Over the Line (6 page)

My fatal error.

Rage thuds heavy through my veins with every beat of my heart, filling me with self-loathing. I’m the player, yet she played me in every conceivable way. I deluded myself into believing I was in control, but it was always her. There’s never been a woman who’s captivated me the way she does. I was ready to turn my world upside down to find a way to make us work, despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

But all she ever wanted was revenge.

I reach behind me, not really sure what I mean to do with my Sig. Shoot
myself
seems the most likely option at the moment. Short of that drastic action, defend myself from the woman I thought I loved would be next. But I’m just remembering that I’m not packing when the blast of Lee’s Beretta rips through the quiet of the room.

Someone lights a match in my chest. I can’t breathe.

The force of the blow knocks me back a step. I stagger against the doorframe and watch through graying vision as she lowers the gun and brings a hand to her shocked face.

The room flashes light then dark and static fills my head. I close my eyes and slide to the floor. Her scent, vanilla and honey, wraps around me and I feel pressure on my chest. She’s saying something quickly but quietly, like a whispered prayer, though, through the ringing in my ears from the blast, I can’t hear what she’s praying for.

I try to open my eyes, to find the face I came all this way to see, but my lids are too heavy. I feel like I’m wired wrong, all my synapses firing to someone else’s commands. I twitch as the static grows louder and fills me from head to toe. My body is nothing but a mass of chaos.

Until everything suddenly stops.

Lee

All I can think when I realize I’m not dreaming and Oliver is real is that he knows what I’ve done to him and he’s come to kill me.

I’ve always known exactly who contracted the hit on our family and why, but I didn’t share that information with Rob. If he’d known for sure Oliver was responsible, he might not have left with us. He would have stayed and fought back. As long as he wasn’t sure which direction the threat was coming from, he had no choice but to run. So far, Rob doesn’t have a clue. Everyone thinks it was revenge on Papa for breaking omertà, the mafia code of silence, and turning over evidence that sent Oliver’s father, Victor Savoca, to prison. Only Oliver and I know the real reason he wants me dead.

We stare at each other forever, and my heart pounds out of control. I’m charged like a live wire. He’s already tried to kill me once, so when he reaches for his gun, I don’t hesitate. My finger tightens on the trigger, and the next second thunder echoes through my head as my Beretta kicks back in my hand.

Oliver staggers against the closet door. It’s only as his eyes close and he slips down the frame to the floor that I realize he doesn’t have a gun.

A red bloom forms on his white dress shirt, jarring me out of my shock.

I drop my gun and grab my leggings from the floor as the bloom becomes a gush. I press them hard against his chest. It’s only when spots flash in my eyes and the room starts to tilt that I realize I’m hyperventilating.

“Calm down,” I breathe. “Calm down.”

It finally occurs to me through my panic that I need to call an ambulance. My phone is downstairs. I lift my leggings off Oliver’s chest and blood pours down his side, pooling on the hardwood floor. I cover him again and lean all my weight on his chest.

That’s when the full gravity of the situation hits me. Oliver is here. He found us. And I’ve just shot him in the heart.

I’ve killed him and we need to get out of here.
Now
.

I need to find everyone. Get them back here. One call to Wes and he’ll have us on a plane back to WITSEC Safesite within hours.

I let go of Oliver and bolt down the stairs to retrieve my phone. I dial Rob, but it goes to voice mail.

“Damn.”

I start to dial Ulie, but notice the blood I’m smearing all over the phone.

Oliver’s blood.

My breath catches on a sob. I cover my face with my hand and focus on pulling myself together. Once my legs stop feeling like they’re about to buckle out from under me, I weave my way back to the stairs.

Oliver is right where I left him: dead on my floor in a pool of blood.

Tears well in my eyes as I kneel down next to him. I lift his hand to my face, press my lips to his knuckles as tears force their way out of me. “You stupid bastard.”

But as I kneel in front of him, I notice his chest still rising and falling. I lower his hand and press my fingers to his neck. Not only does he have a pulse, but it’s strong.

“Oh, God,” I breathe, pulling open his shirt. I use the edge to wipe away the blood so I can see.

There’s a small round wound at the bottom curve of his left pec, just below the nipple. Instead of gushing, it’s more oozing blood now. About three inches away, around the side of his rib cage, is the wound that’s bleeding more. As I dab at it with the tail of his shirt, I realize it’s an exit wound. I don’t know how, but the bullet took a turn.

He’s not dead.

I sit back on my heels and hang my head. “Thank God.”

I pull myself together and run for the bathroom. I’m back a minute later with a pile of towels and first-aid supplies. I’ve been sewing Rob up since we were teenagers, but he’s never had anything like this.

My hands shake as I clean him up with a damp facecloth. I pour hydrogen peroxide over the wounds and disinfect them with Betadine before slathering antibiotic ointment all over them. By the time I’m done, the bleeding has slowed to just a trickle.

I rig pressure bandages over the wounds with cotton balls and Band-Aids, then tape gauze over the whole mess.

I sit back on my heels and start to dial Rob again, but then disconnect. Because one thing I know beyond a doubt: if Rob finds Oliver here, he won’t wait to see if I’ve killed him. He’ll do it himself.

I work Oliver’s shirt and pants off and clean him up, then decide he can’t stay on my floor. I drag him by the legs because I figure it’s probably better than the arms, and I get him to my bed that way. Getting his two hundred and twenty pounds onto it is another trick. I end up sitting on the bed and using my legs like a ramp to inch him up, but that entails grasping him under the arms, and by the time I get him onto the bed, he’s bled through the dressings I just put on.

I re-bandage him and apply more direct pressure to stop the bleeding. When I think it’s back under control, I dig in my drawer for a pair of silk scarves. I use one to tie his hands together and another on his feet. Just in case he wakes up. Then sit back and breathe, trying to sort out what happens next.

My eyes sweep over the familiar landscape of his body. The long jagged scar along his left bicep and another to the right of his navel reveal that Oliver hasn’t always come at his mafia obligations with a pacifist’s heart. His ripped biceps, defined pecs, and chiseled abs tell me he’s stayed ready for the fight, even though he hopes it will never come.

As I trail a fingertip along the scar on his bicep, the memory of the first time I ever did this surfaces in my mind like the
Titanic
back from the dead.

“Let me guess,” I’d said.

It was the last warm day before winter tried to kill us with chill winds off Lake Michigan that cut to our bones. Every native Chicagoan knew it instinctually. Oliver and I weren’t the only Kellogg students who had wandered out to Deering Meadow, outside the library, and settled onto the lawn. Despite the fact that our presentation was only three weeks away, our business law textbooks lay open and all but forgotten as we basked in the last of the dying summer sun. Oliver had pulled off his shirt, giving me my first real look at him.

“Guess what?” he asked without lifting his head out of where it was propped in his hands, his fingers laced behind him.

I lifted my hand and ran my fingertip along the scar. “Knife fight after school in ninth grade when some tough-guy biker senior dissed your family.”

That was Rob’s story for his first major scar. Defending Papa.

Oliver opened one eye and looked at me. “Tenth grade. Victor sent me on a job with Jonny Gott. Drug thing.” He closes his eye again. “Went bad.”

I reached for the one on his stomach, brushing my finger ever so softly over it. His abs tightened and his nipples pebbled as goose bumps rippled over his skin with my caress. I suppressed the smile. “And this one?”

He opened his eyes and rolled on his side, propping his head in his hand and quirking a brow. “If you’re looking for an excuse to touch me, I can think of about a thousand better ones.”

My lips curled in a smirk and I pulled my book closer. “In your dreams, Savoca.”

In actuality, it was
my
dreams. I did want to touch him. Badly.

An electrical current had been building between us since the beginning of the semester. I could feel it reaching critical mass, like a lightning bolt preparing to discharge. I knew if I gave in to it, the results would be spectacular.

But I couldn’t give in.

This was how Oliver played the game. What he didn’t know was he was playing on
my
game board. I needed to let him feel like he was in control, all the while, giving him
none
.

The door downstairs opens and I spring off the bed.

“You weren’t kidding about the gas,” Ulie hollers up the stairs. “I forgot on the way out and almost didn’t make it back. Filled the tank at Murdock’s.”

I slip out the door and close it behind me. “Thanks,” I call down the stairs on my way to the bathroom. I clean myself up and change, then find Ulie in the kitchen. I’m still shaking and I hope she doesn’t notice. “You get everything you needed?”

“Yeah,” she says, pulling groceries out of bags. “This shouldn’t take long. Maybe an hour.” She scowls at something on the island. “What’s that?”

My heart stutters when I follow her gaze and see the smear of blood on the corner of the island, where my phone had been charging. “One of the boys must have spilled something.”

“It looks like blood,” she says, moving closer.

The paralyzing panic fades enough that I can move. I grab a paper towel and wet it, then wipe down the mess. “Maybe one of them cut themselves down at the beach.”

“I just wiped down the counter before I left,” she says, shaking her head.

I toss the red-stained paper towel in the trash and shrug. “Don’t know, Ulie. Maybe you missed it.”

“Maybe,” she says, turning back for her groceries.

“I’ve got a ton of work, sorting through Polly’s books and receipts for the last year,” I say, backing toward the stairs. I need to get out of here before she notices I’m flipping out. “Just yell up when dinner’s ready.”

When I get back to my room, I sit next to Oliver and check his pulse again. He’s pale and his skin is cool and clammy, which sounds right considering the volume of blood I mopped off the floor, but he’s still got a steady heartbeat.

I bag up all the bloody bandages and towels and throw them in my closet to take out to the trash after Ulie’s gone from the kitchen. I go through Oliver’s pockets. He’s got his phone, some cash, and the key to a rental car. No gun.

Does this mean there are others coming?

I know the smart thing to do is call Wes, give him Oliver, then take my family and run.

I move back to the bed and look down at him. I sit and trail a finger along the bandages on his chest, then higher, over his short, dark beard.

There is no Savoca army storming the house, so maybe he’s alone.

If the hit on my family is revenge for what I did to him, I can end this now.

But I have to know.

Which means no one else can know he’s here until I figure this out.

***

I’m sitting in the armchair in the corner of my dark room, listening to the roll of the surf through the open window and staring at Oliver. He’s feverish, alternately sweating and shaking, and an ugly bruise is forming on his chest. I have some antibiotics they gave Rob at Safesite after he’d been shot saving us from the hit man, but they’re pills, which means Oliver would have to swallow them. I’ve tried to wake him to no avail.

It’s nearly midnight when I hear Rob roll up the drive. Out in the run, Crash starts barking and I hear Burn whine for Sherm. Ulie is downstairs, watching some horror flick on TV. I listen as Sherm lets the dogs out of the run and they all come crashing through the front door.

“Why were the dogs still out?” I hear Rob ask downstairs.

“Lee never brought them in,” Ulie answers after a beat.

There’s a scramble of feet on the stairs, both canine and human, and then Crash is barking outside my door. My heart leaps into my throat and I bolt out of the chair when I realize what’s about to happen. I’m already halfway across the room when the door is cracked open. I get to it just as Crash barrels through. I grab the dog’s collar and the door at the same time, before it flies wide, and tug the dog back through into the hall, closing the door behind me.

“I told you Crash isn’t sleeping with me anymore!” I bark at a grinning Sherm.

The smile drops off his face, and instantly I hate myself. It’s been so long since I’ve seen this poor kid smile like that, and now I go and bite his head off.

“Sorry, it’s just . . .” I take a deep breath. “He should stay in your room with Burn at night.”

I glance back at my door, cursing myself for not installing locks on the bedroom doors when we moved in, then guide Sherm toward the bathroom, taking the Disney bag from his hand. Burn follows on Sherm’s heels, but Crash is pacing my door, still barking.
Shit
, I hate that dog.

“How was Disney?”

“Good,” he says, his head drooping.

Again, I want to rip my heart out and feed it to Crash for ruining this for him.

“Brush your teeth and get ready for bed, then I want to hear everything,” I say, nudging him through the bathroom door.

Burn pads into Sherm’s room and curls up on the floor at the foot of his bed. I turn for my room, where Crash is still barking at the door.

“Why can’t you be more like your brother?” I grumble, shoving him toward Sherm and Rob’s room.

Feet on the stairs alert me to my older brother’s presence, and the shaking I was just getting under control after my near miss with the dog starts again.

“Sherm said you had fun,” I say as Rob’s bulk fills the hallway at the top of the stairs.

He gives a non-committal shrug. “Happiest place on earth.”

I wave a hand at him and roll my eyes. “I can see you were overcome with joy.”

He huffs out a laugh as he ducks into his room. “Yeah. Overcome.”

“Did you take pictures?” I ask, propping myself in his doorway.

He strips off his T-shirt and tosses it to the floor. “Adri did.”

“Of course.”

He glares at me as the bathroom door swings open and Sherm emerges. Burn bumps my leg on the way to him, only to turn around and bump me again as Sherm passes into his room.

“What’s with the dog?” Rob asks with a jut of his chin at Crash, who’s still pacing my door. He’s given up the barking for a low, throaty growl.

“He’s
not
sleeping in my room!” I realize I might have overplayed that when Rob’s brow arches. I clear my throat and lower my eyes so he won’t see too much. “I said that when we changed rooms. He needs to stay with Sherm and Burn.”

“And me,” Rob grumbles.

“And you,” I confirm, happy to toss the ball back into his court. “You’re the one who brought them home in the first place, don’t forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” he says, brushing past on his way to the bathroom.

As Rob gets ready for bed, I sit with Sherm and coax details of the day out of him. He shows me the framed picture of him and Rob on Space Mountain. He tells me how Adri bought it and Rob got pissed because he said it was a lousy picture. When I look again, I see why he thinks that. Where everyone around him, including Sherm, is waving their hands in the air and grinning, Rob is gripping the harness in wide-eyed terror.