He smiles against my mouth and plants a quick smooch on my lips before he eases back. “Do you think you could get up now?” I ask. I wave a hand at him. “You’re making me a little nervous.”
The smile becomes a smirk, a very smug one. “When I propose, it’ll be when you least expect it.”
My heart skitters to a stop, slamming into my rib cage. When. Not if, when. “You’re awfully confident,” I manage.
The weirdest expression flits over his face, as though he just realized what he said, and now he’s not sure if he means it. Logical me doesn’t expect him to. We’re fine now. But the few months we’ve had aren’t a strong enough foundation for me to start building my fairytales on.
I do it anyway. I see a house on the beach and Nick chasing a little boy with his dark hair and charming smile. I see me surprising Nick at work, and nights out with just the two of us. I see a church and flowers and my dad looking sharp and cool in a tux, Nick waiting at the end of the aisle.
I see a lifetime in a handful of seconds, and I want this beautiful, impossible dream more than anything. I block it out and work up a smirk of my own. “Who says I’ll say yes?”
The rest of lunch flies by, and Nick’s right—the food is delicious. He doesn’t mind me scanning Craigslist for apartments while we eat, and I show him a few listings. Only two pick up when he calls and let him schedule appointments for that afternoon.
“What are your requirements for my apartment?” I ask, pushing the last bit of pasta around in my bowl. Someone at a nearby table has a strawberry and chocolate dessert that looks fantastic, and I tried to save room. I didn’t do a very good job.
“Easily visible exits and accessible stairwells. Quiet street, no parking garage.”
I lift a brow.
“If I could, I’d never let you walk into a parking garage again,” he growls.
“Yet we keep using them.”
He flips me off, making me giggle. “Multiple floors, though the building would have fewer than forty units. Preferably fewer than twenty five. Windows and doors that can be reinforced. You?”
“No balcony,” I start. “Within walking distance to campus, a decent size kitchen. Everything you’ve already mentioned. Washer and dryer in unit, but if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for laundry facilities on the same floor.” I point my fork at him. “Something I can afford on what’s left of my loans.” I meet his scowl with a bland look. “Not budging on that one. I’m paying for it.”
“Half.”
“All of it.”
He leans in. “Half. I’ll be spending as much time there as you. We’ll split the rent.” Our waiter appears with a plate covered in chocolate and strawberries, and Nick’s scowl fades into a smile. “Hope you saved room for dessert.”
Chapter 25
I’m standing in the middle of an empty living room when it hits me: this is absurd.
It’s strange, unreal, an alternate reality that makes so little sense I’m dizzy. I’m looking at apartments. I’m looking at apartments with Nick. Like we’ll be living together. Me, who hasn’t had a steady relationship with a guy since I was seventeen.
I can’t do this.
The apartment’s decent. It’s small, but bright, and it’s a corner unit. The bedroom is tiny, and the bathroom isn’t big enough for a tub. The kitchen is okay, though, with plenty of cabinets to make up for the lack of counter space.
I pull out my phone to re-check the listing for the rent. I can afford it. Barely. If I dip into my savings to pay for everything else. And only stay until the end of the next semester.
“What do you think?” Nick’s face is neutral. A little too neutral, to be honest. Which either means he hates it, or it meets every one of his criteria and he wants me to sign on the dotted line.
“I can’t really afford it,” I admit.
Nick turns to the property manager, an older, craggy-looking guy in a loose plaid shirt. “Could you give us a moment?”
He shoots Nick a skeptical look, but shrugs and shuffles out of the apartment, shutting the door behind him. “You’re only paying half,” Nick reminds me.
I am not paying half. He can just forget about that right now. I wander over to the window. “This feels weird.” The street below is lined with parked cars on both sides so parking will be a bitch. “There’s an order to this sort of thing, and we’re skipping around.”
“What are you talking about?”
The street is also completely void of people. Not a single, solitary soul outside, walking a dog or hurrying to one of the cars. “This. All of this. Talking about living together like it’s a given. We just went on our first date. Aren’t we supposed to go on the date, then move in together? In like a year? Or more?”
“Convention dictates that, yes, that’s how it’s supposed to go. We’re not conventional, Cass.”
“Maybe I want to be,” I whisper.
The only way I know he’s behind me is from the increased heat at my back. “Turn around.”
I do as he asks and stare at his chest. When he slips two fingers under my chin and tips it up, the anger in his eyes surprises me. “I could give a flying fuck about convention. I like coming home to you. I want you to steal the covers from me and complain about how bad my coffee is. I don’t have to find a new place to live right now. If Con kicks me out, I’ll stay with one of my sisters, or my parents, or, fuck, a hotel. I want to be wherever you are, Cass. If that means sharing a shitty apartment with you while you finish school, I’ll do it. And I will pay half.”
His little speech should have made me feel better, but it has the opposite effect. Heat blooms and spreads across my cheeks, and I tilt my head away from his hold.
“What?”
I shake my head, and he captures my face in his hands. “Talk to me.”
“I feel stupid,” I blurt. “Okay? Stupid and embarrassed and really showing my immaturity.”
His expression is so much like a parent searching for patience I pull myself free, thoroughly mortified. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a relationship. A long while.” I edge around him. “Forget it. Let’s just go. This place won’t work.”
Our phones chime simultaneously. Before I can open my text, Nick spins me around and kisses me. Hard. The kiss is all anger and frustration and heat and, within seconds, I want to climb him like a tree. He breaks the kiss on a growl. “I am getting tired,” he says, voice a low, menacing rumble, “of having you doubt me.”
I shut my eyes and point at my face. “See? Stupid and embarrassed and immature.” I sigh, peering up at him through my lashes. “I don’t doubt your feelings for me, Nick. I’m just… I’ve never done this before, and what if we’re going too fast?”
Another quick kiss, and he releases me. “Then we’d better buckle up.”
A hot lick of fear tickles my belly, and I smother it. Later. We’ll talk about this later. After I’ve had some time alone to sort through the chaos in my head. I check the text I received, and fear roars back to life, threatening to set everything ablaze.
It’s a picture. A proof of life, I think they call it. There’s a copy of today’s LA Times visible in the bottom quarter of the picture. Something that shows, yes, we mean it. The background of the photo is indistinctly gray and industrial.
The woman in the picture is my mother.
Gagged. From the position of her shoulders, her wrists are bound behind her. A bruise is forming on her right cheek, and her hair’s come loose from its twist, scraggly locks hanging around her face.
Isaiah has my mother.
Always, before, it’s been a conscious effort to slot myself into the headspace I need to kill. Not today. Not with my mother’s face staring defiantly at her captor. I slip in and then breathe out as the cool, efficient emptiness stretches over me.
I hold up my phone. “We need to get to a computer. I can’t make out the details on a screen this small.”
He holds up hi
s phone in response. “Your father hasn’t reported to work today.”
As quickly as it came on, the emptiness threatens to break wide open and flood me with despair. But this is Turner. He can take care of himself. Mom… I hate thinking of my mom as a damsel in distress. She won’t be sitting around, waiting for her husband to rescue her. She’s smart too. Smarter than all the guys in that room probably.
Turner would tell me to go after my mother.
“Mom first. Computer?”
“Shoot it to Con. He’ll get started on the analysis. I don’t have my laptop with me, so we’ll have to wait until we get to the office.” Nick strides across the room and opens the door.
My finger hovers, refusing to lower over the button to forward the text to Constantine. Nick’s cousin has proven helpful in the past. He’s stepped up and given me a place to stay when he didn’t have to open his home to me. He sat next to my bed while I was recuperating in the hospital, sometimes holding my hand when the pain became too much and Nick wasn’t there.
Constantine has proven himself, over and over. So why are my instincts telling me no?
I shove my phone into my back pocket. “Not yet,” I say, hurrying for the door. “Unless we reach a point where neither of us have made any headway, I want to keep Mom’s kidnapping to ourselves. Can you see if he can track Turner, though? He’s probably looking for Mom, and if he manages to find her before we do, having someone on him would help us because Turner won’t ask for backup.”
The manager’s still in the hallway. Nick stops briefly while I head for the stairs, probably to tell the guy we won’t be taking the apartment. He catches up when I hit the ground floor, edging in front of me to check the street before we hurry out of the building and into the car.
It’s so perfectly, blandly gray. I enlarge the photo on my phone, tuning out Nick as he coolly relays orders to someone who isn’t Constantine. Gray, gray, and more gray, and if I blow up the photo any more on this small screen, it’ll pixelate.
Unwilling to give up, I shift the picture around, scanning the pipes over my mother’s head. More gray. There’s no one else in the photo. Not even a finger from whoever’s holding the newspaper. Isaiah’s good. He’s very, very good. Nick or I may be able to see some minute detail once the picture’s on a larger screen, but on my phone, I can’t distinguish jack shit.
“How do you know Turner didn’t show up for work?” I ask, setting my phone in my lap. Nick takes a turn a little too fast, and I grab the door handle to keep from careening into him.
“One of my guys, Easton, says he didn’t check-in this morning, and he hasn’t seen him anywhere around his office. He’s on his way to your parent’s house with Peter. I had people on both your parents. Isaiah’s got me spread thin, though, which was the point. Your dad made it a little easier for me by checking in every time he arrived or left. He wanted more people on your mom.”
Turner’s weakness. His one soft spot, one you wouldn’t have to dig very far down to find. “He’s not there. He would have gone to Mom’s office first to talk to her paralegal and the receptionist, and if they didn’t have any useful information, he’s probably holed up in one of his safe houses, plotting out a way to get to Isaiah.”
“Know where any of these safe houses are?” Nick roars into the parking garage, tires squealing on the polished cement as he turns into his parking spot.
“No,” I admit. “I don’t even think Mom knows. Plausible deniability. Worst case scenario, we’d both be able to legitimately say we don’t know where he is.”
We climb out of the car, Nick doing his best to surround me as we make our way to the stairwell. Once inside, I dash up the first couple of flights, Nick at my heels. By the time we reach the fifth floor, I’m breathing harder than I’d like. On the seventh, my muscles are starting to burn. Eighth, they’re going rubbery, and he’s literally right behind me, ready to push me up the stairs.
Now’s a fantastic time to learn that my recovery is not going as well as I thought.
We make it to the ninth floor, and I brace a hand on the wall beside the door as he checks the hallway. He jerks his head, and we slip out of the stairwell, barely making it to the empty office I’d been using without being noticed.
Without a word, he boots up the computer and logs on. He hands me a cable to plug my phone into the computer, and I shake my head. “Already e-mailed it to myself,” I murmur. He stands and moves aside so I can take the chair, and I bring up my e-mail account, the one I use for jobs. His noise of approval barely registers, and I click on the picture.
The larger screen only serves to show the tear tracks on her cheeks. I shut my eyes, defeat threatening to overwhelm me. I didn’t bother to text Isaiah back because he wants a reaction, and I won’t give him one. Not yet. Unless there’s a distinguishing mark or three in the background, we’ll be forced to turn to Isaiah for more information.
“Up.” To punctuate the command, Nick grasps me gently by the elbows and lifts me to my feet.
He shifts the picture into a different program, a small box off to one side running a constant string of commands. “What are you doing?”
“A search to match the picture to any others we’ve already got in the database. If Isaiah’s smart, he won’t use any place known to the family.” Nick scowls at the screen. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he slipped up.”
His phone buzzes, and he swipes it awake, turning it on speaker. “Kosta.”
Constantine’s frustrated voice growls out of the phone. “Caleb Turner hasn’t been by his wife’s office in several days. Got the security officer to show me the lobby and the elevators to see if he might have slipped in sometime today without anyone noticing. Man’s in the wind.”
“You won’t find him unless he wants to be found,” I say, leaning on the desk. “He’s fine.”
“Nothing on the security footage from his office?” Nick asks.
“We’re still trying to get it. Easton didn’t report any unusual activity outside the building this morning. I’ll call you if something turns up.” Constantine disconnects the call, and Nick turns away from the computer.
“There’s a possibility the two disappearances are connected. If you let me tell Con, we’ll have that many more eyes who know what to look for.” He crosses his arms over his chest, glancing at the monitor when the computer beeps quietly.
My belief in Turner and his abilities is so absolute it hadn’t occurred to me to connect the two until Nick said something. The man’s a ghost and knows more ways to kill someone with his bare hands than he does with a weapon. Nick has a point, though, and I weigh it against what I know of Turner. “I don’t think so. The only way—the only way—someone could have taken Turner is if it were multiple someones and they’d managed to incapacitate him from a distance.”
Nick blinks once. “Tris is a trained sniper. SWAT.”
A sniper. Isaiah’s one step ahead of us. Again. “How does he find time to do police work in between following me around?”
The computer beeps again, and Nick spins the chair to face the monitor. “Multitasking. We all do it. Can’t be criminals all day long.” He clicks on a photo and layers it over the one of my mother, hits a few keys, and sits back. “Possible match. Should know in a second.”
I peer over his shoulder. “You’re going to have to teach me this. Too useful to pass up.”
Nick yanks open a drawer in response, rifles through it, and unearths a pen and a scrap of paper. “Warehouse out in Long Beach.” He scribbles the address on the paper and hands it to me with a frown. “Too easy.”
Exactly what I’m thinking. I stare at the address in my hand. She could be out there. It could be a diversion, and she’s somewhere else, somewhere Nick wouldn’t know about. I don’t want this to get out, to get back to Constantine, because my gut’s still muttering that he’s not what he seems.
I have to get to her. Somehow. I will not take any chances with her life. “Send
someone else,” I finally say.
He picks up his phone and dials, his eyes on mine as he holds it to his ear. “Bas. I’m texting you an address. Get your brother and check it out. Might be hot, so go in careful.” He hangs up and tosses the phone on the desk.
“Where would you take her?” I circle the desk and begin pacing, one foot in front of the other. “If you needed to go somewhere no one knew, where would you go?”
“If I didn’t have anything readily available, I’d start with properties owned by people who owe me favors. It’ll take too long to pull together a list of people who might owe Isaiah something, but searching for recent real estate transactions is easy enough. Should have thought of it sooner.” Mouth set in a grim line, he punches a few keys and pauses. “Go back six months, or longer?”
“Better make it a year to be on the safe side. Marc has been dead a year, and that gives Isaiah a long time to plan.” He’s likely taken advantage of it too. Everything he’s done so far has gone off too smoothly for it to be anything less.
Nick goes quiet, and the small office fills with the sound of my feet walking back and forth, back and forth, keys clicking along. There has to be something I can do to help. Right now I’m doing the equivalent of twiddling my thumbs.
My phone buzzes as he motions for me to come over. I pull it out as I step around the desk. He taps his finger on the screen. “Three new properties on the first sweep. He didn’t do much to cover his tracks on these purchases. He flipped two, kept one. A house out in the Valley.”
Lines of code roll up on a small box in the corner of the screen. I point to it. “Another search?”
“Not a very good one. It’s pulled all property sales in LA, Orange, and San Bernardino Counties, and it’s programmed to run against a separate database of known aliases and shell companies. We’ve been working to update it once we found out about Isaiah, but he caught us with our pants down.” He glares at the monitor. “Fucker’s been playing us for too damn long.”
Game of Vengeance Page 21
