Vow of Honor (Vow Series Book 3)

by Emma Renshaw

  I need to get out of here. I stand up, spinning to run out of the room. When I’m a couple feet away, James appears in the doorway.

  “What the fuck are you doing in here?” James roars.

  “What is all this?” I ask, waving my arm around the room, fresh tears springing to my eyes. I don’t know if it’s the thriller I was reading or just my overactive imagination, but so many scenarios are running through my head. Is he in the CIA? Is he on the run? Is he a hitman? Who the hell is he?

  “Get the fuck out of here,” James says menacingly.

  I tread carefully around him, leaving the room and exiting the closet. He slams both doors, hot on my heels. “Why are you snooping through my shit, Tatum?”

  I whip around, staring him in the eyes. “I wasn’t. It was an accident,” I retort.

  “An accident? You just happened to stumble into a hidden fucking room?”

  “Actually…yes.” I lick my lips and inhale through my nose.

  He glares at me, grabbing my arm lightly, pulling me toward him. “Stop bullshitting me, Tatum.”

  “You stop bullshitting me,” I yell. “Who are you?” I ask in a much softer tone.

  He sucks in a sharp breath, his eyes flitting all over my face. “What kind of question is that?” His voice is rough and ragged.

  “What is all that, James?” I ask, placing my fists on his naked, sweaty chest.

  “Nothing,” he says. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  I nod slowly, running my tongue over my teeth before I let out a disbelieving laugh. “It doesn’t concern me? Are you joking right now? Last night you dragged me from my brother’s house to bring me here because my brother lied to you and told you Simon broke into my house. The threat of something happening—just the threat made you ask me to stay with you. You turned back into the James I’m really starting to care about. You promised I wouldn’t regret forgiving you. You promised you would talk to me. So, you can barge your way into my life making demands, but I accidentally find something, and I can’t question you?”

  “No,” he says firmly, releasing me and walking away.

  I stand there, completely stunned by the finality of his words. He’s opened up to me and given me so much, but he’s still keeping himself under wraps. Each day, I’m getting closer to falling completely in love with him, but I can’t do that for a man who won’t share anything with me.

  I grab my purse from the kitchen counter and head for the door. James’s hand pushes the door closed when I open it. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “Anywhere but here,” I bite out.

  “No,” James growls, clamping down on my waist. “You’re staying here.”

  “No, I’m not.” I try to pull the door open again, but James’s hand doesn’t budge.

  “You’re staying here.”

  “No, I’m not,” I argue.

  “He didn’t break in, but what if he does?” James’s voice lowers and his hand spasms against me.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I reply angrily, rolling my eyes. He’s taking this way too far.

  “You don’t know that,” he hisses, stepping into my space and forcing me to take a step back.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I say, even though I know that is the wrong thing to say.

  “Don’t you dare risk your safety,” he replies angrily.

  “Why do you care?” I snap back.

  “Don’t do that, Tatum. You know I care. You’re my friend.”

  I snort. Right. Friend. “That’s bullshit, James. We’re in a relationship. That’s what this is. We care about each other. We have sex. We spend as much time together as possible. Whether you want to admit it or not, we are in a relationship. We agreed this is more.”

  I feel when it hits him that I’m right. I’m still facing the door, but I feel his body jerk slightly at the revelation.

  “I’m leaving, I’m not staying here. You promise to talk, but you won’t. You keep saying I’m safe with you, but I’m not.” At least my heart isn’t safe near James. Every moment I’m near him, I want more. I’m consumed by him; I won’t ever get enough.

  James leans in, putting his head next to mine. “What do I have to do to get you to stay?”

  “Be honest with me.”

  “Fuck,” James mutters. He’s silent for so long, I think he’s going to deny me until he squeezes my waist. “Fine.”

  I turn my head, looking into his eyes. For the first time since I’ve known James, he looks frightened. He keeps his eyes on mine as he gulps. I turn toward him. His hand is braced on the door above me, and other is on my hip. He brings his forehead to mine.

  “Don’t go,” he whispers.

  “I won’t,” I promise. “You can trust me.”

  He breathes deeply, closing his eyes.

  “James,” I say softly, bringing my hand up to cup his face. He turns his head, kissing my palm before his anguished eyes lock on mine again.

  “I guess that’s the first thing I should be honest about. My name isn’t James.”

  Chapter 39

  James

  Tatum blinks rapidly, processing what I just told her. I could’ve started smaller, but if she’s determined to know, then I can’t go easy. Nothing about my life is fucking easy. How in the hell did I end up in this position? I’ve worked my ass off to stay out of things like this, to keep a distance, so I could take all my secrets to my grave. I only hoped that grave would be a long time off. If I tell her, I risk it becoming an early grave.

  Tatum and I can’t last, even if I want it to. The day that I will have to see her with another man, maybe even a kid, will fucking ruin me. That will be the day I move from Texas and settle somewhere else. I can’t lose her yet, though. I want every second I can steal from her. If I could choose, have that type of future, it’d be with her.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s sit and have a drink. We’ll both need it.”

  I gently help Tatum sit on the couch; she looks like she’s in shock, staring off into space, still blinking like a crazy person. I pour us each a glass of whiskey, bringing the bottle and some waters to the coffee table. It’s not even noon, but I need to break out the fucking hard liquor for this shit.

  “Tatum?”

  Her eyes slowly come to mine. “Your name isn’t James?”

  I release a long sigh, freeing something that’s been sitting on my chest for a long time. “No.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Connor is the name on my birth certificate. Connor died a long time ago, Tatum. I’d never respond to anything except for James. James is my name in every way that matters.”

  She shrugs, biting her lip. “Why did you change it?”

  I take a large gulp of the whiskey. “The first name on my birth certificate was ‘Baby Boy.’ My mom was a heroin addict. She tossed me in a dumpster where some homeless person found me and brought me to the hospital. I was premature, close to death, fighting to stay alive. No sense in naming a kid that might die,” I say wryly, taking another long drink.

  Tatum starts crying, pressing her face into my shoulder. “Baby,” she whispers.

  “I guess I lied. I’ll respond to that, if it’s you saying it.”

  This makes her cry harder and grab onto my shirt. We’re just getting started. The faster I get this done, the better it will be for both of us.

  “Eventually, a nurse named me Connor. After that, my birth certificate was updated with that name. I was well enough to go home, except I didn’t have a home. I had to wait for a foster home with availability. Not every foster house will accept a newborn with addiction issues.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she says outraged, swiping at her eyes. An angry blush is taking over her face.

  “It is what it is. I was kicked from foster home to foster home, none of them good. I was called whatever they wanted to call me. By the time I reached kindergarten, I was already behind in school and confused by what my name was.”

&n
bsp; “I want to travel back in time and rescue you.” My throat closes as I stare at her. My fierce girl.

  “Sunshine,” I say hoarsely. She doesn’t understand what she’s already given to me.

  “Were you close with anyone?”

  I smirk, remembering the boys I hung around with. “Yeah. I had a few friends. One really good friend. He and his baby sister bounced in and out of homes. Sometimes they would be back with their mom, which was even worse than the fosters we experienced. We shared a foster house twice. Don’t get me wrong, not all foster homes are bad.” I shrug. “Just never experienced a good one myself. Closest I came was when I was almost adopted.”

  “He’s the one you mentioned while we were dancing?” Her fingers lace together in her lap as she processes. “Do you ever talk to him?”

  “He thinks I’m dead.”

  “What?” she gasps, turning to face me completely. She whispers her next words with tears in her eyes. “Dead? What do you mean?”

  “We’ll get there,” I say, running my hand through my hair. “So, Callan was my only really good friend, my best friend. We protected his sister as much as we could. She was a lot younger, only a toddler when we were teenagers, but we did what we could. When we were kicked out of the system, we got a place together. Callan fought like hell to get his sister out of foster care and home with his mom. If she was there, then we could watch over her better.”

  She chuckles. “Two men and a baby.”

  I grunt. “Something like that.”

  She picks up her glass of whiskey, turning sideways on the couch and putting her legs over my mine. I wrap a hand around one of her thighs, keeping her anchored against me.

  “Then what?” She swirls the liquid amber around the glass before taking a small sip.

  “We needed money. Hell, we always needed money.” I pause, not wanting to go on. I fear that if I even say the words out loud, my worst nightmares will come true. I shake my head. “Fuck. Tatum. This may not be a good idea.”

  “What? You were trusting me. What happened?”

  “If I tell you everything, then you’re at risk.” I squeeze her thigh, pleading with her to understand.

  “You wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” Her fingers brush over my cheek. She’s gazing at me in that way she does, with tender affection and more trust than I’ve ever experienced. My chest expands. She’s right. I’d do anything to protect her, sacrifice anything. I’d lay down my life if it meant I could honor her life.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I vow to her. “I’d never let anything touch you.”

  “I know, so keep going,” Tatum urges.

  My head falls to the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling as I weigh my options. Whether Tatum knows about my past or not, she’s possibly in danger just by being near me. If I don’t tell her, she’ll leave, walk right out the door. My heart jerks in my chest in protest. I lift my head and toss the rest of my whiskey to the back of my throat.

  “At some point, we got tangled up with this kid we went to school with. It started small and then got bigger and bigger. That kid was the son of a man in the mafia,” I admit.

  “The mafia?” Tatum gasps.

  “Yeah, the mafia,” I say.

  “The real mafia?”

  I grin. “The real mafia. It’s Chicago, Tatum. There are lots of old Italian families.”

  “You were in the mafia?” she asks, her eyes wide and disbelieving.

  “No. I’m not Italian, or at least I can’t prove that I’m Italian, so I technically can’t be in the mafia.”

  “But, you…worked with them?”

  “Yeah, I was an associate. Really, I was an errand boy, and so was Callan. It kept us protected, gave us money, and made us feel like we belonged to something.” I laugh humorlessly. “My entire life I wanted to be honorable and loyal and worthy. Men in the mafia are sometimes called men of honor, or uomo d’onore. But it was while working for them I knew I was going down the wrong path. I hated what I was doing, but I barely graduated high school, I had nothing to my name, no prospects. The jobs they gave us slowly started to get bigger. If I was caught, no one would come vouch for me; it’d be my ass sitting in that jail cell.”

  “What do you mean by ‘jobs’?”

  Fuck. My hand pinches the bridge of my nose as I inhale deeply. “It started out as selling small amounts of drugs or collecting money from the dealers. I never had enough on me to land a felony.”

  “James,” Tatum says softly, leaning her head against my shoulder. “I hate thinking about you in a position like that.”

  “Me, too. I wanted out, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t actually voice that. I’d be as good as dead before the words finished leaving my mouth.” I pour a bit more whiskey, throwing it back in one swallow. This is where I lay out the biggest secret of all.

  “I got a call for a job one day. I was supposed to bring a duffle bag filled with cash to a restaurant and exchange it with a senator who would give me a duffle bag of drugs. It was a test, a ploy to make sure they had the senator in their pocket. I didn’t want to do it. Getting caught with that would mean I’d spend most of my life in jail. I didn’t have a goddamn thing to my name, but I didn’t want to lose my life. I spent my life shackled to horrible situations because I didn’t have a family; I didn’t want to spend the next part of my life shackled in a cell.”

  “Did you have to take the job?”

  “If I wanted to live, I had no choice” I say. “The restaurant was on the top floor of a building. The guys hacked in and cut the security cameras for the whole building, that way there’d be none of that evidence. I stood in the lobby, late for the appointment. I was having so much trouble making myself do it. It’s not who I was, it’s not who I wanted to be. There wasn’t another choice, though. Right before I hit the elevator call button, the whole building shook.”

  Tatum stares at me, taking in each word, each syllable.

  “Remember the news report last week? When I started acting like a dick?”

  Tatum gasps. “Yes.”

  “I should have been in there. The video showed the man I was supposed to meet waiting for me. If they’ve seen it, they know I didn’t show. I can only hope they still think I died in the explosion, just wasn’t at the table yet.”

  “Oh, my God,” she breathes.

  “The entire lobby shook with the force of that explosion. I stood there confused when people started running out of the stairwells and alarms started going off. I fled the building in a sea of other people—with a duffle bag of cash. I found a motel that night and watched the news. They said there were no survivors inside the restaurant. ‘I could run’ popped into my mind. The mafia would think I was dead, and I had money to start over. It took two more nights in that motel, watching the news, making sure I could do it. Then I took off.”

  “Oh, my God,” she repeats on a whisper.

  “I took a bus to a few different states, getting fake documents. I didn’t want to do it all in one place. The first thing I got was a fake ID. I was barely twenty.”

  “How’d you know where to go?”

  I shrug. “Guess that’s one thing the mafia taught me, how to find other shady people.”

  “Wow.”

  “Finally, I made it down to Texas. I wanted to be in a city and just blend in. I bought my land with cash, my gym with cash. Since I started making money, I’ve replaced every dollar I spent from that stolen money. I’ve added interest, just in case.”

  “I saw the money,” she whispers.

  “I have more money down there than just for that. If I ever need to run quickly, I don’t have to worry about a bank. I have an account for the gym and to keep up appearances, but other than that, I like to operate with cash.”

  “What about the guns?”

  “Protection,” I say. “If they ever find me, I won’t go down without a fight.”

  Tatum looks terrified at the prospect.

  “It’s been a long time, Tatum. I pla
y everything cautious, but I don’t think they’ll ever find out.”

  “How did they have the video if the cameras were cut?” She asks after a moment of silence.

  “Phillip McKay Junior, the son of the Texas senator,” I say. She nods her head as I continue. “He’s been traveling around the country for years setting fires. A senator always dies in one of them. Before he starts the fire, he sets up cameras inside so he can watch until the fire kills the feed. The man I was meeting at the restaurant was an Illinois senator, he was the intended target that day. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or I would’ve been, I guess, if I actually got on the elevator. It’s just a fucking coincidence that I chose the city where the arsonist lives and even worse coincidence that he was at the same event we were at.”

  “I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want them to find you.” Tatum looks at her hands in her lap as she speaks quietly.

  “With all the computers down there, I keep track of them from afar in the only way I know how. I monitor the chatter. When I said I barely graduated high school, it wasn’t due to my intelligence—just a failing school and school system in general, and I missed a lot of class. When I settled here, I taught myself some things, just enough to be able to stay informed.”

  “What do you mean, ‘chatter’?”

  “The mafia families in the States are branches under the Italian mafia. They still report to them, like managers reporting to a franchise owner. I monitor that. I’ve never been brought up. Not too surprising since I was an errand boy, but I did take off with a lot of money. The only other thing that interests me is Callan and his sister, Braelyn. A couple years ago, I found out he was applying for a scholarship for Braelyn to attend a private school. I created a scholarship and awarded it to her anonymously. Callan is my one regret. He was the closest thing to family I had.”

  My head drops to my hands as I suck in oxygen. Tatum’s hand curls around my neck, rubbing her thumb below my ear. I look up at her and continue telling her about Callan. “I’ve been thinking for ways to get him out for over a decade, I’d have to reveal I’m alive though. And then, we’d both be dead, or worse, they would use Braelyn to get Callan to do something to me.”