Chapter Twenty-Four
Teo
From the airport I wanted to go back out west of the city, get as far away from Beacon Hill as possible, but we were fighting traffic by that time, and night was closing in. Aidan dozed off after half an hour, so I was alone with my own thoughts. What I should have been thinking about were contingency plans, backup options, ideas on how to keep the motel room safe.
What I was actually thinking about was Aidan.
Aidan and his mother, talking about whether he was really going to take his vows.
Well, he’d sounded pretty damn sure about it. And I hated that there was a small, dark part of my soul that hoped he wouldn’t. That hoped he was wrong about it, or that God didn’treallywant Aidan after all.
“You’re an asshole,” I sighed under my breath, disgusted with myself. But when I looked across at Aidan, napping with his head on a rolled-up, cheap new hoodie against the window, I felt a pang. Was it so bad to want him as a man, after all?
I stewed in my own dark thoughts as the sun died. We drove past the outer suburbs and hit a wooded area just as the red sky turned black. The car we’d ‘borrowed’—as Aidan had put it—from the airport was a four wheel-drive with no LoJack, and I’d disconnected the GPS as soon as we were away from the airport.
I saw an aging sign for a motel coming up on the side of the road, and I turned off with relief. I needed to stretch, and as long as this place wasn’t entirely roach-infested, it would do. No other cars were parked outside rooms, and for a moment I worried that the place was actually deserted.
“This is like a horror movie,” Aidan said suddenly. I didn’t exactly jump, but I didn’tnotjump, either. “Like that Hitchcock film.”
“I’ll go in and get a room. You stay here. Duck down. I’m gonna tell ’em there’s only me. No reason they should know our business.”
Soon enough I had the room key in my hand, a flyer with instructions in the other, and a pretty good idea of why this place was so deserted. The welcome wasn’t exactly warm and the list ofDon’tswas long and varied. But I had no intention of causing any memorable trouble for the grouchy jerk at reception.
I kept my sentences short and sharp and tried to flatten the New York City out of my accent. Angelo Messina had always told me off about sounding like a mobster, and I’d never understood until then exactly why it had mattered, or why he’d warned me about it. But the guy at the reception desk seemed completely uninterested in who I was or what I was doing there, even when I specified that I wanted one of the rooms around the corner of the block. I wanted Aidan to remain unseen, and I also wanted the car out of sight, just in case it had been reported.
As I drove slowly down the strip and around the side, I double-checked as best I could that all the other rooms really were empty, and as far as I could tell, they were. Then I pulled up at our room and quietly let Aidan out of the car. He went in and stretched there in the dark while I fumbled with the light switch. There was a worrying fizzle before the light came on, dim and yellow. It was one room, sparsely furnished with a tiny bathroom.
There was only one bed pushed up against the wall, but at least it was a double. I didn’t think Aidan would mind much and he said nothing when he saw it. In fact, the only thing he asked was, “Can I take a shower? I feel gross.”
“Hang on,” I told him, and he waited patiently while I scoped out the bathroom. It was clean, but that was all I could say for it; the faucet looked like it was an original from the fifties. The shower head was set over the bathtub with a waterproof curtain.
It was exactly like the one in that Hitchcock movie Aidan was talking about.
But the shower was the least of my worries. What I was more concerned about was the window over the toilet, an easy means of ingress for anyone who might have followed us.
“Can I go for a walk, stretch my legs?” he asked from behind me.
“Hell, no,” I said to him. “We might be in the middle of nowhere, but that don’t mean you’re off the leash.”
“Yeah, Iknow,” he sighed. “That’s why I asked if I could instead of just bolting out the door. It’s not like I’m desperate to get killed, Teo. I’m quite happy to be leashed by you. I mean…you know what I mean.” He ducked his face away, and I did him a favor and hid my smirk.
In a lot of ways, Aidan O’Leary was much easier to protect than Finch D’Amato. He did what the hell he was told, for one thing.
I unpacked the supplies we’d grabbed at the strip mall and then handed one of the threadbare supplied towels to Aidan. “No walk, but you can take that shower.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m going to get stabbed in there,” he said as he caught sight of the shower. He glanced at the window nervously. “Plus who knows what’s lurking out there?”
“Don’t close the door when you go in,” I told him. “I want eyes on you at all times.” His eyebrows shot up. “Uh—you can leave it ajar,” I suggested quickly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Didn’t you?”
I couldn’t pick his tone. “All I meant was, I need to make sure you’re okay in there.”
“You think I’ll fall down the drain or something?” A smile flickered on his lips.
“I’m being careful. That’s my job.”
“How about you join me?”
