“The worst,” he muttered.
I knew I ought to be scared, but that was never the feeling I had around Cameron. “You were
saying?”
He looked at me blankly.
“That the bad person who knows who you love—” I incited.
“The very bad person will use that to control you,” he finished with growing reluctance.
He squinted. “Can we stop here?”
“No. We can’t.” I was unwavering. Cameron’s world had once been my brother’s world—I
needed to know, however dire. I needed to know where Bill had been, where Cameron still went.
He sighed and paused the movie. He let go of my hand and rotated his body toward me, resting his
elbow on the back of the couch and leaning his head against his lifted fist.
“Imagine what Spider would do if someone ever took Carly and threatened to hurt her if Spider
didn’t do what they wanted,” he put to me.
The image of a crazed Al Pacino brandishing a machine gun in Scarface came to mind. “Okay …”
“Someone … a bad person, who knows that Spider would do anything to keep Carly safe will use
it to control him by threatening to hurt Carly and force Spider to do something that he doesn’t
want to do or can’t do.”
“So people use other people as leverage to get what they want.”
Cameron slightly cleared his throat. “Right.”
“People do that all the time, Cameron,” I informed him. “It’s not the end of the world.
People can move past it.” I had hoped to be proof of that … someday.
“It’s not worth hiding your love away,” I added, artfully.
“This is why I don’t want to talk about this with you,” he said with exasperation. “You’ve
got this cute view of the world.”
I took a quick affronted inhalation and narrowed my eyes. His smile was warm, but his eyes were
tight.
“You’re beautifully na?ve, Emmy … I don’t want to change that.”
“I’m not na?ve,” I huffed. “What did I say that was so na?ve?”
“In my world,” he unwillingly shared, watching my face, “when a loved one gets … taken …
they don’t come out of it unscathed … if they’re lucky to come out of it at all.”
“You mean people lose their lives in the process?” I tried to keep my voice professional,
non-scared, non-na?ve.
“Sometimes …” he admitted with a murmur.
“How often?” I quickly questioned.
He didn’t need to answer. The look on his face was enough response.
“Why—” I had to curtail my tone again. “Why wouldn’t they just let people go once they got
what they wanted? Why does anyone need to get—”
“It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you can’t do what they want you to do without
getting a whole lot of other people killed. And sometimes the person you love is killed … just
because you love them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
He leaned in, and his eyes held mine. “What would you do if the person you loved was hurt? What
would you do to the person who hurt them?”
“I would hunt them down, hurt them, kill them.” I was taken aback by the violence in my own
voice.
“And then you would have gang war, which was probably what they wanted in the first place.”
“Like street shootings and stuff like that?”
“That’s the stuff you see on TV—the unorganized street gang stuff. In the real organized
world no one sees gang wars. You don’t hear about mass shootings … you might hear about weird
disappearances or house fires or car accidents or robberies gone bad. Normal stuff that could
happen to anyone on any day.”
He paused. His face was impenetrable.
“What are you thinking about?” he questioned.
“You tell me. Can’t you just read my mind?” I mocked, though my voice cracked.
He rolled his eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know that every time I open my mouth you get a
little more nervous and eager all at once … I don’t understand it.” He shook his head and
waited.
I hadn’t realized that I was holding my breath. He was very observant.
I exhaled and swallowed. “Why would anyone want a gang war?”
He shrugged lightly. “For the same reasons that the rest of the world starts wars—because they
want something. Territory, power, money, intimidation … there are a lot of reasons that people
start wars. But in our business, they’re usually a bad idea—eventually they attract too much
attention.”
“Like when too many weird things start to happen to too many people,” I mused.
“Precisely.” His face was getting increasingly tense. “We wouldn’t start a war unless
everyone agreed.”
This peaked my interest even more. “Who’s everyone?”
“Let’s just say it’s a bunch of bosses who sit down and make all the decisions for the best
of the business.”
“Like a board of directors?”
He chewed on this and smiled. “Sure. Let’s call them the board of directors.”
“Are Carly and Spider on this board?”
“No, they work directly for me.”
“But you’re on the board,” I said.