26. Caleb
26
CALEB
Terry hasn’t just shown up armed; he’s brought an entire fucking army with him. No one messes with Terry Keegan’s family and walks away from the scene.
He approaches Lev Petrov, Kyle a couple of steps behind him while Cash and Bash surround the warehouse. His glance slides my way, noting the men flanking me, and the cuffed wrists, before settling on the man calling the shots.
“That’s my stepson you’re holding against his will.”
“We had no choice. We did it for his own protection.”
On cue, the men step away from me, and someone else unlocks the cuffs around my wrists. Terry’s eyebrows raise in question at me, and I nod in response. The pain is still reverberating around my skull, but I can live with that so long as Victoria is safe.
“So, you’ll stand aside?—”
Terry doesn’t finish because that’s when the gunshot reaches us from inside the warehouse. A second shot follows almost instantaneously. Everyone reacts at the same time.
I run towards the entrance, surrounded by the thud-thud-thud of heavy footsteps. There are men on the roof, impossible to tell which family they belong to, shooting open the skylights. Lev’s men shoot the doors open on both sides of the building and storm inside in battle formation.
My heart feels like it’s in my throat. “Stay back,” Terry yells, but I’m not listening. I can’t hear any more gunshots from inside, but one is all it would take to shatter my future to smithereens.
Windows smash as I run along a narrow corridor behind Terry and his guys. I don’t often pray, but right now I’m praying that it was a warning shot. Olivia must know that she’ll never get away with this. She’ll have the Petrovs and the Murrays hunting her down, and she’ll never be safe to roam the city streets again.
Terry and his men pause outside an internal door. Their faces are expressionless; this is just another job to them. They’re simply following orders: protect their own and shoot to kill. I don’t know where Lev’s men have gone, but I’m guessing there’s more than one way into the warehouse. Terry’s eyes meet mine, and then the men are spilling through the door, weapons raised, trigger fingers ready.
Voices. “Don’t shoot!”
Another, more familiar voice yells, “Hold fire!”
My stomach lurches upward with an image of Victoria lifeless on the floor of the warehouse, Olivia Dragonetti standing over her with a smoking gun in her hand. Terry won’t be able to stop me. He’ll have to shoot me himself if he wants to keep my hands off her. My fists are already clenching in readiness to squeeze her neck until her eyeballs pop.
So, it’s several moments before my brain can process what I’m seeing when I storm into the storage unit behind Terry. They spread out in formation, their weapons still raised, as the silence settles around the scene in front of us.
My eyes seek out Victoria and find her in a corner of the unit, on her knees between Sienna and Mason. She’s so busy scanning the faces of the armed men who continue to spill into the building that she doesn’t spot me at first, and for a couple of moments, I have her all to myself. She’s searching for me. She knew that I would come, and there’s no fear in her eyes, only anticipation of the moment when she finds me.
It doesn’t matter that she’s on her knees on the filthy floor, or that her hair is disheveled and half-hanging out of a loose ponytail, or that her face is smudged with dirt. She is, and always will be, the most beautiful woman I have ever set eyes on, and when she looks at me, my chest feels like it will explode.
Knowing that she is safe, my pulse settles into a steady beat. We heard gunshots. I scan the warehouse now for a body, blood, the perpetrators. Ivan is flanked by two men with similar dark looks and black clothes. His left hand is clamped over his upper right arm, blood oozing between his fingers. But it’s the old man walking unsteadily towards us carrying the body of a woman in his arms that snags my attention.
Don Dragonetti’s face is ashen; his cheeks have hollowed out since I last saw him, and deep grooves are etched across his forehead. In his arms, her legs dangling against his thigh, is his daughter Olivia. It’s obvious that he is struggling to carry her, but there’s a determination, a fire behind his eyes, that prevents anyone from interfering.
Terry and his men stand aside for him to pass. The Petrovs form a line opposite us, and the don keeps walking, accepting the gesture of peace, his pace halting. As he passes, he catches my eye and nods once, and I don’t try to stop him. He’s a proud man from one of the original Italian mafia families. I don’t know what happened to Olivia, but the other families will offer him the privacy and respect he deserves; whatever went down here, Olivia is his sole heir, and he will accept the consequences of her actions.
I watch Lev Petrov open the door for Don Dragonetti to leave. The area was secured by the Petrovs before I arrived, but it’s obvious now that the don’s arrival was part of the plan Lev refused to discuss with me. He will be free to leave, and the two remaining families will clear up the mess.
“Go get her.” Terry places his warm hand on my shoulder before following Lev outside.
Victoria watches me cross the room, her eyes large with tears. I help her onto her feet, run my fingers through her hair, and press her body against mine. I hold her close and breathe in the smell of her and make a silent vow to never let her go. She’s trembling, but she pulls away so that she can look at me.
“Caleb, I’m so sorry?—”
“Hey.” I cup her face with both hands and kiss her on the lips. “You don’t have to say anything.”
Her eyes grow large with tears. She throws her arms around me and rests her head on my chest, and I hold her while she lets it all out, and the warehouse starts to empty.
Eventually, she pulls away from my embrace and wipes her cheeks with the back of her hands. With a tentative smile, she slips her hand into mine and takes me to Sienna. Ivan and his stalker-friend are already carrying an unconscious Mason outside. I trust that he’ll be in capable hands.
Sienna leans against Victoria for support, gripping her hand tightly. Her face is grimy and streaked with tears, her hair matted, and I can see the livid skin above the neckline of her sweater from the burns she suffered in the wreckBut she’s a striking woman, and there’s something familiar about her that I can’t quite place.
“Caleb, this is Sienna. She was in the car crash with Kyle on New Year’s five years ago.” She hesitates. “Kyle told me all about it.”
I don’t hear Kyle come up behind us until he’s standing beside me. “Ruby?”
There’s a tremor in his voice that makes me want to wrap him in cotton wool and protect him from the rest of the world. He’s a grown man, a brilliant and intelligent lawyer, and a loyal friend to everyone who knows him, but I will always feel like a superhero in his presence.
Sienna winces as if in pain. “You… You don’t look any different.”
“Apart from the hair.” Kyle rubs his hair self-consciously. He stuffs his hands inside his pockets and pulls them straight back out again, tugging the hem of his jacket. His eyes are all over the place, anywhere but on Sienna.
I step in; someone needs to give him a helping hand. “I’m Caleb, Kyle’s brother. Sienna, meet Kyle; Kyle, meet Sienna, not Ruby Tuesday or Wilma from The Flintstones .”
“Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” She chews her bottom lip in a habit that mimics Victoria’s, and eyes up Kyle from beneath lowered eyelashes. “I thought…” Her already raspy voice cracks. “You probably don’t want to know what I thought.”
“Victoria told me.” Kyle seems to jolt to life and takes her hands, folding them between his own and raising them to his chest.
I’ve never seen him like this with a woman. Nervous. Timid. Frightened of saying the wrong thing. I mean, I know how much he struggled after the accident, but he never once expressed his feelings about Sienna. I thought it was all guilt.
“I never…” he begins. “I would never… I believed that you didn’t make it.” His voice trails off.
“His brother checked your pulse,” Victoria says. “Or rather, he couldn’t find one. I believe them, Si.”
Sienna closes her eyes, tears spilling over her bottom lashes. When she opens them again, she’s shaking her head, and it’s as if she has already checked out, already dismissed Kyle from her life a second time, as she snatches her hands away.
“Sienna, I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through.” I glance at Victoria, who is fighting to hold back her own tears. “My brothers should’ve pulled you from the wreckage. In hindsight, well, it’s as much my fault as theirs. I’m not making excuses for them. They thought they were doing the right thing by calling the emergency services and removing Kyle from the situation. If they’d been able to get hold of me, I’d have told them to stay with you.”
Would I have told them to stay with her? Hindsight has a habit of distorting the past to resemble something that doesn’t keep you awake at night. I’d have told them to pull her from the wreckage. I hope. But I know Kyle would’ve been my priority too, as it was for Cash and Bash.
Family first.
“Can you forgive me?” Kyle’s voice shrinks almost to nothing.
“I don’t know. I can’t just erase five years of knowing what you did to me.” She inhales deeply, and her shoulders slump on the exhale. “It isn’t just about that. It’s all this too.” She peers around the warehouse. “I don’t know if I can … live like this.”
“It isn’t always like this,” Kyle says. “I promise you.”
“How can you promise that?” she snaps. “Victoria meets your brother and the next thing I know, she’s married, and I’ve been abducted along with her brother.” Sienna’s voice is hardening.
“Why don’t you ask Victoria how she feels about me,” I suggest.
Victoria blinks, gap-mouthed, like I just told her to stand up and sing opera in front of an audience.
“V?”
All eyes are on Victoria, but she only has eyes for me. “I-I don’t know how I feel about this way of life, but I do know that when I’m with Caleb, I feel safe, and beautiful, and desirable. I feel like anything is possible and that he will always be there to catch me when I fall. And if this way of life is the price I have to pay for falling in love, I’d pay it a million times over.”
I must be grinning. Victoria comes to me, stands on tiptoes, and kisses me on the lips, and I find myself whispering, “I love you too, mo chroi,” without even thinking about how those words will change my life. I should’ve told her sooner. I had the opportunity on the Byway, and I let it slip through my fingers. Maybe if I’d grown a pair of balls and acknowledged how she’d flipped my world on its axis, we wouldn’t be here now, but we don’t dwell on maybes. We forge our own paths, and we don’t look back.
“Please, just give me a chance,” Kyle says. “That’s all I’m asking. A chance to prove to you that I’m not an asshole in a dumb wig and costume.”
“Yeah, that was all my idea too.” I wrap an arm around Victoria’s shoulders and hold her against me. It’s where she belongs. It’s where she’s going to spend the rest of her life, if she’ll have me. “I was Danny Zuko, and Kyle was Kenickie. I thought it would be fun to be someone else for a night. Incognito. Just two regular guys who wouldn’t be recognized.”
Only, I hadn’t counted on bumping into Sandy. Not that it matters now that I’ve found Victoria. For the first time, I can think about it without even wondering what Sandy is up to anymore.
Victoria unfolds my arm from around her shoulders and peers up at me. “Say that again,” she whispers.
“Which part?”
“The part about being Danny Zuko.”
“I knew it!” We both turn around and stare at Sienna. “Black wig, leather jacket. I knew you looked familiar. Danny Zuko, meet Sandy. Sandy, meet Danny Zuko.”