Into the Shadows

by Carolyn Crane

  He’d be the one to laugh, of course. Their senses of humor clicked exactly and she could always make him laugh. And then she’d scold him. You WOULD laugh at a baby. Just a thug who laughs at babies. She’d whisper it with sexy vitriol. You’re just a thug and a brute and a lowlife. That was their game, guaranteed to suck them both under. Even when things were going badly, if one of them would start the game, there was only one way it would finish.

  Because that kind of disdainful talk was like a Pavlovian bell to him, starting up the snarl and hunger inside his heart, and he’d go to her and tear into her and maul her and kiss her, and she’d grab his hair and open to him.

  Even after he’d discovered he was just an interchangeable fuck to her, he’d still go to her like that. He could resist kindness because he knew it was always fake, but he could never resist her disdain because it was real and raw.

  And it got him hot.

  She had daddy villain issues. She was using him. He lovehated her. It was a dark little piece of clockwork they had going. Dark and completely explosive.

  Nadia’s gaze rested on the rug in front of the fireplace, bunched up from the first shot. Their favorite spot when Victor and his crew had gone on the famous Russian trip. Victor had left Thorne in charge.

  Stupid to shoot the rug—of course she’d get it.

  Nadia said nothing for way too long, but he sensed she was pissed. Well, of course. He’d shot the place up like an asshole and woke up a baby.

  “Skooge and Hack and I are now your houseguests,” he said.

  “Skooge and Hack? Seriously? Did you get those names off of a what’s your gangster name website?”

  He drew up straight and moved near, invading her space, letting her feel his size, hyper-conscious of the decreasing distance between his cock and her belly.

  “We will remain here until we find that CD or whatever it is, whether it takes an hour or a week.” He paused, holding her with his eyes. “Hangman wants the CD.”

  It took him a few seconds to get what she was smirking at, and another moment to stifle his own smirk. God, he’d been so immersed in it for the past two years, it didn’t seem odd to say Hangman wants the CD instead of We want the CD. To talk about Hangman as an entity. That was the Hangman style.

  “And you’d better hope Hangman is efficient,” he growled in a tone meant to break her of her smirky mood. “Because we’re not the only ones who will come after that thing. We’re just the first. You remember the Slater brothers?”

  This sobered her up. She exchanged glances with Barbarian, who crossed his arms over his chest. “Why? Why this thing and why now?” Richard asked. “If you tell us, maybe we can help locate it.”

  Us. We. Thorne wanted to shoot out another window. Richard had never been anything to her but a stoic bodyguard. Somebody to try and shake off. Had it evolved into something more?

  It was beginning to rain. He could hear it. Smell it. A spring shower. The carpet would get wet.

  Richard left, mumbling something about tarping the window.

  Nadia just kept her eyes fixed on Thorne. She seemed more muscular, somehow—physically and mentally. More adult. Had her father’s death done this? She’d be an orphan now, he realized dimly.

  She touched a button on his shirt, spoke close enough that he could feel her breath and even the heat of her body. Trying to burn him with their chemistry. It didn’t mean she wasn’t with Richard. “You Hangman Four now?”

  “Hangman Two,” he said.

  “Really worked for you, didn’t it? Buying your way in with a piece of somebody else’s operation.”

  He smiled. “Sure did.”

  “You’re like that fucking bird that takes other birds’ nests that don’t belong to him.”

  He touched the underside of her chin with his scarred pointer finger. Early on, it had meant so much to him that she’d accepted the caress of his mangled hand; she’d even seemed to enjoy and desire it. She was the only woman who ever had. So stupid. “I take a lot that doesn’t belong to me,” he said.

  He could feel the jolt sail through her.

  The burn of their chemistry went two ways.

  God, what was he doing? He dropped his hand and moved away from her, settling onto the couch in the place where her father used to sit. They needed to find the file and get out.

  “Miss Majors still back in the kitchen? I could go for an early dinner. Maybe one of those spicy bacon and egg sandwiches. Skooge, Hack, you hungry?”

  “You can’t just stay here.” Nadia was serious.

  Thorne pointed to the wall of built-in bookcases crammed with first editions and framed photos. Happy, happy family. “Skooge, pull everything off the shelf and examine every inch of every item—unusual wear patterns, fading that doesn’t match up, anything that could be a hiding place. Investigate the inside of every book, and if you have a question, rip shit apart. Hack, you go at bookcases themselves. Same idea.”

  “Thorne!” Nadia said. “Come on.”

  “Not like anyone reads them.” They were the show hardcovers of Victor’s. Nadia read paperbacks.

  “You can’t do this!”

  “And then we drill the walls,” Thorne continued.

  “Thorne!”

  Thorne watched Nadia monitor Skooge as he went over and started pulling things off. “Princess want to call the police?” He knew she wouldn’t.

  God, what was he doing?

  Richard was back with a tarp, duct tape, and a ladder. The knowing glance he exchanged with Nadia nearly killed him. She couldn’t be with Richard.

  She couldn’t.

  “There is a kid here,” she said as Richard started tacking up the plastic over the window. Just like Richard to calmly undo the damage. He’d always been a cool operator—up until the point where he started using his fists.

  “You have my guarantee of safety,” Thorne said. “As long as we’re here, anyway. As long as I’m here.” He watched her, needing her to believe at least that.

  She watched Richard.

  They always said that a turtle carried his home on his back, and that had always reminded him of Nadia, the way she carried an atmosphere of fun and acceptance with her. To Thorne, who’d always been shut out, a lone wolf, she was like a beautiful, dangerous goddess from another planet.

  She used to preside over Victor’s parties. Victor never kept his women for long, so hostessing fell to the girls—specifically, the Party Princess. Nadia had a tiara full of tiny skulls with diamond eyes she liked to wear with her crazy-ass party dresses. Her half sister would always be soaking up the male attention: slender, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Swiss Miss Kara, but Nadia made a party a party. There were times he could barely take his eyes off her—all her big, dark hair and boldness and laughter, and always that tiara—it was just like her to crown herself when nobody else would.

  And she saw people; that was the thing about her. If a guy had a big ugly scar, or was gullible in love or stupid or something, people wouldn’t mention it, partly out of politeness and partly not wanting to piss the guy off. But Nadia, hell, she’d not only mention it, she’d tease him about it and put a warm light on it, like it made him special. She took what most people would see as shitty about a guy and loved it, valuing people in an environment where people had little value.

  Thorne would watch the way Victor’s men would eat that shit up. He’d watch with a sense of wonder, but also dread.

  She’d once baked a cake for one of the shooters’ thirtieth birthdays—with a crosshairs frosted in the middle and a bullet inside. It was so fucking wrong, like a punk-rock Martha Stewart. Her father had been annoyed; there were wives at this party, and Victor had this whole jerk-off fantasy about himself as an upscale businessman. Nadia had simply laughed and pointed out that the man had been shot too much that year—he’d had a run of shit luck that the other guys didn’t talk about, because those runs tended to stick, and it made him a dangerous and unwanted partner for jobs. And suddenly Nadia comes out with that
fucking cake, like she embraced everything that was fucked up about a guy. She met this shooter exactly where he was, and you could see the gratitude in his eyes for her seeing it and even celebrating it. He remembered how she’d draped her arm around the guy’s shoulder. “You’ve been shot over and over, what the fuck are you still doing here?”

  Thorne never wanted her warm light turned on him. Fine for the other guys, but he always made sure never to meet Nadia’s eyes, keeping up a stewing, simmering wall against her, as thick as Alcatraz. He wouldn’t be like one of Victor’s other gangsters, gratefully receiving her kindness like horses getting jerked off or something.

  Don’t do your magic on me, he’d sometimes think at her. He’d think it so loudly, it felt like shouting in his head. Don’t you fucking come near me.

  Not that he didn’t want her. He wanted her like madness, like voodoo—that was the problem. He wanted her lips, her eyes, her laugh, her not-quite-ladylike voice. He’d lie awake at night and imagine having her all to himself.

  He would wonder what her skin felt like, what color her nipples were, if she had freckles on her stomach, and what it would feel like to have a woman like Nadia look at him with that warmth. He became obsessed, working overtime to convince himself she couldn’t be genuine—she was too fun, too cool, too everything to be true. All that had broken one night on the roof, when he’d found her up there crying.

  The night he saw her anew.

  The guys moved to the next set of shelves, laughing, flipping through books and tossing them into piles.

  Suddenly Rufus bounded in under the tarp, running over the broken glass toward Thorne, yelping when he reached him.

  “Shit.” Thorne hauled the massive dog up into his lap. “Rufe,” he whispered as Rufus licked his paw. “Don’t lick.” He pulled out a shard of glass and set it on a sidetable. Rufus whined and went for another paw.

  “Good job,” Nadia said. “He’s probably got glass all in his paws.”

  Thorne held the dog’s big, warm body, keeping him from going back on the floor and getting stuck with more glass.

  Richard spoke up. “Rufus can’t be in the house with Benny.”

  That was a fatherly thing to say. Thorne bit his tongue, holding the dog, wanting to say no—no, no, no to everything, even though, yeah, maybe it was best that Richard was with her. Maybe it was best to keep Rufus away from a kid. Victor had been cruel to Rufus, training the dog to kill. Not exactly the way you molded a family dog. And poor Rufus, bounding in, trying to be with the family and getting all cut up.

  He rubbed Rufus’s belly. “Have a maid bring some tweezers and alcohol.”

  Richard was down from the ladder. Nadia gave him a pleading glance, and he walked off.

  “There’s no maid here, Thorne,” Nadia said. “No groundskeepers, no cooks. I’m not rich anymore.”

  “Then why are you still in this place?”

  “Because I haven’t sold it yet,” she snapped. “Soft real estate market. Lucky for you, huh?”

  “Lucky for whoever would’ve bought it. We’d be helping them redecorate instead.”

  “Asshole.” She knelt in front of Rufus with a thoughtful look in her brown eyes, and then she reached out and stroked his silky ear. Yeah, her hands and forearms definitely looked stronger and more sinewy than before. “You’re okay, Rufe,” she said, and for a second he flipped things around in his mind to pretend he wasn’t holding a ninety-pound pit bull on his lap, like it was him she was touching like that. He’d been so happy when he thought her affection was about him.

  The dog tried to get down, and Thorne adjusted his hold, a Gracie jiu jitsu hold adapted to a dog. Rufus wouldn’t work against his own joints, and when the dog adjusted, Thorne would get there first. Total responsiveness to the moment. The dog had been one of his most worthy opponents.

  Thorne jerked his head in the direction Richard had gone. “You with that guy?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Guess I’m making it my business.”

  “Make away,” she said, cleaning a bit of schmutz from the dog’s eye. Yeah, she was definitely different. Stronger, for sure. And more tender and more fierce, somehow, both at the same time.

  Chapter Four

  Nadia tried to stay focused on Rufus, but all she wanted to do was to run out of there and gather her son up in her arms. She’d hold him close and show him everything was okay. God, she could only imagine how those gunshots would have frightened him. Kara would have Benny calmed down by now. Kara had a wacky little song she sang to Benny when he got startled, and it worked like magic—Kara was so amazing with him—but still, Nadia needed to hold Benny. A little bit for him. A little bit for herself.

  Because Thorne was back. In the same house with them.

  But she stayed because the less Thorne knew, the better. He wouldn’t guess her secret, but she didn’t want to push it.

  She squinted at Rufus’s front right paw. “I can’t tell if there’s one in there, or what.”

  Thorne took over and palpated the dog’s massive foot pad with his good hand—short, dark curls brushing his forehead as he connected with the beast in that wild animal way of his.

  It was so like Thorne to show up in the most upsetting and disruptive way possible after two years of no contact.

  Richard was back with a first aid kit, broom, and dustpan. He was showing amazing restraint, playing errand boy and not getting in the guys’ faces. Richard was more patient and strategic than most people realized, but even he had limits that were best not tested.

  He set the stuff near the window and gave her a dark glance; they were supposed to hit the Baypointe co-op in two nights, and he didn’t like this twist at all. No doubt Richard had the same questions as she did: Was Thorne’s search connected to their raids? Did Thorne intend to search straight through the night? What if it went two nights? Hangman would do that shit—pop pills and stay up days on end for this or that operation. Even her father’s crew hadn’t done that. But Hangman was weird, with all their cyber shit and money laundering.

  She widened her eyes at Richard. They had to do the raid. Time was running out.

  “Where’d you put the good tweezers?” Richard asked.

  “Kitchen bathroom.”

  Richard walked away.

  Thorne eyed the archway through which Richard had disappeared. God, Nadia could practically hear the gears grinding inside his head. Had he sensed the size of the secrets in the room? He just stared after him with those piercing blue eyes—a diamond-sharp gaze to go with his well-defined cheekbones. Her eyes went to the ancient scar that angled over the left one—a cut from years ago, probably never attended to. He’d stripped down to a black T-shirt that was so faded it looked gray. His curly, sooty hair had grown just long enough to grab, but you could still see the cowlick—that place at the top of his forehead where his hair splayed in different directions, as if some mother bear had licked him once, then given it up as hopeless. Benny had that same cowlick, and whenever she saw it in Benny, it made her feel connected to Thorne, even tender toward him. It was as if Benny was the good part of Thorne that had gotten lost inside the murderous Hangman lieutenant, lost inside the man who’d made his feelings about her so painfully clear on that rainy day two years ago, telling her that she was like hotel soap. Disposable. As if Victor’s mansion were a hotel, and she was there to be used for the duration of his stay. Used and discarded.

  Hotel soap.

  She’d gone after him to tell him her news that day—their news—and he’d compared her to hotel soap.

  Rufus whined.

  “Easy, buddy.” Thorne squinted down at his left paw, holding him with both hands. “Can you grab my glasses?”

  It took Nadia a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. “Where are they?” she asked.

  “Left—” He angled his gaze down to his left leg. Of course. His ankle holster. Thorne kept his reading glasses there when he wasn’t armed to the teeth.

/>   “And I’m supposed to get them for you?” she said.

  “Would you rather hold Rufe?”

  She knelt and patted his left leg for the outline. She pulled his jeans up over the work boot, trying to avoid contact with his skin. Her overly careful movements backfired as her knuckles grazed his thick calf, sliding over his dark hairs.

  “You want some of that, Party Princess?” he whispered.

  “Fuck you, Thorne.”

  Yeah, she still did, in spite of everything. In hindsight, it was a gift that he’d rejected her so cruelly before she could tell him she was pregnant—her father had just died, and she wasn’t thinking straight. It was so much safer for Benny—and for her, too—that Thorne didn’t know. It still hurt, though.

  And she still wanted him, dammit.

  He glittered as she handed up the glasses. He drew them from her fingers and put them on, teasingly. She frowned—just a hair of a frown, as if to suggest he didn’t even merit a full frown, and he went back to inspecting the dog’s paw, but the damage was done—the whole feeling of that time came rushing back.

  The way they’d found each other, like they’d made this bubble for themselves inside that world. Their sexy game where he was the lowlife and she was the Party Princess. She didn’t know why it was so hot, but it was. Endlessly hot. Bottomlessly hot.

  And fuck, the glasses.

  She’d been the one to recognize Thorne’s farsightedness—he’d had no idea, of course. He’d just thought reading was hard for him. She’d teased him about being raised by scorpions. She always teased him about that; it was her way of bringing some tenderness to the horrible truth about what Thorne had been through.

  She’d wanted to take him to a proper eye doctor, but he refused, as though proper doctors were for other people. So she dragged him to a drugstore and made him read the letters off a card; they decided he needed 1.5 magnification, and he picked out a random 1.5 pair and put them on. Ugly gold wire frames that didn’t work for him at all. Especially with the scar on his cheek.