Chapter Twenty-Four
The lake house held the hollow silence unique to empty places.
It was thick and complete, broken only by the water lapping outside and the occasional groan of old wood settling.
Leo lay where they’d dropped him, wrists bound behind his back.
His cheek pressed against boards that smelled of dust and mildew and years of disuse, and he listened to his own pulse hammer against his ribs, warning him about something he understood perfectly well.
He was going to die here. Maybe not this hour, maybe not until the sun went down and gave Curtis whatever cover he needed to finish what he’d started, but the ending had already been written the second those two men walked through his office door.
There was no scenario in which Curtis Lennox let him walk out of this cabin, especially if Leo could make one call and undo an empire built on twenty years of calculated, meticulous cruelty.
He shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t grind his bound wrists deeper into the rope.
The movement pulled a fresh wave of pain through the bullet wound on his arm and his ribs where the two men had worked him over not too long ago.
Blood had dried tacky along his jaw, his split lip throbbing in time with his heartbeat.
Underneath all of it, a numbness had started to creep in that scared him more than the pain did, because numbness felt as though his body had begun surrendering before his mind was ready.
He thought about Anja.
About her beautiful face in that hospital corridor, when she’d caught his jacket and told him to be safe.
About her mouth parted around something she hadn’t managed to say before the doors closed between them.
And about how he’d told her he loved her and then walked straight out into the morning without waiting to hear it back.
God, he was glad he’d admitted it anyway.
Whatever happened here, whatever Curtis’s men did to him, at least she knew.
The words existed in the world now, spoken instead of carried silently inside him.
If this was how it ended, he’d rather it end with her knowing than with him having guarded the words too carefully to spend them while he still could.
But he wouldn’t get the rest of it. That was the part that lodged deep in his gut, impossible to remove no matter how he turned it over.
He wouldn’t get mornings with her, wouldn’t get to watch her drink coffee in his kitchen with her hair damp from the shower, wouldn’t get to stand across from her one day and give her a ring instead of a burner phone full of bad news.
He wouldn’t get to bring her to Chloe’s for Sunday dinner and watch his sister fall in love with her too.
And he wouldn’t get to grow old arguing with her about something as ordinary as whose turn it was to take out the trash.
Chloe.
His throat tightened around her name. She was safe behind CObrA Securities’ walls with Kayne, having no idea her brother was lying bound on the floor of a stranger’s lake house, waiting for dark.
Everything came flooding back to him. Every fight they’d ever had as kids.
Every ridiculous argument over the last slice of pizza.
Every phone call where she’d talked him through a bad breakup or a worse contract negotiation, solid, fierce, and utterly unwilling to let him wallow for longer than she deemed necessary.
He wouldn’t get to meet the kids she eventually had, wouldn’t get to be the uncle who taught them terrible jokes and let them stay up too late.
His parents.
He couldn’t even go there.
They knew how much he loved them, didn’t they? That thought alone nearly broke him, and he couldn’t let himself break, not here, not now, not with three armed men on the other side of that door and Curtis’s apologetic voice ringing in his ears.
I’m sorry, son. I truly am. But we have to wait until dark.
He still hadn’t grasped the monumental betrayal of it, even with the proof written across his own body in bruises and dried blood.
Curtis Lennox had forced him out of a hospital bed six years ago and offered him a career when Leo’s knee had ended the only future he’d ever planned for himself.
The man had sat across a desk from him earlier and spoken about leverage as philosophy, as though two decades of ruined families and manufactured tragedies amounted to nothing more than an honest currency other men were too squeamish to trade in.
You don’t threaten the athlete. You go through the people they love.
Leo turned the words over again, hating how clearly he could hear Curtis’s voice delivering them.
Sixty families, give or take, built one relationship at a time over twenty patient years.
In the middle of it all, Curtis had recruited a knee-injured, twenty-six-year-old former athlete specifically because his face was clean enough to make the rotten structure look legitimate.
I taught you this business because I respected you. I loved you like the son I never had.
Leo wanted to believe none of that had been true.
He wanted the entire relationship reduced to nothing but calculation so he could hate it cleanly and completely.
Yet a sick, exhausted part of him suspected Curtis hadn’t been lying about that either.
That was the horror beneath the horror. Curtis could love him and still have him beaten nearly unconscious and dumped on a cabin floor to wait for a lake to swallow him whole, because in Curtis’s mind, both things had always existed together without ever canceling each other out.
Leo thought about Vic Shaw, dead in a Kansas City hotel room for the crime of caring too much about a scared pitcher’s mother.
Then Danica, silenced for asking one question too many at a funeral.
Tim Hargrove, sixty years old and stubborn as a fence post, dead in his own garage because he’d wanted a bigger piece of something he never should have known existed at all.
And then there was Brad. Four names, four lives folded neatly into Curtis’s calm recitation reduced to items on a spreadsheet, and Leo understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful in its finality, that he was about to become the fifth.
He twisted his wrists, testing the ropes again, and felt nothing give beneath the effort except rope biting deeper into skin rubbed raw.
They’d taken his phone before they’d dragged him out of Curtis’s office, battered and bleeding onto the office rug along with a piece of him he suspected he’d never fully get back even if he somehow survived the night.
Nobody knew where he was. That thought was the heaviest of all, colder than the floorboards beneath his cheek, colder than the muted light creeping through the shutters.
Anja had no idea where to look. She’d have his last text, going to tell him now, miss you already, and after that, silence.
There would be a black hole where his signal should have been.
There was nothing at all to point her to where he was right now.
She was smart, resourceful, and stubborn enough to tear the state apart looking for him, and none of it would matter if the trail stopped at Curtis’s front door with nothing on the other side to follow.
He thought of her anyway, because it was the only thing left worth thinking about.
Her voice in the dark this past week, maddeningly calm even when everything around them was falling apart.
The stillness Curtis himself had once admired in her across a crowded ballroom, watching the whole room without appearing to watch anything at all.
That last glimpse of her in the hospital hallway, mouth open, caught off guard for maybe the first time since Leo had known her, right before the doors slid shut between them.
I love you. He’d meant every syllable of it, and if this was truly how it ended, bound and bleeding and tossed into a lake, then at least he’d spent his last free words on the truest thing he knew.
He closed his eyes, and outside, the water kept lapping against the shore, indifferent and endless, counting down the hours until dark. Just as it had for a hundred years before Leo ever arrived, and just as it would for a hundred more after he was gone.