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Chapter Twenty-one
V
I located where we were on the map, and then found the road Tony the Hound told us to take.
I wondered if he was getting suspicious yet. Had the car with the tracker gone past the turnoff, or had the young men already come off the main road somewhere along the route and gone in completely the wrong direction? Even worse was the possibility the other car had taken exactly the same route Tony had told us to, in which case there was the chance a car of young men were about to get their heads blown off by a bunch of gangsters.
I was tense, waiting for the phone to ring to find out what we were playing at, but, for the moment, it remained silent.
X leaned across to take a look at the map. Having him so close sent shivers through my body. I could still feel the dull ache of him between my thighs, the wetness in my underwear. I didn’t know what had come over me—that proximity to death making me cling harder to life, I guessed. I wanted to lean into him, to lay my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. I was tired of fighting with everyone and everything, and I just wanted to let someone else take the strain for a short while. But I couldn’t. I needed to prepare myself for the biggest fight of my life, and I couldn’t let my guard down again.
“There,” he said, stabbing his finger down on the map. “There’s a little back road—possibly not much more than a farm track—which leads further south, adjacent to the route Tony wants us to take.”
“But we don’t know how far down the road they’re going to be.”
“We’re just going to have to take our chances. I don’t think we have any other choice.”
He was right.
“You need to take the next turn,” I said. “Then a couple of miles along, we’ll come across the farm track on the right hand side.”
Why there? Why had they chosen this place, in the middle of nowhere, as a meet-up spot? I guessed we were in the middle of nowhere, so less chance of passersby reporting the gunshots that were bound to come. It also wasn’t too far from the town where I’d been relocated by Witness Protection, so that must have come into play. It was a far cry from New York City, though, and I experienced a sudden and unexpected pang of homesickness.
X took the turn and we found ourselves on an unpaved road. The old vehicle bumped and jolted its way down the track, creaking and moaning its protest. We should have stuck with the truck.
The cell phone buzzed.
“He’s figured out we’re no longer with the tracker.”
“What should I do?” I asked staring at the ringing phone.
“Don’t answer it.”
“Then he might kill my sister.”
“If he does that, he’ll have lost all leverage, both with you and with your father. He’s not a stupid man.”
“Fuck.” I was torn with indecision. If I answered the cell phone, he’d want to know exactly where I was, and if I told him that, we’d lose any element of surprise.
“He doesn’t know we found the tracker,” said X, trying to reassure me. “You could have been carjacked, for all he knows. Anything might have happened.”
He was right, but the thought of him doing something awful to Nickie terrified me.
Even so, I stared at the phone with my heart lodged in my throat, my palms tingling to pick it up and answer it.
X’s hand suddenly covered my thigh, dragging my attention away from the phone and to him.
“It will be all right,” he said, and I found myself tumbling into the blue of his eyes. “I kill for a living, and taking down Tony the Hound and his men won’t prove to be a problem.”
A small smile touched my lips. “You were supposed to kill me, too, remember? You didn’t do so well on that job.”
“Maybe that was because I couldn’t bring myself to see you dead.”
“Not because I stabbed you in the arm and leg?”
His eyebrows lifted, his lips pursing slightly in a way that made my heart flip. “Maybe that helped, too.”
The phone stopped vibrating, the light of the screen going dark again, and ahead of us the dirt track hit a road in a T-junction. My heartrate continued to thunder, and I took a couple of deep breaths. I needed to distance myself, emotionally, from all of this. It was something I’d been good at in the past, and I had to find that cold, dark place inside myself again. That Verity was the one who needed to face Tony the Hound and his men, not the Vee who had been awakened by the touch of the hit man sitting beside her, or the terrified sister frightened for her sibling’s life.
