In Too Deep

11. Chapter Eleven

~Cara~

I almost couldn’t believe Marco’s blasé reaction at finding Kian and me in bed together. We still hadn’t actually had sex, but he didn’t know that. As far as he knew, we had, and he didn’t seem to care at all.

Thinking back as I got dressed for the day, I had to admit that he never actually told me I couldn’t date or be intimate with anyone. He just didn’t want me to spend time with strangers, which amounted to the same thing as not dating, since who was I supposed to date if I couldn’t meet anyone new? But it seemed that his objection had always been to letting someone into our very close-knit circle rather than the idea of me dating in general. In fact, when I answered my bedroom door in my bathrobe and told him Kian was inside, he almost looked pleased.

The weekend was turning out to be one surprise after another.

However, when he asked Kian to ‘keep me company’ for the evening, I had to protest. “I don’t need a babysitter, Marco, and Kian might have other plans.”

No matter how understanding Kian had been about all of the madness of the last day, everyone had their limits and I didn’t want to find out what it would take to reach Kian’s.

Marco ignored the first part of my statement, looking over at Kian instead. “Do you have other plans?”

Kian shrugged. “Nothing I can’t get out of. I’ll need to make a couple of calls, though, and I can’t seem to get a signal.”

He pulled his phone out of his pocket to check again, but I knew before he said anything that he wouldn’t find one. We didn’t have mobile reception or Wi-Fi. Marco always said they were too easy to hack into.

“You can use our phone,” he told Kian, pointing to the one on the wall. Kian’s eyebrows raised as he looked over at it, probably because nobody used landlines anymore.

“What about texts?” Kian asked.

“No, but you can use email on Cara’s computer. It goes through our own secure wiring.”

Kian’s lips tightened and I wondered if he guessed without either of us saying that everything he did on either our phone line or my computer would be monitored.

Although, if he had nothing to hide, why should that bother him?

That sounded just like something Marco would say, and I shook my head at myself for even thinking it. I didn’t want to become like my brother. If Kian was upset about being under surveillance, he would have good reason to be. Nobody wanted to feel that everything they did was being scrutinized; I knew that better than most.

In the end, Kian didn’t complain. Instead, he asked us to excuse him as he went over to the phone on the wall, dialling a number from his phone. I didn’t want it to seem like we were listening to him, so I asked Marco where he was going that night instead.

“I’m going to go talk to the person who came after you last night. I’ll make sure he doesn’t do it again.”

Of course I wanted that, but I didn’t want him getting hurt just to make it happen. “Is that safe?”

“I’ll be as careful as I can be.”

I noticed that he hadn’t really answered my question. “There really isn’t any other way you can deal with this?”

“There isn’t, but I’ve learned from what happened to Mum and Dad. I won’t make the same mistakes they did.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Kian interjected and we both turned to see him still standing with the phone in his hand, his hand covering the mouthpiece. “I’ve got a friend who needs to get me something important. I was supposed to meet up with him this evening and he’s going out of town first thing in the morning. Could I ask him to drop it off here?”

I could tell by the way that Marco’s jaw clenched that he didn’t like the idea, but I begged him silently with my eyes to agree. Kian hadn’t asked for anything for himself before this, and Marco had to be reasonable.

Usually, my puppy-dog eyes didn’t work on my brother, but for some reason, that time, he seemed to soften. “He can drop it off in the security room,” Marco compromised. “Give the men there his name and they’ll let him in the front gate.”

Kian thanked him and relayed that information to the person on the phone before calling over to us once again. “I just realized I don’t actually know where we are. What’s the address?”

Once Marco gave it to him, Kian passed that on as well before hanging up. “Alright. He says he’ll be by later to drop it off.”

He made one more call before coming to sit back down, and Marco left us to go into his office while Kian and I had lunch together. We talked about Little Hands and about music, studiously avoiding any talk of what happened the night before or might be about to happen that evening, either when it came to Marco or in the bedroom either.

When we finished eating, Kian asked to see videos of me playing the piano. It had been a week since I mentioned I had some when we were at Little Hands together, and my cheeks flushed with happiness that he remembered. We sat down on the sofa together in the living room as I used the voice commands on the TV to pull up the saved videos, and with his arm around me, Kian gently massaged my hands while my fingers twitched in time with the beats of the music. I could remember every note and what it felt like to play them. It seemed impossible I’d never get to do it again, but with Kian beside me, the usual bitterness and emptiness that accompanied those thoughts seemed a little less all-consuming. That part of my life might be over, but new parts might be opening.

For the first time in a long time, it felt like I still had a future worth living for.

Kian seemed fascinated as we watched. “You’re amazing, Cara. You’re not just playing the pieces, you’re living in them.”

He used the present tense, I noticed, and although it was a little thing, I appreciated it. To say ‘you were amazing’ would have sounded completely different.

“She’s the best,” Marco agreed from the door, making us both jump. We hadn’t heard him come in, and he smirked at our reaction. “I’m heading out now. I’ll call the house phone if I need you to know anything so be sure to answer it if it rings.”

Kian promised we would, and I got to my feet to go give my brother a hug. Though I hoped he would come back safe and sound, it felt important that I tell him how I felt just in case. “I love you, Marco. Be careful.”

He rested his forehead against my shoulder, just for a second. “I love you too. It’ll all be over soon.”

The way he phrased that didn’t make me feel a lot better.

When he had gone, Kian and I watched a few more videos until I got self-conscious over how long we’d been watching. “There must be something more interesting we could do.”

We found a movie instead and were part way through when a man appeared in the doorway. I saw him first from the corner of my eye and squealed in surprise. Not one of my brother’s security men, he looked vaguely familiar anyway.

Kian’s arm tightened around me, but when he looked over at the door, he recognized the man much quicker than I did. “Thomas? What are you doing here?”

The name helped me to place the face. Thomas. Kian’s friend who I’d spoken to in the pub the night before, but what he might be doing in my house, I had no idea.

“I have the items you need for the food bank,” Thomas said, holding up a carrier bag in his hands.

Kian still looked confused. “I thought you were leaving them with the security guys.”

Thomas shrugged. “They told me I could come in and give them to you.”

That seemed incredibly unusual. No one ever came into the house other than the staff, and now Kian.

Kian seemed to accept his answer, though, quickly reintroducing us. “Cara, you remember Thomas?”

“I do. Hi.” I gave him an uncertain smile as Kian stood up to take the bag from him.

“Is there a toilet I could use while I’m here?” Thomas asked, looking down the hallway curiously. “It’s a long trip back.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll show you,” Kian offered. “Cara, just wait here, alright?”

“Sure.”

Something felt off as I watched them walk out the door together, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what lay behind that feeling. Maybe I really was getting as bad as Marco. Not everyone in the world was out to get me. Sometimes, things were exactly what they seemed, and I had no reason not to trust Kian’s friend. If he was friends with Kian, he couldn’t be all that bad.

Trying to push my anxiety down, I turned my attention back to the TV as I waited for them to come back.

~Kian~

Though I tried not to show it in front of either Cara or Thomas, my heart began racing as soon as Thomas appeared in the doorway to Cara’s living room. How the hell did he get in? And why? That had never been part of the plan.

When I called him earlier, I had to assume the call would be recorded, so I stuck to the script Thomas and I had agreed upon for a situation like this. We’d run through so many possible scenarios and had a plan for each one. The conversation we actually had therefore sounded much different in my head than how it would have appeared to anyone who might have been listening.

“I was wondering if you could take over my shift at the food bank,” I said aloud, but Thomas would have heard: I’m not able to go home right now.

His reply of “Is everything okay?” meant: Are you in trouble?

“Yeah, I just had something come up. A friend of mine needs some help at her place.” Translation? I’m at the Russos’ house.

Following the protocol we’d laid out, I communicated to him that I’d be staying there and that Marco would be going out. That was when he asked if he could drop something off for me.

Again, I knew exactly what he meant. He had some surveillance equipment, top of the line stuff that would be too large for me to be able to smuggle in on myself. Disguised as an everyday item, it might be able to fool Marco’s security scanners. We had agreed we would try to bug Marco’s place if I got inside, but I never expected it to happen this quickly.

I warned him about the scanners when I gave him the address. “There’s a security room just inside the building. You’ll have to leave it there but they’ll make sure it gets to me.”

I thought that had been clear enough: he was to leave the item there and I’d pick it up on the other side. Him coming into the house had never factored into things, not in that conversation nor in any of the planning we’d done ahead of time, and I had no idea what he could have said to talk his way past security.

I didn’t have to wonder for long. As soon as we were out of sight and earshot of Cara, Thomas dropped all pretense. “We can speak freely. I’ve disabled the entire security system.”

“How the fuck did you do that? And why?”

Improvising based on what happened with Marco was one thing; that part of the job I’d prepared for, and we’d always understood that decisions would need to be made on the fly based on circumstance. However, I didn’t like being out of the loop when it came to my own side.

“Why? Because we’re never going to get a better chance than this. Alone in the Russo house? We have to seize the opportunity. Where’s Marco’s office?”

I pointed to the locked door, and in no time at all, Thomas had the lock disabled. He’d always been a whiz at electronics, so it really didn’t surprise me all that much that he’d knocked out the security system, though I was surprised at how much of a risk he was taking.

“I’m not alone,” I reminded him. “Cara’s here and she could come check on us any minute.”

“Then you should go back and distract her. It’s not like you’d need to accompany me to the toilet anyway. I shouldn’t need more than ten minutes to get all the evidence we need off Marco’s server. This is it, Kee. We’ll get everything we need and we’ll be able to take him down, just like we planned. We can end it all tonight.”

I glanced back over my shoulder, down the hall to the living room. Cara was still inside, waiting for me to come back, trusting me completely, while I used the access she’d given me to gather what we needed to put her brother away for the rest of his life. Guilt twisted at my stomach while Thomas sat down behind Marco’s desk and pulled out several pieces of equipment from the carrier bag, presumably to help him hack into the system.

There was no way he could have snuck that past the scanners. “How did you get past the security?”

“I had to take them out. There was no other option.”

“Take them out?” I repeated in disbelief, struggling to keep my voice down. “You killed them?”

How could he say that so calmly? Shooting in self-defense was one thing; I’d been prepared to do that the night before if I needed to, if the man in my flat had managed to break down the door and tried to take Cara by force. But killing two men who were simply doing their job? For all we knew, they were as ignorant of Marco’s business as Cara was. What if they had families of their own?

How did that make us any better than Marco for what he’d done to Matt?

Thomas seemed to have no such reservations. “We can claim they shot first. If we get what we’re after, no one will care too much. The opportunity was too good to pass up.”

I’d never seen this side of Thomas before, and it made me more uncomfortable by the second as he booted up the computer, overriding whatever security measures Marco had in place. “Do you have backup outside? What if Marco comes back before you finish?”

“Marco’s going to be busy for a while,” he reminded me. I’d managed to get that message through to him too, using our code words for Marco and David Park to let Thomas know they’d be meeting. “The only person we have to worry about is Cara. As long as she doesn’t interfere, there’s no reason for her to get hurt.”

The implied threat was impossible to miss: if she did interfere, she might get hurt, and an icy fear spread through my veins. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Then go keep her busy while I finish.” He glanced up at me from the screen, his eyes devoid of any kind of emotion. “We’re in too deep now, Kian, there’s no going back. We’re ending this tonight, one way or another.”

Fuck. I wanted to argue with him but I also wanted to make sure Cara stayed safe. As my mind and heart debated, the second priority won out and I headed back to the living room.

She looked over at me with that sweet, innocent smile as I walked back in. “Has your friend left?”

“No, not yet. He’s still in the bathroom.” As long as I could keep her in the room, she wouldn’t have to know any different, and I tried to seem unconcerned about any of it even as every nerve in my body screamed that this was wrong.

However, before I could sit back down with her, the phone rang: the house line, the one Marco had said he’d call on if he needed to get in touch with us, and my heart immediately kicked up to an even faster gear. That must be Marco. Had something tipped him off about what was happening here? Were we already compromised?

Either way, I didn’t want to take the call in front of Cara, despite there being a phone in the room. “I’m going to answer it in the kitchen. Stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

I took off before she could protest, jogging down the hall to the kitchen, past the open office door. Thomas didn’t look up as I passed by.

“Hello?” I sounded out of breath as I answered, not from the quick jog but from the tightness in my chest.

“Is Cara safe?”

Marco jumped right in with his question, also sounding short of breath himself as he shouted to be heard over the background noise.

“She’s fine,” I assured him. “Why?”

“They knew we were coming.” His furious snarl sent another chill down my back. Everything seemed to be unravelling and I didn’t understand why. “Someone betrayed us. I thought they might have attacked the house at the same time.”

The house hadn’t been attacked. Cara was safe. I had my mouth open to tell him that, but before I could get the words out, a new thought occurred to me.

Maybe it had been attacked after all.

As I stood there, the phone in my hand and my mind racing, things began to fall into place. Thomas insisted on getting close to Cara the night before to plant the microphone on her, but there had been no microphone when we arrived at the house. There had, however, been the tracking bug that Park’s men had used to find us. Now, Park knew about Marco’s planned attack, which I had told Thomas over the phone earlier, while Thomas himself came here, uninvited, to hack Marco’s system, killing his security men in the process.

Whether I’d been distracted by what was happening between me and Cara or whether I simply didn’t want to see the truth before, it seemed pretty obvious now: Thomas had to be working for David Park. Nothing else made as much sense.

How long he’d been working for him, I had no idea. Before we’d even started working on this operation? Before Matt?

Nothing I thought I knew seemed certain anymore.

“The house has a safe room.” Marco was still talking on the other end of the phone, unaware of anything I just figured out. “Cara knows where it is. Take her there and stay there until I get back.”

“Got it.”

Someone shouted at him in the background and the phone seemed to get disconnected so even if I had any further questions, I couldn’t have asked them. I placed the receiver back in the cradle, turning around to head back to Cara, but I didn’t make it more than a couple of steps before Thomas appeared in the doorway, his gun in his hand.

“You son of a bitch.” He must have heard that conversation, or at least enough of it to know that I would put things together.

His face looked almost completely unfamiliar to me, the expression was so cold. “I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, Kian.”

I had nothing to defend myself with as he raised his hand, but that wasn’t even the uppermost thought in my mind. All I could think of at that moment was that if he killed me, nothing would stop him from getting to Cara too. I’d let everyone down - Matt, his family, and myself - but I failed her most of all.

~Cara~

The longer I sat there in the living room on my own, the more something seemed wrong. Why was Marco calling? Why wouldn’t Kian answer it in front of me? Why did Kian seem nervous? He tried to hide it, but I could see the tension in his shoulders and the tightness in his face, things that weren’t typical for him.

That feeling grew so quickly that not more than thirty seconds after he left to answer the call, I got to my feet too. I left the TV on as I went to the living room door, and it only took a quick glance down the hall to make me stop in my tracks, ducking back out of sight.

Blinking in surprise, my mind raced as I tried to make sense of what I just saw: Thomas, Kian’s friend, came out of Marco’s office and headed towards the kitchen with a gun in his hand.

What the hell was going on?

How did he get a gun into the house? Why did he bring a gun into the house? Why was he in Marco’s office? Why was he going to the kitchen, where Kian would be? What did any of it mean?

I had no idea, but as my heart pounded, I understood one thing clearly: Kian was in danger. There wasn’t time to call for help. If anyone could help, it would have to be me.

My eyes darted around the room for anything I could use as a weapon, though anything I could find would be no match for a gun. If Marco kept actual weapons in the house, I had no idea where they would be, so I would have to improvise instead. As panic rose higher and higher in my chest, my eyes fell on a heavy glass award my parents gave me when I passed my Grade 8 piano exam with the Royal College of Music. It was the heaviest thing I could see that I could easily pick up so I grabbed it off the shelf and ran down the hall in my socks, my feet silent on the hardwood floor and my hands shaking with adrenaline.

I arrived in the doorway just in time to see Thomas raise his gun towards Kian. With his back to me, he couldn’t see me, but Kian did, his eyes meeting mine over Thomas’ shoulder, full of apology and dismay.

I didn’t waste a single second as I stepped forward and hit the man in front of me in the back of the head with the award in my hand, as hard as I could. Pain shot through my hand from the impact and from the force of gripping the award at all, and I had to let it go. It went skittering across the floor at the same time the gun went off while Thomas fell to the ground. The sound of the discharge was deafening in the small space, and as I watched in horror, Kian went down too.

I would have screamed if I could have but my throat had completely closed up. My heart seemed to stop beating as my ears rang and I forgot how to breathe. My whole body seemed disconnected from my mind as I stared over at Kian on the ground in disbelief, hoping my eyes were deceiving me or that somehow, this was all some kind of dream. How could this be happening?

It felt like a lifetime, but in reality, probably only a few seconds passed before he raised his head. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear any words come out.

“What?” I couldn’t hear my own question either, everything still muffled by the ringing in my ears.

He got to his feet as I watched, relief flooding through my body, but I could see that he held his right arm stiffly, and as I watched, a deep crimson stain began to spread across the shoulder of his t-shirt.

“Kian, you’re hurt!” I could still barely hear the words, but I was pretty sure I said them, and he seemed to understand too as he came over to me, his eyes focused on me.

“I’ll be okay. Are you hurt?” He looked like he was shouting, but I could barely hear him.

I nodded back. “I’m fine. What… what’s happening?”

My eyes darted down to the man on the floor, the one I’d hit, and I could see blood beginning to pool beneath his head, dripping down onto the gleaming white tile of the kitchen floor. Oh, my God. Did I kill him? My stomach heaved as guilt flooded my body. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, I just wanted to stop him from hurting Kian.

Whereas before, I couldn’t seem to breathe, now, it felt like I couldn’t stop. I gasped and gasped but no air seemed to be getting in.

“Cara, look at me. Focus on me.” Kian’s blue eyes stared directly into mine as he put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. Marco said there’s a safe room in the house and you know where it is?”

I nodded in confirmation. We’d done drills on using it before. Despite my shock, I knew exactly what to do. “There’s a hidden door in my room.”

“Good. Find any staff that are in the house and take them there. Do you have a way of seeing back into your bedroom when you’re inside the safe room?”

Again, I nodded. The control room had cameras and monitors, running on a completely different system from the rest of the house.

“Okay. I need to do a few things first, but I’ll come to your room when I’m done. If it feels safe to let me in, you can. If you’re not sure, keep the door closed. Have you got that?”

Yet again, just like he had the night before when everything got out of hand, he sounded so calm and in control, as if he’d done this a hundred times before. I tried to push my panic down and match his tone. “I’ve got it.”

“I know you do.” He gave me an encouraging smile before he winced, his left hand going to his shoulder. “Let’s move.”

He hadn’t told me exactly what he would be doing, but it must be important. With my hand still throbbing but my hearing getting back to normal, I found the kitchen maid cowering in the pantry, her hands over her ears. Thankfully, the chef had already left for the day, so there shouldn’t be anyone else to worry about. She clung onto me as we made our way down the hall to my room. One of the pictures on the wall, a picture of my parents on their anniversary just before their deaths, concealed a hidden control panel, and from there, I could open the door behind my wardrobe. Marco had chosen that location when he built the room so that it would feel like going through the wardrobe to Narnia; he always tried to make things a little less scary for me.

A lot like Kian did, actually, although ever since Kian arrived, things had become a lot more intense than they’d ever been before.

When we were safely inside, I locked the door behind us. The control room had entrances from both my bedroom and Marco’s, and beyond it lay a small bedroom and a bathroom, plus tinned food and bottled water, in case we needed to stay there for a while. I never thought I would actually have to use the safe room, but I was grateful for it now, and I told the maid to go into the bedroom to wait while I kept an eye on the screens.

From what I could see, Kian was in Marco’s office, and I watched as he pulled some kind of device out of the computer and shoved some things from the desk into the bag that Thomas had brought in with him earlier, using his left hand since his right arm was still bleeding. What was he doing? What was that stuff?

As soon as he’d taken it all, he returned to the kitchen and knelt down next to Thomas. I couldn’t be sure from the angle I had, but it looked like he checked for a pulse before getting up and going to the kitchen drawers. Rooting around in them, he found what he was after and with the kitchen string, he tied Thomas’ hands behind his back even though he still wasn’t moving. Kian picked up the gun and took Thomas’ phone from his pocket before heading down the hall to my room, holding onto everything he’d taken.

The calm, methodical way he moved, the way he seemed to know exactly what to do in any situation, had seemed so calming when he was in front of me, but as I watched him through the screen, it almost looked cold and detached instead.

It looked like he knew exactly what he was doing, and like he had done this before.

He looked like a man who knew exactly what was happening. Who didn’t seem all that shocked that his friend just tried to kill him.

And so, when he stood in the centre of my room, looking up to try to find the camera I watched him through, letting me know that he was ready to come in, a chill ran down my spine.

How much did I really know about this man? Should I let him in, or shouldn’t I?

What if I’d placed my trust in the wrong person all along?