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“Do you know who this is?” a voice rasped.
Eyes wide, she shook her head. “No.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure your protector will fill you in later.”
Cam’s blood curdled. How many times had he heard that voice through the thin walls separating his mother’s bedroom from the living room where he slept? He could be half deaf and he’d still recognize Diamond Tommy Houston’s signature two-pack-a-day wheeze. Tommy had come a long way from enforcer to crime boss since those days, but he was still as deadly as ever.
“You have two choices, Miss Sanford,” Tommy continued. “Get out of town or die.”
“Why?” The single word ripped from her throat, half curse and half question.
“The why is for me to know. All you need to know is that you need to stay away from the cops so they won’t be able think about anything else but finding you. You’re going to be my little distraction,” Tommy continued.
“You killed Ms. Orton?” she asked.
“That pleasure was someone else’s.”
“You wouldn’t mind telling us who did the deed, would you?” Cam asked.
Tommy laughed. “And make this easy for you? You know me better than that, Mr. Hardy. Besides, it won’t matter who really killed Natasha, not when the police are going to pin her death on your friend.”
“You can’t know that,” Drea sputtered.
“I do, because it works well for my purposes, and I always get what I want. What happens next is your choice, but you need to decide right now.” Tommy stated his terms in his signature black or white style. “Leave town and lead the police on a merry chase, or die and force them to scramble around looking for you, because believe me when I’m done there won’t be a body left for them to find.”
Cam craned his neck and scouted out the rooftop across the alley. The sun reflected off something in the shadow of the air conditioning unit. A second shooter.
Fury rippled off of Drea’s skin. “Of all the stupid—”
“She’ll go underground,” Cam said.
“Perfect.” Tommy answered as if he never expected any other answer.
Of course Tommy wanted her to run. If she was innocent but stuck around, it was only a matter of time before the police figured out she wasn’t guilty and caught scent of whatever grander scheme Tommy was working on connected to the Ortons. But if she ran? Tommy could do whatever the hell he wanted. It all made sense in a twisted and sick fucked up way.
“Only guilty people run,” Cam said. “She’s your distraction.” What the hell was Tommy up to?
“Now you see,” Tommy said, as though he sensed Cam putting it all together.
“How long?”
“Forever plus one day.”
“Forget it,” Drea sputtered. “I’m not just walking away from my life. I don’t understand.”
“All you need to understand is that either you do what I want or you end up dead.”
She scoffed. “And if I go to the cops?”
“You’ll end up in jail wishing you could die faster,” Tommy said. His voice slithered down from a jovial uncle to that of a stone cold psychopath. “Think of it like a vacation. You can either serve out your function on a beach somewhere in a country without an extradition agreement, or I can personally see that you spend it in a coffin after a well-timed accident.”
The silence tightened around them as sharp as a razor wire. As bloodthirsty as he was brilliant, the crime boss didn’t make idle threats. Whatever his reason for coming after Drea, he had a legendary habit of holding grudges, and thanks to the dirty cops on his payroll, he had an uncanny ability to settle any debts. No wonder so few people crossed him and lived to tell the tale.
“My man has an itchy trigger finger, Miss Sanford. What’s it going to be?”
Cam could see the answer on her lips, the instinct to fight back at any cost. But this time, it would be her life. He held up his hand, then grabbed the marker hanging from the whiteboard on the fridge and scrawled a message for her in block letters: Fight another day.
Her gaze flicked from the message to him and back again. After a moment, she said, “Yes.”
