The Taken (29 page)

“Hey, I’m helping you.”

“Your help hurts!” she screamed, bent over herself, holding the sheet tight. Then she growled, whirling away, whirling back, all her anger turning in and around on itself. Finally, eyes stormy, she pointed at Grif. “I don’t want to hear another word about your wife and your wings and your lying mid-century ass. You’re just another man who’s afraid of commitment. Truth is, Grif, you don’t have any thrust!”

“Yeah? Well, I’m calling bullshit on your pseudo Lois Lane rockabilly self. How about that?” he shot back, then hit himself in the chest so hard that Kit winced. “Because I
was
there, I know what it was really like, and it wasn’t all Lindy Hop and circle skirts. It wasn’t different from
anything
you’ve seen in the past few days. It was just more of the same. Evie was the only good thing I had in that life, so—”

“Oh Evie this and Evie that . . .” Kit blew out such a hard breath the curls lifted from her forehead. “I swear to God if I hear one more thing about the perfect and precious Evelyn Shaw, I’ll kill
myself!
”

Grif stared, then narrowed his gaze. “You’re not going to have to hear another word about her, Kit. Guaranteed.”

“Get out!” Kit pointed to the door.

“It’s not your house.”

“I meant, get out of my life!”

And Grif stared. And then he turned.

And then he left.

Chapter Twenty-Three

K
it didn’t know why she was surprised. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been left before. But Grif’s abrupt departure was at such great odds with his actions the night before, and the silence so deafening in the wake of the previous night’s lovemaking, that she stood in the kitchen long after the front door had slammed shut, shaking with mental vertigo.

An angel.

“More like a walking plague,” she muttered, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t stay here now. So she headed unthinking, unseeing, back to the bedroom, tossing the sheet on the bed that had barely cooled from her and Grif’s intertwined bodies, and quickly dressed.

“I am not the crazy one,” she whispered, as she packed her toiletries. “And I don’t chase after men who don’t want me, I don’t allow anything in my life that isn’t greatly desired, I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Letting her toiletry bag fall to the sink, Kit stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were shadowed from too little sleep in too many nights, and the lids themselves were low and hooded . . . sexy, she thought. Or would have been minutes earlier. Now she just looked tired.

Leaning toward the mirror, she pulled her hair back from her face until it hurt, then let her fingertips trail over her cheeks and chin. Pursing lips still swollen from kisses, she then shook her head and turned away. The answers she sought wouldn’t be found in her unadorned face. Something small and unseen inside of her had her choosing men who just couldn’t seem to choose her back. Shaking her head, Kit left the bathroom, picked up her bags in the guest room, and headed back through the quiet house.

But then she spied the rickety computer cart. Biting her lower lip, Kit only paused a moment before dumping her things on the sofa. Seating herself before the desktop computer, Kit shook the mouse, bringing the machine humming to life from sleep mode. “The truth, Kit,” she told herself. “Not just the easy answers.”

She typed in “Centurions.” Nothing. “Everlast.” Nada. “You get points for creativity, Shaw,” she mumbled, then went back to her original search, back to the fifties.

Back to Grif’s stated reason for having entered her bedroom, her life—her
heart
—at all.

Kit’s stomach rolled at the image that popped onscreen. There she was, Evelyn Shaw. White-blond hair swirled just above her shoulders in a pinup pose that Marilyn herself would have coveted. The brows were penciled dark, and her eyes shone deeply as well—with color, with secrets, and with the knowledge that she absolutely stunned. Her body, slim yet still lush in a V-neck sheath, slimmed tightly at waist and neck, and her round, soft chin edged up into a full, red mouth. She was authentic, not retro.

Everything, Kit thought, that I’m not.

Kit frowned, and focused on the text. She’d missed this article on her initial search, either because it hadn’t been on the search engine’s home page or because she’d only been skimming. Of course, she’d believed she’d been looking for a long-dead grandmother. Not a wife. Not Grif’s . . . beloved.

But it wasn’t only that. She hadn’t really been taking Grif seriously. While happy to accept his help in solving Nic’s murder, and his protection in preventing her own, she’d put his request on the back burner, deeming its expiration date long overdue and therefore of little importance.

But it suddenly
was
important to Kit, and here was proof that the woman had lived—age twenty-four back in 1960, with a ring winking off her left hand, which Grif claimed was his. “I can’t believe I just got in a lover’s quarrel over a dead woman,” Kit muttered, but she kept scrolling, and reading.

And Evelyn Shaw was long dead, Kit saw, as the police report was quoted. She’d been found in a bungalow at the Marquis Hotel and Casino, with her beautiful throat slit ear to ear. Eyewitnesses said she and her husband had been downstairs gambling all night, and that her actions in the craps pit must have led to an armed confrontation in the lush, shadowed courtyard.

“Sure, blame the chick,” Kit said, scrolling until she found mention of said husband—just one line in this article, and only two words: Griffin Shaw.

Of course, it was a different Griffin, Kit reasoned, though her stomach knotted. The same man she’d already found mention of before, the grandfather that Ray DiMartino had cited at the club, and the man Tony thought he knew.

Grif and I go way back. Fifty years, give or take . . .

Tapping her fingers against the desk, refusing to accept that, Kit started a new search. This time she entered Ray DiMartino’s name, and a slew of articles came up, mostly commentary on the family’s dubious connections, and their infamous mobster past. Too broad, Kit thought, then added Mary Margaret DiMartino’s name to the mix. That limited the search a bit more, and leaning closer she began to scroll.

It didn’t take long. Mary Margaret’s disappearance back in a day when young girls didn’t disappear had been big news in this small, dusty desert town. That she was the niece of reputed kingpin Sal DiMartino made it even more remarkable. Both the
Trib
and
Sun
had covered the case extensively, though the reportage verged on gossip. What had happened to Mary Margaret? Who would be stupid enough to mess with the reputed don of Vegas’s underworld? And who would be brave enough to bring her back?

Kit followed that question to the end of the long article, written by a man named Al Zicaro, who’d apparently considered himself an expert on Las Vegas’s shady side. “Blah, blah, blah—associates, contracts, bada-boom, bada-bing . . .”

She scrolled to the last page of the article, and that’s when she saw it. Ginger hair, a hint of freckling, eyes lined with a perpetual, considering squint. The same gaze she’d stared into so deeply the night before, that’d loomed above her, giving and taking and making her forget everything but his name.

Griffin Shaw.

He stared back at her from an image taken fifty years earlier, making Kit feel like she’d been thrust through time, all reason and sense obliterated in a headlong rush into the past. When she caught her breath again, she leaned closer to the screen.

That was his suit jacket. That was his hat and tie. That was the five o’clock shadow she could still feel sliding against her slightly raw cheek. Barely breathing, Kit read the whole of the article again. Then, putting her hand to her mouth, she looked up and stared out the bulletproof-glass windows.

“Well,” she said, talking to herself again, no longer sure what was crazy. “How about that?”

Then she was grabbed from behind.

G
rif was so unsteady, his breath so tight in his chest, that he could barely locate a direct thought, much less orient himself once outside Tony’s house. It didn’t matter. He was in Vegas. He just looked up, spotted the telltale neon spires, and headed in that direction. But his mind kept going in circles.

Already regretting the things he’d said to Kit, or—if not precisely that, then how he’d said them—he shoved his hands deep in his pockets, tucked his head low, and sighed. She’d treated him more gently than he had any right to be treated, then opened to him with earth-shattering trust. It wasn’t her fault she’d been marked for death. It also wasn’t her fault she was so damned beautiful and feminine and
alive
that he’d forgotten every damned reason he was here, and had gone to bed with her.

God, he’d gone to bed with her!

Grif couldn’t wait to hear what Frank had to say about that.

That thought alone kept him from turning around and going back. He’d sworn to Kit that he wouldn’t leave her side, but that might just be the best way to protect her. Literally, starting with the moment he’d laid eyes on her, outside the window of her best friend’s death chamber, he had been Kit Craig’s worst enemy. Besides, there wasn’t even a hint of the rotting, algal, postmortem plasma stalking her when she’d wrapped her arms around him this morning. Not an ounce of the death scent that’d hunted Paul at the Chambers estate.

Kit, Grif knew, was safe for now.

But she was wrong in thinking he could just
choose
to move on from Evie’s death. She was the reason he was here, after all. The reason he couldn’t move on in the Everlast. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d be, without that reason.

So Grif headed back into Vegas’s core, hoping the chaos there would help order his thoughts. Though it was not yet full dark, the city was already a visual scream, and as Grif turned onto the boulevard, he caught it mid-shout. Tourists traipsed across intersections like colorful soldiers, moving in platoons, the city itself in command. Instead of guns, yard-long plastic cups were strapped across shoulders. The uniforms were anything but that—the pedestrians sported both glitter and jeans, and everything in between. Grif observed it all with casual disinterest, and he’d traversed the full of the Strip before realizing he was wandering with even less purpose than the slot zombies around him.

Breathe, he reminded himself, coming to an abrupt halt. The yelp behind him skittered into a curse, and he caught a glare from a couple using each other to remain upright. Grif sucked in another lungful of air and ignored them. As long as he kept breathing, he could figure this mess out.

Spotting a coffee shop across the street, Grif headed there to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a great cup of joe, then sat outside on a metal bistro set, pairing the java with a smoke. Breathing
that
in, he felt better. Now . . . what next?

Obviously he couldn’t just leave Kit wrapped up in the mess he’d helped create. Even were he inclined to let her die, as Frank and Anne wanted, he’d get no thanks for it. They’d ignore whatever obedience he’d shown and rap him about all his other mistakes instead . . . which included telling Kit who and what he was. As for Kit herself—well, she’d know him for a liar if he just stood by and let her die. He’d promised he wouldn’t, and he still meant to keep that promise.

But what was that old saying? About a woman scorned? She had her mad up now, no doubt about it. She might get over it eventually, but she wasn’t going to help him find out what had happened to Evie—or him—any longer. However, she’d given him an idea. He’d look up Mary Margaret’s whereabouts, go back to Ray for her address if he had to, and find out if she recalled anything about what had happened after he returned her to safety fifty years ago.

Yet thinking of a young Mary Margaret had his mind swinging immediately to another young, vulnerable girl. Someone else whose family should have taken care of her, but didn’t. Bridget Moore, born Bridget Chambers, should have lived a more charmed life than even a mafia princess. Chambers certainly seemed to dote on the daughter he’d been parading around the Valentine’s Day gala. So what had caused him, initially, to turn his back on his eldest?

Or had it been the opposite and
she
didn’t want anyone to know they shared the same blood? She’d changed her name and not mentioned the Chambers family connection to Kit, even when she had the chance. She could just be forgetful—maybe forgive-and-forget-ful?—but she could also be afraid.

“But afraid of who?” Grif muttered, earning a concerned glance from the beggar slumped against the coffee shop’s brick wall. Her estranged father, or the cop who’d bookended her illicit career?

“Let’s find out,” he told the beggar, who just nodded as Grif flicked away the cigarette and flagged down a cab.

B
ridget Moore was closing shop as the cab pulled up, and her shoulders sagged as she turned toward it, like she already knew she wouldn’t like what spilled from inside. Frown deepening when she saw Grif, she pocketed her keys and began walking away. Grif overpaid the driver and rushed to catch up. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t need to talk,” Bridget said, not slowing.

“People are dying,” Grif told her.

“People are always dying.”

“You can stop it.”

“Sure,” she scoffed, showing him her cool, disbelieving gaze. “And then I’ll stop time itself.”

“Look, Bridget,” he said, not letting up as her pace quickened. “We know who you are. We know your father is controlling the most powerful men in this town using blackmail and a lot of high-class hookers.” When she only walked faster, Grif stopped and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What we don’t know is how he’s controlling you.”

Bridget whirled, finger pointed like a weapon. “Nobody controls me!”

Grif lifted his chin. “Prove it.”

Defiance and fury popped into her eyes, but she drew her hands together and twisted. There were words building up inside of her like a storm, but something was still keeping them bottled up.

“I believe you when you say you’re not tricking anymore,” Grif told her, advancing slowly, giving her time to think it through. Her eyes darted from side to side, making sure no one had heard, but she didn’t bolt. “I also believe you’re your own woman and you make decisions for yourself these days. But you know what it’s like to be bulldozed. You can stop that from happening to others.”

Now she scoffed. “And I don’t believe that.”