Chapter 2
2
Sitting next to Alexa on the beach, Elise zipped up her jacket as a harsh breeze rolled in off the water. It was almost May, nowhere near summer in Boston. It wouldn’t get truly warm until July, but it was nice not to be freezing, nice to feel winter receding like a bad memory.
She watched as her sister Julia walked down the beach with John-Thomas, Elise’s nephew. At two years old, JT had lost the drunken sailor gait that characterized his first year of walking. Now he pulled on Julia’s hand, breaking free and running down the sand ahead of her.
Julia’s laughter carried across the beach as she took off after him, pretending to try and catch him while he giggled hysterically.
Elise smiled. It was hard to imagine Julia as she’d been before, guarded and cynical, mostly from all the years she’d spent bailing Elise out of trouble. Watching her sister become a mother — a wonderful mother — had been one of the only good things to come out of Elise’s kidnapping two years earlier. That and the Murphys — Ronan Murphy, who was an amazing husband to Julia and father to JT, and the rest of the family who’d welcomed Elise and protected her when she’d needed refuge, even before Finn had showed up a few months ago.
She still got a flutter of excitement in her stomach when she thought of him, but now there was something else too.
Worry.
Worry over what holding Eudorus hostage was doing to Finn. Fear that it was changing him in ways that would reverberate for the rest of his life.
“Something on your mind?” Alexa asked next to her.
Elise looked at her, sitting in one of the beach chairs they carried down to the water, her long legs stretched out in front of her, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “Yeah.”
“About Finn?” Elise nodded and Alexa slid her sunglasses to the top of her head to reveal blue eyes so piercingly light they were otherworldly. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a few strands had blown loose around her face. “Want to talk about it?”
It was one of the things Elise liked most about the Murphys — the brothers and the women who were their wives and girlfriends. They were always there if Elise wanted to talk, but they were respectful of privacy too, probably because of the nature of their work.
Elise hesitated. There were no secrets in the Murphy family. Not really. They would give you all the space you needed, but if it had to do with the family or the family business, everyone knew what was going on even when they didn’t talk about it.
“How much longer can they keep this up?” she asked.
Finn and his brothers had had Eudorus at the mountain house for three weeks, and other than a few mumbled words that had so far proven useless, they’d gotten nothing out of the man.
Alexa shook her head. “I don’t know. Not much longer, I think.”
“It’s taking a toll on Finn,” Elise said.
Alexa looked at her. “Finn can call it off at any time.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t think he wants to call it off. I’m not even sure he’s capable of calling it off.” Elise paused. “It’s destroying him, but he’s in too deep to see it.”
“Dec said the same thing to Nick,” Alexa said.
“He did?”
Alexa nodded. “Dec said he was going to try and get Finn to come back to the city for a few days, take a break.”
Elise shook her head. “He won’t do that.”
“Nick agrees with you,” Alexa said.
“What does he think about it?” Elise asked.
Nick and Alexa were practically the same person — stubborn enough to have it out now and then, smart enough to give each other a run for their money, but ultimately so much alike they couldn’t be mad at each other for long.
Whatever Nick thought about Finn, Alexa would know, even if Nick hadn’t told her.
“He’s worried too, but ultimately, it’s Finn’s call. Everyone else is essentially working for him,” Alexa said.
Normally Elise would have balked — none of the Murphy brothers would take orders from Finn, who was the youngest and who’d been gone eight years while they built MIS.
But they were keeping the man named Eudorus prisoner because he was the only lead they had on the people behind the murder of Finn’s friends in Ukraine. And they were doing that because Finn had asked them to.
“But that can change right?” Elise asked. “Ronan, Nick, and Declan own MIS. They can pull the plug if they want.”
“Is that what you want?” Alexa asked.
Elise looked out over the water. She was glad it just her and Alexa. There was too much baggage with Julia — they were sisters after all — and Kate, Declan’s girlfriend, was a pragmatic businesswoman who made tough decisions on a daily basis and with a minimum of emotion.
Alexa had been one of the state’s top lawyers at the Attorney General’s office before she’d left to be with Nick, but she had a softness that helped her walk the line between logic and emotion.
“I don’t know,” Elise said. Finn was only in Boston to figure out who had been behind Fedir and Iryna’s murder. He’d been honest from the beginning about his plan to leave again once he brought the murderer to justice.
“You don’t want him to leave,” Alexa said softly.
Elise shook her head. “But I’m not sure it’s good for him to stay.”
She wasn’t sure it was good for her to stay either. It had been two years since she’d been rescued by the Murphys from the trafficking ring that had kidnapped her.
Two years of therapy.
Two years of nightmares.
Two years of anxiety.
She was better now. She could be honest with her therapist — and with herself mostly — about what she was feeling. She could breathe her way through the aftermath of a bad dream. She could talk herself down from a panic attack when she got lost.
But the thought of leaving behind everything that was familiar, of striking out on the open road with nothing but a backpack like Finn, was terrifying. And besides, Finn hadn’t asked her to go with him.
Sympathy shaded Alexa’s eyes. “I’m sorry. That really sucks.”
Elise nodded. “I just want him to be okay, you know?”
“I do,” Alexa said, “but that’s not up to you.”
She was right, but that didn’t make it easy to hear. “I know.”
Julia’s voice came to them from the waterline and Elise watched as she scooped up JT and carried him toward the chairs where Elise sat with Alexa.
“I can’t wait for summer,” Alexa said.
“Me too.” Summer was Elise’s favorite time of year with the Murphys. It was the season of all-day frisbee battles on the beach followed by lingering meals on the patio of the house they shared, the season of piling onto sofas in the great room with pizza and beer to watch baseball or reality TV.
Now she couldn’t help feeling they were on the cusp of change. Nick and Alexa would be moving out of the big house to move into their brownstone down the street. Soon — hopefully — they would adopt a child.
Declan and Kate were having another baby in June, and Declan had already moved out of the house to live with Kate at her family’s estate in Marblehead.
Ronan and Julia were Elise’s family. They’d never put a time limit on her living with them, had always made it clear she was welcome to stay as long as she liked. The house was more than big enough to accommodate them, and there was a lot to like about living with her sister and getting to be with her nephew every day.
But the thought of being the only one at the house after Finn left Boston made Elise want to scream.
Something had to change. Quitting her job at Fringe, the boutique where she’d worked since her rescue, had been a good start, although she hadn’t really had a choice after her new boss sexually harassed her.
She could move into her own place, but somehow that felt like defeat instead of progress, like admitting she would always be right here in Boston, walking the same streets where she knew every store, where she wouldn’t have a panic attack that would leave her shaking and crying on some corner.
Julia deposited a squealing JT on Elise’s lap, and Elise buried her face in her nephew’s neck. He smelled like salt water and graham crackers and sweat. She covered his face with kisses until he squirmed out of her arms.
“You ready to head back?” Julia asked. Her dark blond hair, tousled by the wind, was a riot of waves around her shoulders. “It’s getting chilly, and I need to take JT over to Annie’s.”
Annie, Kate’s mom, had offered to watch JT while Julia and Elise drove up to the mountain house for the weekend. JT was beyond excited. Griffin, Declan and Kate’s seven-year-old son, was JT’s idol, and he loved nothing more than following him around and mimicking his every move.
Alexa got to her feet. “I need to stop at the brownstone. The contractors were supposed to install the lighting in the kitchen today.”
“I can’t wait to see it when it’s done,” Julia said, packing up her stuff. “It’s going to be so gorgeous.”
“I’m excited,” Alexa confessed. She and Julia started up the beach, talking about bathroom finishes and tile and paint colors while Elise trailed them, JT’s sticky hand in hers.
She didn’t want to be here, but she didn’t want to be at the mountain house either.
She just wanted to be with Finn somewhere far away, someplace where they weren’t haunted by the past. Was it possible? Or was the past something you carried inside, something you never really escaped?
She didn’t know. But she was starting to believe she wanted the chance to try.