accidental 11 - accidentally ever after (14 page)

“Sit, Toni,” Wanda ordered, pointing to a chair, her eyes glassy. “You need to eat, too. You’ve had another rough day and I won’t have you collapsing.”

Toni stuffed a knuckle in her mouth to keep from screaming her fears for Nina out loud. Instead she whispered hoarsely, “There has to be something we can do. Maybe Ellesandra can zap you guys back home. I’m fine. I really am. I can get to the castle without you. I’ll explain to the king when I get there. He doesn’t sound like a bad guy. No way would he let someone die just because of some stupid rule. We can get a sick note or something from the big boss Ellessandra. She’ll explain. Surely he’ll listen to her. I just can’t let this go on—”

The clunk of Jon’s boots interrupted her as he came back into the room and knelt down in front of Nina, his handsome face pained. “I shall carry you, milady. Fear not, ’tis just I, at your service.” He looked to Marty and Wanda then. “May I?”

“Ellesandra can help?” Marty whispered, a tear falling from her eyes as she stroked Nina’s cheek with the back of her hand.

His nod was curt, his strong jaw tight. “We think so. Though we must do so apace.” He scooped up Nina’s limp form in his big arms and turned to take her from the room, his muscled thighs carrying him toward the back of Ellesandra’s home, where he disappeared again.

Toni gulped as she stared down at her coffee, unable to even consider drinking it. What had seemed so appealing yesterday, what she’d likely have given her left lung and a kidney for one sip of, felt stupid and vapid now.

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and let her head rest in her hands, tears slipping from her lashes and falling to the mosaic-tiled floor as she closed her eyes and made another bargain with the universe to save Nina.

Take me. If this involves the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” theory of the realm, then take me instead. No one will even know I’m gone back in Jersey. Please, just take me.

* * * *

Jon pushed his way out the back door of Ellesandra’s, and Toni’s heart began that crazy crashing his appearance always evoked while her stomach did a backflip.

And on cue, shafts of light twinkled over his head and the strains of that stupid harp rang in her ears.

“Shut up, would you?” she hissed to the sky with a roll of her eyes.

“Milady, speak up. I did not hear you.”

“I said, how long do we wait to find out if it worked?” she asked Jon as he sat beside her under a portico by a fire pit made of white stone.

She watched the glistening snow fall beneath a pink and deep-purple sky. She was wrapped in a blanket made of the softest cashmere smelling of rose petals, hunkered down on a toadstool made for two, hoping against hope whatever Ellesandra had cooked up for Nina worked.

His handsome face was grim. “Ellesandra said we must wait until the midnight hour.”

Toni blew out a shaky breath, tucking her nose into the blanket and closing her eyes. “There has to be another way, Jon. She can’t stay here much longer or she’ll…I can’t let that happen. She has a little girl and a husband. She needs blood.”

She realized her hysteria was rising along with her voice, but there was little she could do to stop this new wave of panic.

“Have faith, Toni. Ellesandra is one of the most skilled healers in the land,” he said, his voice husky and low.

Faith. She’d had that once, but not anymore. “I’m all out.”

“Why? What troubles you so that you cannot hope? I know something darkens your doorstep. What can it hurt to share, here in my world, when yours is so far away?”

Misery welled in the pit of her stomach, tugging at her already knotted gut. “Because what happened was awful, okay? What I did was awful, and I’ve been running from it ever since.”

He captured her hand, stroking her palm, his fingers tender and warm. “Then I urge you to tell me your woes. My ears listen well.”

Maybe he was right. What could it hurt? Her world was light-years away. No one would ever know…

“I had a boyfriend—”

“Does this word mean the same thing in your land as it does in mine?”

“Probably not. Let me reword. I was involved for a short time, or maybe betrothed is a word you’ll better understand, to a man who was part of a very bad group of people. Kind of like Queen Angria’s henchmen. It’s called the Russian mafia. I didn’t know it until it was too late, but then it was…well, too late.” So late. So, so late.

Jon paused, looking into her eyes, his face darkening under the light of the half moon. “So you didn’t know he was a henchman?”

“No. I worked in the finance department of a car dealership run and owned by this bad man’s father. We’d only dated for a couple of months when what I’m about to tell you happened.”

“You handled gold?”

Oh she’d handled it all right. Handled it so well, she didn’t even know she was handling it. Closing her eyes, she nodded. “Yes. Lots of gold.”

“And what is this car dealership you speak of?”

She sighed, licking her lips. They had some huge otherworld deficits—technology being the biggest. “Cars are like your carriages, only with motors and windows and vroom-vroom—Never mind. They’re a means of transportation in my world. Where I worked, we sold them.”

“For hefty sums, I imagine? Especially if they vroom-vroom,” he teased, his eyes amused.

She chuckled and shook her head. “They’re probably the equivalent of ten herds of sheep here in Shamalot.”

He waved a dismissive hand and grinned. “Sheep are rather inexpensive. Now
reindeer
—”

“Not the point, Stable Boy.”

He sobered, his gorgeous face becoming serious as he straightened and cleared his throat. “Of course. Please continue.”

“Anyway, my betrothed, Stas was his name, was laundering money through the dealership.”

“He washed the gold, you say? How peculiar.”

Toni groaned. “No. Not literally. Suffice it to say, the gold was illegal, and I handled it. Which meant I could go to prison if the police…I mean the people who guard Jersey…ever found out.”

“So then what happened?”

“One night, just after I’d figured out what he was doing, that he was using the car dealership as a front to launder money, I decided I’d confront him. I really hoped I was wrong, but I know numbers, Jon, and those numbers didn’t add up. Anyway, I asked my supervisor to meet me at the dealership so I could tell him about Stas and what he was doing. I was too afraid to do it over the phone. Little did I know, my supervisor was also a part of the mess.”

God, that night. She’d never forget that night—finding out Andre was part of the whole thing, the blood, their laughter at what they’d done.

Jon’s beautiful sapphire eyes narrowed to mere slits in his head. “And did you confront this scoundrel? Were I there in your land, I would have beheaded him. No one steals from the king.”

“I never got that far, and now, looking back, it was a good thing. When I showed up, for some reason I took the back way through the service entrance instead of the front doors. I don’t know why, because it was out of the ordinary for me. But I’ve thanked my lucky stars every day since I chose that path.”

Because it had been the right one. She paused and swallowed hard, tightening her grip on the blanket.

Jon cupped her jaw, letting his thumb run over her lower lip. “This pains you, milady. I cannot bear it. I will not press if you wish for it to remain a secret.”

No. She’d come this far; it was time to go all the way. “Stas and Andre, my supervisor, had just kill…killed a man. I don’t know who he was or why he was at the dealership, but they were standing over his body, and the body was in a pool of…And Stas had a gun in his hand and they were laughing about it while they waited for
me
.”

Toni couldn’t contain her sob as her shoulders sagged and her chin dropped to her chest. Her fate would have been the same had she gone in the front door. It just took one little hiccup in her routine to save her, and she wasn’t wasting that second chance.

“Toni,” Jon whispered, pulling her close, letting his chin rest atop her head. “No more. No more tonight. This stresses your heart and I do not like it.”

She buried her face in his shoulder, fighting hot tears. “It’s okay. Really. Needless to say, I got the hell out of Dodge as fast as I could, because I knew they’d be looking for me. I’d told Andre when I asked to meet him that something was going on with Stas.”

Jon’s grip tightened on her arm, his voice low and menacing. “Why do I suspect this Stas found you?”

And then, she’d done the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life. She told her hothead, overprotective brother. “Because he did. I stupidly confided in my brother, and to this day I can’t believe I did something so careless. But at that point, I still didn’t know anything about Stas’s involvement in the mafia or how widespread his reach was. I just thought he was a bad guy with a hot accent. But I had to tell someone what I saw. So I told my brother Cormac that Stas was cooking the books. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew I should have gone to the police, but I panicked.”

She’d wanted Cormac to go with her, and that had been the plan, until…

“Forgive my ineptitude. How does one cook a book? Surely there’s no culinary value in leather and parchment?”

Her shoulders slumped. “It means to fix them so they look like one thing but are absolutely another. Anyway, I told my brother. We planned to go to the police and tell them everything I’d seen.”

She’d never forget Cormac’s handsome face when he’d heard her story that night, after she’d left the dealership. His disbelief, his rage.

“I suspect your brother is a fierce knight?”

Toni nodded, her heart tight with sorrow. “He is. It’s just the two of us since my mother died six years ago, and we were…
are
very close. He took me to his house and told me to stay put. But Stas showed up and the next thing I know, I’m out cold and Cormac is gone.”

Jon lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. “And this Stas? What did he do to you, Toni?
Tell me
.”

She shook her head as salty tears welled in her eyes. “He tied me up, held a gun to my head, threatened to kill me.”

And she’d stuck her face right back in his, dared him to pull the trigger, using the same technique he’d once told her he used when confronted with a heated argument.

Be the crazy, Antonia.

And then he’d laughed at the size of her balls, his deep-brown eyes glinting with maniacal pleasure. But Stas was far more into a good mind game, which he’d played like an expert by telling her all the things they were going to do, not just to her, but to Cormac.

“A gun? This is a weapon?”

“A bad weapon. Maybe even worse than a sword. It’s faster, stronger.”

“But you escaped his clutches.”

“Just by pure luck. Stas might be pretty badass, but he’s not exactly a rocket scientist.”

Jon’s stare was blank.

“It means he’s not very smart. I managed to get loose while he was on his cell phone in another room. I know Cormac’s house well, so I climbed out a window and slid down a trellis and made a break for it. Somehow I got back to my apartment, and that’s when I found…” She sucked in the cold air with a shiver.

Jon stiffened, the sympathetic anguish clear on his face. “Cormac?”

Toni shuddered, rubbing her arms. “No. My neighbor, Woody. I remember seeing him as Cormac and I left. My best guess is that he heard us talking about going to my brother’s place. Stas probably used his strong-arm tactics to get him to spill the beans about our location. Woody saw me that night when I got back from the dealership—he knew something was wrong because I was close to hysteria by that point. Stas must have sensed that Woody knew something, because he killed him and left him in the middle of my living room.”

Gripping her temple with her forefinger and thumb, she fought that image, the resurrection of the memory of Woody’s body, facedown on her hardwood floor, a hole in the back of his head.

“This Stas must die,” Jon growled with clear agitation, the muscles of his arms flexing in tension.

“If you ever get to Jersey, I’ll give you his address. Bring a sharp sword,” she joked.

“This is no laughing matter, Toni. He is vicious and should swing at dawn.”

“Don’t think for one second I don’t want that, but proving it is a whole other story.”

Just before she’d taken off, she’d made a phone call to the police. Told them everything she saw at the dealership, about Woody and her brother, and they’d claimed to have taken all that information down—and had done absolutely nothing.

Because Stas was part of a network of cold-blooded killers just like him who were pretty good about cleaning up their messes. No one matched the brief description she’d given to the police of the man at the dealership, and Woody’s death wasn’t a death with no body to show for it.

He was just a missing person.

Jon brushed the hair from her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. “What happened to your brother, Toni?”

She licked her lips, suddenly dry and stiff, her body tight with unbearable tension. “I don’t know. I never saw him again after that. But Stas did leave me one thing back at my apartment to remind me I was better off shutting my mouth.”

She’d hidden out at a sleazy motel one town over for a week, with no luck convincing the cops they had two murders on their hands while she’d researched Stas and his family. It was a week spent frantic, afraid, with almost no sleep, until she finally realized Stas probably had connections to the police she’d never get past.

“What happened next?”

That same bile rose in her throat, hot, pungent, almost making her gag at the recollection. “I went back to my apartment in a stupid disguise, hoping to grab some of my things when I realized the police were never going to take me seriously. There was a box waiting outside my door…”

“Don’t say anymore, milady. I do not need to know,” he murmured against the top of her head.

Her throat was too tight to speak anyway, her stomach hot with that sour acidic roll that hit her every time she thought about the contents of that box.