by Lili Valente
“I don’t want a house.” Isaac sounds more exhausted than he did the last time he explained this. “I told you. I want them to give me all of the copies of that tape they say they have of Caitlin committing a crime. If they even have one. I wouldn’t put it past them to lie. They’re crazy.”
“You’re the one who took their plane ticket to Maui,” Ian says. “Mom’s still pissed at you, by the way. Family comes first, and you left Dad a chef short when you ran off.”
“Caitlin is my family, too.” Isaac comes to stand in the doorway, causing his fidgety brother to shift the gun from his left hand to his right, and move close enough to where I’m tied that I think I could get my teeth into his wrist before he has a chance to raise the weapon.
Once he drops it, I’ll fall on top, and do my best to grab the gun with my bound hands and fire it. It doesn’t matter what I hit, as long as I don’t hit myself. The gunshot will be enough to ensure the police are called, and, I’m hoping, enough to convince Ian and Isaac that their plan is going south, and it’s best to cut and run while they still can.
Or they could flip out, fight you for the gun, and shoot you.
They could, but if I don’t get to Caitlin and get on that flight out tonight, the chances of us escaping aren’t looking good. Now that I’ve remembered what my parents used to blackmail me, I know Caitlin is in real danger. I doubt Aaron and Deborah will go straight to the police—they’ll try to blackmail Caitlin first—but if all else fails, I wouldn’t put it past my parents to involve the authorities.
They want me back the way I was before the tumor diagnosis, or they don’t want me at all. I sincerely believe they’d rather see me rotting in jail than spending my newly-released trust fund on Caitlin Cooney and her family. They raised me to be the prince of this town, not to run off into the Croatian sunset with the daughter of the town drunk.
They aren’t going to pull any punches, and neither can I. I need to get back to Caitlin. Tonight. And if risking a gunshot wound is the only way to do it, so be it.
I’m tensing my leg muscles, preparing to launch myself from my chair and sink my teeth deep into Ian’s wrist, when a huge crash—like the contents of a recycling bin being dumped onto concrete—sounds from outside on the porch. Ian curses and strides across the room to join Isaac in the doorway, taking him, and his wrist, out of reach.
“Fuck,” Ian says, shoving Isaac toward the front door. “Check outside. The only reason anyone would be poking around here is because of you.”
Isaac looks like he’s going to protest, but in the end he just rolls his eyes. “Fine. But it was probably a cat or dog or something. I told you, no one followed me here.”
He’s right. No one did, because I was driving while he held a gun on me, and I was paying close attention. We weren’t followed, and I honestly didn’t think there was a chance in hell anyone would find me here, at least not anytime soon.
But I should have known better than to underestimate my girl.
When Caitlin rushes through the hallway leading to the back of the house, and bashes Ian over the head with the base of a lamp while his back is turned, I can’t say I’m that surprised. I’m relieved, proud, and grateful that this is the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, but not surprised.
Ian crumples to the ground with a groan. A second later, his gun is in Caitlin’s hand. A moment after that, Isaac rushes back into the room, and Caitlin lifts the gun, aiming it at her ex-best-friend’s chest.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Caitlin
“If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I hold the gun steady, shaking my head when Isaac takes a step toward me. “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot you. I swear to God I will.” I reach down, feeling around Ian’s neck until I find a pulse, and stand up as soon as I make sure he’s alive. I never expected to knock him out, but I guess I underestimated my own strength.
Just like Isaac.
“Caitlin, please,” Isaac says. “You don’t understand.” He lifts his big hands into the air—the same hands he used to slip beneath my tee shirt, when he knew that Gabe was alive, and the only man I wanted to be with—and takes another step.
I slide the action and drop the barrel of the gun, shifting my aim from his chest to his crotch. “Or maybe I’ll shoot you there. Make the punishment fit the crime.”
“You don’t mean that,” he says, but sweat breaks out on his upper lip, and he doesn’t take another step.
“Try me,” I say, not taking my eyes off of him. “Are you all right, Gabe?”
“Now that you’re here, beautiful, I’m perfect,” he says, sounding so pleased and proud of me it would make me smile, if I weren’t staring into the face of the person who has betrayed me more completely than any other.
My mom and dad were supposed to be the people I could trust the most, but from day one, I knew that was a fairy tale that was never going to come true. Even Aoife came home fucked up often enough at the end that it wasn’t a complete shock when she ran off. But Isaac was always someone I could count on, the big, cuddly bear of a best friend who had my back, and never let me down. And he lied to me worse than any of them. Because he made me believe he was truly one of the good guys.
“I’m going to untie Gabe,” I tell Isaac, venom in every word. “I think I’d enjoy causing you pain, right now, so stay right there, and don’t give me an excuse to shoot you.”
I move slowly, keeping the gun trained on Isaac as I cross the room, using my peripheral vision to guide me closer to Gabe’s chair.
“Please, let me explain,” Isaac begs, sweat beading on his brow to join the drops forming on his upper lip. “I know this looks bad, but I’m doing this for you. Gabe’s parents said they have surveillance videos of you committing a crime. They’re going to use it to put you in jail if—”
“I know about the footage.” I reach Gabe’s side and rest a hand on his shoulder, just that brief touch enough to give me strength. He’s okay. He’s really okay. I’m not too late. “Gabe’s parents hired a private investigator to follow me and Gabe last summer.”
Isaac’s eyes widen. “Then it’s true?” He shakes his head, grief twisting his features as I work on the knots binding Gabe’s arms with my free hand. “God, Caitlin, what has he done to you? Can’t you see how bad this relationship has been for you and the kids? Please, let me help. Leave him tied up. We can call his parents, ransom him for the video, and then get the hell out of here. We can start over and—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gabe says, in a silky voice. “I mean, talk about bad influences, I doubt you’ve kidnapped anyone at gun point before now. Seems to me this obsession with Caitlin has been bad for you, Isaac. Best for you to get some professional help, and let this dream go. Because, as I’m sure Caitlin will tell you, you’re never getting your sweaty paws on her again.”
Isaac scowls, and his hands ball into fists. “Shut your mouth, you fucking piece of—”
“Quiet, Isaac,” I say, in a sharp tone. “You too, Gabe.”
“What?” Gabe asks, innocence personified. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“You’re poking the bear, and you know it,” I say, fighting the urge to smile when Gabe laughs.
“You’re sick,” Isaac says, glaring at Gabe with enough heat to melt his skin from his bones. “You’re the one who needs professional help. You’ve ruined her life!”
“No one has ruined my life,” I say, abandoning the knots and standing with a frustrated sigh. “I’m not going to be able to get the ropes untied with the gun in my hand, and I’m not taking the gun off of you, Isaac. So I want you to cross the kitchen, slowly, kneel down, and untie Gabe. If you try to hurt him, or make any sudden moves, I will shoot you, please don’t make me prove that, okay?”<
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“He doesn’t believe you’re capable,” Gabe says, turning his head to look at me for the first time. I feel his attention on my face, and know he’s truly worried. “Be careful.”
“I will be,” I tell him. “I’ll shoot if I have to. I’m leaving here with you, Gabe, and nothing and no one is going to stop me.” I motion with the gun. “Let’s go, Isaac, nice and slow.”
Isaac starts across the room, and I back away, maintaining a good six feet between us, so that if he lunges for the gun, I’ll have time to react. I keep the gun trained on his torso and my eyes on his face, sensing that—should he decide to try something—I’ll see it in his eyes, before I’ll see it in his body language.
“Please, Caitlin,” he begs as he moves. “Please don’t do this. I love you so much. It feels like I’ve loved you my entire life.”
“It isn’t love when it’s built on a lie, Isaac,” I say, my stomach clenching at the desperation in his voice. I would feel sorry for him, but the second he threatened Gabe, my pity went out the window. Now, I just want to get away from him. Forever.
“Not everything was a lie,” he says. “We were happy together for a while. You know we were, you know we—”
“I don’t know anything, except that the sight of you is making me sick.” I make my tone as heartless as I can, not wanting to give Isaac even a shred of hope that this bargaining is working. “Now stop talking, and get to work. I don’t want to hear another word from you until Gabe’s arms are free.”
Isaac grimaces, but he doesn’t speak again. He shuffles around behind Gabe’s chair, hands trembling and more sweat rolling from his body. By the time he kneels down, his face is covered in beads of perspiration. Sweat drips from his temples and chin, but his skin is pale and sallow, not flushed the way it is after a run.
He looks awful, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d been using drugs. He reminds me of Aoife, when she’d come home itching and sweating, dying for a fix after her boyfriend of the moment had run out of money or moved on to the next pretty girl with a bad habit. But Isaac is so straight he only rarely drinks on Saturday night. The fix he craves is something you can’t buy on a street corner, and he knows he’s never getting his hands on it again. And that’s the kind of thing that makes a junkie desperate.
I know that. I’ve been around enough people with monkeys on their backs to know they’ll do crazy things to feed their addictions. I should have known Isaac wasn’t going to play nice, but when he turns and rushes me, using every bit of muscle in his long, powerful legs, I’m not prepared.
I hesitate a beat too long.
“Caitlin!” Gabe calls out my name in warning, but it’s too late, I’m already in the air, my back slamming into the wall behind me.
I groan as the back of my head bounces off the plaster, but I hold tight to the gun and pull my elbow down toward my ribs, wedging the weapon in between me and Isaac as he pins me to the wall with his body.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, even as his hands tighten around my waist until it feels like his fingers are going to puncture my skin. “I don’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“Then put me down, and don’t make me have to shoot you. My finger is still on the trigger,” I say through gritted teeth, hating the feel of his sweaty body flush against mine, and the sour smell of his breath hot on my face. The last of the affection I feel for Isaac is rapidly transforming into contempt, but I still don’t want to shoot him unless I have no other choice.
“Put her down, Isaac,” Gabe says from the kitchen. “She’s half your size. If you want to fight, come untie me, and we can fight. Just you and me, out in the yard with our fists, until one of us drops.”
“Shut up,” Isaac shouts, making me flinch. “I’m sorry,” he adds in a whisper. “I just hate him, Caitlin. I hate his voice, I hate his face, I hate his money, and his fucking cocky attitude. And I hate that you love him…more than you love me.” He sucks in a breath that emerges as a sob. “Why, Caitlin? Why don’t you love me?”
I stare up into his glassy eyes, with all the pain simmering behind them, but I know Isaac isn’t looking back at me. He isn’t seeing me, he’s seeing whatever it is that has left him so broken he doesn’t have the love for himself he needs to let me go. Maybe it’s because his parents always favored Ian, even though his little brother was an unrepentant asshole. Maybe it’s all those years of being called “Titty Boy” in elementary school, back before Isaac became an athlete, and was just big and overweight, not big and strong. Maybe it’s because his last girlfriend, Heather, told him he was lousy in bed when they broke up, and swore she had never loved him.
Maybe it’s a little of all those things, but looking up at him now, I know it wouldn’t matter if I promised to go back to Maui with him, and love him forever. It wouldn’t matter if there had never been a Gabe, and Isaac had been my first and only. Isaac would never be confident in my love. He would still do his best to wear me down, and keep me weak, because that’s the only way he knows how to be strong. All these years I thought he was my rock, but really he was picking away at my foundation, so that he would always need to be there to prop me up.
“That’s not the answer you need, Isaac,” I finally say, though I doubt anything I say will make a difference with him in his current state. “You need to ask why you don’t love yourself.”
Isaac sobs and drops his head, bringing his sweaty cheek to press against mine. “I need you, Caitlin. Please don’t leave. Please stay with me. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. I’ll make a lot of money. I’ll learn to walk and talk like a cocky asshole, whatever you need. Just please stay. Please let me take you away from here, and keep you safe.”
Lock me away is more like it. Isaac doesn’t want a partner, he wants a princess in a tower, always in need of rescuing. We are trapped in a tug of war between what Isaac needs, and who I am, and only one of us is going to win. I know that, and I suddenly know he’s not going to give me a choice whether or not to pull the trigger.
“I’m going to shoot you, Isaac,” I say, tears filling my eyes. “If you don’t put me down and walk away, right now, I’m going to shoot you.”
He shakes his head. “You won’t. I know you won’t.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat and curl my finger. “You’re wrong. If you could really see me, you would know that.”
The gunshot is so loud it feels like a thunderbolt has ripped through my head. Isaac drops me and stumbles back, clutching the top of his shoulder, his mouth open wide, but I can’t hear his scream. All I can hear is high-pitched whining in my ears, and the pounding of my blood rushing through my veins. I slide the action again and aim the gun at Isaac, but he’s already on the floor, clutching his bleeding shoulder as he curls into a sobbing ball on the linoleum. The wound doesn’t look fatal, but the fact that I’ve shot him seems to have killed the last of Isaac’s will to fight for me. I wait another beat, long enough to make sure he’s staying down, and then I hurry across the room to free Gabe.
Gabe’s mouth moves, but I can’t hear him, either, so I just shake my head and kneel down. I set the gun between my knees and work the knots free in less than a minute now that I have the use of both of my hands.
Gabe springs up from the chair, pulling me up off the ground and hugging me tight. He smoothes my hair from my forehead, and I think I hear him mumble something, but I still can’t make out the words.
“I can’t hear you,” I say, looking up into his steady blue eyes. “My ears are ringing. But we have to get out of here. Should we bring the gun?”
Gabe shakes his head, then presses the rope I pulled from his wrists into my hand before motioning to Ian on the ground. I nod, and kneel down next to Isaac’s brother, pulling his heavy arms behind his back and binding them, doing my best not to look at Isaac writhing on the floor a few feet away. I’m dimly aware of Gabe moving around the kitchen, doing something with the gun, but I don’t look up until he kneels next to Is
aac and rolls him over onto his back.
Isaac’s scream as he’s moved is loud enough to penetrate the ringing filling my head, but he doesn’t fight Gabe when Gabe presses a folded kitchen towel to his shoulder, then wraps a garbage bag around it, and ties it tight, ensuring there will be pressure on the wound. Once he’s finished, Gabe moves to Isaac’s feet and tugs the laces from his boots before using them to tie Isaac’s legs together.
When he’s finished, he presses another towel into my hands and makes wiping gestures. I nod and begin striding swiftly around the kitchen, wiping down everything I think I touched. Gabe does the same with another towel, and in a few minutes, he’s back at my side, urging me down the darkened hall to the back door.
“We…go,” he says. “No sirens…but…soon.”
I pick up pieces of his sentences as the ringing in my ears begins to fade, and nod. “Let’s go. The keys are in the van. It’s parked two blocks away.”
I follow him down the hall, ignoring the pitiful voice calling my name from behind me. Isaac is in my past now. He’s going to live, and I’m glad about that, but in my heart he’s dead and buried. I don’t have any more love to waste on him.
I’m saving my energy for Gabe, the kids, and the new life waiting for us if Gabe and I can make it to the airport in time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gabe
“But shall I live in hope? All men, I hope, live so.”
-Shakespeare
Caitlin and I make it to the airport with only fifteen minutes remaining before the flight to Frankfurt will begin to board. Luckily, the rental car office is closed, and all we have to do is park the van, dump the keys in a lockbox, and catch the shuttle to the terminal. Even luckier, I have all our passports and birth certificates, and ten grand in cash from the sale of the car, shoved into my back pockets. I tucked it all into my jeans on the way out of Harry’s, and the documents aren’t much worse for wear after my adventure with Isaac.
