by Cassie Wild
Four
Lane
Her tears had gutted me.
I wanted nothing more than to lay down behind her and hold her, promise her that everything was going to be okay.
But I kept remembering the venom in her voice when she said, “Don’t you lie to me about this.”
I saw the despair in her eyes as she told me her cousins were all she had.
I wanted to argue with her, tell her that she had me.
I’d take care of her.
But it was pretty obvious she didn’t want my care.
Maybe she needed it right now, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it.
It was pretty obvious she wasn’t.
The phone call to her cousin might have helped a little, but she was still furious with me. Still scared and hurt.
Guilt punched at me at the agony on her face as she ended the phone call with her cousin. I hoped I was right that Croft wouldn’t go after anybody but her. It wasn’t his MO, but I’d been wrong before.
Judging by the way the two women had talked to each other, they were a lot more than cousins, and if something happened to the other women, Trice would be devastated. She would never forgive me, but I could live with that as long as she was safe.
Living with her pain was a different story.
This was because of me.
If I hadn’t taken her to the club, Croft would have never seen her, and he never would have connected the dots between her and Gabriel Marks. Never would have thought much of anything when…if…he’d seen her at the party.
And how stupid was I, thinking she’d been there to spy on me when I’d been the one to grab her off the street? I could be a paranoid asshole and still think something was up there, but I’d acted completely out of character when I’d grabbed her. It would have been more like me to grab the person chasing her, if I’d done anything at all.
And to take her home with me?
Take her to the club with me?
That’s what had started all of this.
My fault, I reminded myself as I settled on the bed, my eyes resting on Trice’s still form.
She’d slid into a restless sleep not long after she’d laid down, and I couldn’t help but think how she’d slept through the night, dropping into sleep like a woman exhausted to the bone.
Even now, although her sleep was fitful, she dozed on.
There had been shadows under her eyes when I’d found her on the street yesterday, and even the long hours she’d slept away here in the hotel hadn’t done much to alleviate them.
Why was she so tired?
I thought again of how she’d been running the day we met and wondered if that had anything to do with it.
She’d tell me, I decided.
I was going to find out everything there was to know about her. I didn’t know how I’d get her to open up and talk to me, but there had to be a way. I’d figure it out.
She stirred a little after noon, and I took advantage of her time in the bathroom to place an order for room service. It would be a good thirty minutes, but at least I could get some food into her. She hadn’t eaten dinner or breakfast. Neither had I. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good if we didn’t put fuel into our bodies.
She emerged almost twenty minutes later, her hair damp, looking beautiful in the slightly wrinkled dress I’d asked Zeb to pick up for me. He hadn’t asked any questions, and when I told him to play dumb if TU asked about me, he’d just nodded.
I had a good two days, I figured, before TU would think to question why I hadn’t been by the bar. Maybe three.
That was all the time I had to figure out how to deal with Croft and figure out the best way to protect Trice.
So far, I was at a loss.
The only way to deal with Croft was to kill him. I wasn’t opposed to doing that, but that would still leave TU. I could handle that too, if necessary, but I’d rather find another way to deal with the mess altogether.
“I ordered some food,” I told her as she lowered herself to the edge of the bed. She didn’t even glance at me. “I thought you had to be hungry.”
She lifted one shoulder, her eyes on the window.
“Trice…”
She half-turned her head toward me but didn’t entirely look at me. I didn’t really know what to say to her, either. So, I lapsed into silence.
The room stayed quiet until room service knocked on the door.
I got up to answer, watching Trice from the corner of my eye. I wouldn’t put it past her to try and rush out the door. But all she did was sit on the bed, staring out the window. Like a broken doll.
Her listlessness was getting to me in ways I hadn’t expected.
Once the guy left, taking his pushcart with him, I gestured to the two trays. “There’s a burger and fries and a chicken salad sandwich. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for.” She flicked a look at me, disinterest written all over her face. “Are you hungry?” I persisted. She had to be hungry.
She lifted one shoulder and rose slowly from the bed, moving over to the small table that also served as a desk while eying the food.
Something that might have been relief exploded through me as she sat down and took one of the covered trays without even looking at it. I sat across from her.
She tensed, but after a few seconds, she slowly relaxed and removed the silver dome from her plate of food.
She didn’t show any real interest in what was beneath it. I tried to pretend I wasn’t watching her, but I was excruciatingly aware of every move she made as she picked up a fry and crunched into it. She ate it almost mechanically, then picked up the little salt shaker and liberally salted the rest of the fries and proceeded to demolish them.
She ignored the burger completely.
I ate the chicken salad sandwich – I hated chicken salad, but I was hoping she’d eat some of the food in front of her.
When all she did was finish off her fries, I gestured to mine. “Want these?”
She got up instead and went to the bed, laying down.
“You need to eat more than that,” I told her.
“I’m not hungry,” she said, her voice frostily polite.
I stared at her.
She closed her eyes.
She couldn’t be tired.
But she lay that way, eyes closed, body rigid.
There was an impenetrable wall between us, and until she was ready to let it down, there was nothing else I could do.
“I need you to do me a favor,” I said, keeping my voice low as I spoke to Zeb.
She’d fallen asleep. It had taken forever, hours, really. It was edging up on six, and I’d been debating on whether I should order room service again when I’d heard the soft, steady sound of her deep, soft breathing.
I’d watched her a good ten minutes before deciding she really was asleep.
That was when I pulled out my phone and made the call.
I hadn’t lied when I told her that I was only worried about her.
But she was shutting down, all because of her worry about her cousins.
What was the point of keeping her safe if something happened to her cousins and it caused her to completely shut down? Or worse…do something stupid?
I’d seen it before.
So now I had to worry about a couple of girls I didn’t even know.
That meant I had to trust a friend to help me out.
The good news was that I had a friend I could trust.
Zeb was former military. In his other life, he’d had some background in surveillance, and I was going to put my trust in him right now.
With one eye on her, I waited for Zeb to come on the line, and once he did, I started to talk.
She stirred not long after I finished the call, and I watched her guardedly as she sat up.
Trice slanted a look at me as she pushed her hair back from her face, then stretched, her arms going up over her head while she thrust her chest out.
My mouth went a little dry, and when she caught sight of me staring, I had to tear my eyes away from her.
Shoving out of the chair, I paced over to the phone and asked in a rough voice, “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.” She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “How long are you planning to keep me here?”
I wished to hell I had an answer to that. “Not much longer.”
I had to figure out a plan, soon, because it wasn’t like I could hang out at this downtown hotel for the duration, could I?
“I guess I could eat some fries. I wouldn’t mind some soup. Chicken noodle or mushroom or something like that. Nothing tomato-based,” she said.
“Want a burger? A steak?”
She shook her head, making a sour face as if even the idea made her stomach hurt.
I put in an order, getting a burger for me and cream of broccoli soup and fries for her. She needed to eat better than she did. That might explain why she looked so tired. But I doubted she wanted a lecture on nutrition from the likes of me.
Once I had the order in, I turned to meet her gaze.
She met my eyes, an uneasy expression on her face.
“It will take about an hour. Dinner time rush,” I explained.
She lifted a shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”
I exhaled a long breath. “I thought maybe we could talk.”
She drew her knees to her chest, looking even more closed off and guarded than she had a few seconds ago.
I wished I could say or do something that would take that look from her eyes.
“I’m not going to bite, you know,” I said, forcing a smile. “I just…hell, Trice. I don’t even know why you were running the day we met.”
She looked away, her dark hair falling to shield her face.
“It’s complicated,” she said, her tone guarded.
“What isn’t?”
After a few seconds, she swung her head back around to face me, and I tensed at her expression. “I was running from a man called Ephraim Farrar. My mother and my clan expected me to marry him. I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea.”
She threw the words at me like a gauntlet.
Now, they lay between us like a challenge.
I was too busy struggling to understand them to really get the look on her face.
It took me a few seconds.
She was daring me, I realized finally.
Daring me to call her a liar. To tell her she was wrong.
To say any number of things.
But the truth was written right there in her eyes, in the hard expression of her face.
“You’re serious,” I said slowly.
She lifted her chin, staring me down. “Why would I lie about something like that?”
Rising from the chair, I paced over to the window and stared outside. “How old are you?” I asked softly.
“Nineteen.”
Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to ignore the instinctive stab of guilt. She was every bit as young as I’d feared.
“They can’t make you marry just anybody,” I told her.
“You’ve never been in a position where you’ve felt weak, have you?” she asked softly.
I turned to look at her, but she was looking off to the side.
She sounded…tired.
As if sensing my gaze, she finally turned and met my eyes. “Have you?” she challenged.
I didn’t know how to answer that. From the time I’d been old enough to understand how to walk, how to talk, my dad had impressed strength upon me. How did a guy in my situation understand what it was like to feel weak?
“I guess not,” I finally said.
“Then you wouldn’t understand,” she said, and the exhaustion I sensed inside her permeated every single word. She shook her head. “When you’ve lived your whole life having everything you do dictated by somebody else, when you’ve lived your whole life having somebody control the money you make, the actions you take…” She laughed a little as she got to her feet, moving over to stand next to me at the window. “How could you understand?”
“Did you marry him?” I asked, almost dreading the answer now.
She turned her head and looked at me. “No.”
I met her eyes slowly.
She cocked a brow. “I ran away. He’d come over to the house that day. He claimed he wanted to talk about the wedding. But he sort of wanted to…preempt it. I wasn’t in the mood for that. I got away from him and managed to lock him in my room. I ran. It was one of his goons after me. I don’t know which one. But I got out of the house, and I ran. I didn’t even know which way I was going.”
Fury blistered in me at her words, and I caught her arm. “By pre-empt…he tried to lay hands on you?”
“What else would I mean?” she asked wearily. “Ephraim had already had one bride run away from him. He wasn’t about to lose another.”
Confused, I shook my head. “What?”
“Oh, I didn’t even go into detail about that one, did I?” Trice laughed, the sound sour. “I wasn’t his first pick, I’m afraid. He wanted to marry my other cousin, Joelle. Joelle is sixteen, Lane. Sixteen years old and Ephraim was going to force her to marry him. Suria got her away, thank God. They were planning on getting me to join them, but things moved so fast…” She stopped talking and looked away. “None of us thought Ephraim would focus on me instead.”
“How in the hell can they make any of you marry?”
“It’s the clan way,” she said simply. She folded her arms over her chest and looked away. “It’s just…it’s how things are.”
“The clan…what’s this clan you keep talking about?” I asked. But then I remembered something Croft had said when I overheard him and TU talking. “Are you a Gypsy? Is that what this is about?”
“I’m Roma.” She stared at me hard. “Romani. Gypsy isn’t exactly the PC term.”
I almost said, Fuck PC. But the way she was looking at me made me think twice.
“So, I guess this is just…it’s part of life?”
She nodded, and a look of disgust creased her features. “Not all Roma clans are like this, but mine seems to be stuck in the dark ages.”
“They’d force you to get married? What about your mom?” I demanded. “Your dad?”
She laughed bitterly at that question.
“My dad skipped out when I was a baby. I think having me come along was more than he’d planned on. I don’t even know who he is. I doubt he’d given a damn about any of this.” She slashed a hand through the air, the expression on her face ugly and hot. “And my mom?”
She stopped talking for a moment and paced a few feet away, staring at something I couldn’t see. When she finally spun around to face me, the look on her face was one more befitting a heart-broken child.
“She wants to know how she’s supposed to take care of herself. When I asked her how she could do this to me, she asked me how she’s supposed to care for herself if I don’t marry Ephraim. It’s my job to marry him and make sure she’s taken care of, to make sure she’s got a nice plush life. And if I don’t, it’s my fault that she suffers. That is the story about my mom, Lane. And you want to know why in the hell I’m so determined to take care of my cousins?” She was shouting now. “It’s because they were the only ones who ever cared about what happened to me!”
I went to her.
Nothing could have stopped me then.
Wrapping her in my arms, I ignored her attempts to shove me away and pulled her up against me.
“Cry,” I told her. “It’s okay. You go ahead and cry. You need it. You’ve earned it.”
After a few seconds of fighting it, she finally gave in and collapsed against me, sobbing.
I held her tight against me, one hand cradling the back of her head, my other arm wrapped around her waist and clutching her tight to my chest. “Go ahead and cry,” I murmured against her ear.
In my mind’s eye, I summoned up a picture. Of her mother. Of this neb
ulous Ephraim. And I obliterated them.
As she continued to sob, I turned my lips to her temple and whispered, “They won’t hurt you.”
It wouldn’t undo what they’d tried to do. It wouldn’t undo the harm.
But I’d damn well do everything I could to keep them from hurting her again.
A soft sighing sound escaped her just as the knock came at the door.
Brushing a kiss against her temple, I said, “It’s the food. I need to get that.”
She nodded against my chest.
My heart rolled over behind my ribs as I eased away from her.
She lay back on the bed and curled up into a tight ball. I drew the comforter over her and went to the door and signed the ticket, telling the bellhop I’d handle the trays.
He relented after I passed over a twenty as a tip and promised to wheel the cart into the hall within the next ten minutes.
Once I had the cart in the room, I moved the trays to the table, then pushed the cart back out the door before locking it securely.
Trice was sitting up by the time I was done, the blanket clutched between her fingers as she stared out at nothing.
“You hungry?” I asked. I wasn’t holding out any hope for that.
She lifted a shoulder listlessly but didn’t argue when I put the tray down on the bed next to her.
She lifted the dome off, and to my surprise, a faint smile appeared at the sight of the French fries and soup.
“You should eat more than that,” I told her when she glanced at me.
“I’m not hungry for more than this.”
We ate in relative silence. I kept catching her sending me looks from the corner of her eye, but the apathy I’d felt from her earlier seemed to have lessened, and I didn’t want to risk it returning so I didn’t say anything, even when those looks made me feel like I might come out of my skin.
Once we were done eating, I moved the trays out into the hallway and turned to find her standing in the middle of the room, her arms crossed over her belly, looking a little lost.
I wanted to kill Croft.
The anger bled over onto TU, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid making that decision about him any longer. Once I had Trice safe, TU and I were going to settle things.
