Scare Crow (20 page)

Boom! The detonation I had been waiting
for.

I could see it even in the farthest corner of his eyes. The hope, the desperation.
He wanted me to say it back. He needed me to love him as much as he loved me. I knew
this. I had known this for a while. But I had chosen to overloo
k it.

Something was climbing up my throat. I put my hand to my mouth, thinking I was going
to be sick. Griff drove off the road, stopped the car, and watched me turn o
live.

He reached out, but I stopped him. I wasn’t going to be sick—what was climbing up
my throat was words. Words that would be powerful enough to break him and me. To brea
k
us
.

The words had reached the inside of my mouth, and swished around like Listerine. And
then my lips parted. “Griff, I’m preg
nant.”

Griff didn’t move. He didn’t blink. His chest did not take in any
air.

“Did you hear what I
said?”

He took another minute and a br
eath.

“How far along are you?” he asked me, keeping his eyes a
head.

“About six mo
nths.”

I could see him make a very quick calculation in his brain as he figured out whose
child I was carrying. “How long have you known about
this?”

I couldn’t lie to him. Not anymore. “A w
hile.”

He stoically put the car in drive, hit the turn signal, and veered us back onto the
road. Then he turned the music up and took us home without one more word being sp
oken.

When we got home, I grabbed Meatball’s leash, but Griff took it fro
m me.

“I’ll take him,” he said without looking at me. His lips were tight and white as he
headed out the
door.

I had expected to feel some kind of relief after finally telling Griff the truth about
the baby. But all I felt was ache. The truth hadn’t set me free. It had blown a suffocating
bubble aroun
d me.

I needed to talk to Griff, even though I had no idea what else to say to him. Hadn’t
I said en
ough?

I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and stared at my leaky walls, waiting for him
to come back, wondering if he would come
back.

****

Griff did come back a couple of hours later. He went into the kitchen, and I heard
the cling of dog chow against Meatball’s salad bowl, before hearing the front door
close as Griff left. It only took Meatball a minute to scarf down his meal before
climbing up the crate stairs I had built for him so that he could get onto my stilted
bed. He burped in my face, then let me wrap my arms around his thick neck and stuff
my face in his fur while I continued to wait for G
riff.

It was total darkness when I woke up. Meatball was crowding all the space on the bed.
I was about to push him over so that I could get a bit of breathing space when I noticed
Griff sitting at the end of the bed. I leaned over Meatball and switched the lam
p on.

Griff had already hopped off and leaned over the side, leaned over Meatball to take
me into his
arms.

He said, “I’m an idiot. Jesus, I’m such a bloody i
diot.”

Meatball grumbled and pushed us apart long enough to get off the bed and go find a
new spot to sleep on the f
loor.

I had switched from burying my face in Meatball’s fur to burying my face in Griff’s
neck. I let out a sigh that lightened the weight pushing against my h
eart.

“I should have told you,” I mumbled through the crook of his neck. “I should have
told sooner, but I didn’t know
how.”

Griff pushed me to arm’s length so that he could se
e me.

“Of course you didn’t tell me. With everything that happened.” He looked ill, as though
he were the one who had been afflicted with morning sickness. “I’m sorry, so sorry
all this happened. I understand now why you seemed like you had changed so much. How
are you d
oing?”

I smiled, and my eyes watered at the corners as relief settled in. “I’m fine, Griff.
The baby’s fine. I saw a doctor a few weeks
ago.”

“You need more than just one doctor,” he said, worry encasing his voice. “When I took
Meatball for a walk, I was so angry. But my head cleared, and I realized what an asshole
I was, Em. I’ve been in that world. I’ve seen these pricks in action. I felt sick
when I understood what you were trying to tell me while I was too self-absorbed to
listen.” He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket, struggling to unfold it. “I
went to the library, and then to the school crisis ce
nter.”

I looked at the piece of paper, and my heart sank. Griff did not understand at
all.

“I don’t know how to help you, but there are people who can,” he said. “And I’ll be
there with you, every step of the
way.”

There was a moment, a fleeting moment, after I read the piece of paper and realized
that Griff thought I had gotten pregnant after being raped, that I considered letting
him believe this because this would keep him wit
h me.

But as soon as this glimpse of a thought flashed through, I felt sick to my stomach.
Because Cameron and his memory didn’t deserve that, even if he had chosen death instead
of fighting for us. And because I was done lying to Griff for my own selfish reasons
just so he wouldn’t leav
e me.

Griff waited for me to speak, hope and desperation finding their way back to his
eyes.

I gulped and took a few long breaths. “It’s not what you think, Griff.” I couldn’t
do it. I couldn’t tell him. But I had to. “This baby was made out of
love.”

I told Griff about Cameron and me. About Cameron falling in love with me. About me
falling in love with Cam
eron.

I had expected this to hurt him, but he instead kept a sympathetic eye. “Your mind
was playing tricks on you to help you survive the ordeal. I know you think you loved
him, Em, but you didn’t. And believe me, he never loved
you.”

“I did love him. And he did too,” I said, my voice
calm.

“You knew the guy what? A few weeks? It doesn’t make sense for you to have fallen
in love so quickly with someone you barely
knew.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense, Griff. I don’t know why I fell in love with Cameron …”
I had asked myself that question many times. I didn’t understand it, but I accepte
d it.

“You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “When I saw you that day
in the barn, he barely acknowledged you. He treated you as though you were his property.
How can you love someone who treats you like that? Is that what chicks are into nowadays?
Being with a guy who treats them like
crap?”

I could hear the frustration in his tone. Cameron had been forced to ignore me, rebuff
his feelings for my own protection. “It’s complicated, G
riff.”

But this wasn’t enough to satisfy
him.

“How can you have loved someone who left you? Pregnant nonethe
less!”

“Cameron didn’t know that I was pregnant when …” I sighed, realizing I had never told
him that Cameron was dead. “He didn’t leave me, Griff. He was killed. By Spider. That’s
why I need to kill Spider and Victor—because they will eventually find out that I’m
having Cameron’s baby. And there’s no way they are going to let that ha
ppen.”

“What did you
say?”

“That I need to
kill—”

“No, not that. Cameron. You said that he’s
dead?”

I told Griff about being taken by Shield. About being locked in a little room. About
what had almost happened. About Cameron using his last breath to save me before being
shot by Sp
ider.

A dark look took over Griff’s features. When he didn’t speak, I finished with what
I needed him to understand most. “I love Cameron, and Cameron loved me. While I wish
he would have fought for us, I can’t change that. But I will fight for the child we
created together.” That was it. I had now told him everyt
hing.

Griff looked pensive for a second, but something inside him triggered. “You mean,
you
did
love him. You said that you love him, but what you really meant to say is that you
used to love
him.”

I knew this would hurt him. “There’ll always be a part of me that will love him.”
I touched his arm. “But it doesn’t change anything else. I love you, Griff. But I
don’t know if I love you in that way. Things are just too complicated and confusing
right now. Nothing makes sense any
more.”

Griff shrugged his arm from my grasp. “As long as you love him, you’ll never be able
to lov
e me.”

I didn’t know what to tell him. But I felt as though I had just put a bullet through
his h
eart.

He stood and paced. “So if that son of a bitch walked through the door right now,
you would take off into the sunset with him? After everyt
hing?”

“There’s no sense in hashing out hypotheses, Griff. Cameron isn’t coming back. This
is my life
now.”

Griff stopped pacing long enough to look at me. Watching me. Deciding what he was
going to do. But I already knew what his decision would be. I could see it in the
vacancy of his eyes. There was so much I needed to tell him. How much I needed him.
How much his light made my life tolerable. How I could see myself being happy someday.
But there was no point. It was too late. I had hurt him too much for
that.

While Griff’s body was still there, standing in front of me, he was already elsew
here.

Griff turned around and went to bed. Right before dawn burst, I heard him shuffling
next door. He tiptoed past my curtain and down the stairs. When I got up in the morning,
I went to his room. His bed was made. His duffel bag was
gone.

Griff had lef
t me.

The fact that I had fallen in love with his nemesis was killing Griff, like a bullet
that lingered near his heart. The fact that I was pregnant with the child of his archenemy,
the fact that I was bearing the seed of everything he hated, the fact that I still
loved Cameron was enough to thrust the bullet to its final ta
rget.

CHAPTER TEN: CAMERON

FICTION

There was no rewriting of this s
tory.

There were times when I would lie awake at night with my eyes closed, imagining a
different story. One that started with me choosing to take that scholarship to MIT,
instead of taking over the drug world with Bill. I would meet Emmy on the street.
I would smile. She would smile back, immediately taking my breath away. I would take
her out to dinner, to an intimate but expensive place. I would make her laugh all
night. We would stroll through the streets hand in hand, stay out until the sun came
out.

Fall in love, unafraid, carele
ssly.

I would ask her father for her hand in marriage. He would slap me on the back, offer
me a cigar. I would marry Emmy in a huge wedding, one with as many guests as my old
high school had students. We would have children. As many as she wanted. They would
grow up being able to play in the front yard in the thickest, greenest grass known
to man, without having to live in fear of who might be lurking in the bushes. Emmy
would live happy. Wit
h me.

I was lying on the couch with my eyes closed. She came into my brain. I pushed her
out. She tried to inch her way back in. I opened my eyes and got up because there
was just no changing the ending to my story. Mine would end badly. Not Em
my’s.

I went to meet Manny at a Thai restaurant on the outskirts of Houston. It was as hot
in there as it was outside, and it smelled like dead fish left in the heat. At least
the place was deserted, as it ought to be. Manny and I grabbed a booth, and our guards
found seats at tables ne
arby.

Manny took the water pitcher that had been left on the table by the owner before he
left the premises. She poured us each a glass. I didn’t touch it. As far as I knew,
she had already laced it with toxin or some kind of ro
ofie.

She took a big gulp from her glass as if she were answering my thoughts, proving me
wrong. Then she ran her index finger along the side of her glass, picking up the condensation
and bringing it to her exposed collarbone. While she pretended I wasn’t watching her
do this, I wondered if she had chosen this heated location just so she could wear
the least amount of clothes possible and water her
self.

Sunlight was poking in through the drawn plastic shades and hitting Manny’s mane.
But all I could think about was how lovely Emmy’s skin would have looked in this light.
And how that dress would make her eyes shine. Everything reminded me of Emmy these
days. The less I saw her, the more I thought of her. It was becoming an obsession,
one that I used to be able to control. Like steam caught under a lid, I used to be
able to lessen the fixation just by seeing her, releasing the steam caught under.
Then I could concentrate, go back to business. I didn’t have that outlet anymore,
so the steam pressurized under my skin. A pressure co
oker.

“I didn’t kill my father,” Manny announced, forcing me out of my dayd
ream.

I wasn’t paying attention to her, so she had to get my attention som
ehow.

“I know everyone thinks I’m the one who ordered my father killed. But I di
dn’t.”

“Hm,” I said as I checked my phone. There were fifteen missed calls from Spider—something
was up. I put the phone back in my po
cket.

“You believe me, don’t
you?”

I glanced up and examined her face. “Is it important to you that I believe
you?”

She shrugged and looked out the wi
ndow.

Manny and I had been spending a lot of time together lately as we tried to fix the
mess she had made with the three cartel families. We were meeting with the Castillos,
one of the three Mexican cartel families. It was a last-resort kind of meeting. The
families were no longer pitted just against each other. Now they were pitted against
us as well because they knew Manny had been meeting with Julièn. She had been cavalier
about her dealings with the Mexican president, and the cartel saw this as a betrayal
from the whole Coali
tion.

I suspected that she had been purposefully careless to get her way and force the Coalition
to work with Julièn. To her dismay, the Coalition had still ruled in favor of mending
our broken relations with the families. The current was, however, changing. I had
already been quietly approached by three of the younger captains who voiced a sudden
change of heart. Suddenly they wanted to work with Ju
lièn.

Manny was apparently working hard behind the scenes. Which meant she was bribing them
or blackmailing them or sleeping with them. Possibly all of the above. It had nothing
to do with Julièn and everything to do with her being the one to bring Julièn into
the fold. She wanted the captains to see that she could broker the big moneymakers;
that when the time came for them to replace me, she would be first in
line.

In the meantime, we still planned for a peace treaty. But Manny saw our time together
more as an opportunity to get back into my favor and my pants. The more I rebuffed
her affections, the more desperate she became. Knees swiping mine, shoulders close
together, lingering looks. She reminded me of an orphaned baby raccoon. You see one
lingering by your garbage—lost, motherless, needy, broken—cute enough to take home.
Oh, she’ll cuddle up to you, climb up on your lap, make you feel warm inside and out.
But try to get too close, try to domesticate her, and she’ll chew your face off when
you’re slee
ping.

Carly called her evil. But evil was inaccurate. Manny was just a beautiful, intelligent,
impulsive, total sociopath. Soft and cuddly on the outside; rabies-spreading creature
on the in
side.

I glanced around the restaurant at the men I had brought with me, the men who were
being paid to protect me. I barely knew any of them. Not my best guys. But Manny’s
men were her very best men. Vicious, loyal murderers. Half of them were sitting inside,
ready. The other half were outside on rooftops, ready to fire. This was supposed to
be a friendly mee
ting.

Spider was still being kept out of the picture. Tiny was out looking for Norestrom.
I had no friends in this room, and that was just fine by me—though part of me wondered
how bad things were about to get for Spider to have called my phone so many t
imes.

I looked at my w
atch.

“Looks like they’re running late,” Manny told me, preempting my ques
tion.

This was her meeting. She was responsible for scheduling it and mending fences. I
was there as a show of support from the Coalition and to make sure Manny didn’t make
any promises we couldn’t
keep.

“Maybe they got stuck in traffic,” I said, smirking. The cartel was never late. They
came charging and prep
ared.

Manny tried to grin, but her talent for drama wasn’t good enough to hide the anxiety
that mounted in her. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed how very quiet it was out
side.

I took a sip of my drink, keeping my eyes on Manny. She had lost her easy manner as
her gaze stayed on the
door.

She reached for her cell phone too late. Our answer came bursting through the door
in a torrent of bullets. I dashed under the table just as a bullet found the water
jug and glass and water exploded everyw
here.

Then I pulled a stunned Manny under with me, almost ripping her arm out of its socket
in the pro
cess.

While our guards—whichever ones were still alive—answered the masked men’s bullets
with theirs, I took cover, dragging Manny with me, and made for the restaurant’s kit
chen.

“No. This way,” she yelled at me, heading toward the patron bathrooms. There was a
blast in the kitchen as the rest of the Munoz family unearthed a way in, blocking
our only exit. I had recognized the Munoz group by their choice in weapons: AK-47-style
rifle with a dot of pink paint on the ha
ndle.

Manny and I found ourselves in the women’s bathroom. It smelled nicer than any men’s
room could ever smell, and it had three stalls and not a damn window in sight. A cul-de-sac,
or a pretty-smelling coffin? Manny locked the paper-thin door and drew me to the back
wall. There was an old-fashioned heat radiator, the kind that made walls seem as though
they were playing the accordion. Manny pulled the radiator from the wall. It was a
dummy, a fake. It wasn’t at all attached to the wall that was pretending to play it.
Behind it, a hole the size of the hood of a pickup truck had been dug out of the bricks,
and a metal floorboard had been placed on the floor, filling the space between the
subway tiles of the bathroom floor and the cement wall. Inside the hole, there was
a small gray screen and a lever, which looked like the arm of a slot machine. When
Manny pulled the lever, the metal floor fell open—a trapdoor—and the screen lit up
with the number thirty. And then the number twenty-
nine.

“We have thirty seconds to jump in,” she yelled. Bullets were fired through the bathroom
door. Manny shrieked, grabbed her thigh, and fell crouched to the f
loor.

I yanked the dummy radiator in front of us as a shield and gladly shoved Manny into
the black hole. She rolled in like a garbage bag going down a hill, hitting her head
on the back wall before disappearing. I fired my gun at the door to delay the cartel’s
entry, tucked my gun into the back of my jeans, and backed myself into the hole. I
was hanging by my hands, darkness engulfing my free-flying limbs, and glanced up to
see five seconds on the countdown. The men had burst through the door now. I could
hear their bullets hitting the empty stalls as they searched for us. It was now or
n
ever.

I le
t go.

I slid, down deep, through a swinging hatch just as a ball of fire exploded above
and was shut out as the hatch slammed back. I landed on a stack of foam, next to Manny,
who was grabbing hold of her wounded
leg.

I instantly recognized the expression on her face. It was a look of shock that it
hurt, badly, but not as bad as you thought it would, mixed with a look of wonder as
to where exactly the bullet was. Was it stuck in a muscle, like a pencil through a
potato? Did it fragment? Did it go all the way through? Did it hit anything vital?
Manny’s gunshot cherry had just been po
pped.

I was in a metal room barely big enough to contain the two of us. I could hear more
things exploding over and around us and it was blistering inside, but wherever we
were, we were safe from the flames that were burning the cartel and our own
men.

“Things didn’t go as you planned.” I pulled the hem of her dress up and checked her
wound. The bullet was still lodged in her thigh, but she would live. I ripped a piece
of her dress and tied it around her leg, placing her hand over the bullet w
ound.

Then I laced my fingers behind my head and rested against the metal wall. “Let me
guess. You got a message to the Munoz family that we were meeting with the Castillos,
so that they could get their opportunity to kill the Castillos. You told them that
if they killed the Castillos and eventually the Vasquez family, we would give them
some kind of exclusivity over all Mexican tr
ades?”

“They were supposed to get the Castillos outside the restaurant,” she admitted through
clenched t
eeth.

“Outside the restaurant. So that you would know when they got there. So that your
sharpshooters would have enough time to kill both groups. So that you and I would
have time to escape. So that you would have time to burn all the evidence of your
de
ceit.”

“I just saved you, didn
’t I?”

“This is pretty cozy. Kind of perfect, actually. Though I supposed that’s why you
picked this p
lace.”

I held her eyes and grinned at the murderous wench. She smiled back swe
etly.

Manny was the most dangerous kind of woman. A woman in love, a woman rebuked, a woman
who would stop at nothing to get what she wante
d—me.

She was willing to put us and her best men in danger; she was willing to get everyone—including
me and including herself—killed, just so that she could have me, even if it were only
in d
eath.

“And you honestly thought that the Munoz family was going to let you decide their
fate? That they didn’t know what you were up to?” It felt good to see Manny humbled.
“You realize that your sharpshooters were killed before they ever had a chance to
feel a breeze? You just killed off all of your
men.”

I glanced over her face. I could tell she was trying to save face, but there was a
hint of vulnerability in her expression. “I really fucked up,” she admi
tted.

“Yeah, you
did.”

She crawled up on my lap as we waited for the fire to burn out and for the reinforcements
that Spider had probably already sent flying in. He knew where I was meeting the cartel
because it was his job to know. He just wasn’t allowed to come with me, this time
and from now on. Through his substantial contacts, Spider had undoubtedly found out
about the ambush even before we had entered the restaurant. This was why he had called
me so many times. This was why I had ignored his calls so many times. I knew that,
had he been with me, or had I at least brought men that he knew and knew how to reach,
we would have been out before the cartel had ever even loaded their guns. But that
wasn’t how it was supposed to go
down.