Tearing Down Walls (Love Under Construction Series Book 2) (11 page)

“Butler, let us in! We’re not going away! Go ahead, don’t answer your phone, but we’ll just stay out here and bug the hell out of you all night!” Steve yelled.

“Laura! It’s Vic! Come on, hon, let us in!” Vic was leaning against the front door, and he almost fell into the house when she opened the door.

“Well hello, Cabrizzi. Nice to see you too.” She turned and walked back into the house, and both men couldn’t help but notice that she looked like hell gone wrong, not to mention that the house was a wreck, empty beer cans, liquor bottles, and food wrappers everywhere. “Well, come on in, both of you, since I invited you over – somehow.” She watched as they came in and stood in front of her in the small living room. “Sit down. What the hell is so important that you disturbed my drunk?”

“Know this man?” Steve pulled the picture of whoever the guy was out of his jacket pocket. When he unfolded it and laid it on Laura’s coffee table, her face went white. “Well, I see you’re acquainted,” Steve snarled.

“Where did you get that?” she managed to choke out.

Steve leaned back into the sofa and stretched his arms out along the top edge. “Out of our membership database.” Laura gasped. “He turned up at the club this evening, asking for a Laura Billings. Vic talked to him.”

“Oh my god. What did you tell him?” she whispered.

“Not a damn thing, sweetheart,” Vic said. “Jared and I both told him no one named Laura worked there, and I told him my name was Frank Beckett. Plus my membership hasn’t been entered, so he can’t find me in the database. I’m clean. And if you’re in some kind of trouble, I’m the only clean link you’ve got, so you’d better start talking and do it now. We can’t help you if we don’t know what’s going on.”

“I can’t,” Laura said, and Vic could see her walling herself off and folding into herself.

Vic glanced at Steve, who looked like he was losing his patience. Vic made a sign to Steve to hold back, then sat down beside Laura and put a hand on hers. “Laura, honey, you’ve got to tell us. I think you need help, and we have to know what’s going on.”

When she lifted her head, Vic’s heart froze. The look in her eyes was one of pure terror, so he took her hand and squeezed it.
She’s letting me hold her hand – she must be in trouble,
he thought. “Honey, please. We need to help you, that’s obvious. I know it’s hard, but let’s try, okay? How do you know him?”

Laura started slowly. “He was a sergeant in one of the infantry units I was assigned to in the Bosnian action.”

“I didn’t know you were military. When was this?”

“Nineteen ninety-six. I was a naval EOD specialist.” That was news to Vic; he’d had no clue that she’d dealt with explosives.

Vic’s voice was gentle. “Okay. And why is he looking for you?”

“He wants to kill me.”

Vic looked at Steve, whose eyebrows had shot up into his hairline. “Sweetie, why would you think that?”

“He’s tried before.” Now Vic was alarmed. Was she serious? Sure looked like it. “He took the plating out of my body armor and detonated an IED that I was working to disarm.”

“Shit!” Steve muttered.

“Laura, why would he do something like that?” Vic almost whispered.

“To keep me quiet. He told me that he’d do it right the next time. He was afraid I’d talk.”

“Quiet about what, honey?” Vic asked her and stroked her hair. She shivered. “Laura, you have to tell us. What happened? What was he afraid you’d tell? What did he do?”

“He, he . . .” She knew at that moment that if she wanted to stay alive, she had to tell them. There was no other way. “There were six of them, him and five enlisteds. And I was in my quarters, and, and . . . they came in and . . . and . . .” She tried to finish and couldn’t.

Vic was confused, but only for a split second, and then it hit him like an avalanche. That’s why she was so closed off, so emotionless. She was trying to protect herself. “Laura, look at me.” She looked at the floor. “Laura, honey, look at me. Look right in my eyes. Right this minute.” When she wouldn’t, Vic took her chin in his hand, lifted her head, and locked gazes with her. “Laura, tell me: Did they rape you?”

The slim brunette started to shake violently, and Vic looked at Steve and saw the horror in his face, his shock at what he was hearing. Vic couldn’t help it; he pulled her to him and held her as tight as he could, and she shook so hard that he had trouble holding her.

But she didn’t cry. A July heat wave of anger rolled over Vic, and in that instant he decided that if he walked back into that club and that son of a bitch was there, he’d kill the motherfucker with his bare hands. Laura kept shaking, but no tears came, no relief, the pain all bottled up inside her like a boiler that couldn’t blow. Vic held her and rocked her until she’d almost stopped shaking, then took her chin in his hand again and lifted her face to him. “Laura, look at me.” Her big hazel eyes turned to his dark ones and locked onto them.

What she saw there shocked her; Vic was looking at her with no judgment, no disgust, no pity. All she saw there was a good man who wanted to help her, even if it put his life in danger. “You’re going to make it through this;
we’re
going to make it through this. You, me, Steve, José, Peyton, all of us. We’re all in this together, right, Steve?”

“Absolutely.” Steve had come to his senses and moved to Laura’s other side. “You never told me that you’d been injured. What happened?”

“It was the month after they . . . I was supposed to be disarming the ordnance. Looking back, there was no reason for it to blow, but it did. He detonated it. I’m sure of it. My body armor was compromised; no one would tell me, but I have a friend still working in records for the military. They investigated and found that the plating had been removed and replaced with cheaper sheet metal, but they didn’t do anything about it. They covered for him and threw me under the bus.”

Vic remembered one of the nurses at the hospital quizzing him about Laura.
The scars the nurse mentioned,
Vic thought.
That’s what they’re from. Oh, god, how much should one person have to take?

“Why did you think it was him?” Steve asked.

“Don’t think – know. Because as the chopper was lifting me out, he asked to talk to me, pretending to care about me. But when he was sure none of the medics could hear him, he told me he’d made a mistake by not taking me out, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.”

“Bastard. But I don’t understand,” Vic said. “After all these years, why now? Why would he think you’d talk now?”

“I wouldn’t have. But I got a call from one of the other men who . . . Anyway, he said they’d all talked, and they were going to confess to the MPs, turn themselves in because they couldn’t live with what they’d done to me. But Wagner wouldn’t.” Vic remembered the call she’d gotten at the bar; that must’ve been it.

“Wagner? That’s his name?” Vic asked.

Laura shuddered. “Yeah, Cletus Wagner. So they’re going to talk. I warned Brewster when he called; I told him, ‘Brewster, he’ll come after all of you.’ But he didn’t believe me. They’re all in danger. He’s ruthless.” Then she turned to Vic and said, “How did he find me?”

“I have no idea. But he won’t find you again, not if I have anything to do with it.”

“Doesn’t work here, huh?” Cletus Wagner watched the tiny monitor screen. The lock on the back door of the club had been easy enough to pick. Now he was watching Steve’s security tapes and, plain as day, there was Laura Billings, standing behind the bar. “Well, well, well, EOD Specialist Billings! Your days are definitely numbered.”

“Thanks for this. We need somewhere to keep her safe until we can figure out what to do.” Vic wanted to make sure Tony knew how much he appreciated it when he and Steve dropped Laura off at the big house in Shelbyville.

“After what she did for Nikki, she’s got a permanent place here if she needs it. And she’ll be perfectly safe; you can count on that,” Tony told him as they watched Nikki lead Laura upstairs to get her settled in a bedroom.

“You can’t imagine what she’s been through. And she’s kept it all in for sixteen years. Sixteen years; that’s a long time to hurt, to feel the way she’s bound to feel.” Vic shook his head. “I got pissed at her for the way she treated me. But god help her, I don’t know how she functioned on a daily basis, much less carried on a conversation or worked.”

“I guess we never know what’s going on inside another person, huh?” Tony said.
Like the way you’d love to fuck my wife. And I think the feeling is mutual. And it’s really starting to piss me off.

“Nope. All that hurt.” Vic took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Hurts me to think about it.” Tony could swear his big cousin was tearing up.

“I think being here with Nik will help her. Maybe she can get Laura to open up, talk about it,” Tony told him.

Vic nodded. “Somebody needs to help her. I wish it could be me.” One look and Tony decided he’d never seen his cousin quite so sad.

“I’ll give you this room. It’s the farthest from ours. You’ll have a little more privacy and, well, we get loud sometimes, if you know what I mean.” Nikki turned a little pink and smiled at Laura.

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be okay,” Laura said, throwing her bag down in a chair. “I just appreciate you letting me stay here. You’re putting yourselves in danger doing this.”

“We’ll be fine here.” Nikki put her hand on Laura’s shoulder. “And if you need anything, just say so. It’ll be fun to have you here during the day while Tony’s gone.” She’d had to call Annabeth and Katie to tell them that she wouldn’t be able to come over and help Katie for awhile; the poor thing had the worst case of morning sickness Nikki had ever seen, and Katie’s sister had offered to take over barf duty, so it was covered. “You get some rest now. You’ve had a very hard day.”

Nikki turned to leave the room, but Laura said, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure!” Nikki said, coming back into the room and sitting down on the bed. She patted the comforter for Laura to sit down. “What do you want to know?”

“I guess Vic told you . . . you know, about . . .”

“Yes, honey, he did. He felt if we were going to shelter you and risk our own lives, we should at least know what was going on. He wasn’t being gossipy or betraying your trust. He’s just trying to help keep you safe.”

“Well, do you think . . . Is there any . . . Oh, I don’t know how to say it,” she said, looking at her lap.

“What, hon? Just blurt it out. Nothing shocks me, and there’s no judgment here.”

“Do you think . . . Do you think there’s any hope for me?” There – it was out and on the table, one of her worst fears spoken out loud.

Nikki laughed out loud. “Of course, sweetie! There’s always hope! You know my story. Believe me, I thought there was no hope for me, that my life was over, that I’d be alone for the rest of my life. And look around,” she said, sweeping her arms out. “I’ve got a gorgeous husband who loves me more than anything in the world, a beautiful home, a beautiful family, kids and grandkids, one helluva handsome cousin-in-law,” she said and winked, “and everything a woman could want. Not to mention all the super white-hot sex a girl can handle!”

“No man would ever want me,” Laura declared.