by Penny Reid
Mark’s phone ringing cut off the conversation and everyone tensed. Conner sat up from where he was sitting on the couch and all the guys watched in anticipation as Mark brought the phone to his ear.
“Hey.” Mark looked at me, his eyes narrowing into slits. “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Yeah. . . Yeah. . . Yeah. Okay. We’ll be ready.”
Then he hung up.
“Breakfast time is over,” he said, walking towards me, stopping to pick up duct tape and a black hood on his way. He pulled out a length of tape.
I didn’t struggle as he taped my mouth. Nor did I put up a fight when he put the hood over my head. It had little eyeholes, so I watched the other guys spring into action, picking up their dirty dishes and carrying them away, like the sight of pancakes would be shameful. They left the rest of the mess, beer bottles scattering the floor, pizza boxes in the corner, drug paraphernalia all over the place.
But maple fucking syrup? EVERYBODY PANCAKE!
“You got to hold still.” Ricky bent close to my ear, tilting and arranging my head against the wall, like it was resting there. “We’ve knocked you out.”
They’d been telling me this—that I was going to have to hold still and, no matter what happened, act like I’d been knocked out—since I arrived, but they refused to explain why.
Soon the guys had taken their positions—Mark by the entrance and Ricky, Conner, and John hovering in the doorway to an attached room—and were on high alert. It wasn’t long before the sound of a car pulling up followed by feet on gravel had them all sharing meaningful looks.
Then the voices, more meaningful looks.
Then the door opening, more meaningful looks.
I swear, even with the black hood partially obscuring my vision, I could see it was a soap opera in here with all the meaningful looks.
And then finally, the big man made his entrance.
Ricky, Conner, and John hid, making themselves silent and scarce.
Seamus stopped by the door, conferring quietly with Mark, his eyes swinging to me. He didn’t look surprised to see me, but then I didn’t expect him to look surprised. For my part, I didn’t move. I figured I would bide my time, making a move if the situation called for it.
Whatever this was about, eventually Seamus would let me go. He’d have to. Or else he’d have to answer to Ma.
But then a second guy appeared right behind Seamus and I almost forgot to hold still.
Caleb.
Caleb fucking Tyson.
The fury boiled over and I had trouble reminding myself that I was all tied up. Even if I fought against these restraints, it would do nothing. That’s not true, it would show I wasn’t knocked out and it would show how much I hated this guy. What good would that do? He’d probably get a kick out of seeing me struggle.
So I breathed out through my nose and I waited.
“Now you see him,” Seamus gestured to my slumped form as the pair of assholes walked further into the space. “You want me to take off the hood?”
“No. It’s him. I recognize trash when I see it.”
Seamus cleared his throat, then rubbed the back of his hand across his nose—and that meant he was irritated. He only ever rubbed his hand over his nose when he was irritated.
But when he spoke, his voice was calm. “We’ve sent the message to your cousin, but she hasn’t responded.”
“She’ll respond. She’ll want proof of life before she sends the money.” Caleb wrinkled his nose at me like I was a pile of skidmarked underwear, and then tilted his head towards Mark. “And it’s just you two?”
“Yeah. I told you, I run a tight operation. No need to include more guys when Mark and I can handle it.”
Caleb leaned closer to Seamus, lowering his voice, “And your man Mark is trustworthy?”
“Absolutely. Won’t breathe a word, especially after he gets his cut of the ransom.”
Ransom.
Fucking Seamus!
Caleb nodded, stepping away. “You’ll have your half when the job is finished.”
“What do you want us to do with him? After she sends the cash?” Seamus asked, gaining back the step Caleb had taken.
I started, blinking my disbelief. Seamus’s question shocked the hell out of me. My brother was a worthless piece of shit, but I’d never known him to take orders from anyone except our ma. Ever.
Ever.
And now he was asking Caleb for his opinion? Or rather, asking him for direction on what to do? Nah. This wasn’t right. Something was up.
“I told you before, I don’t care how you do it.” Tiny Satan glanced around the warehouse, sounding agitated.
Seamus studied Caleb for a minute, like he was thinking through a puzzle. “Why do you want him dead so much?”
Caleb’s glare moved over Seamus, and then settled on me. His eyes sharpened with menace and a rage, I imagine a vein or two was probably popping out of his forehead.
“He’s in the way.”
“You’re talking about Caravel? You want those shares your cousin owns?”
“Caravel can crash and burn, I don’t give a shit about Caravel. And soon no one else will either, when it’s insolvent and the stock price is in the toilet.”
“So what’s the deal? Why not take the ransom money and run?”
Caleb scoffed at Seamus, tugging on his cuff links. “Please. Three million won’t last me a year.”
“You mean one point five.”
“What?” Caleb snapped.
“One point five. Your take is half.”
“Oh, right. The point is, I need him gone and my loony cunt of a cousin committed—where she belongs. They’re in the way.”
“How are they in the way?”
Tiny Satan’s glare moved back to Seamus. Then he turned, strolling back to the exit like he didn’t have a care in the world and calling over his shoulder, “None of your fucking business. You do your part, and I’ll do mine. When it’s over, you’ll get your half.”
Seamus, hands in his pockets, watched the man go. He held still, like he was waiting for something. A vehicle started, and I listened as it pulled away, eventually fading into the distance.
Once it was quiet again, Seamus called out, “I told you fucking assholes not to knock him out.”
Ricky appeared in the doorway to the adjacent room—right behind him were Conner and John—and walked over to me. “He’s not knocked out, he’s holding still.”
When Ricky removed my hood, I took a deep breath, tilting my neck to one side to stretch it.
Seamus, his eyes moving over me, smirked. “Get that fucking tape off his mouth.”
“I’ll do it.” Mark hurried over, apparently not wanting to miss another chance to yank the duct tape from my face.
He did it, slower than necessary, drawing it out. When he was done he winked at me. “That’s for the taser.”
“Are we even?” I asked, stretching my lips. “Or do I have to watch you give yourself a Lucky Stranger?”
Now Mark smirked, shaking his head like he thought I was funny, and walked away.
My attention returned to my brother. He was watching me, a happy but small smile curving his mouth and behind his eyes.
“You hear all that?” he asked, like he was pleased with himself.
“Yeah.” I nodded, giving him a once-over. “You planning to kill me?”
His smile dropped. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Asking me shit like that?”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it, assface. What do I look like? Willy Wonka?”
He sputtered for a moment, and then hollered at me, “You’re my brother, dipshit. I’m not killing my goddamn brother.” Seamus turned, grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where I was sitting. “I fucking swear to Christ, you’re so fucking stupid sometimes.”
I waited until he’d sat down before speaking. “Are you going to untie me?”
“Not yet. Not until you listen. Then I’ll untie you.”
“Fine. Talk.”
S
eamus studied me for a beat, then launched into it. “This is what happened. So, that rich fuckstain? Caleb Tyson? He comes to me last week, tells me he’s Kathleen Caravel-Tyson’s cousin and she’s crazy. She needs to be committed and he’s worried about you. She’s got a psycho mother, locked up in a hospital somewhere, and she’s a danger to my brother.”
“How is Kat a danger to me?”
He held his hands up. “I’m just telling you what Tyson told me. He says that he had a court order to be her guardian, so she tricked you into marrying her. He also said, if she inherited, she’d be worth billions. But she was safer locked away, then she wouldn’t be a danger to you. He also said, if anything happened to her, he’d pay a ransom to get her back.”
“He just . . . tossed that out there? Like, ‘Hey. My cousin is a loony bitch, but I’d pay a ransom to get her back.’”
Seamus squirmed. “When you put it like that, it makes me sound like a marblehead for believing him.”
I blinked at my brother’s use of the word marblehead. According to him, I was a dipshit, Caleb Tyson was a fuckstain, but he was a wee little adorable marblehead.
This fucking guy.
“You realize everything he said was bullshit, right?” I asked, wanting to make sure he and I were on the same page about Kat’s cousin.
“She’s not worth billions?”
“No. That part is true. The rest is bullshit.”
“Yeah. I know that now. But why would I doubt him then?”
“You didn’t want to doubt him. All you saw were the dollar signs.”
Seamus ignored me, like I hadn’t spoken. “He was slick, convincing. I thought I was doing you a favor. I thought you didn’t know who she was, that she’d pulled one over.”
“So you, what? Went to the house last week to save me? Or to kidnap her?”
He shrugged. “Both. I figured you wouldn’t mind me taking her off your hands. Caleb would pay a ransom, I’d be all set up, you’d divorce her, she’d go to an institution. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody wins, huh?”
Seamus rolled his eyes, turning his head to shout to Ricky, “You got any more pancakes?”
My attention snagged on the purple and green bruises around his neck. I didn’t feel remorse about putting them there. I’d done what I had to do to keep Kat safe, but sometimes I still wished Seamus wasn’t such a corrupt piece of shit. Even now, tied up in his warehouse clubhouse, I still wished he was just my brother.
“Kidnapping me was stupid.”
Seamus gave me the side-eye, his eyebrows ticking higher on his forehead. “Oh yeah? Why?”
“Because Quinn.”
He seemed to think this over, his eyes growing smaller with the effort required to use his brain. “You think he’s gonna find us?”
“My guess is, he already knows where I am, and he’s gonna come in here any minute and shoot you.”
Seamus crossed his arms, giving me a look like he knew a secret. “You don’t know your wife.”
“What?” I snapped.
“That woman you married, she’s not going to let Quinn come in here, guns blazing. She’s not going to take the chance that you might get hurt in the cross fire. She’ll pay the ransom.”
I frowned at my brother, peering at him, saying nothing, because he was probably right. Guilt flared again, so much fucking guilt, along with the image of her throwing a stapler at the wall behind me. I’d hurt her. Thinking about Kat hurt made it feel like I had a two-ton weight on my chest.
“That woman loves you. That woman is crazy about you. I saw it the first night, when she was walking back to the table after you two were smooching. After talking to Tyson, I thought maybe she was just plain crazy, but I was wrong.” He paused here to rub his chin, his stare moving beyond me. “When I knocked you out, you should have seen her. If I’d made one wrong move, she was going to blow my head off, shoot me dead in my own mother’s house. That, brother, is true love.”
“Am I finished listening?”
“Not yet.” Seamus pulled out his phone, pressed a few buttons, and then showed me the screen. “This is the message Caleb has been sending Kat since seven this morning.”
I read the threatening text, unsurprised. “I already figured out that I’m being ransomed.”
“Caleb thinks you are.”
Examining my brother, I turned my head slightly to the side, sending him a disbelieving look. “What does that mean?”
Seamus’s attention was back on his phone and he was tapping through screens until the sound of a recording filled the silence.
Caleb: “She’ll respond. She’ll want proof of life before she sends the money. And it’s just you two?”
Seamus: “Yeah. I told you, I run a tight operation. No need to include more guys when Mark and I can handle it.”
Caleb: “And your man Mark is trustworthy?”
Seamus: “Absolutely. Won’t breathe a word, especially after he gets his cut of the ransom.”
Caleb: “You’ll have your half when the job is finished.”
Seamus stopped the recording, giving me a satisfied smirk. “Consider it a wedding present.”
I didn’t try to disguise my shock, mostly because I didn’t think I’d be able to. “You . . . recorded that? You recorded Caleb?”
“Yeah.” His grin widened. “When I figured out Kat wasn’t playing you, and you tried to beat the shit out of me—”
“Hey. You come in the house with two guns and a knife, planning to kidnap my wife. Did you think I wouldn’t see the Glock tucked in the back of your pants?”
“I didn’t draw it, did I?”
That gave me pause. “Why didn’t you?”
“I’m not drawing a gun on you,” came Seamus’s stern answer; he looked serious, earnest in a way he seldom did. Clearing his throat, he asked, “So why didn’t you use the gun on me? When you found it, why didn’t you point it at me to keep me from getting up?”
Glaring at him, flexing my jaw, I stalled.
The truth was, I had no idea. I should’ve, and usually I would’ve if he’d been anyone else, but I didn’t.
Eventually, I muttered, “Go fuck yourself.”
He smiled. “That’s what I thought.”
“Whatever,” I rolled my eyes, my knee bouncing for some reason. “What—specifically—happened after you hit me over the head?”
“That wife of yours, she grabbed the Glock, stepped between you and me, and started screaming for me to back off, to not touch you. Like I said, I swear, I thought she was going to shoot me. She was pissed, like, if I gave you a funny look she was going to snap my dick off and feed it to Bark Wahlberg as a snack.”
I smirked at that, proud of her for some reason. “Yeah, well. Don’t piss off the wife.”
“Tell me about it,” he sighed, then chuckled, then sighed again. “I tried to apologize, but—you know—my throat didn’t exactly work. So I left. Then, last weekend, I tracked Tyson down to his marina in Duxbury and we had a little chat. He admitted he’d been trying to use me to get what he wanted—his cousin out of the way—so he made an alternate offer.”
“Which was?”
“I pick you up, Kat wires a ransom, then I kill you, and he and I split the payday.”
“And you accepted?”
“Yeah,” Seamus widened his eyes on me, like my question was stupid. “Yeah, I accepted. If I didn’t do it, he was going to find someone else. So I played along, to keep you and Kat safe.”
“Played along.” I studied my brother, watching his big-eyed act of innocence, like he was swooping in and saving the day for Kat and me.
Nope.
I didn’t buy it.
I knew my brother.
I believed him when he said he didn’t want to kill me. I believed him when he told me why he hadn’t pulled his gun. I even believed him when he said he’d taken the job so Caleb wouldn’t offer it to someone else.
But not for one second did I believe he was doing this out of t
he kindness of his heart.
“What’s in it for you?”
He blinked at me, looking stunned. “Pardon me?”
“You can take that pardon and shove it up your ass. What’s in it for you?”
Seamus shook his head, his eyes flickering over me like he was disappointed.
In me.
Don’t everyone die laughing at once.
“Nothing, Danny. Nothing is in it for me. I recorded things so you could put that Tyson shitbag in jail. I took the job to keep you safe. I organized my guys to bring you here. I even made sure they didn’t knock you out, ’cause I know you got that concussion.”
Nope.
Still didn’t buy it.
I glared at my brother, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He stared back, still wearing his mantel of angelic intentions.
And then his phone rang. He sighed, glancing at it, his eyebrows ticking up on his forehead. “It’s Kat.”
“Kat’s calling you?”
“It’s probably for you.” Seamus swiped to answer, then held the phone to my ear.
Glaring at my brother, I listened as Kat’s soft, sweet voice said, “Hello?”
I blinked, winced. That shitty feeling, now an old friend, detonated in my chest.
God, I miss her.
“Kit-Kat.”
“Oh God.” She made a sound like a sob, like she was holding in tears, and the sound made me want to smash everything in Boston. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice breaking.
“I’m fine.” I had to clear my throat, it was tight, but I wanted to reassure her. “I’m not hurt. I’m totally fine. I—”
Before I could say anything else, Seamus took the phone away. My eyes cut to his and I watched as he ended the call, a small smirk of triumph on his features.
And then he laughed, like he couldn’t help himself.
And then he turned, still laughing, and called to me over his shoulder, “Thanks, Danny. Thank you for providing proof of life.”
Chapter Thirty
Weinberger Kidnapping: One-month-old Peter Weinberger was kidnapped from his suburban home in Long Island on July 4, 1956. The kidnapping resulted in new legislation—signed by President Eisenhower—that reduced the FBI’s waiting period in kidnapping cases from 7 days to 24 hours.
