would please him to imagine she’d spent ten years scared he, personally, would find her.
“You always thought you were so smart,” Jimmy sneered at her now. “But you’re not. A smart girl would never have come back, throwing Dad’s name around. Because Dad died. And so did I. And the last thing I need is for too many people to connect the individual I am now with any member of the long-lost Sheeran family.”
“The bartender—”
“Donnie is well paid to call me anytime someone turns up asking after people. It doesn’t matter who. Because who asks for people in a place like Sharkey’s? It’s not an information booth.”
“But—”
“A smart girl wouldn’t have shouted out a long-dead name in a public place, encouraging people to remember things I’d rather they forgot. I’m a businessman. I can’t do business if people are hung up on ancient history.”
“You killed your entire family,” Caradine whispered. “What kind of business is that?”
“Not yours,” Jimmy said with soft menace. Caradine couldn’t entirely hide her shudder of revulsion. “Did you really think you could come back here and weasel your way into my good graces? You were a liability back then.” His flat eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Are you wired?”
“What?” Her voice cracked on the word, which was only partially feigned. Because she kept trying to see Jimmy in the bald head or the curled lip he wore, and she couldn’t, and she suspected all of her nightmares would wear this face. “What? No! Of course I’m not—”
Jimmy threw her back against the wall. And he gripped her throat again while he pawed at her. Not gently. Not lasciviously, for which she supposed she ought to have been grateful. But still, he made it very clear that he didn’t care if he hurt her.
At all.
Caradine could feel a murderous haze washing over her. Fury. Shame. And that dark ugliness inside that she’d always known was there. The part of her that was like him. Like the rest of her family. The thing in her blood that she’d never indulged, because she never wanted to turn out like the rest of them.
She didn’t much care if she let it loose here. With Jimmy.
But she couldn’t let herself give in to it. Not now. Not yet. She told herself, over and over, that she was choosing to subject herself to this. She was choosing to let him manhandle her, because it was expedient.
Because she knew that a clock was ticking, even if he didn’t.
And because she’d rid herself of the Alaska Force comm unit before she’d gone down into the tunnel, so there was nothing for him to find.
“I told you I wasn’t wired,” she managed to say through her damaged throat when he was done. And she wasn’t acting when one hand rose to touch her own throat gently, or when she tried to swallow and winced. “I don’t know what you think is happening here, but all I’m trying to do is come back home.”
“There’s nothing I hate worse than a rat, Julia.” Jimmy’s nostrils flared. “You remember that.”
She didn’t point out that if he killed her, which seemed to be the direction they were heading in, she wouldn’t need to remember anything.
“Are you why Dad was so weird that night?” she asked him, even though it hurt to speak. “Is that what was going on in that room?”
“Did Lindsay tell you that before she kicked it?” He looked disgusted. “I told them it was a mistake to let her in there. The eye candy wasn’t worth it.”
“She was your sister,” Caradine managed to say. “Not eye candy.”
“She was a piece of ass,” Jimmy said, with a horrible coldness and distance that probably left their own bruises all over her. “The only difference between you and her was that she knew her place.”
“Nice,” Caradine couldn’t seem to help herself from saying.
She expected him to hit her again. Instead, he smiled.
And she shuddered again, not sure she cared if he saw it.
“Here’s a reality check for you, Jules,” Jimmy told her, with obvious relish. “Dad was going to let you graduate. He was going to let you go through the whole rigmarole, especially since you paid for it yourself. Why not? Then he was going to sell you off to Vincent Campari down in Jersey. You remember Vincen
t?”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell,” Caradine said, though it did.
Too many bells. All of them horrendous.
“Let me remind you.” And Jimmy was actually grinning now, with his fake face and his same old dead eyes. “His first wife killed herself. His second wife is locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Hackensack. You would have been number three. How do you think you would have fared with an old-school type like Vincent, with the mouth on you?”
Vincent Campari was a very bad man. A known murderer who had also been old, ugly, and lecherous. He’d given Caradine the creeps, something she’d been foolish enough to let her father see when she’d been all of thirteen.
She’d known better by then. Never give her father or men like him weapons when they already had so many of their own.
“If he puts all his wives into early graves or mental institutions, how could marrying me to him possibly have benefited Dad?” she asked now.
As if they weren’t discussing, almost casually, what would have been repeated rapes, other abuses, and God knew what else. She would have been silent and enduring within six months, or dead.
This was what her father and brother had wanted for her.
In case she was tempted to forget why she was here.
“It was a win-win situation,” her older brother told her, sounding as happy as she’d ever heard him. “If he sold you off, he would get that in with Vincent’s friends and family down there. When Vincent messed you up, he’d get to be gracious when he excused it. Points all around. If Vincent killed you or incapacitated you, even better. He got to hold that in reserve, an ace to play. You’re lucky Vincent’s dead or I might consider making the same deal myself for the same reason.”
She felt torn in two then. There was the part of her that had lived in Grizzly Harbor for five years. The part that had cooked food and thrown back drinks in the Fairweather. The part of her that had breathed in that crisp, cold Alaskan air and looked forward to days filled with nothing more worrying or upsetting than the occasional moose at large in the village.
