She sagged back onto the couch, shuddering with sobs. When he took away his sustaining energy, she was only two feet tall, helpless and terrified. He’d gotten in her head, made himself her pillar of strength. Without him, she would become that pile of smoking rubble that all those months in the rat hole had actually made of her.
She’d thought that the way she felt now was a miraculous healing, but she couldn’t take credit for any of it. She’d just been leaning on his strength.
Now he was taking it away. Jettisoning her into outer space so that he could run off and perform his own act of goddamn suicidal heroism without any interference from her. Leaving her naked, destroyed, alone.
So unfair. It made her fucking
furious.
She got up and stomped naked through the kitchen. Wrenched open the bathroom door.
Miles had just stepped out of the shower. He stood there in a cloud of steam, towel in hand. Drops of water trailed seductively over the taut, angular contours of his powerful body. His cock, still half hard, rose to greet her.
“You bastard,” she said. “I am so angry at you.”
Miles tossed the towel away, pushing heavy, dripping hair back off his forehead. “I know just how you feel.”
“No, you don’t!” she raged. “You arrogant son of a bitch. You weren’t locked in a hole and mindfucked for months on end. You don’t know
shit!
”
His eyebrow twitched up. “Feeling sorry for ourselves, are we?”
“Shut up!” she yelled at him. “Just shut up!”
“I tried,” he said. “You followed me in here, Lara. You’re the one who wanted more.”
“I came in here to kick your arrogant ass! Who do you think you are, having a tantrum on me, when you’re the one who’s riding off on the kamikaze mission? And you have the nerve to give me attitude?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m nothing but nerve. One big raw nerve.”
His move was so swift. She gasped, and then she was pinned between the chilly tiles of the bathroom wall and his hot, wet body. Straddling him, legs over his elbows. Wide open.
“If you want to say no, say it right now,” he said. “Loud.”
She swatted his chest. “Goddamn you, Miles!”
“That wasn’t a no.” He thrust his cock slowly inside her. Withdrew, slow and deliberate, and shoved in once again, deep and hard. “You shouldn’t have come in here. Now you just deal with me.”
He blocked whatever response she might have made by kissing her. She wrapped herself around him and kissed him back.
Furiously. Clinging to his neck, fingers dug into the thick muscles of his shoulders. Tears streamed from her eyes, and she didn’t care. She wanted his heat, his light. She never wanted to let him go, never wanted those deep, slick strokes inside her body to end.
But nothing lasted forever. The explosion obliterated her.
They stayed locked together, glued. Muscles shaking, for many long, silent minutes. She sensed that the fragile bubble of perfect intimacy would pop the minute that reality intruded again.
Miles was the first to move. He glanced up at the small bathroom window. “Sky’s lighter,” he said. “It’s almost dawn. Let’s get moving.”
He withdrew from her body, setting her gently on her feet, and reached to turn on the shower.
“Miles,” she whispered, and switched to the head texting.
are we ok?
He switched the water off again and leaned against the shower booth. He did not turn to look at her. “Just because I came?” he said out loud. “No. But we can’t wait to thrash out our issues. We don’t have the luxury. Can’t put off the farewell fuck.”
She flinched back, covered her face. “Oh, God.”
He switched the water on again, testing until it got hot. “Get in,” he said. “If both of us stay quiet, we can’t say anything unbearable.”
She was surprised when he stepped in after her.
She tried turning to face him, but he turned her back, filled his hands with soap, and caressed her all over. His strong hands were magic, transmitting a tingling heat. Letting his hands say what words could not. She turned her face to the water, let it rinse away her tears.
But the water went cold, and that moment of grace ended, too.
He switched the water off. She clung to him, as the chilly water dripped around them, and hid her face against his chest.
“I’ll get on that bus,” she said, her voice choked. “I’ll disappear, like you said. But not because you commanded me to, got that? It’s because I love you. And I trust you. And I believe in you. Okay?”
He was startled into silence for a long moment. Water plopped from the showerhead, hollow and loud in the stillness. “Okay,” he said softly, kissing her forehead. “Thank you.”
She pulled away without looking at him. Once dried and out in the kitchen, Miles fished in the dryer for the clothes they’d washed. The mud had washed out, but the bloodstains had set. He yanked his stained shirt and jeans on without comment.
Lara got dressed swiftly, and groomed her wet snarls of hair with a comb she’d found in the bathroom. She helped Miles fold bedding, sweep up crumbs, wash and dry cups, pans. Silent busywork. He came down from the bedroom with a couple of oversized mens’ sweatshirts. Hers was a faded navy blue hoodie, with Lewis & Clark College stenciled on it. She swam in it. The hem hit her at mid-thigh, but it stayed put if she zipped it up and pulled the drawstring on the hood tight.
He tossed the sheet they’d used into the washing machine.
“Should we leave a note?” she asked. “To tell them we—”
“Done,” he said.
“Should we maybe leave some money for—”
“Covered. Braid your hair. Lots of wind on that bike. Gonna call Sean.” He fished out his phone, turned it on, and she waited, transfixed, while it connected.
“Hey,” he said. “So? . . . okay. Yeah, will do.”
He met her eyes. “Nothing new,” he said. “No new contact. Davy’s still out for the count. Let’s get moving. We need to rent you a car.”
“I can’t rent a car,” she reminded him. “I don’t have a license, Miles. No ID at all. Nothing on earth but what you’ve given me.”
Miles looked like he was grinding his teeth. “That sucks,” he said. “I’ll have to arrange for an ID and a debit card to be waiting for you somewhere. Without knowing where it is myself.”
The reasoning behind that struck fear into her soul.
Miles herded her out the door. Time to abandon their oasis.
The dawn motorcycle ride was like a fever dream. She held the canvas bag that held the disassembled rifle between her legs, the computer bag swinging and bouncing on her back, barely managing to clutch Miles’ waist. The air was cold, and intensely sweet. Outlines were so sharp, colors so deep, light so dazzling, shadows densely black. The gray of the sky was vast and ominous. Wind slashed icily at her face and ears. Miles’ long hair whipped back, stinging her, but she still leaned closer to smell his skin. He stared straight ahead, as laser-focused in this, as he was in everything, whether it was saving her life or driving her crazy with his body.
The Citadel was wintry. Ice-bound. Protection, as always, but no comfort. She tried to be a grown-up about that. To keep her fears pressed down deep inside.
They felt like a pot about to boil over.
25
P
etrie pushed the doorbell again, cursing as he shoved his fingers through his hair. It was a nervous habit that encouraged the hair to stand straight up, like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.
Ambivalent didn’t even begin to describe the way he felt about the phone call that had dragged him here. Ever since he’d met this crowd—an event marked by the bullet he’d taken in his lung at the Jersey mob boss’s house—he’d been marveling at the grand style of messes these people got into. They had a talent for it.
Kind of like he did himself. Like attracts like.
But this episode was so far outside the bounds of normal, he was strongly considering jumping into his car and driving away, without a word of explanation or apology. Just cutting ties. He got into enough trouble on his own. This shit he did not need.
He liked these people. He enjoyed hanging out with them. They were smart, interesting, an amazing resource. The kind of people he’d like to knock back a few beers with when things were good, and have at his back when things got weird.
But not this weird. Telelpaths? Brain-crushing psychic monsters who burst people’s blood vessels from a distance? Seriously?
He would have turned tail a while ago but for the off chance of catching a glimpse of the Snow Queen, a.k.a., the remote, sylphlike and inexplicably hostile Svetlana. The McCloud Crowd’s maiden princess in the lofty tower. The chick disdained him utterly, and did not hesitate to snub him when she deigned to acknowledge his existence at all. He was such a goddamn masochist.
“Chi e’?
” The door opened, and a wild-eyed Zia Rosa, Bruno’s more-or-less batty Italian great-aunt, stared at him, wild-eyed and suspicious. Her jet-black helmet of bouffant curls was wildly askew. “What you doin’ here, Sam?”
“Sean called me,” he explained, making his voice low and soothing. “He asked me to come here and help drive some of the kids to a safe house. He didn’t say anything to you about that?”
“I don’ know what he say to who, I don’ understand nothing,” the woman complained. Her voice was snappish, but her hands were trembling. “
Non si capisce niente.
Crazy sonzabitches, threatening little children. What kinda crazy sonzabitches would hurt a little kid?”
Petrie kept his mouth shut. In his line of work, to his great misfortune, he’d run across many crazy sonzabitches who hurt little kids. Even some who actually got off on it. He tried not to dwell on them. That stuff took years off your life.
Zia Rosa stepped back and finally let him in. The place was a madhouse. The kids had absorbed the freak-out vibe, and were running around like mad things, screaming in shrill, ear-splitting voices. In the space of eight seconds, he identified Tonio and Lena, Lily and Bruno’s twins, racing madly after Jamie, Davy’s little boy, and Maddy, Connor’s little daughter. Stubborn little Eamon, Sean’s boy, was stumbling along behind on his chubby legs, roaring in outrage at being left in the dust.
Petrie waited for the procession to go by, and turned to Zia Rosa again. “So? What do you need me to do? Where are we going?”
“Shhhh!” Zia Rosa shushed him, her dark eyes darting anxiously from left to right. “We can’t talk about it. They got mind readers!”
Petrie let out a slow, measured breath. “Mrs. Ranieri, we have to know where we’re going in order to get there,” he said patiently.
“They’ll tell us when we’re moving,” Zia said. “When we’re sure we’re not being followed. Don’t say nothin’!”
Lily came in, with tiny Marco draped over her shoulder. “Oh, Sam. Thanks for coming. Bruno said you’d drive Jeannie and Kevvie. Kev and Edie will take Eamon and Maddy, I’ll take Zia, Marco and Lena, and Sveti and Bruno will take Jamie and Tonio. We just have to wait for Kev and Edie to get here with the kids. Get yourself some coffee, there’s a fresh pot in the kitchen. I’m going to try and get Marco down so I can pack, so make yourself at home.”
She hurried off, and he wandered into the kitchen, relieved that they’d assigned him the biggest kids. Jeannie and Kevvie were smart, reasonable, young human beings. He could deal with them just fine. Infants or toddlers would have provoked instant catastrophic brain melt.
Not that he should make light of brain-melt, considering what had happened to Davy. He looked around Bruno and Lily’s kitchen, thickly cluttered with baby and toddler paraphernalia. He picked out a mug, poured some brew and sipped, wondering what had really happened to Davy’s brain. If the guy just happened to have an aneurism randomly, like anyone could have, and the arguably paranoid and volatile minds in the McCloud Crowd, Miles foremost among them, had blown up that disaster into something that it wasn’t.
Something that it could not possibly be.
He sipped coffee, listened to the constant kiddie shrieking in the far part of the house, glad it wasn’t his problem. He could hear Lily in the adjoining room, Bruno’s office, humming a lullabye to little Marco. But her singing was higher and faster and jerkier than a lullaby should be, and Marco was feeling it. He fussed and squeaked.
When he finally calmed down, Lily deposited him and hurried off to do what she could in her narrow naptime window. His coffee finished, he rinsed the cup and walked into Bruno’s studio.
The room was crowded with toy designs. Wild, colorful stuff was scattered and hanging everywhere. Heaps of paperwork lay all over the desks and shelves. Bruno ran a toy business, and Kev McCloud was one of the main designers. Marco’s bassinet dominated the room. A hanging mobile that featured what appeared to be strands of DNA fashioned out of colored beads dangled over his head.
Petrie edged closer, peeking into the bassinet. Marco was finally starting to plump up properly, get the dimples and the chubby wrist folds. He’d lost the shriveled preemie look. His round cheeks quivered rhythmically, sucking constantly on his binkie as he slept.
Cute. Petrie enjoyed kids—in small, calibrated doses. His sister’s kids, for instance, were great. But he was uncomfortable with them on a visceral level. Their vulnerability scared the shit out of him, knowing as he did just how shitty the world could be if the fickle wheel of fortune turned and dumped them down, down, down. So many dangers. Kid killers, school shootings, bullies, pedophiles, child traffickers, heroin and meth, drunk drivers, and date rape. Jesus wept.
You couldn’t pay him enough to risk it.
His niece and nephew and little Marco and the rest of the McCloud Crowd’s spawn all had better odds than most, but still. You never knew when the telepathic mind-melters were going to come along and mess you up.
The door opened, and Sveti barreled in. She jolted back when she saw him. “What are you doing to him?” Her voice was shaky.
He lifted his hands. “Ah . . . nothing? I wasn’t going to skewer him and barbecue him. I was just watching him sleep.”
She hurried over to the crib and peered in, making sure he hadn’t started the barbecuing process. “Since when have you been interested in babies?”
“I like babies just fine,” he said.
Satisfied that Marco was intact, she put some distance between them, in the usual pose she tended to strike with him. Hands on hips, tilted gold-brown eyes flashing. Looking extremely fine in her fitted black-ribbed sweater that hugged her small but very curvy frame. Hair swirling down, long and shiny and touchable. And those tight skinny jeans, wow. He longed for the back view, but was certain he’d get an eyeful of it, as soon as she minced off in a huff. He could probably start the countdown to that ass twitching huff any minute now.
“What’s eating you?” It was suicide to ask, but hey. He’d always been kind of dumb that way.
Sure enough, she looked outraged. “Someone threatened my little friends,” she said. “Is that not enough for you, as an explanation?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Excuse me,” she murmured. “Please, move. Lily asked me to pack Marco’s diaper bag. No, move the other way, please.”
She shoved him out of her way, and proceeded to start packing a big, quilted bag with baby stuff. In went the portable changing table, diaper cream, wipes, spit-up rags. She was fiercely ignoring him.
“So you think this threat is real?” he asked.
Her gaze whipped around. “You think that it is not? Why?”
That was a trick question if he’d ever heard one, but he just opted for blunt honesty. “I think it sounds nuts,” he said.
Sveti let her glossy hair swing forward to hide her eyes as she counted out a handful of colorful onesies and tiny wool socks. “I have experience in things that are nuts,” she said. “As nuts as this, perhaps worse. If Tam and the McClouds say that this thing happened, it did happen. I trust them. And I trust Miles, too.”
That needled him. “Miles? Really? You saw how he was at the wedding,” he said. “The guy’s on the verge of a psychotic break.”
“He is still my friend, and I trust him,” she said stubbornly.
Petrie wondered, not for the first time, if Sveti had a thing for Miles. Unrequited, of course, since the guy was perennially hung up on Cindy. Cindy herself had struck him as being in no way worthy of Miles’ devotion, but there was no accounting for tastes. “He’s got his hands full,” he said. “Hot and heavy with the new girlfriend that he just rescued from the black hole of Calcutta. Hell of a place to pick up chicks. Not much of an advertisement for his good judgment.”
Sveti gave him a reproachful look. “I would not make jokes,” she said. “It is not her fault, what happened to her. And I know how it is to be in a hole for months. It is not a matter for joking.”
Bring out the big guns, why didn’t she. She counted out a double handful of tiny disposable diapers, and packed them into the bag, so certain that her guilt darts had hit their mark, she didn’t even need to look up. But she hadn’t seemed upset about Miles hooking up with the girl from the black hole. She hadn’t batted an eye, in fact. Hmm.
Sveti could one-up almost anybody with her hands tied when it came to hard-luck stories. Kidnapped by a mafia
Vor
at the age of twelve, sent off to have her organs harvested in retaliation against her cop father. The father was subsequently murdered, and she was rescued at the eleventh hour by the McCloud Crowd, just as the bad guys were about to cut her heart out, but her mother had become mentally imbalanced from the tragedy and committed suicide some years after.
He figured that was what gave her the remote, tragic air. And her iron-clad moral upper hand. Hell, she was entitled to it.
But her hostility to him was still a mystery. She pushed him a little harder than she strictly needed to, to roll out the cart stowed beneath the bassinet to get out Q-tips, Tylenol drops, teething gel.
“What’s your problem with me, Sveti?” he demanded.
She waited just a little bit too long before she bounced it back to him. “Problem? What problem? I don’t have a problem.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You think I’m scum. I know I made a bad first impression, but—”
“Horrible,” she said. “Tormenting Zia with pictures of dead people. You were disgusting. Opportunistic.”
“Yeah, horrible,” he agreed. “It’s called ‘doing my job.’ It’s not a very pretty job sometimes. So forgive me, already.”
She gazed at him, her mouth a little open. Her eyes looked scared. Almost trapped. She smelled like some flower he half-recognized, a honey-sweet, succulent smell. Her cheeks had a blush of pink. And her skin was fine-grained, flawless. Somehow, he’d moved closer to her, without meaning to. There was a tiny nipple jut under the sweater. Like they’d just . . . gone hard.
God knows, he had. Like, when she walked in.
He cleared his throat. “You hate my guts.”
She sniffed. “Certainly not. I do not put so much energy into thinking about you, Petrie.”
“Wow. You cut me to the bone, Sveti.” He took a step closer, which had the effect of backing her right up to the wall. Bassinet on one side, desk on the other. Nowhere to run.
“Hold still,” he said softly. “You have something in your hair.”
It was a cheap, transparent ploy. He’d wanted to touch her hair for a couple of years now. But she didn’t call him on it. Just flinched away slightly when his fingers made contact with that miraculous stuff. Satin smooth, flashes of red in the brown. So warm. Almost like putting his fingers in a creamy, silken liquid. It made his cock ache.
Miles’ jibe at the wedding flashed through his mind, and he looked at Sveti’s pupils. Dilated. Vast velvet pools of black. Her face, so pink.
All those capillaries, expanding just for you.
He hadn’t checked the heart rate yet, but he was going to make a stab at it. Her lips were moving, like she was trying to speak, but nothing was coming out. “What?” he prompted.
She shook her head. She looked almost on the verge of tears. “I forgot my English,” she whispered.
“That’s okay,” he said. “It’ll come to you. But there’s something I need to know. Something Miles said. I was wondering if it was true.”
He eased in a little closer, inhaling that scent, for as long a breath as his lungs would expand. She wore tiny jewels in her pink earlobes.
Her eyelashes fluttered, nervously. “What did Miles say?”
He insinuated himself deeper into that soft cloud of perfumed warmth that clung to her, savoring the shocked stillness, the dazzled look in her eyes.
And then it was happening. He hadn’t made a move. It was a kiss that had been forming underground for years, and now it had burst up out of the dark, ready to rock. No slick lead-in, no careful buildup, no crafty seduction. He just went at her, fierce and dominating, kissing her like he was already fucking her. He didn’t remember deciding to stick his hand up under her sweater, cupping her tit, teasing her tight nipple through the filmy fabric of her bra. There was no calculation, no weighing if it might be too much, no wondering what he might get away with. His conscious mind had not been invited to this party.