57. Caspian
Caspian
I n the doorway, Orion looked positively murderous.
But hot.
Jacob’s father hung up on him and Orion arched a brow.
“Your carelessness is what got us here,” he said simply. “Both of you.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault?” Jacob asked.
“You knew where you should have been. What you should have been doing.” He tapped his finger against the butt of his gun. “You knew you were being watched.”
“It was your job to protect him, I thought.”
Orion’s eye twitched. “You know as well as I do there’s no controlling him when he wants something.”
“Let’s not fight,” I begged, holding up a hand toward each of them. “Please.”
Orion turned his stare toward me, thankfully shoving his hand into his pocket instead of reaching for his gun. “Have you called Vanessa yet?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
I didn’t even know where my cell phone was, and I told him.
“Well, find it.” With that, he turned on his heel and stalked down the hallway. After listening to him stomp down the stairs, I sagged with relief, my arms and legs both shaking like an earthquake was rattling itself loose from the base of my spine.
“Get dressed,” Jacob said gently, reaching over and stroking his fingers through my hair. “Get dressed and we’ll figure everything out.”
I went through the motions with numb fingers, finding clean underwear and my cellphone half thrown under the bed.
I dressed and did my best to untangle my hair before brushing my teeth and giving myself one long—and possibly final—look in the mirror.
It was ridiculous how I’d gotten into this mess.
From a misguided attempt to do what I thought was right, to try and help my father save our restaurant, to being a hired assassin who was too bad at his job to have ever been offered a contract in the first place.
There was nothing about me that would have given anyone the sense I was good at the job Vanessa had assigned me. Before Vince, I’d never even held a gun, let alone used it to shoot a person. She knew when she hired me that I was going to fail. She must have known, which begged the question…
I replayed the conversations I’d had with her from the day she gave me the name to the last time we spoke. She’d given me a second chance, but…what had I heard in her voice? It was me or Vince, and she knew Orion was back. She had to know that he’d…
I punched the mirror, pulling back as it shattered onto the counter and into the sink. Picking shards out of my knuckles as I went to the bed, I grabbed my phone and called my brother. It had been so long since he’d answered, I wondered if he’d forgotten about me. Or worse, if he was trying to.
I called my dad instead.
When he picked up the phone, there was so much noise and laughter in the background, I had to pull the phone away from my ear. He laughed at something someone said before offering a gruff Hello into the receiver.
He sounded nothing like a man whose son was in hiding over a botched murder attempt. Nothing like a man who was so in debt he was about to lose everything his father and his father before him had worked for.
“Dad,” I said, voice weak.
“Caspian?” Another laugh. “I’m surprised to hear from you.”
“Surprised I’m alive?” I asked.
On the other end of the call, a door slammed and the background noise quieted down .
“I’ve always been surprised at the things you survive,” he said.
“Have you talked to my bro?—”
He interrupted me, “Don’t mention him.”
I swallowed hard, past a bit of discomfort that lodged itself at the top of my throat, making it painful.
“I’m going to finish the job, Dad,” I said, doubtful if I ever would. With Vince missing—taken by someone who truly meant him harm—there was no chance for us to entertain our little game of pretend anymore. No opportunity to smoke out the people who wished him harm and take them down at the knees.
Not like I could help with any of that. That would be him and Jake and Orion.
Men who were far more capable of that kind of things than me.
It was a wonder, I often thought, that Vince could quite literally choke the life out of another man, then turn and handle me with such tenderness.
Maybe I was an escape for him, or maybe it was the other way around.
I wasn’t sure.
Closing my eyes, I rubbed hard at them. Vince’s weak voice filled my ears, calling out for Orion…
I hadn’t understood then, but I knew now.
In his final moments, the man he wanted was his equal in every way.
The man who was downstairs, dressed and ready to go fight while I still moped around in a bedroom that would never belong to me.
The only thing I’d wanted, for so many years, was to get close to Vince Angelini, and now I had, but at what cost. It was a pipe dream to have ever thought I’d be able to kill him, to have ever imagined that me being the one to pull the trigger would offer him some kind of great mercy.
It wasn’t anything more than a fantasy I’d built in my head to convince myself I was worth something.
“What did you think the job was, Caspian?” he asked.
I could picture him sitting in his office at the restaurant, tucked being that peeling pressboard desk that he’d inherited from his father when grandpa passed the restaurant down.
“I was supposed to kill Vince Angelini,” I said. “It would pay enough to clear the debts on the restaurant, and…”
His laughter cut me off. “And you think you’re close to killing Vince Angelini? A man so heartless he shot his own father in the face?”
I swallowed hard.
“You think you’d ever have a chance to get close enough to do it right?”
“I was close enough the first time,” I snapped.
“And you fucked it up.”
“I was doing this for you,” I reminded him. “For us.”
“Were you, Caspian?” he asked. “Were you really?”