Mason blinked, struggling to believe me. “Holy shit, Wesley, you’re one of the good guys.”
I shook my head, denying his words immediately. “I’m not a hero, Payne. Don’t think I wouldn’t have built my kingdom and enjoyed the throne.” But I would have run it differently. I would have done it all better. I would have put men in leadership that would have been better. It had been my dream since before I ever met Caro, before the bratva ever became part of my life. I was trading that for her now. I was giving everything up for her.
And I knew I was making the right decision.
“We’ll get you through this,” Mason promised, a new respect reflecting in his hard stare. “And we’ll keep her safe while you’re inside.”
“You better.” I struggled to swallow against the rising tide of nausea inside me. “And Mason?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want any of this to come back on me. I’m anonymous during this entire thing. This is yours. You take the credit. Leave me out of it completely.”
“Done,” he promised and for some reason I believed him.
We shook hands again before he led me back to the interrogation room where I officially confessed to the charges brought against me. It was the hardest few hours of my life, knowing I was putting my life, Caro’s life, in the hands of two men I did not trust.
But it was my only option. It was the only way to keep my plan from derailing.
Mason would take credit for decommissioning the Russians. And I kept Caro. A more perfect deal had never been made.
Until three and a half months later when I learned how cruel the universe could be. Caroline disappeared with Frankie. It wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the feds. Caroline ran away.
A lesser man would have taken the hint, but I was well into my deal with Mason and eternally in love with Caro. No stone would go unturned, no corner of the planet would be left unchecked. I would find her. I would make her mine again. I’d explain this entire fucking mess. And then we’d spend the rest of our lives living out the consequences of this great love between us.
It was us against the world. Caro and me. And nobody would get between us. Nothing would keep me from protecting her. Nothing would prevent us from the rest of our life together.
I would find her. And then I would spend the rest of my life giving her the life she wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Caroline
Present Day
Three hours later, I woke up with Juliet in the crook of my arm that was now thoroughly asleep and tingling painfully. I wiggled out from beneath her and rolled my head around on my stiff neck.
The twenty-four hours Juliet was with Atticus had been the worst day of my life. The worst. I still hadn’t fully processed the fear, agony and bone-deep exhaustion I’d suffered through. Losing her put things into perspective for me. Our time together was precious and should be cherished. I appreciated that there were bigger issues in the world than matching socks or picking up toys. And I needed to tell her I loved her every thirty seconds until the day I died.
The one thing that didn’t change was how uncomfortable it was to sleep with a child. She was so little. How was it possible she took up so much room? And all the blankets?
I needed a chiropractor after only a few hours with her.
Sitting up in bed, I watched her sleep for a few minutes and tried to relax in that calm beauty. She was so peaceful. So naïve to everything this ugly, dark world wanted to use to hurt her.
My heart felt heavy in my chest, too heavy for my broken body to support. I couldn’t even sit up straight. The heaviness was too much to bear.
I pressed my hand to my mouth and tried to stop my chin from trembling. It was the precursor to tears and I didn’t want to shed any more of those. At least, not tonight.
There was too much to do and no time to lose myself in the pain of the past. Even if it had invaded my present, even if it had taken my spirit hostage and waged war on everything I thought to be real and true.
He’d tricked me. Sayer had manipulated me. He’d lured me into the bratva and then made it his life’s mission to keep me there.
My long list of sins could be credited to him, to the syndicate I hated being a part of. Finding out I had a choice in the matter was the worst kind of heartbreak.
I thought back to that night when I was ten years old. Had I known I was making a deal with the devil, I wouldn’t have been so goddamn cocky about it. All I had wanted was proof that he’d been made. I wanted to see his tattoo. I thought I’d been getting an even trade. I thought I’d even been doing a kind thing for him.
After all, he was the one that had to live with his decision to be Russian mafia for the rest of his life. Getting his necklace back from Atticus was the least I could do.
To think I actually blamed myself for his ill fate.
God, I felt sick. I’d felt guilty my entire life for what I told him the first time I met him. All I had wanted for him was to survive. I’d wanted to see that he was okay.
And in return, he’d made me join him. He’d pulled me into the madness with him.
I brushed at stray tears and tried harder to pull myself together.
Would I give up those years though? Would I give him up if I had the chance to start over? Would I give Juliet up if it meant a different life?
No.
Never.
What did that mean?
I had no idea. I didn’t have the energy to sift through my feelings and figure out what I felt for Sayer after everything that had been confessed.
What I really needed was space. Time. Distance. I needed to figure out what I wanted and how I needed to move forward.
Even more than that, I needed to get out of this city and back to the life I’d worked so hard to build on my own. My heart ached for Frisco, for Maggie’s on the Mountain, for the simplicity of living a quiet life with Juliet and Frankie.
If I was honest with myself, truly honest in a way I didn’t want to be, I could admit that aside from Juliet’s kidnapping, I hadn’t totally hated these past few days. Even the FBI heist was… fun. I realized I was stupid to think that since there would be hell to pay for it, but I couldn’t help it. There was a part of me that enjoyed the thrill of the game.
That excitement had been stripped away from me now that I knew the truth, now that I realized I had been the mark the entire time.
Squinting at the clock, I tried to make sense of the number three. It was the middle of the night. Nobody made good decisions at this hour. But I couldn’t wait a second longer. I had to get out of here.
I held up a pair of boyfriend jeans and snarled.
Too soon. I wasn’t ready to face real pants yet.
I settled for my leather leggings, a black sweatshirt with a peplum ruffle at the bottom and my motorcycle boots. If there was ever an outfit that said chic runaway, this was it. Using skills from my past, I moved about the room in absolute silence, skipping makeup altogether but attending to other necessities like brushing my teeth and applying deodorant.
I left Juliet sleeping to track down Frankie. Obviously, I wouldn’t leave without her. She was anxious to get out of this city anyway. Each day we stayed here made her more and more restless. She still hadn’t seen her uncles. And even though I knew she didn’t want to, this was a rip the Band-Aid off kind of situation—she wanted to get it over with.
The apartment was silent as I stepped into the living room. I had every intention of going straight to Frankie’s room to grab her, but I was sidelined by Sayer’s sleeping form.
He was sitting up again, like the first night I’d found him. His legs were stretched in front of him and his arms were folded over his chest while his head rested awkwardly, bent at his neck. He had positioned himself right in front of his bedroom door in a leather chair that he’d dragged over from next to the couch. A guard caught sleeping on the job.
I stood there staring at him for endless minutes, trying to make sense of th
e hammering emotions beating their way through me. The anger had worn off, leaving a gaping gash of sorrow in its wake.
It wasn’t so much what he had done, I decided. It was that he never told me. That I had to find out from Atticus of all people.
And worse, Sayer had never planned to tell me. He would have kept that secret his entire life.
I wanted to call him a liar, to call our entire relationship a lie… but I’d only be lying to myself because I knew both things to be false.
Yes, Sayer lied for business, for his profession, to me when he thought my safety was an issue— like when he’d gone to prison. But he didn’t lie to me regularly. Maybe the information he shared was ambiguous. Maybe he was mysterious. But he wasn’t a liar.
And yes, our relationship was rocky at the time, but it wasn’t entirely a lie. I loved Sayer. I loved him with everything in me. My love for him was possibly the most honest thing about me. It had nearly killed me to leave him five years ago.
And it would certainly kill me this time to do it again.
Not to mention what it would do to Juliet…
What did that leave me with?
Anger over something he’d done when he was thirteen? When he’d been desperate and living on the streets and in need of someone to take care of him?
With his eyes closed and the hardness about him stripped away, he still looked like he needed someone to rescue him. He reminded me so much of the boy that I’d met in that fateful back alley fifteen years ago. He looked lost again. Troubled. He looked desperate and broken and in need of fixing.
And oh, how my heart split with the desire to help him.
I wanted to pick up all of his shattered pieces and put him back together. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold him tightly against me. I wanted to promise him that everything was going to be okay and that I would never leave him again.
But how could I say any of those things when it was exactly what I planned to do?
“Was it all really so bad?”
I blinked back tears and realized he’d woken up and caught me staring at him.
Struggling to compose myself, I looked away, out the window at the city that had raised me, then destroyed me. “Don’t ask me that.”
“Why not? Because you can’t admit the truth? It wasn’t that bad, Six. It was good. Fucking amazing.” He leaned forward, and I flinched. I thought he might have been readying to stand but at my reaction his hands rubbed his knees and he relaxed back into the chair. “I didn’t take your life away. I gave you a new one, a better one.”
“You’re so full of it,” I spat, trying to revive the blazing anger I’d felt only hours ago. “You take away my freedom, my choice? And then call it a gift? Get over yourself.”
He jumped to his feet, uncaring about my reaction this time. My back was against the wall in the next second and his hands were planted on my waist, caging me in.
“You first,” he growled. His lips were on mine before I could slap him, kissing, taking… claiming what he thought was his.
“Sayer,” I protested, pushing at his shoulders.
His lips moved to my throat, leaving me to gasp for air. “I’m sorry, Caroline,” he said when I was getting ready to yell at him. “I’m so fucking sorry. If I could change what I did, I would. In a second. You have to know that I was a stupid thirteen-year-old kid and I thought I had finally found the thing I had been looking for my entire life. I thought you were a gift from God because of the shitty life I’d had. My angel in the alley. My savior. You didn’t just change my life, Six, you gave me a brand new one. You resurrected me. You saved me. And all I wanted to do, all I still want to do, is spend my life loving you… worshiping you… giving you everything you gave me and more. I didn’t do it to trap you. I did it so that I could spend the rest of my life with you.”
Tears streamed down my face and my entire body tingled in a war against itself. Could I trust him? How could I not? Could I forgive him? How could I not? Did I still love him?
How could I not?
“I didn’t want this life,” I hiccupped, grasping at whatever was left of my outrage. “I never wanted to be a thief.”
Sayer pulled back, meeting my eyes with the most intense gaze I had ever seen. His eyes had never been more deeply blue. “You were a thief before I met you. I didn’t make you do that. And I didn’t turn you into a liar. I will take responsibility for what I did, and Six, I plan to rectify that. I plan to spend the rest of my life making sure you never have to do any of that ever again. You and me. Forever. Not the Volkov. Not the game. Just the two of us and our family. That’s all you have to do for the rest of your life.”
My entire body trembled. His words were healing. I was relaxing and bending back into this man that I could not stop loving. No matter what happened or the lies in our past, no matter what we had ahead of us or what we had to face before we left this city, I would never stop loving him. Never stop living for him. “No more secrets?”
His hands cupped my face, his thumbs brushing away my tears. The way he held me made my soul ache with tenderness for this man that had been to hell and back more than once, who had big aspirations in this crazy life of ours, but gave everything up just to be with me.
“No,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Never again. You are my everything, Caroline. My reason and hope and total existence. No more secrets. No more lies. No more anything— only you and me and Juliet. You are the life I’ve always wanted, the one thing I have worked my entire life to have. There is nothing I want more than you and our daughter. Nothing that could sway me away. I love you, Six. I have always loved you. I will always love you.”
I closed my eyes as his truth and promises washed over me. They sank deep into my bones and smoothed all the jagged pieces of me. They healed and fixed and binded me to him all over again. “I love you too,” I confessed, another piece of absolute truth that had no shadows of deception in it. “I have always loved you.” I pressed my lips to his, savoring the taste of him mingled with my tears. “I will always love you.”
His arms were around me in the next second, holding me against his chest tightly, but at the same time, carefully, as if I was a fragile thing he was afraid to break.
From the first moment he came back into my life, I didn’t know what Sayer and I were doing, only that we were a part of each other’s lives again. Nothing else had made sense. I didn’t know what to do with my mistrust or my insecurity, or the years of pain and brokenness between Sayer and me.
Now I knew.
We were together. We would always be together. You could argue that we had never really been apart. I hadn’t broken up with him. I hadn’t ever ended us. Probably because I knew we could never end.
We’d both made mistakes. Sayer wasn’t a perfect man and I wasn’t a perfect woman. I wasn’t blameless in the history of our beautiful mess.
And besides, it wasn’t how we started that mattered… it was how we ended up.
There had never been anyone for me other than this man. He was mine. And I was his.
Right when I’d decided to take this man on the couch again, his phone went off, the ring startling us both.
I jumped, sucking in a sharp breath that wasn’t enough to calm my racing heart. “That thing always goes off at the most inconvenient times,” I growled.
He glanced down at it on the coffee table. “For someone that used to be a hardened criminal, you are awfully jumpy these days.”
“I’m out of practice.”
He grinned at me. “Let’s keep it that way.”
I had just enough time to smile at him adoringly before he reached for his phone. It stopped ringing as soon as he touched it.
Then it started ringing again. He quickly silenced it but frowned when he looked at the screen. “It’s Gus,” he said.
“Answer it. It might be important.”
“What?” he barked at Gus. I watched the color drain from his face and his eyes grow tight with worry. ?
??She’s not.” He listened some more, and looked up at me. “Caroline, go check and see if Frankie is here.”
I didn’t hesitate. I ran to her bedroom and threw the door open, hitting the light switch at the same time. Her bed was empty. Her room looked untouched from earlier.
“She’s not here,” I yelled at Sayer. What did that mean? Why was Gus calling at three-thirty A.M. looking for her?
I returned to Sayer as he was asking, “Do you know where they would go?” It was torture to listen and only be able to hear one end of the conversation. Was Frankie missing? Had something happened?
What the hell was going on?
“I’ll be right there.” He listened again and cursed under his breath. “Get Cage… Yeah, well, get him anyway… See you in twenty.”
“Where’s Frankie?” I demanded as soon as Sayer clicked off the phone.
He met my gaze and held it, trying to cushion the blow of his words with empathy and concern. My stomach felt sick as a sharp pang of déjà vu hit me. This must have been what I looked like when I told him Juliet was gone. This was the agony he had been through.
And now he was the one tortured by a phone call that would haunt him for the rest of his life, just like mine.
“Gus thinks Atticus took her,” he said in a gentle voice. “She was staying at his place tonight. He thought he heard her scream, but by the time he got to her, she wasn’t there. He can’t find her anywhere and she’s not answering her phone.”
Adrenaline jumped in my veins and I suddenly felt very awake. I shook off the remnants from Sayer’s confession that made me blissfully sluggish and emotionally overwhelmed and became the fighting force I needed to be.
“How do we find her?” I demanded. I pulled a ponytail holder from my wrist, using it to pull my hair on the top of my head. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to get her back,” Sayer growled. He walked over to the kitchen sink and splashed his face with water. Then he started digging around in the cabinets until he found two hand guns with ammo. He set one on the counter for me. He looked at me, gauging me with his eyes. He had become the man I knew from my youth again. He was vibrating with danger and murderous intent. “Do you want to go?”