Page 489 of Summer Heat
“Yeah.” His answer is quick and met with a simmering anger that I recognize from him. There’s the brother I know and love. “I told him about her. I needed his help.”
“You told Marcus. Who else?”
“He’s the only one I told. It had to be him or someone he told.”
“Why did you tell him anything?”
“I had her license plate and nothing else.”
My thumb rubs in circular motions over my pointer finger as I take it all in.
He adds, “I couldn’t lose her again.” I know he could have told Jase. Jase could have looked up her information. But I don’t remind him of that. He holds on to guilt too much.
I have nothing but silence as I think of any reason that Marcus would come for us. He’s not a man I want as an enemy, but I’m also not certain it’s him.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. It will never happen again.” He strengthens his resolve and leans forward, daring me to object. And I do.
“And what if she leaves you again?” I ask him and he stares back at me, his chest rising and falling with determination. “What if she finds out something she shouldn’t?”
He doesn’t say what I expect him to, that she won’t. Instead he merely answers, “Then I’ll follow her.”
My breath leaves me slowly, words failing me.
“She’s mine,” he says as if nothing else matters. And maybe it doesn’t.
I nod my head once.
The hands of the clock in the office are all I can hear as I run my thumbnail under the flap of the envelope and stare back at my brother. “She’s changed you.”
“How’s that?” he asks me. Again he’s on the defensive, and it makes me smile. I like to see him showing something that’s real.
“It’s hard to pretend when you’d do anything for someone you love.”
His gaze flickers to the envelope in my hand and he stares at it as he says, “I didn’t come here for a heart to heart, Carter.”
“You didn’t open it?” Although the words come out with disbelief, the corners of my lips kick up with amusement. He’s so consumed with Addison he didn’t give a fuck about the one thing I’ve been losing sleep over.
“Marcus said it was a message of what’s to come,” he tells me as I finally open it. The paper tears easily and inside I’m surprised to find only a one-by-one-inch square photo. It falls into my palm facedown and I toss the crumpled envelope onto the desk, then flip the small piece of photo paper over.
“I went through all that shit for that?” Daniel asks, but I ignore him, too drawn to the picture.
I trace the curve of her porcelain face. I let the rough pad of my thumb run along the edge of the photo as I note her beautiful smile and the way her dark hair is lit with the sunshine in the image.
My heart pounds hard and I can’t hear what Daniel’s saying. I can’t hear anything but the conversation I had with Tony Romano in the basement cellar months ago. The man who I’ve been avoiding, and the man who reached out to Marcus to deliver the message rather than tell me himself.
The dimly lit, cold and dark room was as unforgiving and unmoving as I was when he made his case and I turned him down.
Then he started bartering with things that didn’t belong to him.
With women the Talverys were shipping off. His enemies. He wanted me to help him in a war against the Talverys and he was offering their property as payment. There was no way I’d ever accept.
“What it is?” Daniel presses, barely interrupting my memory.
“The gift from the Romanos.” I don’t know how the words come out strong as I gently place the photo onto the desk. “They want us on their side of this war they’re starting.”
I remember the way the heavy knife felt in my hand as I picked it up from his desk and stabbed it down onto the splintered wood in front of him. The sharp tip struck the paper in front of him.
The photo of the enemy family.
