Stepbrother Thief (28 page)

“You said if I answered your first question, I could ask whatever I want. Well, I
want,
Regina.”

I scrape the end off the cake—some fancy triple chocolate something or other—and slide it between my lips. Gill watches me the entire time, tracing my mouth with his eyes, swallowing hard when I pull the fork back out. I knew that blow job was a bad idea, but …

“Have you ever been in love?” he asks as I blink away my surprise and turn slowly to stare at him. “I mean with anyone other than me,” he adds with a smirk that doesn't quite reach his eyes. I could lie right now, play with him a little, throw him offtrack. But I don't. Why bother? I just promised myself I'd be truthful. Not a lot of good ever comes from lying.

“No.” I take another bite of cake and then set my fork down. “But that's not a very mindless sort of a question, Gill. Ask me what my favorite food is, my favorite song, ask me what your daughter and I do for fun.” I see the anger slide across his face for a moment before he pushes it back.

“If I still know you as well as I think I do, then your favorite food is and always will be cheesecake. And your favorite song … A lot can happen in ten years, but I can't believe you'd let anything kick Queen out of your top spot.
Don't Stop Me Now,
that's still your groove, isn't it?” He grins, a wickedly impish little grin, one that shaves these last ten years right off of his face. If it wasn't for the rough edge of stubble coming in on his chin, I'd still think he was seventeen.

“I …” All the things he just said are true, so how can I really respond to that?

“And my daughter,” he says, testing the words like they're foreign to him. Hey, they're even foreign to me, so I get it. “I want to know everything about her, Regina. I know it's a little late, but I still want to be a dad if I can.”

“Cliff is her dad, Gilleon.”

“Ah, yes,
Cliff,
” Gill growls, his voice taking on a rough edge. “Don't you mean
Papa
?”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I ask, my own defenses sliding into place as anger laces my voice. “Are you angry with him? With me? Because if you are, then you'd best just say something now.”

“I'm not angry with you,” Gill says, but he stands up and grabs his plates, tossing them onto the room service tray with a clink of china. His tense muscles are telling a different story than his words. “I just think my father should've said something to me is all. I can get why you didn't. Why you couldn't.”

“I
asked
Cliff not to tell you, Gill. You said yourself that knowing wouldn't have changed things, so why does it matter?”

I sit up straight and set the cake on the nightstand. Since Gill found out about Solène, we've been avoiding the issue—mostly by fucking. I don't think that's a great long-term solution.

“It shouldn't,” he says, but even though he's not looking at me, I can tell he's gritting his teeth. “But it does. I see how close you are with my dad, with Solène, and I can't help but wonder how things would've turned out if …” Gill pauses and turns to look at me, running a hand down his face. He's still holding secrets, clinging to them, and I can see why now. He's
afraid
to tell me. Doesn't bode well for me, does it? “Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm here now, I know now, and I want to be a dad to our daughter.”

“Well, that's something you'll have to earn the right to. I'm still working towards my right,” I say, crossing my legs at the knee and noticing as Gill's eyes travel up from my ankle to the swell of my calf, and towards the creamy expanse of thigh that's exposed under the bunched up legs of my shorts. “Once you get us our money, we'll find a place, and we'll start living a normal life again. If you're able to make some concessions in your work and stick around for a while, you can get to know us all again and we'll see how things go from there.”

Gill watches me for a long moment and then nods, like he's thought better about saying whatever words are hovering around his lips.

“I'm gonna take a shower,” he tells me, and I try really hard not to think about him soaping up that strong, hard body of his. “Will you be up when I get out?” I shake my head, realizing that this is a golden opportunity for me to crawl under the covers and try to fall asleep. If I wait for him to lay down next to me, I'll have to listen to the rhythm of his breathing and remember the many, many nights that we drifted off to sleep in one another's arms.

I shake my head.

“
Je vais dormir.
”
I'm going to sleep.

Gill smiles tightly at me, pausing at the door to the bathroom.

“
Fais de beaux rêves,
” he says.
Sweet dreams.
“
Ma belle petite fleur.
”

I watch as Gill disappears into the golden light of the bathroom and shuts the door behind him.

Three o'clock in the morning.

That's what time it is when Gill wakes me from sleep, wrapping a hand around my mouth and pulling me tight against his body. I know that only because my eyes have sprung wide open and I find myself staring right at the green letters of the alarm clock on the nightstand. Fear whispers through me, its cold fingers tracing up my spine and dulling any excitement I might've had at being pressed up so tight to Gill.

“Don't make a sound,” he whispers, his voice low and rough, laced through with violence. I go completely still as he releases me, sliding his hand away from my lips and rolling from the bed without making any noise at all.
How long has he been lying there?
I wonder as I stay right where am I, one leg outside the blankets, one pillow tucked between my knees, and another clutched in my arms. I've slept this way every single night since Gill left—whether I had a boyfriend or not. Apparently nobody was good enough to replace the solid feel of him in my arms.

I want so badly to ask what's going on, but I don't. I don't even turn over. If Gill wanted me to do anything but lie here, he'd have said something. So I wait there in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind racing, and I listen to the click of a lock, the slight whisper of the hotel room door sliding across the carpet.

Seconds tick past, but they feel like hours. My whole body starts to itch, my muscles cramping, suddenly desperate to get out of this position now that I know I
can't
move. This psychological torture lasts for all of about two minutes—I know that because the only thing I can do right now is stare at this damn clock.

And then I hear the first of two gunshots, whipping myself up and around to catch sight of a man collapsing to the floor in a heap. I manage to actually
see
the second shot take place as Gill emerges from the shadows like a panther, melting into the slight glow of light from the cracked bathroom door.

His face is so cold, almost inhuman. I clamp a hand over my mouth to hold back a scream as he oh so calmly levels his pistol at a second man's head and pulls the trigger. Just. Like. That.

I jump, my back slamming against the headboard as Gill's blue gaze tracks the body's descent to the floor. The sound of the gun going off is loud, yes, but not the earsplitting sonic boom that I'm used to from days spent on the range, earplugs stuffed nice and snug on either side of my head. The noise I just heard was more like a really loud
click.
I'm not an idiot—I know the suppressor on the end of his gun isn't the sole reason for the decrease in noise; they don't work like they do in the movies, where silencers turn pistols into laser guns, sending a
pew pew
noise out towards the audience. Subsonic ammo, then?

I realize that my mind is spinning with useless facts, trying to cover up the truth of the moment with shock. Who gives two fucks about subsonic ammo and pistols and the fact that Gill's tattooed fingers are still wrapped around the butt of a Walther PPQ .22? Who cares that he's standing there in the shadows between the bathroom wall and my bed, lowering his gun with muscles taut, face expressionless? I notice all sorts of random things in that moment, like how the blood from the two men is splattered on the wall behind them in a red blotch like a firework blooming in the night sky. I don't see any bullet holes in the wall or anything, but maybe it's just too dark to notice? I know subsonic ammo moves much slower than supersonic ammo. Maybe there just aren't any?

I turn my head slowly,
painstakingly
slowly, towards Gilleon.

He just
killed
somebody. Two somebodies.

Holy. Shit.

I drop my hand and take in a gasping breath that hurts my chest and makes me shudder. The sound causes Gill to jump, like he forgot I was there for a moment. I watch as he lowers the gun and turns to look at me. He must sense some of what I'm feeling because he doesn't move any closer, giving me a second to gather myself together.

Gilleon just murdered two men.

Knowing that someone's capable of something and seeing it firsthand, those are two very different things. In the back of my mind, past all of the whirling thoughts and the shock, I realize that these are probably very bad men, maybe one of them is even the same guy who tried to kill me all those weeks ago. I get it. I really do, but …

“Are you okay, Regina?” Gill asks, moving over to the edge of the bed and kneeling down to eye level with me. A few feet away, warm corpses dot the beige carpeting. I swallow hard and nod, refusing to descend into any sort of freak-out. When Gilleon came back, invited me into this, he gave me a warning, told me that something like this might happen. And I realize that ten years in this sort of lifestyle has to have led to some serious situations, but Jesus H. Christ, I've never been around anything like this before. “Just wait here and I'll take care of it,” he says, voice calm, eyes like icebergs floating in a black sea, bright around the pupil but darker at the edges.

He stands up and switches the gun out for a cell, stepping over the bodies and tucking himself in the brightness of the bathroom, so I can't quite hear whatever it is that he's saying.

I look back up at the blood on the wall again. Nope. Definitely no bullet holes. I remember reading something about how .22s are often used to assassinate people because the round gets stuck inside their skull and bounces around their brain.

I lean back and close my eyes, sucking in a big breath that turns out to be a mistake. The air smells like gunpowder and copper, metallic and tangy. I almost throw up, but push the urge back, opening my eyes and reaching out for my half-full pint of beer on the nightstand. I throw it back, sucking down the amber liquid like it's water.

When I slam it back down on the table, I can see Gill standing near the door to our room looking back at me. Half of his face is covered in shadow, the other half limned in light. It's a perfect analogy, but a sad one. Here he stands, the love of my life, a man who I'm still fairly certain is my soul mate—if one can believe in such things—and he's on the precipice of darkness, ready to topple over the edge. I've always seen him fight back against that, against the roughness inside of him, against whatever happened between the time Cliff and his mom got divorced to when he came to live with us. I know it was bad because he'd tell me his tamest stories with a frown on his face and his fists clenched at his sides. But I've never heard the worst of it.

Maybe I don't want to know. If it's taken over him so thoroughly, then maybe it really is better that he left?

No.

No. That's just me trying to rationalize what I saw. If Gill's half dark, then he's also half light. What if I gave him a push in the right direction? Even scarier, what if I
don't
? What will happen then? Will that shadow take over his face and consume him from the inside out?

“Aveline will be here in a few minutes to pick you up,” he says, his tone even and undisturbed. I stare right back at him, at the slight stubble on his jaw, the firm set of his lips. The jovial, smiling Gill, the bit of teenager that I keep seeing pop up in him, is buried deep right now. So I just nod and sit still. If Aveline's coming, then I'll wait right here until she gets to the hotel. “She'll take you home.” Gill glances down at the two bodies on the floor. “This should send Karl a strong enough message that he shouldn't bother us there. Not tonight anyway, not with Max's guys on patrol.”

I just nod again because this isn't my world;
Gill
isn't a part of my world anymore, and I can never, ever forget that.