Читать книгу Game of Lies - Amanda K. Byrne - Страница 9

Most of my life with Nick is crammed into this cabinet. When I left Constantine’s for my old apartment, all I took with me were some clothes, my phone, and the weapons Nick bought me. The gun’s locked in a box on the top shelf, next to the one holding the whetstone and oil I use to clean the knives. The knives themselves are stored in their original box, next to the supplies.

Three little boxes and a bunch of nearly new jeans and shirts. It’s so far from a complete picture it’s laughable. It doesn’t show the quiet evenings full of getting-to-know-you conversations, or his casual acceptance of my ability to take care of myself. There’s nothing of the meals I’ve made for us or the hells we’ve gone through.

Then with one move, one choice, he screwed it up.

I grab a sweatshirt and shut the cabinet doors. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe Nick did when he doped my coffee. Whatever the answer is, it’s not one I have time to search for. Isaiah’s still alive. I pull the sweatshirt over my head and go back downstairs.

The refrigerator is full, as are the cupboards. Everything I could possibly need to feed myself a healthy, nutritious meal is in this kitchen. I take out a glass and fill it with water from the tap while I debate my dinner choices. Part of me wants to be annoying and contrary and make Nick pick up take-out. He deserves it for locking me inside.

“Dammit!” Water slops over the sides of the glass as I slam it onto the counter. I promised Mom I’d stop by to see her today. She might be a member of the walking dead, but I promised. On the off chance she notices I haven’t been around, I don’t want to cause her any more worry.

Any other time, I might have waited until Nick gave me my key, shown him I’m not the selfish, immature girl he says I am, but this is my mother. The only family I have left. She trumps proving anything to my boyfriend. He’s got to have it squirreled away in one of the rooms upstairs.

The door swings open with a loud squeak as I’m hurrying toward the stairs. Nick shuts it behind him and twists the key in the lock.

“I told my mother I’d stop by and see her today. You said there was a key I could have?” I ask.

“I dropped by your parents’ house and told her you would be out of touch for a few days,” he responds. “She said she was going to visit your aunt for a while and would call you when she got there.” He starts up the stairs. “Come on.”

So Mom will talk to Nick, but not to me? The hits won’t stop coming. I follow him to the second level while trying to wrestle the hurt into place.

He opens one of the two closed doors and waves me inside. The long, narrow room reminds me of his study and the second bedroom at the condo. A U-shaped desk sits in the near corner, three monitors cluttering its surface. When he reaches under the desk and boots up the computer, the monitors flare to life.

I wander farther into the room. There’s not much else. A couch is pushed against the far wall, a neatly folded blanket topped with a pillow on one end. A duffle bag is tossed in the corner, the top of it zipped tight.

Something about the blanket and the pillow throws me. I stare at them, trying to understand what they mean. He fucked up, yes, and he hurt me, but I assumed we’d still be sharing a bed, like we have all the other nights.

I don’t want him in here. I want him next to me. I want everything to go back to the way it was. Before Turner was killed.

The only way I’ll get that is to kill Isaiah.

I relax my shoulders and turn around. “You’re still willing to work with me?”

He regards me steadily, his face giving nothing away. “Have a seat.” He points to a chair beside the desk. “Yes, I’m still willing to work with you. That was what should have happened in the first place.”

I pick up the stack of papers on the chair and sit, searching for the words to tell him why I’d done what I had. “Before,” I say quietly, slowly, “it was personal, but not…overly so, I guess. Like there was still some distance. Isaiah already admitted he underestimated me, and up until he shot Turner, I thought he’d keep doing that. After? It wasn’t enough for his men to die. I needed him to be afraid. I need him to fear me. I want him to realize that I don’t play by his rules and he made a huge mistake thinking he could get me to do things his way. If you and Constantine helped, it became too much like a business transaction.”

I look down at the papers in my hands. “You didn’t even try, Nick. You said there was an easy way and a hard way, and the hard way was talking me out of it. If you really meant to try, you wouldn’t have gone straight for the drugs. How do you know I wouldn’t have listened?”

He sighs. “Because you wouldn’t have, Cass. You plowed through those nine men with a singular focus. The Cass I know, the Cass I love, would have hesitated. That lack of hesitation proved I wasn’t dealing with her anymore.”

He’s right. There was no hesitation. My timid, remorseful self is there, though, and she likes to poke her head up at the most inopportune times. “How do I know you’re not offering to help me now so you can kill Isaiah yourself?”

“You don’t,” he says bluntly. “And I’m not going to tell you I won’t. Because if getting to Isaiah means putting yourself in danger, you won’t get anywhere near him. I’d rather have you alive and hating me than both of you in the ground. His life is not worth yours.”

He takes the stack of papers from me and shuffles through them. He finds the one he’s looking for about halfway through the bunch. “Map of the surrounding houses.” He passes the paper to me. “Haven’t had a lot of time to run surveillance on the street, so we’ll need to do that for a few days.”

I put my anger and hurt on ice and study the paper. A few days of inactivity could have the benefit of keeping Isaiah on edge. Given how quickly I eliminated the other men, he might be expecting me to rush at him. Sneaking up from the side has some benefits.

The downside is this won’t be over quickly.

“You said my mom’s leaving town?” Aunt Carol lives in Montana. Her house is near Flathead Lake, surrounded by trees. It’s quiet, peaceful, and this time of year, covered in snow. It’s also in the middle of nowhere. They could be in danger, and there’d be no one around to hear them scream.

“Isaiah’s stretched too thin, thanks to you. Going after your mother wouldn’t be a smart move on his part. I can bring her here if you’d rather.” He slides the keyboard toward him and types in a command. I scoot the chair around and lean in.

It’s a schedule, complete with approximate times and destinations. I reach for the mouse, brushing Nick’s hand in the process. The brief touch sparks a wave of longing, and I hold my breath, willing it to pass.

I could touch him. Kiss him. Let him break me down and put me back together. And if I did, I’d spend more time wondering about his motives than accepting his gestures at face value, and it would destroy whatever we have left.

It was easy to ignore his concern and affection in the first few days after Turner’s death. When I left Constantine’s for my apartment, when he started coming to me at night, little chinks began appearing in my armor. Never large enough to cause much damage, but I felt him. It didn’t take long for my brain to re-wire and accept that with Nick there I could relax, snatch those precious hours of sleep.

“I don’t get it.” I tuck my hands in my lap. “If what I’ve done isn’t sanctioned by the organization, why didn’t you stop me sooner?”

Nick’s gaze remains on the monitors, two new programs springing up on the remaining screens. “Partly because my father and Uncle Anton agreed something should be done about Isaiah’s men. And because if it had been one of my sisters, my mother, or you, I would have done the same thing.”

The muscles of his jaw twitch and relax as I wait for him to continue. “There’s this rage,” he says quietly. “It’ll burn you from the inside out if you let it fester. You should have come to me first with your new plan, Cass. Not gone ahead without me and assume I’d be there to clean up your mess.”

It doesn’t burn. It freezes. It’s this thick, heavy layer of ice that threatens to kill all the good, leaving only the bad. How does Nick know about the rage? From everything he’s told me, he’s never been in the situation I’m in. “You talk like you’ve experienced it.”

He shakes his head. “I’ve got an imagination. And I’ve seen this before. It happens every once in a while in the family.” The look he sends me is one of quiet resignation. “Everyone has the capacity to kill. Some will never need to use it. Others will channel it in different ways, becoming soldiers, terrorists, hunters. Still more will access it in a moment of fear or anger.”

A capacity to kill. We’ve exercised ours more than most. “There’s another category,” I say. “The hardened. The ones who kill without compunction.”

His eyes turn to stone, and his mouth firms into a thin line. “I’m not going to let you become one of them. I’m not letting you walk away, either. We finish this together.” His gaze flits over my face, and then his eyes meet mine. He taps the monitor with the schedule like the interlude never happened. “Isaiah’s schedule, such as it is. It’s more a schedule for the house than for him personally.”

The switch in topic almost gives me whiplash. All right. We’re done with the soft, tender portion of our talk for now. I turn my attention to the monitor. “Do we know when the LAPD schedules will change? Will Tris be on this shift for a while?”

“We don’t know, which is why we’ll be doing surveillance for a couple of days to confirm this schedule.”

I reach for the mouse again and scroll through the schedule. “I’ve seen the house wake earlier than seven. Don’t know how often it happens, but there were at least two instances where someone left before six.”

“Do you remember what days?” Nick rummages through the drawers and comes up with a pad of paper and a pen.

“One was last Friday. The other might have been this past Monday, or possibly Tuesday. Guy leaving the house was the same one both times. I couldn’t get close enough to see who it was. Dark hair, on the skinny side. Wore a dark blue windbreaker.” There aren’t enough hiding spots for me to stick around for any length of time.

“Might have been Michael.” Nick hits a few keys, and a picture appears on the middle monitor. “This him?”

“Maybe. Like I said, I wasn’t very close.”

A satellite map of the neighborhood pops up on the third monitor. He taps it with his finger. “Show me where you were.”

“Zoom in.”

Slowly, the houses and cars become clearer. I trace the line of the street with my finger, pausing in front of a house three houses up on the left, on the opposite side of the street. “Here. The owners have been out of town for the past week, so I’ve been able to use their yard to watch the traffic. Not ideal, but I’ve been able to track some of the comings and goings.” I point to the house directly across from Isaiah’s. “They were out one night. There’s a large shrub next to the front porch that provided some cover, though there wasn’t a lot of activity that night. Isaiah’s men seem to be in the house by eight in the evening.” I haven’t had a chance to pull an all-nighter, mostly because there isn’t any place on the street for me to hide. Smart choice on Isaiah’s part. The residential neighborhood limited what I could gather without being seen.

“We’ll go back tomorrow night. I’ll see if there’s any traffic cameras nearby.”

Over the next few hours, we fall into the rhythm we developed over the last few months, and it’s as though the problems of the past twelve hours never happened.

The false sense of peace continues when we break for food. “How long should we wait?” I ask, dumping the ground turkey into the skillet. “I’ve already got him on edge. I know we need more information, but I don’t think we can risk more than a few days.”

“At least three.” The look of fierce concentration on his face is pretty funny, like the pepper he’s slicing is going to jump off the cutting board and run away. “Given that Tris’s schedule could change at the last minute, we’ll need to be prepared. Constantine’s working on getting us into one of the houses across the street. Couple of vacant ones with people on vacation for the holidays.”

The mention of vacation stops me cold. I set my wooden spoon aside and turn to Nick. “I would feel a lot better if my mother were here. Aunt Carol’s closest neighbor is about a half mile away, and on the off chance Isaiah decides to go after her, they’re too vulnerable.”

He doesn’t speak, just places the knife next to the cutting board, wipes his hands, and pulls out his phone. I take it from him and find my mother’s contact information.

It rings once, twice, three times. If it gets to five, it will automatically switch over to voicemail. The ice creeps back in as it starts on the fourth ring. She’s an adult. More, she’s the one who lived with Turner all these years. I have to trust she’ll be able to take care of herself.

But I don’t think the broken shell she’s become is capable of doing that.

“Hello?”

The ice doesn’t recede completely, though it retreats enough I feel relief at the sound of her voice. “Mom?”

“Cassidy. I’m glad you called. I’m assuming Nick told you I’ll be staying with your Aunt Carol for a while?”

She sounds almost…normal. “He did. I’d like you to stay with us. It’s safer.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “I can’t,” she says at last. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I love you, but I need some time.”

Time? Time for what? What is she sorry for? “I don’t understand.”

Another stretch of silence, and her meaning penetrates. She needs time away from me. Her daughter.

The ice surges and spreads, swallowing me whole. “You’ll call when you get to Aunt Carol’s?”

“I will. I’ll call you every day at four too. It’s only for a couple of weeks, Cass. When I get back, we’ll have a long talk about what to do.” After a slight hesitation, she tells me she loves me and hangs up.

I give Nick his phone and pick up the spoon to poke at the meat.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine. She’s going to check in daily until she comes back. Are the peppers ready?” Everything is not fine.

Unfortunately, this is one thing Isaiah’s death won’t fix.