Over the Line (14 page)

On the other side, Sherm stumbles back from where his ear was pressed to the door. His expression is a mix of shock and fear.

“Christ, Sherm!” Rob bellows.

Sherm shrinks back, plastering himself against the far wall.

I shut the door and get in between them. “Sherm, why don’t you take the dogs out to the run and wait for us on the front porch, okay?”

He doesn’t take his eyes off Rob, but nods.

We head downstairs in strained silence and Rob storms down the drive toward the house next door. Sherm grabs the dogs’ leashes and I see him fighting frightened tears.

I grasp his arms and bend down to his level. “Rob’s scared too, buddy. He didn’t mean to yell at you.”

He pushes away from me, and when he glares and says, “I don’t want to leave!” I know I misinterpreted his fear.

I take a deep breath. “We might have to, Sherm. This is the risk of living the way we do. We won’t be able to stay anywhere forever. We have to stay safe.”

He starts down the stairs with the dogs and they drag him toward the bluff. He wrestles them the other direction, toward the run.

“Stay close!” I yell after him, then jog after Rob. I catch up to him just as he’s starting up the driveway of the house next door.

“Do you want to explain this, Lee?” His voice is stone and he won’t look at me. “Why you’ve kept the man responsible for trying to kill us in your room for six days without telling anyone?”

“Because I think I believe him. He says someone else holds the contract.”

“He’s lying.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because that’s how he rolls. I know he’s not telling us everything.” When he finally turns to look at me, his glare scorches through me. “Why are you so willing to believe him? What’s really going on, Lee?”

“Nothing,” I say as we reach the car. I click it open and duck inside before he can see the truth on my face. I’m not ready for him to know Oliver’s ever been anything more than a classmate.

But part of what Rob’s saying is true. Oliver is cautious. He never plays all his cards. He always holds the best ones up his sleeve.

Like who is trying to kill us.

But I can’t blame him for not telling me. Oliver is nothing if not a student of human nature. He read the situation and decided his best chance at self-preservation was to withhold that information. And, chances are, he was right.

“He’s been in Florida for over a week. No one has broken down our door. There’s no army. If his men knew he was here, there’s no way they’d let him come alone. He’s unarmed, Rob.”

“We’ll see about that,” he says, popping the trunk.

We spend the next fifteen minutes tearing everything apart. The only thing of note we find is a roll of duct tape with some food in a shopping bag from Len’s Market.

“Yep. He’s here on a charity mission,” Rob says, holding up the tape.

“There’s no gun, Rob. He’s not going to kill us with duct tape.”

“There are no weapons
here
,” he says, chucking the tape into the car.

“If you don’t believe it, let’s check his hotel.”

Rob shakes his head slowly and I can see him working it out in his head. “That could be a trap. His thugs could be waiting there.”

“If anyone was there, they’d have come after Oliver by now.”

He props an elbow on the window. “You still haven’t answered my question. What’s going on with you and Savoca?”

“Jesus, Rob. I told you. Nothing. I shot him, for Christ’s sake.”

He looks at me a long minute, studying my face for the lie. I’m not sure if he sees it or not. His poker face is better than mine. Finally, he slams the car door and hoofs back down the driveway. “We should kill him and get it over with.”

My heart stalls as I chase him down the drive. “We can’t kill him. Wes will be here soon. He’ll relocate us. We’ll be safe.”
Oliver won’t be able to find me again
.

At the thought, my heart dies a little more.

It took months after we were relocated to come to terms with the fact I’d never see Oliver again. But now that he’s here, now that I’ve admitted to myself what he means to me, I can’t let him go again. I’ve been hollow for so long, and now I remember what it is to feel full. I don’t want to lose that feeling. I can’t go back to being a shell of a person, just going through the motions.

I grab Rob’s arm. “I think we should just keep this to ourselves for now. Let’s see what he knows.”

His eyes pull wide in a disillusioned stare as he spins on me. “Every second he’s here, our entire family is in danger.”

I take a deep breath to steel my nerves when I realize by the semi-wild look in Rob’s eyes that his mind is made up. “Think about this, Rob. That won’t change if we kill him. If we do, we’d be hunted by both sides, the mob and the Feds. I’m not going to put Sherm in that kind of danger.”

He throws a hand at our house. “When they find out he’s been here for days before we turned him in, they’ll pull our protection.”

“So we do neither.” I know I’m grasping at straws, but I’d say anything right now to keep Oliver alive.

He tilts his head and narrows his eyes the way he does when he’d trying to see into my head. “So what’s your suggestion? Keep him tied to your bed for the foreseeable future? I don’t think that’s a viable alternative.”

“Just until he tells us who we’re running from.”

He starts toward the house again full bore, determination etched on his face like it was stone. “He’s going to tell us that right now.”

Ulie pulls up the drive just as we’re climbing the porch stairs.

“What’s the big emergency?” she asks, splitting a concerned glance between us.

“Talk to your sister,” Rob says without slowing down.

I grab his arm. “No way, Rob. You’re not going in there without me.”

“Going in where?” Ulie asks, alarm raising her voice a pitch.

Rob pulls out of my grasp and yanks his Glock from his waistband as he strides into the house. Ulie follows on his heels.

And that’s when I notice both Sherm and the dogs are gone.

I watch after Rob and Ulie, torn between protecting the man that I love and my little brother’s safety. Oliver’s life is hanging by a thread, but the pull of my little brother is stronger. I pray Ulie can keep Rob from doing anything crazy as I run toward the bluff.

Oliver

“You’ve changed,” I say to Grant as he paces the window.

He turns and cuts me a smug smirk. “You haven’t.”

I never paid him much attention back in Chicago. It was widely known he wasn’t part of his father’s machine. He was a worthless club rat. A womanizing drunk. Not anyone I had any use for. But now, as he holds his sister’s gun on me, I see a determination in his eyes. A sense of purpose that I never remember seeing there before.

“I get that you want to protect your family. It’s admirable. But I’m not the enemy.”

He barks out a sardonic laugh as he turns to the window and peers out. “Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Do you miss Chicago?”

At my question, he turns back to me. “What does it matter? We’re not going back.”

I take the opportunity to study his face again. He’s definitely changed. Though he’s much rougher around the edges now, he’s grown up.

“Why are you so sure?”

He gives a loose shrug. “What’s there to go back to? It’s been six months.”

“Would you go back if you could?”

It doesn’t surprise me all that much when he just shrugs again. It’s the same indifferent reaction I got when I asked Lee if she was happy here. Neither of them seem too driven to get back home. They may not be happy, but they’re not miserable.

I don’t think Lee was happy in Chicago either, truth be told. At least not that she ever showed me.

There was only once I saw her truly happy.

It seemed trite to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the first time we hooked up in the library, so I didn’t mention the date as our plane took off out of Chicago. I’d graduated from Kellogg in June, but it was her last day of finals before winter break. We couldn’t spend Christmas away from our families, so I knew it was the last time I’d see her for a few weeks. I wanted her to myself for whatever time I could have her.

We stayed at my family’s vacation home in Aspen. I’d spent enough time there with my parents that people knew who I was, but they didn’t know Lee. For the first time in the year we’d been sleeping together, we had three days and two nights where we didn’t have to hide. Not even from my family. They knew I was in Aspen with a woman. Which meant they knew to leave me alone.

But from the moment our flight touched down, Lee was different. She took my hand as the pilot was maneuvering us to the Jetway. “Look. It’s snowing.”

“It was snowing in Chicago too,” I pointed out.

She shook her head and turned to stare out her window onto the dark tarmac. “Not like this. We’re skiing tomorrow.”

I stood from my first-class seat and retrieved her bag from the overhead compartment once the door was opened. “You ski?”

“It’s my favorite thing,” she said with a grin that lit her entire face.

I’d learned to ski when I was young. I was good, but she was fearless. Where I carved several tight turns down the middle of the steep moguls, enjoying the technical aspects of the sport, she found the deepest powder at the edge of the trail and pointed her skis downhill, flying just on the edge of control within a hairsbreadth of the trees. It generally took me ten times as many turns and twice as long to get down any given slope as her. Sometimes I’d stop midway and just watch her. I’d never seen her that free. We’d meet at the bottom and ride the chair back up, and she’d be grinning the entire way.

And, Christ, she was beautiful: her cheeks and nose pink with cold, snow clinging to her hair, and her eyes clearer than I’d ever seen them.

She beamed at me over dinner that night.

“You’re a slowpoke,” she’d teased. “I should have known that caution would carry over to everything you do. Even the fun stuff.”

“And you’re insane,” I’d countered. “I should have known that reckless abandon would carry over to everything
you
do.”

She took a few bites before answering. “I love the speed. It makes me feel alive.”

I lifted an eyebrow at her. “That’s not going to last long when you catch an edge and hit a tree going seventy miles an hour.”

She shrugged. “What’s the point if there’s no risk?”

“Exercise, fresh air, the view,” I said gesturing out the window next to us at the red-and-purple-streaked sky as the sun set over the cragged peaks of the Rockies.

She took in the view as she chewed. “I can get all those things jogging the paths near Lake Michigan. What I only get on the slopes is the rush that comes with putting it all out there—risking everything.”

“Who taught you to ski?” I asked.

“Mama,” she said, looking down at her plate and pushing her food around with her fork. “She went to boarding school in Italy . . . skied the Alps every winter. She was amazing.”

“Did she take you there? The Alps?”

She nodded. “It was our girls’ trip. From the time Ulie was old enough to ski on her own, Mama would take me and Ulie to Italy for spring break. Mama had an aunt there who we stayed with.” Her eyes got far away. “I miss it.”

What was painted all over her face was that she missed more than the trips. She missed her mother. The familiar thread of self-loathing twisted in my gut and I lost my appetite.

“Have you been to Aspen before?” I asked to change the subject.

She shook her head and glanced out the window again. “No.”

“Do you like it here?”

“I love it. It’s beautiful. And the powder . . .” She trailed off and rolled her eyes as if tasting something exquisite.

“Could you live here?”

Her eyes snapped to mine. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, would you ever consider leaving Chicago?” My heart hammered harder in my chest as I asked. I hadn’t planned for the conversation to take this turn, but since it had, I felt the compulsion to follow it through to the end.

Her gaze drifted past me, out the window over the gold-and-purple-tinged snow as the sky began to darken. “Maybe.”

“Have you thought about what you want out of life? In five years, what will you be doing?”

She chewed slowly then looked at me as she swallowed. “The same thing I’m doing now.”

“But you’ll be finished with school. Have you thought about marriage? Kids?”

She shrugged, separating the asparagus stalks on her plate and rearranging them self-consciously. “I don’t know.”

“But if you
did
know, what would it be?” I pushed.

“I want out!” she finally hissed under her breath, cutting me a sharp look. “I want to have my own life that’s not measured by how well I shuffle money into off-shore accounts, or how creative my accounting is.” She looked away then, out the window, some of the light fading from her eyes. “But that’s not going to happen. For either of us. You are the Savoca organization now, just like Rob is the Delgado organization. We’re all too deep into the family business to get out.” She blows out a bitter laugh. “Maybe we’ve all been in too deep since the day we were born. I don’t think this is a life that anyone just leaves.”

I reached for her hand across the table, gently drawing her eyes back to mine. “But you would . . . if the opportunity arose?”

She held my gaze without even the hint of a response, as if afraid to even think that it might be possible.

As we lay in bed that night, her hair strewn across my chest and my face buried against the crown of her head, I decided. And with the decision came a feeling I’ve never really experienced before or since. Reckless abandon. It felt the way Lee looked flying down the mountain. Exhilarating.

We landed in Chicago and I dropped Lee at her apartment. The next day, I bought the engagement ring. We had agreed, no Christmas presents.

But she was getting one.

Voices drift with the crash of the surf up to us from outside, Lee and Rob arguing, from the sound of it. Their footsteps on the porch stairs pause when a car pulls up, and then feet are rushing up the stairs.

“Holy shit,” Lee’s younger sister, Ulie, says from the door as she and Rob push through. “What are you going to do?” Her wide eyes are locked on Rob’s gun as she asks. “You can’t—”

“You have exactly fifteen seconds to tell me who holds the contract,” Rob growls as he storms the bed, cutting off Ulie’s plea.

“The hit man was Andre Yankov.”

He presses the muzzle of the gun tighter to my forehead. “I know that. I broke his neck in the family room of my father’s house. That doesn’t prove anything. Both our families have used him.”

I lift my head, forcing his hand back. “The last he was seen before that night was in Carino’s parking lot, talking to Jimmy D.”

“Our cousin?” Ulie asks, her incredulous gaze lifting to my eyes.

I give her a slow nod.

“When?” Rob asks.

“December twentieth. The night before the attempt.”

He backs off half a step. “How do I know that’s true?”

“There’s nothing I can give you to prove it, but the information came from a very reliable source.”

“Oh, well, that clears it right up.” Sarcasm drips from his words and his scowl deepens. He grasps a fistful of my hair and yanks me up by it. “So I’m just supposed to take your word that my cousin wants all of us dead?”

I struggle a little to get to a sitting position and hope I manage to keep the pain off my face. I follow Ulie’s horrified gaze to my bandages and find them soaked through with blood and dripping down my sides from Rob’s attempt to torture the info out of me. “He has a lot to gain.”

“Just fucking shoot him,” Grant says from where he’s holding up the window frame with his back, his arms crossed over his chest and Lee’s Cheetah dangling from a finger. That seems to be his mantra.

The momentary distraction means I’m not prepared when Rob’s fist smashes into my ribs again, knocking the wind out of me.

“That your best answer?” he asks, low in my ear. “Because, I’ve got to tell you, it sucks.”

For a long time, I can’t get my breath to answer.

“If you won’t talk, you’re no use to me,” Rob says, stepping back and raising his gun.

“No!” Ulie cries.

The alarm in her voice seems to jar Rob from his myopic quest. He turns to look at her and a dark cloud passes over his features. “Step out of the room, Ulie.”

“I’m not leaving,” she says, shaking her head harder than necessary to make her point.

Rob looks wildly around the room at his siblings. “Go! Both of you!”

“No!” Ulie shouts again at the same instant Lee’s voice comes from outside, frantically calling Sherm’s name.

Rob’s eyes snap to Grant and he lowers his gun. “What’s going on out there?”

Grant pulls the window open wider and yells, “What’s wrong?”

“Sherm’s gone!” comes Lee’s panicked answer.