Eve’s Wedding Knight

rock is a rock. Important thing is, you’re gonna be okay. This is never gonna happen to you again, I promise you. I’m gonna make sure of that.”

“Honey-” Eve’s mother was patting her shoulder “-I think we should go now-leave you two alone. Don’t you think so, Pop?” She squeezed Eve’s hand and rubbed her arm as she moved away from her side, pausing to smile tearily at her past Sonny’s broad shoulder as she grabbed at Summer and made shooing motions at Mirabella. “Come, girls-we can come back tomorrow.”

“They’re going to keep me here a couple of days,” Eve said, sniffling. “I guess they’ll be admitting me soon-I’m just waiting for X rays.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow,” her mother assured her, “after you’ve had time to get some rest.” And she was herding everyone out of the exam room amidst foot-shufflings and hand-squeezings and awkward little pats on whatever part of her sheet-shrouded anatomy was closest. Eve caught a glimpse of her sisters’ faces, set and pale, clinging to hers until the last second, until the curtain swished back and she was alone… with Sonny.

It was strange. She could feel her heart pounding, feel her body trembling, feel the sticky dryness of fear in her throat-and yet there was a part of herself that felt detached from all that, as if she were sitting somewhere apart from the scene but watching events with a critical eye-the director, perhaps, judging her own performance. Fear… Okay, the fear is real, so go with that. Make it work for you…

“Sonny, the wedding, our beautiful wedding… all our plans-”

“Shh… Hey, what’d I tell you? It’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know what happened. The last thing I remember, I’d opened the champagne-I had this bottle I’d been saving, you know?-and I was going to find you. There was a little time before the ceremony, and I thought we could…” Sickness rose suddenly in her throat. Sonny was leaning down, his face blocking out the light as he pressed his lips to her undamaged cheek, then to the top of her head. The smell of his hair spray and aftershave almost made her gag.

“Shh…it’s okay, baby. We’ll make up for it, I promise you. As soon as you’re outa here-”

“It must have been so awful for you…” Shaking like a leaf, she felt herself lift her arms and twine them around his neck…

In a windowless room not far away, Jake watched the scene on a hospital security monitor. He had a knot the size of a baseball in his gut, but his face betrayed only a slight frown of concentration, nothing that would have given him away even if the other two people in the room had been looking at him-which they weren’t. Like his, their eyes were glued to the monitor.

“Scared to death,” Jake’s partner, Burdell “Birdie” Poole, muttered into his knuckles. He had one arm folded across his barrel chest, the other bent at the elbow, the hand fisted and pressed against his mouth, and as he spoke leaned slightly away from the screen, as if by distancing himself from it physically he could disconnect emotionally, as well. Birdie looked, with his buzz haircut, slightly harassed look and gradually expanding waistline, like the family man he was. He kept a picture of his patient wife, Marjorie-a saint, in Jake’s opinion, and probably the only genuinely happy cop’s wife he knew-and their four chubby children on his desk and carried snapshots of them in his wallet When it came to women and kids he had a soft spot a mile wide. And a pit bull toughness when it came to the bad asses of the world that made Jake glad they were on the same side.

Now Birdie exhaled through his nostrils. “She’s shakin’ like a leaf-you can see it from here. She’s gonna blow it…

“Maybe not… maybe not.” His supervisor, Don Coffee, was leaning toward the bank of monitors, his weight on one forearm while the fingers of the other hand beat an erratic tattoo on the countertop, eyes riveted on the screen. Without turning his head, he said, “Redfield, you know the man-is he buying it?”

Jake snorted. The fact was, he did know Sonny Cisneros-just well enough to know there was no way in hell to know what the man was thinking. The guy was a sociopath-a man without a conscience. He played by nobody’s rules except his own.

Aloud, he said, “Why wouldn’t he buy it? Sure she’s shaking-she gets beat up and thrown into a Dumpster on the way to her own wedding, leaves the guy standing at the altar, no explanation, and now she’s facing him for the first time? Hell, be strange if she wasn’t shaking.” He knew his voice sounded like a junkyard dog’s growl, but didn’t make any effort to clear it or ease the tension in his jaws. The two men in the room with him were used to him tightening up whenever Cisneros’s name came into the conversation.

Right now, though, there was a lot more going on inside him than just the usual teeth-clenching edginess. There was that brassy tang at the back of his throat, for one thing-he wanted this to work so badly, he could taste it. And something else-that knot in his belly, which was something he didn’t remember feeling before. Cold-no, not cold…white-hot, as if it would burn right through him. He’d felt it back in his apartment, when his witness had put it into words-the fact that she’d slept with Cisneros.

What the hell was the matter with him? Of course she’d slept with the man-she was marrying him, wasn’t she? But whenever the thought came into his mind, he felt the knot… the cold fire in his belly. Right now, watching the two of them together, seeing that blond, bandaged head next to Cisneros’s and those slender arms twined around his thick neck, those big, dark-blue eyes closed…he felt the fire eating its way through his guts… into his chest… all but eating him alive. He knew he should probably stop watching for the sake of his own mental health, if nothing else, but he didn’t. For some reason he couldn’t take his eyes from the screen.

“You really think she could pull this off?” Coffee asked, swiveling to look at him. “It’s a hell of a risk-you know that, don’t you? Are you sure she’ll even agree to go along with it? What we’d be asking her to do would be dangerous even for a trained agent. She’s a civilian and she’s vulnerable-”

“She’ll go along with it.” Jake’s eyes burned in their sockets as he watched Cisneros pull back from the bed, watched his hand, winking with gold and diamonds, slide lingeringly across the woman’s breasts. He felt her shrinking in the depths of his soul. “She’s tougher than she looks,” he growled.

Cisneros was leaving, finally. Jake watched as he moved to the curtains… watched Eve give him a wan and teary smile…blow him a kiss. And then she was alone, and he saw her body shudder with revulsion, and her eyes, wide-open and staring, now, darken with rage until they looked like two holes burned into marble.

“She’ll go along with it,” Jake said softly, his heart quickening within him.

“Seems to me she’s between a rock and a hard place,” Birdie said. “She’s got to go back to the guy-how’ll it look if she doesn’t? But can you imagine what it’s gonna be like for her, knowing what she knows?” He shook his head.

“That’s why she’ll do it,” Jake said. “Because she’s got no choice.”

“I think you’re jumping to conclusions, Bell,” Summer said in an undertone as she and Mirabella hurried across the hospital parking lot, once again bringing up the rear. The night was moving along toward the wee hours and the low-country fog was already coming in, swirling around the light posts and settling like crystal dust onto the hoods and windshields of parked cars. “Of course she’d be upset-”

“Not upset-afraid. You saw her face.” Mirabella’s voice was low-pitched, as well, but staccato with impotent fury. “I’m telling you, she’s scared of him. Scared to death. We have to do something. We can’t just let her-”

Her sister’s hand clutched her arm, stopping her in her tracks. “You can’t mean you think he did that to her. Bella, that’s just ridiculous. On their wedding day? And even if he did, Evie would never put up with such a thing-never. She’d have him in jail so fast, it’d make your head swim!”

Mirabella grudgingly conceded, “Maybe not But some-thing’s not right, I can feel it. You saw her face, Sumz. She didn’t want us to leave her alone with him. I just wish I knew what the hell’s going on. If she’s in some kind of trouble-”

“If Evie was in trouble, she’d tell us,” Summer said in a shaky voice. She was hugging herself against the dampness and chill, but shivering anyway. Her face looked pinched and unhappy. “I’m sure she would. We’re her family, after all.”

“Would she?” said Mirabella, her tone softly accusing. “You didn’t.”

Chapter 6