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And whoever’s helping her? I won’t be nearly as kind to them.
Chapter Five – Thea
When morning hits, Max shuffles down the stairs like it’s another day, nothing out of the ordinary. I spent most of the night-slash-early-morning lounging on the couch, trying to ignore the way Silus kept staring at me—since the man had duct tape over his mouth, he couldn’t say a single word more, but that didn’t stop him from being so intently focused on me that I constantly had to fight a blush.
I mean, shit. The man could undress you with his eyes. I don’t know what kind of superpower that is, but I’m not here for it. Nope. Not even a little.
Maybe if I keep repeating that lie to myself it’ll eventually become true.
Max yawns as he rounds the bottom of the staircases and turns to walk through the living room. Silus instantly flicks his gaze to him, narrowing that dark stare, while I get up and follow him into the kitchen in the back of the house.
My brother holds up a hand and mutters, “Yeah, yeah. I know. I swear I didn’t stay up all night playing Crazy—”
I slap him on the arm, and he bounces back, recoiling with a much faster reflex than I thought he would, given his half-asleep state. “He’s awake,” I hiss out, glancing over my shoulder at our kidnapped mafia boss.
The look my brother gives me: shock mixed with disbelief, tells me he didn’t notice Silus’s glare when he walked by. Leave it to Max to be so oblivious.
Max says not a word as he scurries back into the living room and stands next to Silus, who turns his head and his glare my brother’s way the moment he comes into his sight. Max takes in the tape across his mouth and asks, “Did he try to call for help or something?”
I go with Max to the living room. “No, he just wouldn’t shut up,” I tell him as I fold my arms over my chest, “and I didn’t want to listen to him anymore.”
Silus’s gaze travels to me, where it stays. When he looks at me, his eyes don’t scream murder; they scream something else instead, something I’d rather not think about.
Max chuckles. “Nice.” We return to the kitchen, where he starts a pot of coffee and pulls out a mostly-empty box of cereal. “After I eat, I’m going to see about meeting one of Cormac’s guys. I’ll need to snap a pic of Silus just to prove we have him, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to meet with Cormac today. I mean, these two have bad blood. The O’Connors and the McLeans hate each other, some Romeo and Juliet kind of shit, minus the Romeo and Juliet.”
I watch my brother take his bowl to our tiny kitchen table. “How are you going to get him out of here?”
“I’m not. Cormac’s guys will.”
“I’d rather not have more dangerous men in this house.” I mean, shit, is my brother thinking straight at all? What’s to stop Cormac’s men from killing us the moment they get their hands on Silus? This whole thing is asking for trouble—which, I guess, just proves it’s one of Max’s schemes.
“What do you want me to do?” Max speaks with a mouthful. “He’s one heavy motherfucker. Do you know how hard it was getting him out of the car and into the house by myself? Give it a day. I’m sure that asshole will have bruises upon bruises.”
My brother is a small guy. Logistically, it must have been difficult for him to get Silus into the house all by himself. He didn’t want me to help, though; he wanted me to come home separately so no one could tie me to Silus’s disappearance—as if the new bartender at the club who abandoned her post the same time Silus stumbled out of the club isn’t suspicious.
I’m still skeptical about this plan. There’s so many holes in it the water would’ve leaked out already if it was a jug.
“Look, these guys—” Max pauses as he glances over his shoulder at Silus. “—they all run their empires on codes of honor and shit. You do them wrong, they’ll do you wrong. But if they agree to a deal, they won’t back out. They’re not that kind of slime.”
“And how would you know?”
“Because, sis, I keep my ears to the ground. I know how these things work. Trust me. Absolutely nothing will go wrong.” The look I give him stops him from saying anything else.
I mean, shit. Saying nothing will go wrong is like the ultimate way of tempting fate. It’s like those scenes in the movies where someone says something along the lines of it can’t get any worse and then the next frame shows a heavy rain pounding on their heads. My brother is asking for the rain to come, and in our case, the rain will be a spray of bullets accompanied by early graves.
Once the coffee is done, I pour my brother and myself a cup. Normally I hate the stuff, but seeing as how I stayed up all night, I’m going to need a shot of caffeine straight into my heart today. Max takes his black, but I have to put a shit ton of sugar into it, otherwise it just isn’t bearable to me.
I’m not very hungry, but I force myself to eat some toast. The bread’s a little stale, but as long as it doesn’t have any mold on it, it’s edible. I sit at the table and eat with Max in silence, keenly aware that Silus is less than fifteen feet away, probably hungry himself.
Should we offer to feed him?
No, that’s stupid.
Max wolfs down his cereal and chugs his coffee. He wipes the back of his mouth with his hand, stands, and says, “I’m off. Wish me luck.”
I don’t say anything, mostly because I want to tell him we shouldn’t need luck to pull this off. Every what-if scenario should’ve been accounted for. Those are the kinds of things people do before trying to pull off a bank-robbing heist or a high-profile kidnapping like this.
Max leaves the house, and just like that, I’m alone with our prisoner again.
