Maybe he saw that in her face. Because he shook his head in disbelief, the set of his jaw a little grim. “That’s some Stockholm fucking syndrome, Doc.”
“Well, it’s a fucking syndrome alright,” she cracked, a little bit exhausted and a little bit hysterical…and a lot determined.
Because if they were both caught up in this thing with each other, she couldn’t let him go off alone. But there was no way in hell she would allow him to regret, or second-guess, staying. She was an asset, not a liability. Maybe her skill set was different from his badass military shifter powers, but she knew how to protect herself, and how to protect people she cared about. They’d survived decades in an increasingly hostile America, after all. Her community had taught her the value of strength in numbers.
Her community. Oh. Neha’s tired brain grabbed on to the word like a life raft. The word, the concept, the place. No one would think to look for Joe Peluso amid a bunch of Indian people. It would give them a chance to breathe, to regroup, to come up with a real plan. Her immediate instinct was to hide him in Edison or Rahway or North Brunswick, surrounded by desis for miles. But they couldn’t risk going across state lines. Hell, putting aside the risk of hitting an SRB or ICE checkpoint, she didn’t even want to leave Kings County.
Joe had already fucked the chances for a plea deal. The last thing they needed was extra charges piled on top of multiple counts of Murder One and jailbreak—however mitigating the circumstances of said jailbreak might be. But New York was a Sanctuary City, a haven. That still counted for something. And even if he was a supernatural, Joe was first and foremost a white cisgender heterosexual man. That counted for even more. She just needed to get him somewhere safe before she could take advantage of that privilege with regard to all his charges.
“We need to go to Queens,” she concluded grimly as she patted the packed go bag and set it aside. “Jackson Heights is probably our best bet for a temporary hideout. We can reassess things from there after the search for you has died down.”
Though most of the area’s Punjabi population had jumped ship to Jersey, like her own family, she still had two aunties who lived right off Seventy-Third Street, smack in the middle of dozens of Indian restaurants and clothing stores. They were unrelated to each other and not at all related to her, but the community bonds were thick nonetheless. Elders were always your aunties and your uncles…and always happy to help.
“I’m from Queens,” Joe pointed out. “First place they’re gonna look, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Cute. Was that a step up or down from “Doc”? “It’s called ‘hiding in plain sight’ for a reason,” she fired back. “It’ll take the drones hours to sift through footage…and facial recognition will be harder if I’m surrounded by other brown people. Even computers can’t tell us apart.”
“Okay.” He sighed, scrubbing at his jaw with the back of one hand. “Okay,” he repeated, as if he’d grudgingly convinced himself to go along with her. And then he looked at her for a long moment…the kind that spanned sweat-drenched hours. “So, uh…we gonna talk about what we just did? I kinda fucked the hell outta you, babe. Twice.”
Four times if you counted oral separately, and Neha definitely did. She wasn’t sure she had the energy for an Oprah Winfrey heart-to-heart about sex in stressful situations, but it was best to just get it all out of the way. “I get tested for STIs every year. And you don’t have to worry about telling Joe Jr. we conceived him against a wall. I have an IUD.”
“Hell. So do I.” He barked out a laugh at what she was sure was an expression of utter bewilderment on her face. It was close enough to an actual bark that it made her wonder, yet again, what kind of shifter he actually was. “Why do you think I haven’t changed since I’ve been a guest of the Brooklyn Hilton? I’m chipped, Doc. Chipped and snipped.”
“You can’t shift forms?” An implant preventing him from going full supernatural explained so much…and yet not nearly enough. She gave his phenomenal body another once-over, wondering where it was.
“I get the prickles, but it hurts like a bitch and I can’t shift fully,” Joe confirmed. If he was discomfited by her staring, by her obvious curiosity, he didn’t show it. “Not since I was oh-so-honorably discharged. They weren’t about to let us Apex boys run around unchecked. And, all apologies to Joe Jr., I can’t get you pregnant either. Mandatory vasectomies. They didn’t want to risk us passing on our altered DNA or some shit. But that ain’t what I’m asking about, and you know it. You fucked me. You bagged yourself a supe. How does that make you feel?”
He gave the classic psychiatrist question a mocking edge as he turned it back on her. It was all there in the set of his shoulders. In the way his darkly cynical gaze cut from her back to the family photos on her mantel and to the picture of Guru-ji on the adjacent wall. He was waiting for her to panic. To backpedal. To say she was sorry for what had just happened between them. He would have to wait a very long time.
Neha sighed, dragging her hands through her still-wet hair. “What do you want to hear, Joe?” she asked, coming around the couch to where he stood. “That I’m disgusted with myself? That I fulfilled some sort of weird fetish and I’m done now? Neither of those things are true. I don’t have any regrets. I know who and what you are. I knew what you wanted from me the first time I saw you…and if I’m honest with myself, I wanted it, too. And I want it again. As many times as you’re willing to give it. I like sex and I like you. But more than that…? I want to help you. I want to keep you alive.”
Was that enough for him? God, she hoped so. But he didn’t confirm or deny. He just stared at her for a long, charged moment. And then he reached for her duffel and slung it over his shoulder, ready to go.
Chapter 13
They took the long way to Jackson Heights, walking to the F train at ass o’clock in the morning, her go bag in her hand and a duffel filled with clothes and other shit slung over his shoulder. It was full dark, with drones buzzing in the distance like wasps. They picked a nearly empty subway car toward the back, and Neha pretty much immediately dropped her boss superhero act, taking up two seats and half his lap.
“You manspreading now?” He laughed, tucking the backpack between his knees and laying one arm across the back of the beat-up red-and-orange plastic seats. So much security shit had gotten upgraded since 2016…but the MTA was still chugging along old school, put together with duct tape, spit, and prayers.
“You gonna stop me?” She mimicked his tone with surprising ease. He could almost believe she grew up down the street from him, dodging pimps and meth-heads.
“No, baby. You can spread for me anytime,” he leered, reaching down to squeeze her thigh.
The jokes were easy. Even when everything in him hurt and he was constantly glancing around the train as it lurched up through Brooklyn and into Manhattan. Jesus, fuck, how did it all get to this place? And he knew that was a fucking laughable question. He got it to this place. With a licensed 9mm and a KA-BAR he bought at a trade show upstate.
Fucking a woman…fucking Neha…was about feeling everything. Skin and sweat and come and your heart pounding in your ears. Killing someone, at least for him and at least in the moment, involved feeling nothing at all except the rush. He’d taken out those six motherfuckers with an empty space in his chest and ice behind his eyes. And they weren’t the first people he’d put in the ground. Just the first he did for personal reasons. For him and not for his country.
The lawyers thought the why mattered. They thought the why could get him a plea deal. The why didn’t matter. And copping a plea was definitely off the table now. He’d be lucky if he made it to the end of the week without getting shot by the cops or the Russian mafia. Maybe cops who were Russian mafia. Wouldn’t that just be fucking poetic?
Somewhere around Midtown, Neha sighed and turned her face into his neck. She wasn’t asleep like he’d figured, just quiet. Thinking. Maybe thinking the same th
ings as him. “I’m going to get you out of this,” she said softly.
“I like sex and I like you. But more than that…? I want to help you. I want to keep you alive.”
It was hilarious that she thought she could. And kinda fucking beautiful, too. He kissed the top of her head before he could think better of doing something so mushy. “And who’s gonna get you out of it, huh?” She’d probably watched a lot of cop and lawyer shows growing up. Ally McBeal and SVU and all that shit. Where the case got solved in an hour and everybody hit the bar after to celebrate. That didn’t happen in reality. Not his reality, anyway. “You’re not gonna walk away clean, Doc. They’ll get you, too. All because you came with me.”
“I’m not scared of the legal consequences,” she assured him, pulling back to scowl at him—or at least what passed for a scowl on a face too pretty for mean mugging. “They can hold me in contempt and disbar me, but they can’t deport me or my family. We’re all citizens.”
Like that had ever stopped the government or the mob from disappearing people they wanted disappeared. Yeah, she’d definitely watched a lot of TV growing up. Like Kenny. You couldn’t tear that kid away from his phone or his iPad. Always streaming some ridiculous escapist comic-book shit that had him thinking he was indestructible, too. He wasn’t.
None of them were bulletproof.
The train started to fill up a little at Rockefeller Center. More people got on at Sixty-Third. Night shifters getting off the clock. People walking over from the 4, 5, and 6 trains. Neha rearranged herself, sat up. She’d put on some kind of Indian outfit before they left, soft but brightly colored. Her hair was braided. She looked sweet and… What was the word he was looking for…? Wholesome. Not like the woman he’d eye-fucked across a table almost a month ago.
He wasn’t really sure this Neha 2.0 helped him look less suspicious. If anything, she made him look worse. A hulking thug with a ball cap tugged low over his eyes, wearing a suit with a generic radio-station T-shirt that he found in the back of a drawer. He looked like someone who beat his family on the regular. Or someone who kidnapped kids into his white van. Shit, maybe it wouldn’t take a week for them to get caught. Maybe there would be a whole crew waiting for them when they got off at Seventy-Fourth Street in Queens. Guns blazing.
“You’re tensing up.” Now it was Neha’s turn to squeeze his thigh. “Try not to brood so loudly, okay?”
He couldn’t even argue with that. Instead, he turned in his seat, because looking at her was way better than looking in at himself. “Just what are we gonna do when we get where we’re going? Call the ACLU?”
“I prefer the Southern Poverty Law Center myself,” she said with a hefty dose of fake high-and-mighty. “But, no, ‘we’ are not going to do anything.” She wagged her finger at him like his nonna used to do. Except it was a thousand times hotter coming from her. “You are going to lay low. Tomorrow, when things have cooled down a little, I might make a few calls and assess the situation.”
She wasn’t the only one who was going to be making calls. Or assessing things. Joe had work to do, too. Hail Mary passes to throw. Sure, he was on board with Neha’s way for now…but he had to go after Aleksei Vasiliev eventually. Or it would never stop. Russian mafia would always be looking for him. And they’d probably go after everyone else he’d ever cared about. The Castellis. Mishelle. Neha. Vasiliev’s people would dig up all the intel and pick them off one by one. So he had to hit them on their turf. Harder than he hit them before…but not without putting a few safety nets in place.
He’d had the digits in his head for years. One of his Apex brothers had passed the intel to him on their last night in Helmand. When they were outnumbered by a pride of Taliban shifters and hunkered down in the brush. Nothing like surprise lions to mess up your evening. “By all reports, white lions are no longer native to the area,” the fancy zoologist advising their unit had told them in the initial mission briefing. “If there are insurgent groups of supernaturals, they should be foxes or Pallas cats.” Yeah, that was a negative, Chief. Their team got incontrovertible—and indigestible—proof that night.
While they were regrouping, plastered against a rock wall, Drake had started giving out his last will and testaments. Just in case it all went FUBAR. He’d bequeathed Joe a phone number. “These are the guys you call to unfuck things. You hear me? Word has it, they’re like us.” Like us. It could’ve meant anything. Military. Supe. Fucked in the head. Drake hadn’t gotten the chance to elaborate because they had to go back out into the fray. Joe was now clinging to hope that it was all of the above. Enough to help him with this epic shitshow. To give him some backup or Neha a safe route out. And if it wasn’t? Well, the lone-wolf narrative still fit him to a T. He’d take off. Promises to Neha or no.
She wanted to save him. Maybe the best thing he could do for her was save her from himself.
* * *
Aishneet Auntie handed over the keys to her rental, some of her husband’s clothes, and a Wi-Fi password without a single question. Comments about how Neha needed to stay out of the sun and perhaps lose a few pounds, sure, but no interrogation about why she needed to crash in the studio the couple rented out for extra income. Sikh generosity was truly a blessing. And though she’d long since given up on praying, Neha sent up a thank-you to Guru-ji as she collected Joe from the side of Auntie’s house and they made their way to a tiny apartment above a kebab shop.
Neha’s phone had started blowing up with texts while she and Joe were still at her place. Mom. Papa. Her brothers. She hadn’t realized her parents were so up on their emoji game. She’d shot off vague reassuring replies that implied she’d been nowhere near the courthouse when the shooting began. What else could she say? She’d packed down her worry about their worry and focused on the immediate problems…and then she’d copied a few numbers into her burners and iPod Touch, powered down the smartphone, and shoved it in a drawer so she couldn’t be tracked. In the bright light of day, Aishneet Auntie was her best shot of getting a real message to her frantic loved ones.
It had only taken a quick exchange in Punjabi to make her meaning clear. Bas. Done. Auntie Network activated. It would probably filter through two more aunties before someone rang her mom with a greeting of “Sat sri akal!” and gushed about how wonderful it was that Neha was off on a big business trip for her law firm and maybe she’d meet a nice man and settle down. Virtually untraceable by the feds or Vasiliev’s goons. Maybe after all of this was over, she’d write a book: A Desi’s Guide to Going on the Run. Item 1: Aunties get shit done.
It was early yet. The neighborhood was quiet. Metal barriers were still down over most of the storefronts, which had signs in English, Bengali, and Hindi advertising everything from gold jewelry to cell-phone plans to homemade sweets. Neha felt safer in neighborhoods like this than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. No one here would follow her around a store to make sure she wasn’t shoplifting or assume she couldn’t afford the merchandise. Sure, she might get dinged on not speaking fluent Bengali, but that level of passive-aggression was something she was more than capable of handling. And she had an arsenal of Punjabi just waiting to be deployed.
“So, that was your aunt?” Joe wondered as she fit a key into the lock of the third-floor walk-up.
She had to laugh. “No. Just my auntie. One of Papa and Ma’s friends from the gurdwara we used to go to when I was a kid. Indians call everyone ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’ as a sign of respect—and it pretty much gives all your elders free rein to boss you around and harp on all your shortcomings.” And to love you and care for you. She was lucky that way. There was a cross-country network she could count on if she and Joe did have to leave the state. “Never underestimate a desi auntie,” she told Joe as they walked into the studio one after the other. “They’re probably more connected than the Bratva or the Cosa Nostra.”
A grin split his craggy face. “Reminds me of my old neighborhood. Everybody alwa
ys in your business. My nonna’s friends would be shouting from window to window if they saw me out smashing parking meters with the bigger boys, and I’d have the switch waiting for me by the time I got home.” Neha couldn’t check her flinch, or swallow the lump that suddenly rose in her throat. Joe dropped their bags, his hands coming up to cradle her cheeks. “Hey. Don’t feel sorry for me. That kid needed his ass beat.”
“Bullshit. No child deserves to be beaten.” She covered his wrists with her fingers, barely able to circle them. “You deserved to be loved, Joe. To trust that you could come home and be safe.”
“And then what? I would’ve turned out okay? I wouldn’t have iced those fuckers?” He shook his head. “You know better than that. Plenty of kids get beat and don’t become killers. And I saw guys with two parents, a dog, and a picket fence practically getting off on ‘accidentally’ shooting noncombatants in the ’Stan. My backstory doesn’t change what I did, Doc. Don’t try to make it my defense.”
It was too late for that. Neha had built up every defense in the world for Joe Peluso. And she had none left for herself. “Joe…” she began, letting Aishneet Auntie’s keys dig into the fleshy part of her palm. “Joe, you have to stop.”
“Stop what?” He shook his head, kicking her duffel bag a few feet in, further from the door. “Believing I’m trash? ’Cause, babe, that ain’t about to happen. Not now and not ever. I’ve earned every bit of the hell raining down on me right now. You haven’t. You shouldn’t be a part of this.”
But she was a part of it. She’d chosen this. Chosen him. There was no going back.
Chapter 14
It was astonishing how her brother’s mood could flip from elation to rage on a dime. Literally overnight. Yulia had come into Kamchatka for the morning shift and found it looking like a tornado had struck. Glass everywhere. Water and flowers scattered from the broken vases. The top-shelf liquors behind the bar all emptied, with the bottles broken. By all accounts—and the amount of new barware she was directed to order by the club’s general manager—Peluso and the lawyer woman had vanished into thin air. Aleksei had not emerged from his office since his tirade.
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