56. Jacob
Jacob
“ G et out,” Orion said, deathly quiet and still. His gun remained leveled at Caspian and me, and the look in his eyes made it clear he wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger. Caspian trembled behind me, his fingertips pressed gently against the small of my back.
“No,” I said.
Orion took a step closer, then another and another until the cold steel of the gun was pressed against my sternum hard enough to bruise.
“Get. Out.”
I curled my fingers around the weapon and pushed my weight into it. “No.”
Something flashed in Orion’s eyes, and I saw my face, a wet reflection.
His jaw ticked, and he shoved me out of the way, advancing on Caspian before any of us realized he was moving.
Caspian hit the wall in the hallway with a painful-sounding thump, and Orion lifted the gun, pressing it against the left side of Caspian’s chest.
“This is where you shot him,” he said simply, not a question or an accusation. Just a fact. “You shot him, then you let him bleed out on your lap.
Tears slipped from the corners of Caspian’s eyes and he blinked hard, staring at Orion and holding his hands open in surrender.
“I thought it was the only way.”
“To save yourself,” Orion said.
Caspian nodded.
“And now? You’d have done it again?”
“To save him ,” Caspian pressed.
Orion scowled, some of the fight leaking out of his posture, but not the whole of it. I took a tentative step toward him and gently settled my hand against his back. He straightened and almost leaned back against me, keeping the gun pointed at Caspian all the while.
“Call Vanessa,” he said slowly. “Call her and tell her you want to meet.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because she’s either behind this or she’s not. Either way, I’m going to fucking kill her.” He jerked his shoulder, sidestepping away from my touch and lowering the gun to his side.
“Vince had a plan,” Caspian said.
“Vince is gone!” Orion’s face was absolutely frantic, swaying toward the stairs like the answer was at the front door and not in the hallway. In a way, he wasn’t wrong. “ Vince is gone. I hated his idea. I hate you. And I’m tired of waiting.”
Orion stormed off, and I barely had time to hold my arms open before Caspian walked into them and dropped his forehead against my chest. There were more tears than before, his shoulders heaving with loud sobs that sounded like they were rattling his bones.
“Where is he?” Caspian whispered, and I knew he was talking about Vince, not Orion.
“I don’t know.”
I held him a little longer, my own brain too active to stay still for long.
Daren had been right with what he said to Orion earlier.
I hadn’t been at the church. I’d told Vince at the start of this whole thing that I needed to be there, but as the nights grew long, it was hard to pull myself away from the three of them.
I found I didn’t want to go back to the uncomfortable apartment at the church.
I wanted to be in Vince’s bed, on my knees in his office.
I didn’t want the things my father wanted for me.
And I understood how Gideon and Fletcher had felt before starting a revolution that trickled through more families than just theirs.
The current situation with Vince was proof enough of it.
When it was impossible for me to stand still any longer, I pulled Caspian down toward the guest room where our things were kept.
Not like I had brought many things with me in the first place, but my cell phone was there, discarded and ignored on the nightstand .
I had one missed call from my father…from the night before.
Caspian sat down beside me on the bed and I called my father back. He answered on the third ring.
“It’s about time you called me back,” he answered.
“My phone died,” I lied.
“Busy with your flock, then?” he asked, mocking.
I looked at Caspian and told my father the truth, “Yes.”
“You weren’t at the church last night.”
“No.” I paused and swallowed. Upstairs, a door slammed.
“Where were you?”
“There’s a man I’ve been seeing,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be a priest , Jacob.”
“That’s just pretend, and he…it’s fine. He doesn’t know who I am. He just thinks he’s a man who gets to take a priest to bed now and then.”
The lie was bitter, but unavoidable.
“More than once.”
“Yes,” I rasped.
“Has Angelini come to offer any confessions since his attempted murder?”
I thought about the first night Vince and Orion walked into the church together, the way the marble floor felt against my knees and the leather felt against my back. If I closed my eyes, I could still taste the salt of Vince’s cum on my tongue.
“Yes. ”
“Did you offer him absolution?”
I scoffed. “I’m supposed to be a priest, of course I did.”
“And since then?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“I’m sure you have.”
The silence between us was deafening. The echo of Orion’s shoes grew louder as he searched us out by the sound of my voice.
When he appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, he was fully dressed.
Black slacks, black shoes, a white button-up, always rolled up to his forearms, his black leather shoulder holster secure around his back.
His face was still wrecked, but his hair was brushed, and I imagined his mouth would have tasted like spearmint.
“I was just returning your missed call,” I said into the receiver. “Have there been any updates I need to know about?”
“Nothing that concerns you, Jacob.” It was a lie. The opposite from what Daren had said on the phone. “But maybe I’ll attend your next mass and see if you offer me the same penance you were kind enough to give that bastard mafia prince.”