With her lower lip protruding, Sloane asks, “Can we at least text?”
Demi throws her arms around her neck and hugs her tight. “Every single day. I promise.”
While she adds additional words to her pledge, I jerk my head to the side, wordlessly requesting an impromptu Walsh family meeting. We’re missing Landon, but considering he’d spend the next three hours lecturing me on responsible decision-making, I’d rather he be absent. I don’t have time to burn.
“Has Mom and Dad gone to the Four Seasons?” Our parents have had a timeshare in a two-bedroom condo for over a decade. They usually only visit in the summer, but Saint has the gift of the gab. He convinced them there’s no such thing as too many vacation days.
Saint lifts his chin. “And Landon promised to take Justine back to school this morning, but I still have a bad feeling about this.” He joins me near the trunk of his car. “Running won’t change anything. If you made a deal with Dimitri, then go against it, you’ll have all sides coming at you.”
“I don’t have much choice, Sebastian. I can’t stay here.” The fact I use his real name exposes how blurry my head feels.
“Why not?” Caidyn intervenes, unaware of the full story. He knows I fought tonight, but he has no clue it was a deathmatch. None of my brothers do. I kept that snippet of information solely between Demi and me. Well, so I thought. My altercation with Agent Moses this evening exposed tonight there’s a massive leak in my boat.
With my head still in the disbelief stage of my remorse, I give a less murderous excuse for my cowardice. “I hit Col Petretti. It wasn’t a fairy tap. I’m reasonably sure I knocked him out.” For the first time in my life, my voice doesn’t have an ounce of cockiness to it. “I think I broke his nose.”
Saint hisses out a cuss, whereas Caidyn straight up shouts his. Their responses expose I was right to hold back all the details of my night. If they think hitting a mobster is bad, imagine their reaction when I tell them I killed a man.
Although I’m riddled with guilt that I ended someone’s life, there’s no denying the truth. “He was hurting Demi. I had to stop him.”
Caidyn freezes with his hand suspended mid-air. “He didn’t… it wasn’t like…” He does a movement with his hands that shouldn’t speak on his behalf, but somehow does. “Right?”
The lost expression on Saint’s face exposes Caidyn kept matters we discussed last night under wraps. I’m not surprised he didn’t rat me out. He’s good like that.
“He didn’t do… that,” I answer, gritting my teeth. “But if I hadn’t arrived, there were no guarantees. It was fucking horrific.” When the crack my opponent’s neck made replays in my head, I involuntarily shiver. “I couldn’t make the shit up I saw tonight.”
Mistaking the shakes of my body as me being cold, Saint tugs off his jacket and hands it to me. “Maybe talk to Dimitri? Things aren’t tight with him and his father. He may help you if it benefits him.”
“Maybe,” I parrot, my head too muddled to think of a better reply. “But for now, I need to get her off her uncle’s radar.” I shift on my feet to face Demi during the ‘her’ part of my comment. She’s still talking to Sloane, but I feel her eyes constantly drifting to me. I don’t know exactly what her plan was when she ran this morning, and in all honesty, I don’t want to know because if it’s anything like I’m thinking, I would have made the scratch in Col’s neck an inch deeper. I’m not a killer, but I’d kill again for Demi without a single thought crossing my mind.
When the innocence in Demi’s eyes prompts me on what my family meeting was about, I dig the photograph I snatched out of the blond agent’s hand earlier tonight before thrusting it in Saint’s chest. Justine’s welfare isn’t solely his responsibility, but since he seems to know a heap more about Dimitri than he’s letting on, I’ll pretend as if it is.
“When was this?” Saint’s voice is as rough as mine, his suspicion just as high.
“I don’t know. I was planning to ask you the same thing.”
Caidyn gives me a look, warning me to tread carefully but remains as quiet as a church mouse.
“Why the fuck would I know they went on a date?” Saint asks when my glare becomes too much for him to bear. “They could be friends.”
“Friends? Right. ‘Cause we all look at our friends like that...” My words trail off when I tap on Dimitri’s face in the obvious surveillance image. He isn’t looking at Justine like I do Demi. She’s getting more attention from the men surrounding her than Dimitri.
What the fuck?
Caidyn unearths the reason for my quiet when he peers down at the photograph Saint is clutching for dear life. “Leave it with me,” he says a couple of seconds later. When I attempt to fire off an objection, he shifts my focus back to Demi. “You’ve got more pressing matters to deal with than who our little sister dines with.” With the photograph shoved into his pocket and his hands on my shoulders, he guides me to Saint’s ride. “Get her out of here before they come looking.”
I fucking hate that we’re running like cowards, but sometimes running is the only solution.
Halfway into the driver’s seat, I call Demi’s name. When I’m awarded her eyes, I nudge my head to the passenger door Saint is holding open for her. “Are you ready?”
After nodding, she hugs Sloane like it could be the last time she’ll see her, then she does the same to my brothers. It’s stupid of me to feel jealous, so I won’t mention it.
“Look after him, Demi,” I hear Caidyn say a mere second before he closes the passenger door of Saint’s car, trapping Demi and me inside. “He isn’t the only brother I have, but he’s the only one I like.”
His mumbled comment swipes the uncomfortableness of our departure. It seems as if we’re going on vacation instead of hiding from a man who will torture me for hours before killing me, or worse, force me to watch him do the same to his niece.
“It’s really nice out here,” Demi mumbles on a yawn when I pull Saint’s car into the driveway carved along a mountain an hour out of Ravenshoe. “Has your family owned it for long?”
“This cabin doesn’t belong to my family. A friend of Caidyn’s said we could stay here as long as we need.”
“Oh.” Heat flashes across her cheeks like she suddenly feels stupid. “That’s smart. We probably shouldn’t stay somewhere associated with your family.”
Hating that she feels responsible for anything happening, I gather her hand in mine, raise it to my mouth, then press a kiss on the edge of her palm. “My brothers aren’t walking into this blindly, Demi. They know everything.”
She forcefully swallows. “Everything?”
With the ground dewy because of the late hour, it’s foolish of me to remove my eyes from the dirt road. I wouldn’t if I didn’t think my comfort was more vital to Demi than air in her lungs.
After tracking my index finger down her bruised cheek and across her plump lips, I mutter, “They know enough to know we made the right decision to get away for a couple of weeks. I’ll tell them the rest when the time is right.”