The Given (17 page)

Justin made a dissenting sound, and the man could practically see Justin's giant head swiveling on his neck like a big slab of meat. “Voluntary. He was shot six months back, made some sort of miraculous recovery—”

“I remember,” the man murmured, squinting out the window at the cold night, trying to pull the details from the vast stores of his mind.

“He was investigating the Baptista-Kolyadenko drug war. Apparently took a bullet for Craig.”

“Invested, then.”

“Not likely to turn on her,” Justin confirmed.

The man stopped pacing and closed his eyes, feeling suddenly old. Life was so much simpler back when the boys were running this town. It was easier to tell who to push and where. Men, even cops, could be as easily bought as killed, and the whole town had been smaller. More controllable. Too bad he'd never had any control back then.

He opened his eyes, realizing that he really did prefer things as they were today.

“Okay, here's what we're going to do. You stay with them. Did you put the tracker on Craig's car?”

“While they were at dinner,” Justin confirmed.

“Okay, so lay off. Don't approach them—”

“But—”

“
Don't
fucking approach them.” His voice hardened, like he'd been through fire and was changed at the cellular level. He was certainly a different man than he'd been fifty years prior, that was for sure.

“We can't go at them directly,” he explained, as he resumed his pacing. Walking, moving around, helped him think. “They're smart, and there's a bunch of them working on this now.”

“And the Sunset operation?” Justin asked hopefully. The long-running scam had earned them both a fine amount of money.

“Blown.” And he'd put a lot of time into that one. Those vulnerable trust funds had been ripe pickings for someone who knew how to hide his tracks. And this man did. “It doesn't matter. If we're patient and we stay with them, they'll do all the legwork for us.”

Craig and Shaw would lead them directly to the diamonds.

“Got it?” the man asked Justin. He was going to have to go soon. It was late, and he did need some sleep.

“Yeah,” Justin answered, but there was a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“What?” the man said coolly.

“It's just that . . .” Justin hesitated, and this time the man could see the dolt scratching the side of that big melon head. “She's not happy.”

She.
She?

“She,” the man said through clenched teeth, “is dead!”

The past, he thought, had chased him long enough, but now it was dying all around him. And
she
was a part of that.

“All right, all right,” Justin said, and the man fought the urge to put his fist through his bedroom wall. He was not going to let some twenty-first-century meathead make him lose out on his biggest racket yet. Unfortunately he needed Justin's eyes and ears right now.

The man blew out a long breath, pushing out an anger that'd been building for decades, wondering if Justin felt its singe on the other side of the line.

“All right, then,” he finally said. “Got a pen? Because I've got a plan.”

And with Justin's pen scratching in the background, the man laid out exactly what was going to happen to Kit Craig and Griffin Shaw next.

CHAPTER TEN

A
fter saying good-bye to Dennis, they all returned to Marin's town house. Kit's aunt might be unwilling to play hostess to their ragtag bunch, but she certainly wouldn't turn her niece away when she needed a place to stay. Thus, Kit took the large guest room, which left Grif to bunk up with Zicaro in the study. The old geezer claimed his side of the pullout bed by dropping his drawers and falling into the cacophonous sleep of a well-sated man. Yet even without Zicaro's lusty snores, Grif wouldn't have been able to find sleep. He'd just learned that he'd been murdered for diamonds, for money. Worse, for a
map
that he didn't even possess. Besides, for him slumber meant dreaming of the woman who was only a few steps away in the next room.

He shouldn't go in there—she'd made that clear after he'd left that lone feather on her pillow months earlier—but he also knew he wouldn't rest until he saw her one more time that night. It reassured him that she was safe. His actions thus far had altered her fate enough to have the telling plasma release its lustrous, silvery hold from around her ankles for now, but he couldn't be sure that her original destiny—to die only one day from now—wasn't still true.

Kit was already asleep when he slipped into her room. She had one hand resting upon her forehead, like she'd fallen in a faint, the other arm draped across her middle. Wishing neither to startle her nor to leave, Grif slipped across the room and tucked himself into the corner armchair to watch her sleep. Moonlight slipped through the crack in the drapes, lighting her furrowed brow, and he wished he still had the right to reach over and smooth it. If only there were a way to reassure her, as he couldn't when she was awake, that everything would be okay.

“I'm here, Kit.” He risked the whisper. “And this time I'm going to stick.”

Because along with the knowledge that he'd likely been murdered over a grab for diamonds, he'd come to realize something else in the past twenty-four hours. He loved this woman with all that was left of him. Enough, he thought, to make a shrine of his blood and bone for her. To dedicate this life to seeing her safe. Even from him.

Grif watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, ears pricked to the evenness of her breath. The movies and books got it all wrong. Virgin brides and dashing suitors. A romance made special just because it was the emotion's initial bloom. First love was a slice of life, yes, but it was more of a soft, wispy petal than the root of the thing. Mature love was what really curled a man's toes. Finding a person you could graft yourself to and be better and stronger for it. That's what allowed you to find purchase on this great mudflat.

The sad truth was that first love rarely lasted, but a union between those who'd pruned away the infatuation of youth allowed stronger emotions to sprout in its place. A good cutting could later result in a love that had no end.

His love for Evie, he now knew, had ended. He didn't think he'd have realized that if it weren't for Kit. In retrospect, Grif could admit that marrying the then-twenty-two-year-old back in 1958 had been impulsive, the folly of a young man. They'd only been married two years. They hadn't even had time to suss out each other's deeper preferences. He'd known her favorite color, red, but not the why of it. It wasn't that he didn't want to know. They just hadn't gotten that far.

And after that, after his death, it was his obsession that became his true love. He was consumed with the way his life was supposed to have been, and devoured by the regret for never seeing it through. He couldn't even say now if he and Evie would have lasted the whole of the last fifty years. Had it been a love to survive decades?

Kit had once been married as well, and he wondered if she'd understand this if he tried to explain it. Did her previous union have the same sinewy greenness to it as his relationship with Evie now seemed to have had? Did she ever feel that her marriage hadn't preceded her relationship with Grif as much as it paved the road for it?

He didn't know. He certainly couldn't ask. However, he did wish—with the same obsessive regret—that he hadn't been so in love with his own heartbreak that he forgot to look ahead. Because what he and Kit had found together—fifty years apart and from beyond the grave—had been beautiful and stabbing at the same time. Like a breath drawn after a long, hard sprint.

And wasn't that when you needed to catch your breath the most?

Grif's shoulders began to shake, but he stilled them as soon as he realized it. He wiped his eyes. Love was fine; a fact, even. But this emotion wouldn't do him or Kit any good. Fact was, Evie was still alive, and Grif was still technically married. If nothing else, there had to be an end to that before there could ever be a new beginning. So he could keep watch over Kit all he wanted, he could long for her in this life or the next, and love her for eternity. But he wasn't going to torture her with it any longer.

And
that
was really why he remained in the corner and simply let her sleep.

K
it's eyes shot open right before her phone rang. It was the dead of night, but she felt watched somehow, as if waking in the jarring brightness of an airport, and pulling her coat from over her head to find that her plane had already boarded. Yet the moonlight trailing through the curtains revealed only the unrelieved right angles of the guest room's furniture and the concave scoop of the empty corner chair. That's when her ringtone blasted the psychobilly chords of the Reverend Horton Heat.

She reached for the phone automatically, her brain still slow to realize that this particular ringtone signaled an unlisted number.

“I believe you have something that's ours,” said a low, male voice.

“Maybe.” Kit pushed into a sitting position and reached for the light. “What does it look like?”

“It's old and gray and forgot its toothbrush.”

“Oh.” Tucking the phone between her shoulder and ear, Kit scrambled for a pen and paper. “It's sleeping right now.”

“And what about you? Are you having trouble sleeping?” The voice managed to sound concerned. “Because you should be. You really should.”

Kit froze with her pen poised over her small notepad.

“You're going to need to keep your eyes open from now on. I mean every second of every day. You're not even gonna want to blink.”

Kit clenched her jaw so tight her teeth ached. She was so tired of being bossed around by faceless men with mean ambitions. The past year's events had left her with little bounce-back. Experience was supposed to make a person stronger and give them a foundation from which to bound to new heights, but Kit had taken a series of relentless hits: she'd been kidnapped by men who peddled women's flesh, and threatened by others, who poured drugs into the same. Then there was the issue of patriarchal angels who toyed with mortal lives like they were game pieces, just because they could.

And now this?

Kit pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it for a long moment. Then she hung up.

Adjusting the pillows behind her, Kit repositioned herself against the headboard. Maybe it was the wine she'd consumed earlier in the evening. Or the muted, late night hours. Or Grif's steadying presence back in her life. Yet, for some reason, the phone call didn't scare her.

Gaze fastened on the bedside clock, she'd counted to twenty before the phone rang again, but waited until the half-minute mark to tuck it to her ear. “What?”

“Have you ever been in love, Ms. Craig?”

Kit thought of Grif in the next room, but didn't answer. Seriously. Screw this guy and his threatening midnight questions.

“Because love,” the man continued, “at least, the most passionate love, comes from a deep place. It's born somewhere far inside of us, and once it takes root, it's almost impossible to ferret out.”

“Your point, please. It's late.”

“Passion
is
my point. There's passion in love, but there's also passion in hate and greed and lust. Those are all my favorites,” he said, and Kit thought, I bet. “Yet love is still the strongest passion of all. Oddly, the etymological root of ‘passion' is the Latin
passus,
and that means ‘to suffer.' That's what we really do when we love. We suffer. We submit.”

Kit said nothing at all now.

“Your aunt is the only family you have left, is she not?”

Oh, God.

“I wonder how she'd react if that fancy town house she's letting you stay in suddenly caught fire. I'm not saying it will, but gosh. What if there's a gas leak? Or an electrical cord gone bad? What if—and I know this will sound totally unbelievable—but what if some sort of rocket were to crash through that front living-room window and blow it all to smithereens?”

He let her think about that for a minute.

“I mean, that's the crazy thing about life, isn't it?” he said, his voice calm by contrast. “Anything can happen at any time at all.”

Yes, Kit thought, shaking now. Just like with her mother, attacked from within her own body. Just like with her father, assaulted on the street. Was there no safe place? Kit wondered, the thought coming perilously close to a prayer.

“One thing's for sure, though,” the man continued. “Something like that occurs, and your dear aunt Marin, your family, your
love,
will know the true meaning of passion. She will suffer. And you? You will submit.”

Kit's mouth was dry, head swimming like she'd drank two bottles of wine earlier instead of two glasses, but she managed to speak. “What do you want?”

“We will meet tomorrow at the Paris Hotel. Let's be civilized like the French and arrive say . . . after lunch? I always like to take a restful afternoon siesta.”

Kit didn't bother saying that siestas were a Spanish cultural tradition, not French. She had a feeling he already knew.

“Don't forget to bring the old man, our information, and our new friend Griffin Shaw. We're most anxious to have a little chat with him, too.”

Kit caught sight of her own gaze in the dresser mirror, and was surprised to find her exact feelings reflected there. Her eyes were narrowed and mouth downturned. She looked just a little demonic.

“Hey, Justin,” she suddenly said, and knew she'd named the right man when only silence met her words. “We'll meet you tomorrow, and you'll get your fucking flash drives, but if you hurt my aunt, your knowledge of what it means to suffer isn't going to be some dusty old dictionary definition. Trust me when I tell you . . . there won't be an angel in Paradise who will lift a finger to save you.”