“Savannah, please move.” His tone is eerie.
I stare up at this 6’2” man who could easily pick me up and move me aside in the blink of an eye, but he doesn’t. He’s asking me to move. I place my hands on his shoulders just as he did mine.
“Mark, Abigail is so excited to see her sister. This will ruin the mood in the house, and I’m so tired of the attention being on me. Please, do nothing until after Thanksgiving dinner. Do it for Abigail and the rest of the house. They deserve a break.”
His eyes squeeze shut while he thinks.
I think he’s going to say no, but his eyes flicker open, and I can tell he understands.
“You have until tomorrow night. If you don’t tell him by then, I will.”
Oh, thank God. I drop my head. “Okay, yes. Thank you.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else? Anywhere at all?” He looks so upset that I want to hug him.
“No, I promise.” I wipe my cheeks dry and try to reassure him. “It’s just my arms. He was drunk.”
“So, he didn’t trip over Scoot and bite his lip,” he mutters more to himself than to me.
“No. Do you believe he would hand me over to the Cartels?”
He runs his hand over the back of his neck. “Fifteen minutes ago, I would have said ‘Hell, no,’ but now, after seeing that tape, I don’t know.”
“Oh, God.” I feel sick.
“York knows all the ins and outs of this job. He knows which lines you don’tevercross. I don’t care if he was drunk. He wasn’t too drunk to throw you against the wall or to form a complete sentence.”
“Wait? Could you hear us?”
“There’s no audio yet, but we all lip read. I could make out some of it.”
I try to let all this sink in. “What’s going to happen to him?”
Mark moves back to sit on the couch while I stand, not sure if I’m coming or going. Fuck, I’m so scattered!
“Well, if Cole doesn’t kill him, which I suspect he will, he’ll be sent back to Army headquarters for a psych check. They’ll want to review the tape to see if you want to press charges.”
A chill races up my spine. That is the last thing I want to do. I just want him gone.
“This is going to be a big blow to the house, although I always knew there was something wrong with that son of a bitch.”
“I don’t understand why he’d risk his career. He knows the cameras are all throughout the house.”
“Cole has been upgrading the entire security system, and right before we left, they were working on the cameras downstairs. They were having trouble getting them to connect to the server, so they were offline for six hours. He probably thought they were still down. Fuck, I want to rip his head off right now.”
There’s a knock at the door, and we both jump. Keith pops his head in.
“Is there a party I don’t know about?” When he sees my face, he comes in and shuts the door behind him. “Okay, what’s going on?” I shoot a look at Mark, who is standing up.
“Nothing that can’t wait for a day,” he says, walking me to the door.
Keith doesn’t buy it, but doesn’t push it either, and the three of us walk back to the living room, where only a few people were left.
Cole’s face relaxes into a smile when he sees us walking over to him. “Hey, where did you two run off to?”
“Just got chatting and lost track of time,” Mark says, looking around the room. Oh, God, there’s York a few feet away.
I can practically feel the rage building in Mark’s body as he watches York. I begin to feel even more nervous when I notice Cole watching him too. I need to think fast.