by Sam Mariano
"I know," he says, softly. A few seconds pass, then he asks, "Do you think you would've liked me if we would've met under different circumstances? Same people, just... better situation."
I want to immediately say yes, but I think it over for a second first. There are certainly things about him I wouldn't have been psyched about—the whole family legacy thing had put me off violent men, so if I didn't actively need one to save me, it probably would have held less appeal.
But he isn't like them. I know logically he would probably do the same bad things if he had to, because above all, Liam is a man who does what needs to be done... but he has heart, a code, a kind of integrity they all lack. He isn't just blowing through life—and other people's lives—inflicting pain and suffering because he can. They’re so cowardly compared to him. It feels like an insult to even compare them in my mind.
"Yes," I finally say. "If I could've somehow still seen behind your shields, I'm sure I would've."
“I probably wouldn’t have let you,” he says lightly.
“I would have made you,” I inform him, playfully haughty.
“Oh, yeah, you’re so forceful.” He rolls his eyes.
“Hey, I’m totally scary and intimidating.”
“I know you can’t tell, but I’m shaking over here.”
The exchange has taken my mind off things, but now it wanders to bedroom activities, curiosity about things we didn’t have a chance to try. I wonder if he’d like me taking charge.
I wonder if Ryder will come through so I get the chance to find out.
Then I frown, realizing the story he told me about his family didn’t include a brother. Had he just left it out in case people were listening? I want to ask, but for the same reason, I don’t.
Annabelle
I manage to fall asleep despite the unrelenting shaking of my chilled body, so when the ramming sound jerks me awake, I’m initially a little pissed.
Then it hits me—the understanding that something is on the other side, trying to get in. Blood rages through my veins. I inhale sharply, torn between fear and excitement.
It has to be Ryder. Right? The bad guys have keys.
I turn my head toward Liam to see if he’s awake, if he somehow knows more than I do. His body is rigid, his eyes alert and trained on the door.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. I don’t know if he was asleep or awake, but fear cloaks me like a blanket as one certainty settles in: one way or another, things are about to change.
Before we have too long to ponder the kerfuffle outside, the door splinters and bursts open. I strain to look, craning my neck, and my heart explodes, relief and happiness pouring through me.
"Oh my God, he did it," I murmur.
Ryder steps through with his darker skinned companion right behind him. Ryder is smug, but Ali grins when he sees Liam tied to the chair.
"Oh man." Ali reaches into his pocket, I assume to draw out a knife to cut the ropes, but instead he produces a cell phone and snaps a picture.
"You dick," Liam says, but without censure.
"We're the dicks?" Ryder asks, a dark brow rising. "Here you are trying to die without so much as a goodbye and we’re the dicks?"
As Ryder approaches Liam and begins cutting him loose, Ali comes over to me, his eyes wandering over my bare body. Without looking at my face, he turns and looks around, spotting the pile of clothes on the ground and picking them up.
He drops them on top of my body, then seems to realize I can’t get dressed. Finally, he does extract a pocket knife and a moment later I can move. I expect relief, but my muscles are so sore from being held in the same position, all I can do is stretch, trying and failing to find comfort.
“You didn’t bring aspirin, did you?” I mutter, extending my arm up over my head and bending it down toward the middle of my back.
“She’s cute,” Ryder says, instead of answering me.
“That’s a no?” I ask Ali.
“I’m sure we’ve got some in the carriage,” he mocks, lightly.
“If not, we’ll send a footman,” Ryder adds, winking at me.
“A simple no was a lot to ask for, I realize.”
Liam is smirking as his friends pick on me, but all that’s forgotten a moment later when Liam, no longer restrained, approaches me. I’m still on the cot, but sitting up. I’ve managed to pull on my pants, but my upper body is still clad only in a bra. His eyes rake over me possessively, like he’s torn between taking inventory and deciding which part of me he’s going to devour first.
Eyes still on my body, Liam asks, “What day is it?”
“Saturday,” Ryder supplies.
Aggravation flickers in the depths of those beautiful brown eyes. “What time?”
Checking the watch on his left wrist, Ryder replies, “Almost 7:30.”
“Shit,” Liam mutters, finally meeting my eyes. “Get dressed. We have to go.”
I nod, opening the bottom of my shirt and slipping it over my head. As I pull it down past my face, I ask, “Where do we go now?”
I expect him to say another hideaway, the cabin in the woods, maybe the airport. Now that we’re free and Liam’s friends are here, the dream of going away to the sunset house is no longer lost. We can have a future now. Both of us. Together.
What I do not expect, despite everything that’s happened so far, is for him to say, “Pietro’s.”
My spirits drop. I stare at him as my jaw falls open, and his seems to lock up defensively.
He turns away to brief the guys, and I’m still fucking floored.
Finally I find my voice. “You can’t be serious.”
He doesn’t defend himself, merely looks at me and says, “We’ve gotta move.”
“We need to leave. We need to get the hell out of here.”
Ryder and Ali exchange glances, but Liam’s orders obviously trump mine and they walk out the door first.
Liam pushes me ahead of him and I walk out, but I can’t believe he would even think of going back. Not after all this. Not after we could’ve both died because he didn’t let it go the first time.
“Liam, why would we go there?” I ask quietly, since I figure maybe he’s just being a stupid idiot guy in front of his friends. Guys are supposed to be prone to that, right? I hadn’t experienced it firsthand since high school (since Paul’s always an idiot, friends or no) but I was sure that was a thing. Liam being a man with a lot of pride, I figure it’s possible.
“The party starts in a half hour.”
Of course I knew that when Ryder said what day and time it was, but I don’t know why we care.
Fear wraps itself around my stomach and I grab Liam’s wrist to get his attention. It works. Those brown eyes burn a hole right through me, delivering passionate declarations without a single syllable falling from his lips.
“This is our chance to run,” I implore, quietly. “To start a life together, away from all this.”
I want this to work—to remind him how close we came to losing everything, to want me more than he wants… whatever the hell it is he wants.
But I don’t expect it to. I expect him to retreat, to pull away from me. I’m relieved when he doesn’t. Instead, he leaves my hands wrapped around his wrist and he stops in the middle of the hallway to look me in the eye.
“I have to finish this, Annabelle. I want to finish this.”
“More than you want to be safe and happy with me?” I ask.
Regret surfaces then and he captures my hand, extracting his wrist from my hold. My stomach bottoms out, expecting him to pull away now, but instead he brings my hands to his lips and leaves a gentle kiss there.
“There’s nothing I want more than to erase all of the bad shit that’s ever been done to you. I don’t have the power to do that… but I do have the power to erase the people who did it.”
Every hair on my body prickles, goose bumps rising up all over. A desire so deep I’m not even sure I can call it that suddenly blankets m
e and I’m nearly overwhelmed by the tenderness.
This man, this wonderful, ruthless, mystery of a man… he loves me.
You don’t risk your life to slay dragons for a woman you don’t love.
As scary as that is, as much as I don’t want him to go, as much as I would rather run and know we’ll all be safe… I also feel a swell of pride. It may not be the healthiest impulse in the world, but this man wants to protect me, and I’ve always wanted to be protected.
On impulse I swoop in and grab him, pulling him down for a kiss. I don’t intend it to be much of one, since we need to get the hell out of here, but his big hands close around my waist, pulling me against his body, and suddenly nothing else exists. There are no cold, dank walls in a scary, abandoned warehouse. There aren’t two men of questionable moral character just ahead of us, and people wanting to kill us potentially around every corner.
There’s only me and Liam, his hands on my body, our tongues colliding, hearts pounding. There’s nothing else. Just us.
Someone loudly clearing their throat finally pierces our moment and I pull back to see Ryder giving us a highly unimpressed look.
I can’t help smiling, and Liam catches my hands, entwining our fingers as he pulls me along. Even though everything is crazy and scary and uncertain, in this moment I’m happy.
I guess I should’ve known.
It’s not like he made it a big secret. He never came out and told me what the plan was, never explicitly answered that question when asked, but he’d given me the pieces I needed to put the puzzle together if I cared to try.
Liam was going to kill my whole family and virtually everyone I knew.
That had always been the plan. Before I arrived at the junkyard that day to steal apples, before he pinned me against the tree, before I was more than a faceless guest on a list, Liam was commissioned to engineer all of our deaths.
Once we were there, outside the house I grew up in, bustling with well-dressed partygoers and uniformed help, I had to beg him one more time not to go in. Whatever Raj had planned, just let him do it. Let the other guys do the dirty work.
It made no difference. With one last searing kiss, Liam demanded I wait in the car and he took off with Ryder and Ali, melting into the darkness. Left alone with only my nerves for company, I dug around the car and found a small pair of binoculars under the seat.
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to look. As much as I wanted to accept every side of Liam, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spot people I knew, knowing what Liam had planned for them.
The first several minutes of perusal turned up only strangers, but that didn’t really help. They could be good people. They could have children at home in bed, waiting for them to return. Friends, parents, colleagues who would mourn them. I didn’t want their deaths. I didn’t want destruction on this level, not even on my worst day. I can see wanting Pietro gone, even Paul, but must there be so many casualties?
Helplessness hits me because I can’t even call Liam. There’s no way to reach him, to beg him to reconsider. It’s too late. Theoretically I might be able to find him if I get out of the car and go creeping around, but I’m not an idiot, so I don’t do that.
Suddenly, my attention is caught when I come across Paul. I’m a little floored to see he brought Marlene to my mother’s anniversary party. He’s such an ass. I feel a sliver of pity for the dumb girl, but at least she chose her fate. I never got that chance.
I turn my binoculars to the wooded darkness Liam and his pals disappeared into. Somewhere in the foreboding darkness, the fate I chose is preparing to risk everything—again—and I hope like hell it works out better this time than last. I’m so frustrated by his insistence on doing this, but at the same time… I sort of get it. I guess he needs to know the job has been finished, that Pietro doesn’t survive like the cockroach he is. If we leave, he has to trust some stranger to do it, and well… Liam isn’t so big on the trust thing.
I don’t know how it’s going to happen until I hear the first explosion. The sound’s so loud that it reverberates in my chest and I duck behind the front passenger seat intuitively. Chaos ensues outside, more explosions, smaller explosions, but what really gets through, what I expect will haunt me, is the steady sound of people screaming in terror. Clapping my hands over my ears, I remain crouched on the floor. I know it’s cowardly, but I can’t look. I don’t want a visual to accompany the sounds or the feelings.
I have to look at Liam when he comes back, after all.
The sound of gunfire explodes somewhere outside the car, far enough away that I know I’m reasonably safe, but still so close that I can’t keep from trembling. I wish they wouldn’t have brought me. I know there wasn’t time to take me anywhere else, but I don’t want to hear what’s going on out there. I don’t want to be here.
It goes on forever. The screaming winds down but I remain hunched over and hiding with my eyes closed. Too many thoughts fly through my head. It feels like my heart’s going to zoom right out of my chest. I’m relieved that the screaming has at least stopped, and it’s sounding less like a war zone outside, until I consider what it probably means that it’s getting quieter.
Liam
We make it back to the car to find Annabelle in the back seat, hunched over, hiding her head in her arms like she’s sick. My stomach drops. She sits up but doesn’t look at me as I slide in next to her.
Ill-equipped to deal with it right now, especially in front of Ryder and Al, I ignore it for the time being. Top priority right now is getting the hell out of here.
With Ryder at the wheel and luck on our side—at least for now—we make it out. The sounds of sirens flying to the scene are behind us, and Annabelle sits beside me, worryingly silent. Not like I expected her to be a chatterbox when I got back to the car—though I suppose it could’ve gone that way; I can’t really predict how she’ll respond to things—but she still hasn’t even looked at me. It’s impossible to hold her to her unwitting assurance that what I did, who I was, wasn’t a dealbreaker now that she’s actually experienced it. I knew that. I’ve known it all along, every step of the way, but it still stings.
I’m not even sorry. When I fired at Paul, I knew Annabelle’s tormentor was falling and felt no remorse. I didn’t get Pietro, but Ryder did, and when the last breath left his body, Annabelle’s world became a safer place.
I know not everyone who died tonight deserved to, but there are casualties in every war.
Now the war is over.
But now Annabelle carries the survivor’s burden. I shouldn’t have let her experience it. I should’ve made time, dropped her off somewhere and picked her up when it was all over. She would still know what I’d done, but she would’ve been shielded from the cold, brutal reality of being there.
Ryder finally breaks the silence. “What’s the plan for tonight?”
I steal a sideways glance at Annabelle, some stupidly hopeful part of me hoping she’ll look at me—but also afraid she will, and I’ll see her opinion of me forever changed. Where she saw a hero before tonight, now she’ll see a monster.
But she doesn’t look. She remains withdrawn, arms protectively wrapped around herself, her gaze on her left kneecap.
Swallowing, I tell myself to get a fucking grip. I knew this would happen. This isn’t a shock. The reaction I expected back at the mall was just late in coming; then she only heard my words, now she saw me in action. It was idiotic to let my hopes lift in the first place. I knew better.
I’ve always had this dormant streak of fucking absurd hope. No matter what life’s dealt me, no matter what I’ve done, no matter how dark and realistic I’ve felt about the world in general, I had this sleeper cell, apparently just waiting for someone to tap into it. I’m not sure how she did it, but Annabelle has and now I’m fucked.
“Hotel,” I finally respond.
“Can you be more specific? I don’t know the area and we probably want something low-key where they won’t ask for credit cards and license plates an
d all that bullshit.”
I already had just such a place scoped out in case I needed it, so I tell him how to get there. About a half hour later we arrive. I send Ryder and Al in alone to reserve the rooms, leaving Annabelle alone with me. I hate that she wasn’t to begin with, even if only to sit there ignoring me.
I have no idea what to expect. Deafening silence, I guess, which is how it starts. I keep an eye on the lobby door, trying to work out something to say to her.
Finally her voice, low, a little ragged, breaks the silence. “I didn’t look.”
I turn my head to look at her, but I don’t respond ‘cause I don’t know how. Images pass through my mind of the kind of man she deserves, the kind of man who would think of things like that—cradling her head in his hands, gazing deeply into her eyes and imploring her not to look; even despite his misdeeds, seeking to protect her from having to live with visual memories of that kind of horror.
She keeps her head up, but she’s looking out the windshield instead of at me. “Are they all… gone?”
Everything happened in a flurry, and I’m not positive we got every last guest, but once everyone on my list was dead, we left. Raj had brought in reinforcements and there was no time to risk letting them know they had help, but they seemed to figure out pretty quick we were firing with them, not against them. Being last minute men, maybe they thought they weren’t completely filled in. At any rate, they were still picking off survivors when we left, so by the time help arrived on the scene, there’s a good chance everyone was dead.
“Yeah,” I tell her.
“Did you… see…?”
She doesn’t finish, but I imagine she’s asking about someone close to her—maybe her mother, Pietro, Paul. Before the first explosion went off, I saw her mother in the kitchen, where one of the explosives was, so I assume she was one of the first to die. I saw Ryder hit Pietro, saw the ruined, bloody suit stretched across his unmoving body. Paul’s Annabelle-stand-in, Marlene, had the misfortune of being hit with a fiery piece of rubble from the explosion. Her dress caught fire and she writhed and screamed, crying out to Paul for help as he darted away. Might’ve been merciful to shoot her so she didn’t burn to death, but I didn’t.
