Page 87 of Delta Force Defender

“You always thought you were so smart,” Jimmy sneered at her now. “But you’re not. A smart girl would never have come back, throwing Dad’s name around. Because Dad died. And so did I. And the last thing I need is for too many people to connect the individual I am now with any member of the long-lost Sheeran family.”

“The bartender—”

“Donnie is well paid to call me anytime someone turns up asking after people. It doesn’t matter who. Because who asks for people in a place like Sharkey’s? It’s not an information booth.”

“But—”

“A smart girl wouldn’t have shouted out a long-dead name in a public place, encouraging people to remember things I’d rather they forgot. I’m a businessman. I can’t do business if people are hung up on ancient history.”

“You killed your entire family,” Caradine whispered. “What kind of business is that?”

“Not yours,” Jimmy said with soft menace. Caradine couldn’t entirely hide her shudder of revulsion. “Did you really think you could come back here and weasel your way into my good graces? You were a liability back then.” His flat eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Are you wired?”

“What?” Her voice cracked on the word, which was only partially feigned. Because she kept trying to see Jimmy in the bald head or the curled lip he wore, and shecouldn’t, and she suspected all of her nightmares would wear this face. “What? No! Of course I’m not—”

Jimmy threw her back against the wall. And he gripped her throat again while he pawed at her. Not gently. Not lasciviously, for which she supposed she ought to have been grateful. But still, he made it very clear that he didn’t care if he hurt her.

At all.

Caradine could feel a murderous haze washing over her. Fury. Shame. And that dark ugliness inside that she’d always known was there. The part of her that was like him. Like the rest of her family. The thing in her blood that she’d never indulged, because she never wanted to turn out like the rest of them.

She didn’t much care if she let it loose here. With Jimmy.

But she couldn’t let herself give in to it. Not now. Not yet. She told herself, over and over, that she was choosing to subject herself to this. She was choosing to let him manhandle her, because it was expedient.

Because she knew that a clock was ticking, even if he didn’t.

And because she’d rid herself of the Alaska Force comm unit before she’d gone down into the tunnel, so there was nothing for him to find.

“I told you I wasn’t wired,” she managed to say through her damaged throat when he was done. And she wasn’t acting when one hand rose to touch her own throat gently, or when she tried to swallow and winced. “I don’t know what you think is happening here, but all I’m trying to do is come back home.”

“There’s nothing I hate worse than a rat, Julia.” Jimmy’s nostrils flared. “You remember that.”

She didn’t point out that if he killed her, which seemed to be the direction they were heading in, she wouldn’t need to remember anything.

“Are you why Dad was so weird that night?” sheasked him, even though it hurt to speak. “Is that what was going on in that room?”

“Did Lindsay tell you that before she kicked it?” He looked disgusted. “I told them it was a mistake to let her in there. The eye candy wasn’t worth it.”

“She was your sister,” Caradine managed to say. “Not eye candy.”

“She was a piece of ass,” Jimmy said, with a horrible coldness and distance that probably left their own bruises all over her. “The only difference between you and her was that she knew her place.”

“Nice,” Caradine couldn’t seem to help herself from saying.

She expected him to hit her again. Instead, he smiled.

And she shuddered again, not sure she cared if he saw it.

“Here’s a reality check for you, Jules,” Jimmy told her, with obvious relish. “Dad was going to let you graduate. He was going to let you go through the whole rigmarole, especially since you paid for it yourself. Why not? Then he was going to sell you off to Vincent Campari down in Jersey. You remember Vincent?”

“The name doesn’t ring a bell,” Caradine said, though it did.

Too many bells. All of them horrendous.

“Let me remind you.” And Jimmy was actually grinning now, with his fake face and his same old dead eyes. “His first wife killed herself. His second wife is locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Hackensack. You would have been number three. How do you think you would have fared with an old-school type like Vincent, with the mouth on you?”

Vincent Campari was a very bad man. A known murderer who had also been old, ugly, and lecherous. He’d given Caradine the creeps, something she’d been foolish enough to let her father see when she’d been all of thirteen.

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