by Nikki Wild
My self-preservation instinct kicked into overdrive, rattling off every reason in the world why I should do this—why I should just let things be. The status quo was safer, it whispered to me. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
But how could I continue living as I had with Delfino, knowing I’d squandered this opportunity, and possibly at Leo’s expense? How could I go back to my cage having teetered on the cusp of freedom, knowing it intimately enough that if I closed my eyes, I could still smell it, taste it, see the afterimage of it burned into my retinas like I’d stared too long at the sun? That wouldn’t be living—it would be existing, surviving, which was exactly what life had been like before Leo returned for me. Days had passed in a dull, gray haze. The moment I saw Leo in his hospital bed, it was like watching the sun rise for the first time in years. He held all the colors of the dawn in his eyes.
Wetting my dry, cracked lips, I asked him, “Once we have what we need… what then? If we tell Delfino we know what he’s doing, what’s to keep him from killing us instead of giving in to our demands?”
Leo glanced down at the door handle. “We’ll tell him I called a buddy of mine. Told him what we found, where we hid the evidence, and that if we don’t show up on his doorstep in the next twenty-four hours, he’s gonna take it to the Feds.” He began taking off his jacket. “Fair enough?”
“Actually… yes,” I said, my nagging fears subsiding slightly. “But who are you going to call? And on what phone? Yours got wrecked when your bike did, and I don’t exactly have one—”
I just barely stifled a shriek as Leo put his jacket-wrapped fist through the narrow, vertical pane of glass on one side of the door. He cleared away the jagged leftovers, then reached inside and released the locks.
“What are you doing?!” I hissed at him through my teeth. “Are you actually out of your mind?” In the distance, a dog barked in warning; it was all I could do not to shake Leo until candy came out. “What happened to subtlety? To… stealth?”
“Bobby pins weren’t gonna do the trick on that lock,” he said, and I looked down at the knob. He was right. It was way too heavy-duty, too complex. “You said Pleasant Lakes doesn’t deal in security systems, which means we won’t have that to worry about. And besides.” Metal scraped against wood and Leo flashed me a grin. “There was a deadbolt.”
Again, I stifled a shriek, though this was less surprise and more anger. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists to stop from trembling as he opened the door, affording us entry. “You could have warned me. I wasn’t prepared.”
“If I’d warned you, you would’ve told me not to do it,” he said, shaking the shards off his jacket before donning it again.
I scowled. “Of course I would have! You took a huge risk, doing that!”
Leo’s gaze took a languid stroll up and down my body. He’d told me before that I was sexy when I was angry. If that was the case, I must have been smoking hot to him now, because I was livid.
“You know what the Bible says about risk-taking, don’t you, Lulu?” he asked me. Before I could reply, he held up a hand in a mimicry of a saint and said, “ ‘Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.’ ”
“That was Grace Hopper, you idiot,” I said as I moved past him. “And you’re quoting one of the gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame!”
“Hey, it was a good movie,” he called after me, his voice a harsh whisper. When I paused just after the threshold, he almost ran into the back of me. “What’s wrong?”
“I…” I chewed at my lip. “I guess I’m just now realizing what we’re doing. How much is going to change, after we’re done here.” The hallway before me tilted and pitched. My chest felt tight. “Jesus, Leo… we could die. Delfino could kill us both. He…”
Firm, callused fingers on my waist gave me pause. “I told you, that’s not going to happen. We’ve got this in the bag, Lulu.” I looked up at him to see if he meant it, but his face was nigh unreadable. He was probably trying to seem brave to keep me from losing my nerve. Joke was on him—I’d been doing the same thing for his sake.
“It’s scary, though. Isn’t it?” he continued, and for a moment, I was sure I saw a crack in his façade—a slipping of his mask that revealed the man, the human being, underneath. “Making a decision this big. Knowing you’ll have to live… or not… with the consequences.”
I nodded faintly. “Yes.”
He closed the door. It was only when he turned the lock and secured the bolt that any sound emerged, like twin gunshots fired in close quarters. I felt like the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, hearing evidence of his guilt where no one else could. So loud was his conscience that he gave himself away, certain he couldn’t possibly be the only one who knew what he’d done—mistaking the jovial nature of the constables for mockery. I, too, was making mountains out of molehills. But unlike that sad, devious narrator, I was not alone in my struggle. I had Leo here to assuage me.
Raking his fingers through his hair, he said, “Thing is, Lucy… thing is, we’re never actually prepared to go through with our big plans, no matter how much we think we are. Right up until the last second, we think we’ve got a handle on things. We’ve crunched the numbers. We’ve gathered our courage. Opened ourselves to the possibility of success; steeled ourselves for failure. But then it comes time to act, to put one foot in front of the other, to speak up, to pull the trigger, or even just… take a stand. And everything changes. It doesn’t matter who you are, how tough, how educated. When we stand on the precipice of possibility becoming reality, we all falter.”
He held my gaze so intensely I found myself unable to look away. There was a low smolder in his cognac irises, a golden glow that neatly rimmed the twin singularities of his pupils. I found earnestness there and a certain… vulnerability. It took a moment, but eventually, I realized the veil of cocksure certainty had fallen away, and what I was seeing was the real Leo, trying to make a connection—trying to tell me, without saying so, that he was scared too.
I sucked in a slow, shaky breath. “What happens then? After we stumble… what comes next?” I allowed myself a thin laugh. “Sounds an awful lot like we fall.”
“We might,” he admitted, stepping forward to brush his fingers down the side of my face. “Lots of people do. More often than not, that’s how these things go.” I lowered my eyes and gently, Leo grasped my chin, forcing me to look up at him again. “But baby… what if you fly?”
My throat grew tight with emotion at the prospect. Oh, that was all I’d ever wanted—to rise and to soar. To experience a life without boundaries or limitations. The first time I met Leo, he’d forced me to remember that dream. Just being in his presence was enough to make those bittersweet memories of freedom come flooding back, to ignite the fantasy that one day I might experience something like that again. When he’d left, I’d made such an effort to let go of it—to deny myself the agony that came with hoping for better, when all I’d end up getting was worse—I’d thought such desires lost to me forever.
But now that he was back… I wanted again. Desperately. Shamelessly. If there was even the smallest chance that we could come out on top, that we could cross the divide between dream and reality, then I wanted to step off the cliff’s edge, spread my wings, and let the wind take me where it may.
I wanted to fly. And when I did, I wanted Leo there beside me.
“We should… we should find Delfino’s office,” I said with a new steadiness in my voice. “Dig up as much as we possibly can. I don’t want there to be even the most minute possibility that he’ll slither out of this one.” Gently, I pulled away from Leo. “I want this to be the last night either of us spends in Pleasant Lakes ever again.”
One corner of Leo’s lips curled in a smile. “That’s my Lulu.”
Furtively, I wiped my eyes with my wrist and turned to the hallway, glancing between the doors. “It’s this one,” I said, a little surprised by my own confidence. “The one without a name on the door. He�
��d want to keep a low profile. And it’s the only one with a lock that looks like that.”
I gestured to it. Delfino had had his office door outfitted with a keypad like he was an agent for the NSA, or something. I wrinkled my nose at it. I knew next to nothing about any dates or other numerical values that might be important to that bastard. Now what were we going to do?
As it turned out, Leo already had a plan, and it looked a hell of a lot like the last one he’d executed.
“Back up,” he said, giving me just enough time to move out of the way before he delivered a solid kick to the door.
“Why?” I asked him, staring in disbelief as he kicked a second time, making enough noise for it to echo down the hall. “Why are you like this?!”
“Just getting the job done,” he answered, kicking again. Taking a moment to breathe, he finally acknowledged my glare. “Oh, come on, Lulu. We don’t have all night to try to figure out the code.”
I shook my head. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Leo shrugged. “Sounds better than being dead.” And he took a step back, reared up, and kicked again—as hard as he could this time.
The door gave way, buckling beneath his boot. As it swung inward Leo groaned and clutched his side, cursing on the back of a wheeze. “Fuck!”
“Shh,” I urged him, covering his mouth with one hand while my other pulled up the hem of his shirt. His ribs had been bruised before, but over the past week some of them had faded from midnight blue to sickly shades of yellow and green. Now, though, they were purpling again. I sighed. “I told you. I told you this was going to happen. Between exerting yourself this way and crossing a stream of freezing cold water, you’ll be lucky if you don’t end up with a raging case of pneumonia by the time this is all said and done.” I listened to him wheeze. “And you better not have collapsed a lung, Leo Richards, or so help me…”
He kissed my palm. I glared at him. Though his lips were obscured, the crinkling of the corners of his eyes told me he was smiling.
“I like how you take care of me,” he said as I moved my hand away. “Sometimes the best medicine is a good kick in the ass.”
“You’re going to get more than that, if we don’t hurry up and get out of here,” I said, pulling him into the office past the ruined door. “All right, let’s find his filing cabinet.”
Limping slightly, Leo moved past me. “Don’t need to.” He approached the desk near the center of the room and started prying open the computer tower. “We’ll jack the hard drive. Easier to find, gives us access to all of Delfino’s personal files, and is way more portable than a stack of manila folders.”
While he worked on separating the drive from the rest of the hardware, I opened up a couple of drawers anyway, peering inside. I thumbed through the folder tabs and opened one up, squinting at its contents in the darkness. Then I flipped the nearby switch for the light to get a better look.
“Holy crap,” I whispered, turning to Leo. “You would not believe how much money has been donated to this church.”
“Is it all by guys with very Italian-sounding names?” he quipped. I glanced down at the file. It was.
“Yeah. How’d…?”
“Money laundering,” Leo said, freeing the hard drive and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “For the mob. Delfino’s well-connected, Lucy, and nobody—and I mean nobody—looks at charitable donations to churches. Not in America, anyway. And on top of all that, the money’s all tax-free.” He chuckled. “Clever bastards. I bet it all funnels back out in the name of public service works. And every single one of those, I bet you could trace back to a name on that list.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Delfino really has been running a racket… and a complicated one.” It made sense now, why he posed as a pastor—why he spent so much time “ministering” to the supposed “unfortunates” of Pleasant Lakes. No doubt he was overseeing a hundred deals like this. And why not? We were an idyllic little town in the middle of nowhere, well off the radar when it came to organizations like the FBI. Pleasant Lakes was the perfect ruse.
This wasn’t just a hideout for Delfino. This—the whole town—was a front for a much larger operation.
“Keep that file,” Leo said, turning the light back off. “We’ve got all our bases covered now—between whatever’s on this thing and what you’ve got in your hand, we’re gonna nail this fucker to the wall.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, if I were you.”
I whirled at the sickeningly familiar sound of the voice behind me. Delfino stood in the doorway to the office, a pitch black silhouette against the wan light of the hallway beyond.
“How…?” I whispered, but I knew there was no point in finishing that sentence. There was no point in talking, begging, or pleading at all. The way his flat, dead eyes glinted in the vermilion glow of the exit signs, I could tell what he was thinking: that up until his moment, he’d shown us mercy. Now that we’d crossed him, though, we had seen the last of it.
Behind him, I could make out three men wearing sheriff’s department uniforms, batons already in their hands. The breadth of them blocked the exist and any hope Leo and I had of escape. The blood drained from my face and I felt dizzy, like the floor beneath my feet had started to spin.
I looked up at Leo. Though his face was a cold, emotionless slate, I could see in his eyes clear as day what he was thinking—watched as he sized up Delfino, then the deputies, and finally the width of the door to see if we had any hope of getting out. When his shoulders slumped and Delfino smiled, I knew what the answer was.
We were screwed.
Nineteen
Leo
I wish I could say I didn’t go down without a fight.
The fact of the matter was I was in no condition to defend myself. Lucy was right—I’d done a goddamn number on myself. I should’ve been more careful. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. I’d gotten reckless, thinking that I had nothing to lose.
Now the truth was staring me in the face: I had a lot to lose here. A whole lot. And so did she.
Delfino’s men had separated me from her immediately. He’d shoved the folder she took back in his filing cabinet and given her this look of pure, unadulterated murder. That was the only time I’d struggled, pushing against my captors to try to wrench Lucy away from Delfino’s grasp. The way he gripped her arm would leave bruises. I was sure of it.
My efforts had been rewarded with a nightstick to my injured ribs. There was a crack that I heard as much as I felt, and the ensuing agony had brought me to my knees. They’d inflicted another fracture on me—I was sure of it. While I was gasping for a good breath that might clear my head and make my vision stop swimming, one of them zip-tied my hands behind my back and another one shoved a sack over my head. Next thing I knew, I was being dragged out of the church and tossed unceremoniously into the back of a police cruiser.
At first I assumed they were going to take me somewhere secluded and put me out of my misery. Maybe it’d be a swamp teeming with alligators, or maybe I’d end up face-down in a shallow grave. No need to spend too much time getting rid of my body when no one would ever coming looking for me—wasn’t that what Delfino and the sheriff had said they were betting on back at the body shop? I couldn’t contain a furious, self-loathing snort. So, it was all going according to plan.
No matter what I did, this bastard and his hillbilly brute squad were one step ahead of me. Maybe I wasn’t as smart as Lucy, but I wasn’t an idiot either. How the hell were they doing this? We’d been so careful…
Well, minus my breaking the church window. And kicking down a door. And screaming obscenities when doing that did exactly the kind of damage Lucy had told me it would. Goddammit, I was a grade-A moron—always letting my attitude get the best of me. But how had they gotten there so quickly?
“You’re not real smart, for a city boy,” Sheriff Rigby—I’d heard him talk enough to know his voice by now—drawled from the front seat. I was sitting in the middle between t
he two other deputies, the weight of their bodies compressing my ribs to an excruciating degree. “Don’t they got those fancy silent alarm systems where you come from?”
I closed my eyes and bit back a curse. Sure, Lucy’s proclamation that most people in Pleasant Lakes wouldn’t bother with a security system made sense—but Delfino wasn’t most people, and what he was hiding in there was worth protecting. My face heated under the fabric of the sack. I was honestly embarrassed for myself. I’d made a careless, cocky, rookie mistake, and the worst part was that I couldn’t even argue with the sheriff when he called me stupid.
When I didn’t answer, the rest of the ride proceeded in silence. Sheriff Rigby seemed to take a special joy in hitting every pothole and speed bump on the way to wherever it was we were headed, jostling me right into the elbows of the men at my sides. I tried not to react, but each time a stifled grunt escaped me, a low chuckle sounded in stereo. Oh, how I wish I’d saved my strength. All three of these fucks could’ve used a swift kick in the mouth.
Finally, the cruiser came to a stop. It was abrupt enough that the lap belt cut hard into my hips and the momentum threw me back against the seat, sending searing currents of anguish through my entire left side. A few moments later the buckle came undone, the back doors opened, and I was hauled out onto an expanse of gravel that made it hard for me to get my footing.
As I listed and stumbled, the business end of another nightstick slammed against my solar plexus. I doubled, wheezing. “Straighten the fuck up and walk,” a new voice said. I growled, but could do little else other than obey.
