Crow’s Row (49 page)

Hours seemed to roll by in this cardboard box of a room, and Victor never came. The warehouse went deadly quiet. Perhaps it was nighttime now. Eventually, I turned off the swinging lightbulb, crawled down the bed, fell asleep and rebooted. There were no nightmares while I slept—I was already in one.

Victor was staring at me in the dark the next time I awoke. I shot up and curled my body to the wall, as far away from him as I could. In the shadows, Victor smiled his sickly smile and moved to the bed, sitting next me.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. I felt his hand graze my hair, pushing it away from my face, like Cameron had lovingly done before him. I was tired of crying, of playing weak. Tears fell anyway.

Victor shushed me. “Lie down.”

I didn’t move. Hypnotized by my fear.

“Lie down,” he shouted. I yelped with fright.

With every muscle of my body shaking, I laid on my back. Victor got up and pulled on the string of the light. I closed my eyes as the light came on. The tears had already soaked the pillow by the time Victor had climbed on top of me. He started to kiss me and didn’t care this time that I wasn’t kissing back. His breath smelled like alcohol or mouthwash. I couldn’t tell the difference. Whatever it was, it made me sick to my stomach.

His kisses became more forceful, and his hands more aggressive. I started to struggle. He grabbed my wrists and with one hand held them over my head. I started kicking and screaming. He put his hand over my mouth and held me down with the weight of his body.

“If you don’t behave, I’ll have you serve your time in one of my whorehouses. Or maybe I’ll just kill you. I don’t need you to be alive to make that boy lose control.” He stared me down. “Now, will you behave?”

I nodded yes. As soon as he let go of my mouth, I spat in his face. “Go ahead and kill me then, because I will never do what you want me to do. I won’t betray him no matter what you do to me.”

He slapped me across my already bruised cheek. Tears of pain leaked out of my eyes. I winced, but I had stopped crying. I continued to try to wiggle away from him, but this only seemed to egg him on. His breaths became excited. He started fumbling with his belt buckle; I started kicking and screaming as hard as I could. I managed to unclench one of my hands and scratched his face. He screamed in anger and in pain and slapped me across the face again. The door burst open. Victor looked up. I used his momentary distraction to struggle away from him and run to cower into a corner of the room.

Mickey was in the doorway.

“I said to stay away,” Victor screamed at him.

Mickey quickly eyed me and turned to Victor. “I’m sorry, sir. I heard you scream. I thought—”

“You thought nothing. Get out of here and don’t come back in!”

Mickey eyed me again. “Sir, there’s someone here to see you.”

I heard short footsteps, and a man I recognized as Rocco’s killer walked through the door. It took everything I had not to jump at Norestrom’s throat to choke him. But, from the battered look of his face, it looked like someone had already beaten me to it. One of his eyes was swollen shut, his nose was bloody and crooked, and he was missing several teeth.

“What happened to you?” Victor asked him.

Norestrom turned all of his attention to Victor. “I got caught by one of Spider’s boys. They tried to beat the location out of me. But I didn’t tell them a thing and escaped before they could kill me.”

Victor half-smiled and absentmindedly said, as he glanced back at me, “Well, it’s good to have you back, son. We’ll need you around for the takeover. Go get cleaned up and make sure that the young lady and I get our privacy.”

“Sure, Shield.” Norestrom had a smug look on his face as he turned to soldier-man. “Think you can manage to follow those orders, Mickey, or do I have to draw you a picture?”

Mickey looked furious, but nodded his head in obedience. The men walked out and locked the door behind them. They gave us our privacy. Victor immediately stood up and swaggered toward me like he had already won. I got up and met him with my fists up. I threw a punch that fanned him. He found this hilarious.

“You and your brother have always been fighters. I never understood what you were so angry about. Bill, I guess, had reason to be upset, what with your father leaving my sister like that. Can’t blame your father though. Your mother was quite the catch.” He laughed again. “Poor Billy. He came to me, thinking he would find an ally against his father. But my sister was nothing but a weak-minded woman. I was ashamed of being related to her. She didn’t deserve to have her honor defended by me or Bill.”

Victor pulled my fists down and brought his smiling face to mine. “Are you still a virgin?”

“No. Cameron already took care of that,” I said spitefully.

His smile was gone. This gave me little comfort. He grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me to the bed while my limbs flailed in dead air. He quickly resumed his position on top of me and proceeded to fumble with his belt buckle. I thrashed about while he loosened his pants and I wished that I would have found pants to wear instead of a skirt for the funeral—at least it would have delayed him a bit more. As Victor struggled with me and his pants, I felt something cold fall close to my thigh. Suddenly, everything changed for me. I grew calmer and stopped struggling, which mildly pleased Victor.

“There. Now that’s more like it,” he said softly. His grasp on my hands loosened as he took advantage of my change in humor to pull the rest of his pants down. I pulled my hand free and grabbed the revolver that had slid next to my thigh. I brought it to his head.

With the feel of a cold barrel against his skull, I had Victor’s full and undivided attention. But he just laughed.

“You even know how to use that thing?” he teased.

I pulled back the lever, removed any doubt. He flinched when it clicked next to his skin. His eyes grew as big as the bottom of a shot glass.

“Get off me,” I ordered.

He clumsily rolled off the bed and stood in front of me in his underwear with his arms up and his pants around his ankles.

“Just relax,” he said fanning his hands. “Don’t do anything foolish. One scream from me and twenty guards will be running in here.”

“And you’ll be dead,” I added. I got up and demanded that he turn around. I placed the gun against the back of his head and made him walk to the door. He was a lot taller than me, so I had to stretch on my tiptoes to keep the gun pressed at his head while he walked. We got to the door, and, not trusting him to give the right signal, I reached my free hand around him to knock on the door, three times. After a few seconds, I heard someone fumble with the lock and open the door.

Mickey reached for his gun as he saw Victor with his hands laced behind his head and me peering behind him.

“Don’t even think about it. You touch that thing and your boss is dead,” I yelled, surprised by the force of my own voice. I was completely calm. I told him to slowly remove his gun from its holster using his opposite hand—I saw this in a movie once—and hand it to me. Mickey kind of chuckled as he followed my orders. Equipped with two guns, I ordered Mickey to walk ahead of us with his hands up. Victor was hopping and tripping over his downed pants, and I followed him.

With the two large men in front of me, I couldn’t see anything ahead. I looked at the floor and saw that we had reached the end of the carpet and the hall into the warehouse.

I heard hushed voices as we walked out.

“What’s going on here?” Victor exclaimed.

I tried to peek around him, but Mickey was blocking my view.

“Mickey, get down. I can’t see anything,” I whined. I then remembered that I was the one who was holding the guns.

Mickey chuckled and got down on his knees with his fingers still behind his head. Victor did the same, without my order. The view finally opened up, and my knees almost buckled under me. I was trying to confirm what I thought I had seen, but my vision was being blurred with tears. I couldn’t wipe the tears away because my trembling hands were still holding onto the two revolvers.

“Emmy!” I heard Cameron say with exasperation. I didn’t need to see that it was indeed him.

I heard hurried footsteps and through the blanket of my tears saw Mickey and Victor being brought down to the ground by a group of large figures. I couldn’t move beyond the uncontrollable trembling of my hands. My legs were as stiff as a board now, and my head was swimming.

I was still pointing the guns ahead of me, at Cameron’s guards who were cowering away from my trembling aim as they tried to drag Mickey and Victor off. But I was looking at Cameron, who was standing next to me.

“We got them. It’s okay,” he said softly in my ear as he tugged my arms down and took the weapons away from me. He wrapped me in his arms, and I started weeping. I was bringing my hands to my eyes, trying to keep up with the tears so that I could see his face.

He was joyfully, and at the same time sadly, laughing in my ear. “I came to save you, but I guess you didn’t need me to save you after all.”

I wanted to tell him that I did need him, always, but nothing but tears came out. I gave up trying and brought my face to his and pressed my lips against his, grimacing when his lips brushed the cut on my mouth. Cameron pulled me away and glanced over my face, passing his hand over my lip and bruised cheek. His faint smile was replaced with anger.

“Did Shield do this to you?” he shouted, shooting his arm straight out and pointing at Victor, who was on the floor face down. Suddenly Cameron noticed the pants around Shield’s ankles. His face went pale. “Jesus, did he—”

“He hit me. That’s it. I got to him before …” I couldn’t finish. Before what? The could-have-been was too hard for me to admit.

Cameron was enraged. He lunged for Victor, spinning him around, mounting him, and punching him in the face, over and over again. Victor cowered in a ball, covering his bloodied face with his hands. Spider came running up behind them, yelling.

“Cameron, stop! You’re going to kill him!”

“Good!” Cameron yelled back.

With Spider’s order, the guards pulled Cameron off of Victor. It took four of them to finally manage to get him away from Victor. Spider made the guards drag Victor away from Cameron’s sight, while a seething Cameron watched from the sideline. I rushed to him and threw my arms around his neck. I whispered that I was fine over and over while I held on.

He calmed down after a while and crushed me in his arms.

“How did you find me?” I asked, trying to wiggle out enough to look at him.

He smiled, almost to his eyes. There were bags entrenched under them. He looked twenty years older. “The guards caught Norestrom a couple days before Rocco’s funeral. We were going to sell him back in pieces to Shield for what he did to my brother, but when you went missing, I tried to beat the location out of him … before we killed him. He wouldn’t talk fast enough. I let him escape, knowing that he would be stupid enough to come find Shield and lead us to you.”

His eyes were locked on mine, but mine started tearing up again. “Cameron, I didn’t mean to abandon you at the church. Uncle Victor convinced me to go with him. They started shooting outside. The window exploded. I thought—”

“One of Shield’s men shot at the church window when he heard you warn me through the radio. They weren’t shooting at us. They couldn’t. If they killed us in an ambush like that, the leaders would have hunted all of them down. It took us a little while to figure out that they were shooting at anything but us. They were warning Shield. I should have known it was a trap and never left you. I completely screwed up.”

He held me, and then pushed me away, holding my shoulders in his hands. “I had no idea Shield was your uncle. If I did, I would have warned you.”

“He was my brother’s uncle.” I really didn’t feel like explaining my family’s history at that particular time, but Cameron didn’t push for more.

“That explains a lot, like where Bill got all his ideas from and his extreme dislike for Shield,” he said. “Though, I wished Bill would have told me.”

I smiled up at him, and he gently kissed me, on the good side of my mouth.

When we turned around, the warehouse was practically empty, except for Spider and Tiny, who were standing by Victor. Tiny was holding Victor up by the shoulders while Spider was waving his finger at Victor and speaking to him with a low voice. Victor looked terrified.

We made our way toward them. Victor glared at me, and I glared back.

“Let him go,” Spider, who had his back to us, said to Tiny.

“What?” Cameron yelled out. “Tiny, keep hold of him.”

Tiny held onto Victor and looked confusedly from Spider to Cameron.

“We’re letting him go, Cameron,” Spider said as he turned on his heels to face us.

“After everything he’s done? No, he’s a dead man.”

“We’re letting him go, Cameron,” Spider repeated with more force.

Cameron dragged Spider away from us, and, in arguing whispers, they decided Victor’s fate. I watched Cameron’s face turn ashen in the midst of their argument. After a while, Spider was doing all the talking, and Cameron was listening with his head bent in defeat.

“Let him go,” Cameron said dejectedly to Tiny when they had returned. He was blanched. I swallowed hard.