by C. L. Stone
He lay back on the bed next to me and rolled to his side, propping himself up with an elbow. He placed a hand on my lower back, close to my butt. “For now, we go home. We let someone else investigate Colt. We’ve got more important things to worry about.”
“Like what?”
“Like you. And your brother.”
The guilt dropped onto my chest like a rock. “Axel said not to approach Wil now. He told me to let him come to me.”
“I think Axel’s wrong,” he said. “I think you should find him and talk to him.”
I turned onto my side to face him. His hand slid down, smoothed over to my hip.
“You think my brother will talk to me?” I asked. “He didn’t seem to want to. He hasn’t tried to make contact.”
“You should let him know you still care,” he said. “Whether or not he comes back home with you, that’s up to him. Axel believes if someone really wants to be around you, they’ll come to you. Your brother might not know he can come to you for help, if he needs to.”
It had been so long since I’d seen Wil. I constantly wondered if I’d said something wrong, done something to him. Had I teased him too much? Was there any reason he’d stay away from me?
Raven’s hand slid up to my shoulder, and he massaged the muscle. “The longer you go without seeing him, the harder it’ll be.”
“I should find him,” I said. He was probably right. Maybe in a way, my brother was more like me than the others realized. He needed to be shown someone cared, that he could trust me if he was in trouble.
My arms were up over my head, against the wall. Raven slid his hands up, reaching for mine. He nudged them a little, massaging my wrists. “I’ll help you find him. Axel will, too, if you believe you should. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but there is a choice here.”
Maybe he was right. “What happens if I find him? Can he come stay? If he needs to?”
“You know he can,” he said. “He can always stay with us.”
I was glad for that. “Maybe he can help us do…whatever we’ve been doing. I thought I was helping that nonprofit teen foster home before, and helping save jobs for people. Can we still do that?”
“Happens every day,” he said, and he leaned in, kissing my forehead. “We’re not alone, little thief. You don’t have to fight the world alone. You just have to learn your limits. We don’t tread into things that the police or the FBI should be taking care of.”
“Blake was going to do it.”
“Blake assumed this game was going to be like hide-and-find. Find the info. Faster and easier than legal ways. Technically, he might have pulled it off, if he’d done it right.”
“We messed up, calling me the investor,” I said.
“It got dangerous fast. Too close, too quickly, you get burned. Right now, we’re all worthless. We can’t touch Colt and he knows our faces.”
“But now we can tell a…detective or something? About what he was doing?”
He smirked. “We’ll put the right people in touch with Ethan.”
Still, this was so depressing. I’d pictured getting the money, getting it back, and destroying all the bad guys. We were just going to walk away?
I buried my face in the pillow. We bulldozed our way into this, and now we were running away. Perhaps Raven was right, though. When they’d gone after Blake in the first place—back when they’d recruited me—they were working on something the police couldn’t touch, but which needed to be dealt with.
The Academy might teeter on some lines to help people, but they stayed on the right side of the law.
There was a scrape of plastic against wood. Raven moved my wrists slightly, keeping them together over my head.
I stayed put, curious but tired, too. I thought he was just adjusting himself, trying to get more comfortable.
He slowly moved from the bed, getting up.
I forced myself to open an eye. He headed to the door.
Had he heard a knock? “Where are you…?” I tugged my arms and couldn’t move them. My knuckles knocked against the wood. I looked up.
My wrists were tied with a single plastic zip tie, connecting me with the metal frame of the bed.
Oh my God. He did not. “What are you doing?” I called to him, jerking my arms as if that would get me free.
“Doing what I promised you, little thief.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned to the door, opening it. “Finding Blake.”
“We’ll go together.”
“Not now,” he said. “You need to stay for when people come back. I think I might know where he is.”
Anger flared through me, waking me. I groaned, twisting my wrists, trying to pull them free. I kicked at the bed. “Let me go. I’ll stay.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” He walked out, closing the door.
I leaned my body against the metal frame, trying to get my limbs out of the tie. I twisted and tugged, but I wasn’t going to get it off without cutting off my thumb.
He needed a good punch in the nose again. He couldn’t have just told me to stay?
I probably wouldn’t have listened, but he could have at least asked. Brute.
I dropped my head onto the pillow, blowing out a puff of air. Fighting my restraint had made me dizzy.
I was so tired, but I was too angry to sleep while waiting on someone to come free me.
How embarrassing.
There was a pen on the side table. I twisted, reaching with my feet. I wasn’t sure what I could use it for, but it was better than just helplessly waiting.
I stretched my leg out but knocked the table on the way, and everything on it slid the other direction, the pen rolling to the floor.
So much for saving myself.
Footsteps sounded outside. The door opened.
Marc poked his head in and spotted me on the bed. “Hey,” he said.
I grunted, still embarrassed. I twisted my wrists against the tie. “Come here, get me out of this.”
His eyes finally locked on my wrists and the tie and he stepped inside quickly, locking the door before coming to the bed. “Whoa,” he said and looked over my body before reaching for my wrists, touching the tie. “Did someone hurt you? Who did this?”
“Raven,” I said. At least Marc was alone. “He wanted to leave without me following.”
“Oh,” he said and rolled his eyes. “Sounds like him. Does this a lot to me…sometimes Corey, when he wants to go rogue.” He pulled a pocketknife out and snapped it open. “Stay still. I don’t want to cut you.”
I groaned and strained against the tie. “Just hurry. Maybe we can still find him. And then I can shoot him. In the face.”
“Maybe not the face,” he said. “But I’ll hold him down once we get out of here and let you take a few jabs.” He pressed the knife blade to the tie, cutting it.
It broke quickly. I pulled my wrists down, sitting up on the bed, checking the purple lines on my wrists.
Marc put his knife away and caught one of my wrists, inspecting it. “You haven’t been here that long,” he said, tracing a thumb over one of the purple dents in my skin. “But long enough for him to get anywhere on this ship. Where was he going?”
“To find Blake, or that’s what he said.” I wanted to go hunting for him, but at the same time, I was so annoyed, so flustered. “Which we should be doing, too. We should find everyone and go.”
“I thought that was the plan. That’s why I’m here. But what happened? I didn’t get the details.”
I went over making the deal with Sam, finding out about Colt, and then our suspicions that Sam might be up to something by asking us to stay on board.
“I think it’s enough that we should leave,” I said. I showed him the phone we had gotten back from Sam. “This is Colt’s phone. We could give it to the right people. Raven said it’s time to give it up and get out of here.”
“I agree with you both,” Marc said. He checked the
porthole window. “We’ve got about an hour before sunset still. We can wait here until it’s time, and we’ll have to get word to everyone about leaving. This having communication down is a pain in the ass.”
“Sam might not be happy to see us leave early,” I said. “He claims to want Colt out of his hair.”
“I don’t know about that. He’s got enough security to watch his back. I wouldn’t trust him at this point. We should leave, but I’ll worry about Avery and Ethan if we all go.”
I was glad I wasn’t the only one worried about who we left behind. “Maybe someone should stay?” I asked.
“We can bring in replacements,” he said. “New faces. We don’t have to tell Avery and Ethan who they are, just that they won’t be alone.”
“So we just need to find the others, and get this all happening. We need to find Blake and Raven.”
He turned his gaze away. “Bambi…”
I adjusted how I was sitting on the bed to put a foot on his butt and fake-kick him.
He caught it, shaking his head, not laughing. “Stop.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Raven might have left you for a reason,” Marc said. “If he’d thought what he was going to do would be easy, he would have brought you along. If Raven went alone, it’s likely he knows where Blake is and it won’t be easy to get him back.”
Raven’s style of handling things was getting on my last nerve. “How would he even know? We’ve been looking for him for two days.” I pressed a palm to my forehead. Without communications, finding anyone on this ship might be really difficult.
There was a brisk knock at the door before Doyle opened it. He took one look at Marc, started to come in, saw me, and then groaned and backed away like he was leaving.
“Hey,” Marc said. “Wait. Change of plans. We’re all getting off the boat. Have you seen Blake?”
Doyle returned and closed the door, his eyes on me, death daggers shooting in my direction.
“What?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything to him.”
“I haven’t heard one peep from him,” Doyle said. “It really isn’t like him. He never goes for so long on a mission without at least letting me know what’s going on.”
“Don’t you normally stay in your house and listen to audio waves in the sky?” I asked.
“I mean the times we’ve been out together,” he said. “All five times. Or more. Maybe.” He shook his head, messing up the mop of brown on his head. “But this isn’t like him. He’s usually up my ass. He didn’t even come ask why the audio contact went down.”
Good point. “Did anyone see him after the fire in the storage room?”
No one spoke. Marc and Doyle exchanged a dark look, both shaking their heads.
Marc was right. Raven knew something was wrong.
I went for the door, but Marc caught me by the waist and made me stop. “Whoa,” Marc said. “Let’s not start the goose chase again.”
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “And I’m not going to chase. I’m going to go get Sam to find him, and if he doesn’t help me, I’ll smash his nose in until he does.”
“You’re the one that bargained with him,” Marc said. “You can’t do that.”
“I can,” Doyle said and he opened the door, slipping out and leaving it open behind him.
I nudged Marc. “Let me go with him.”
“You should stay,” he said. “You haven’t gotten any sleep since you got your concussion, right?”
“I slept last night.”
“You should still be resting. You’ve been running around enough. I’ll go with him.”
“We’ll both go,” I said. “Or you’re going to have to tie me up again.”
He smirked and shook his head, heading toward the door. “Tempting.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “But we can save it for later.”
Teamwork
Marc and I had to jog to catch up with Doyle.
“What?” Doyle asked, looking over his shoulder at me once.
“Where was Blake supposed to go last?” Marc asked.
“He was going to check in with… about…something,” Doyle said. “Didn’t I yell at him? Something about Axel.”
We were walking past cabins, heading toward a rear stairwell. “Yeah,” Marc said. “You told Blake Axel said to fuck off, remember?”
“I can’t keep track of you all,” Doyle said and stopped in the hallway. “Anyone seen the girl man?”
Good question. “Anyone talk to her recently?” I asked. “Let’s check her room.” It made sense to start there. Blake might have checked in at some point. Hopefully Fancy or someone else was there to give us a few clues.
Walking through the hallways in my normal jeans and a T-shirt made me feel so much better. For the first time on this ship, I wasn’t Kitty or someone else. I was just me, Kayli. No more games. No more hiding my face.
Funny enough, I seemed to blend in just fine. No one we came across was too familiar. No one looked my way. We passed a few people in plain black clothing, but they all turned away from us. Whatever Sam was up to, his men were staying out of our way.
The hallway was quiet as we finally reached Fancy’s suite.
She let us in and then returned to her mirror. She had on a blue dress and was applying a dramatic evening look with her makeup. She surveyed us with one eye done up in dark eyeliner, the other incomplete, making it look strange. “Well, the party has been getting wild around here, hasn’t it? That sun was beating me to death all afternoon.”
Doyle pressed a palm to his face, rubbing it. “Is that all you’ve been doing? And now you’re getting ready for a party?”
“Getting ready for dinner,” she said. “I’ve been doing what everyone told me to do. Keeping an ear out. By the way, I think my earpiece broke. It stopped working ages ago.”
“Have you heard from Blake?” I asked.
“Not since I painted that fine torso yesterday morning.” She surveyed the floor. “Did anyone see where I threw my black stilettos?”
“No time,” Marc said. “You should put something simple on in case you need to move quickly. We’re going to get off this boat.”
Fancy dropped her eyeliner, and it clattered onto the floor. “What? How? Is it because of the fire?” She gasped. “Is the boat still on fire? Are we going down?”
“Stop panicking, crazy,” Doyle said.
“We have the investor’s name,” I said. “But we should leave. There might be more trouble.”
She shook her head. “What about Ethan? And sweet, sweet, baby-faced Avery?” She looked at me. “We needed to find the money so we can give it back to the kids. We needed to find out if more kids are in trouble.”
“We have the investor,” I said, “but he knows our faces and that we’re on to him. We need to back off or he’s going to run. He’s also the son of the governor or someone like that. He might be untouchable. He might know you’re a part of it, too. It isn’t safe to stay.”
“But all that money! Girl, do you know how much these shoes cost? Mama don’t do no free work. When scumbags are carrying some good cash, we need to get paid.”
I hid clenched fists behind my back. I wanted to shake her. “We can’t fight him right now and get the money back. We need to back off.”
“Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her finger. “You know what happened when I turned my back on one of y’all when things were getting dicey? You went for a swim. What makes you think I’ll just leave now? If Ethan has to stay, I’ll stay.”
I approved of her loyalty, but she wasn’t listening to reason. “I don’t want you hurt. You’ve been with us since the start. He might know you’re with us. Ethan’s untouchable, but you…”
“And someone’s going to have to take that risk to stay with Ethan.”
Marc stepped up, opening his hands in offering to Fancy, and he brandished the sweetest smile, bedroom eyes. “Baby,” he said. “Sweetheart. We’ve g
ot a plan. Ethan wouldn’t want you to hurt that beautiful face.”
Every jaw dropped, every eye widened.
Fancy batted her eyelashes. “Oh, sweet Jesus. You know how to talk to a girl.”
Marc went to her, taking her hands in his. “We just want to get everyone safely off this boat. Ethan and Avery can’t leave, that’d be too noticeable, but we can take you.”
“I can’t leave, sweetie,” she said, releasing his hand and patting his cheek. “And I know you’re trying to talk me into it, but I came on this boat with Avery. He’ll need help.”
“We’ve got help on the way,” Marc said. “Come help us find Blake. Then we’ll get out of here.”
She swayed on her feet slightly as she looked at Marc, considering his words. She shook her head, but then started to undo the clasp on her dress.
Before I could divert my eyes, the dress fell to the floor in a heap. She hadn’t worn a bra, but at least her doodle noodle was tucked into black underwear.
“I can’t leave,” she said. “I’d be too noticeable if I was missing, but I can at least help you look for Blake.”
It’s Not What It Seems
Fancy put on shorts and a halter top, but she wouldn’t leave her suite without finishing her eyeliner. She found a handbag and loaded it with her gun and lipstick. She left the rings and necklaces off this time, ready for business.
We started from the front of the ship and headed back, going down a floor, working our way back and forth through the ship, checking in public areas as well as storage, bathrooms, anywhere someone could hide. Or hide a body.
Security eyed us as we passed the shopping level, through some bars, and the casino, but stayed out of our way.
Along the way, we found Liam and Henry, who assured us that help was still on the way. Marc asked for replacements, new faces to watch over Avery and Ethan while we were gone. They said it was possible, and they’d make sure to put someone else on board.
“We’re looking for Blake,” I told Liam. “But have you gotten in touch with everyone else?”
“I think so,” he said. “We’ll keep an eye out for Blake, too. We’re having to make calls with cell phones, and that’s sometimes dicey if they happen to be able to listen in on those.” He checked his watch. “You’ve got a half hour before nightfall. We can’t leave until after dark. You have a little time, but not much.” He told us the location to meet later.
