But on the other hand, just dumping her off at an Air BnB or a Motel 6 was also asking for trouble. I needed her to be in as secure a location as possible without me being there.
I’d have to take her to one of the nicer hotels in Breckenridge and specifically request a room on the top floor. I’d give her a gun—I always carried at least a couple with me in case one jammed. I’d check in on her every hour to make sure all was fine.
And goddamnit, Burke had better have gotten to Miami and started making some progress.
We were slowly inching our way toward I-70, but fuck if Denver wasn’t the busiest airport in the Western part of the States. It sure fucking felt that way. It would’ve made Sean’s life much easier…
If he was indeed back—and I had no reason to doubt Emily’s story—then he had truly gone off the fucking rails. I had not been subtle in my moment with him that I would kill him if he came back. He knew I’d ruin him if I even got suspicious about him being near Emily. So this was bad. He was unhinged.
But not in the crazy sense, though I supposed that was possible. It meant that there was nothing I could hold over him. A man who truly had nothing to lose was the most dangerous kind of man, for that was a man that could not be reasoned with. He’d have to die, or he’d kill all of us along the way.
Good fucking thing I was a DOM.
I got out of the Denver area, and I-70 morphed from an inner-city freeway into something more akin to a rural highway. I checked my rearview mirrors carefully and several times. Never saw anyone following. Sean was too good and too connected for me to just assume this meant the end of any trouble, but it was a step in the right direction.
A step in the right direction, like with Kelly.
I grimaced quietly, trying not to wake up Emily with my annoyance with myself. What the hell were we going to do next? She was right. We couldn’t just fuck our way to happily ever after, though it probably came pretty damn close. I knew that when I was with Kelly, I felt strongly for her. When I was with Charlotte, I felt like I’d found a new purpose as a father.
But fuck.
This Sean thing was making me realize it was all too easy to “bring work home” in my case. Sean was not a passive guy. If he felt he could get back at me, I knew he’d go for Kelly and Charlotte.
But the very idea of just walking out…
If it was just Kelly, maybe I could argue my way into it. I was pretty sure even Scott had done that at one point on his mission. But with Charlotte in the picture?
I needed to clear it up.
A short while later, I finally pulled up to a nearby inn that I knew wouldn’t treat Emily as nothing more than a couple hundred bucks a night. I almost left her sleeping in the car, but that was too damn risky.
“Hey,” I said, “wake up, it’s time to get settled in.”
She groaned, opening her eyes.
“We’re not going to see Kelly?”
“Maybe eventually, but this is safer,” I said. “Before we go inside…”
I reached down and grabbed a pistol. Emily looked at it like I’d just handed her a bomb that would go off in five seconds.
“What is this?”
“It’s what you think it is; it’s a gun,” I said. “You use it to shoot people.”
“I’ve…never handled a gun in my life.”
“And you’ve never been in this much danger if we’re right. Hard times call for hard responses.”
Emily still didn’t look comfortable holding it. It was also painfully obvious she was inexperienced, as evidenced by how, when she held it, the barrel pointed at me. The safety was on—I never risked a misfire—but boy, she was painfully green.
It didn’t matter, though. As long as the bullet ripped through Sean and killed him, it didn’t fucking matter if a Green Beret or a green bitch had fired it.
“Put that in your bag, and don’t let anyone know you fucking have it,” I said. “If housekeeping comes, you put that in your pants. No one associated with this hotel should have even the slightest fucking clue that you own a weapon. Understand?”
She nodded, grimacing.
“I’m going to book us two rooms, one across from the other,” I said. “I’ll literally be right across the hall.”
“Not next door?”
“It’ll give me a better vantage point if I hear rustling.”
Emily nodded like she understood. She was just a city girl caught up in a whirlwind that she’d never imagined herself to be.
“Do exactly what I say, and you will get through this fine, OK?”
She nodded.
I then reached down into my small bag of supplies and grabbed a beeper that had the audio disabled. I handed it to her.
“The hell is this?”
“It’s something someone would have used in World War II,” I said sarcastically. “If you feel like you’re in danger, you can press this and I’ll come immediately. Think of it like a portable silent alarm.”
This was good, but we were wasting time. Being out here in the open, even in a car, was a good way to ensure that Sean or any of his fucking dipshit friends could watch us.
“I’ll also get you a burner phone when we get inside as a backup,” I said. “When we get inside, draw the curtains immediately. Don’t go near
