Page 5 of Accidentally Mine

“Yes, but you’re getting older. And there are some really great hospitals in Florida or Arizona.

Maybe Colorado? The climate’s definitely more agreeable.

” I’d be willing to move just about anywhere if that’s what it took to get her to come with me.

Sometimes, I worried that the Markins might take their anger at me out on my only living relative.

She wrapped her cardigan around her shoulders and shook her head. “I’ve endured sixty-four Boston winters.”

“But—”

She gave me a conversation-ending scowl. “The devil himself wouldn’t get me to leave. I’m perfectly fine, Rebecca.”

I frowned. I knew I’d sooner part the Red Sea than Marie from South Boston. But I couldn’t just leave her.

“Speaking of devils,” she said, sliding the Globe over to me.

I frowned down at the picture I’d seen online this morning, with Markin Murder Sentence Overturned written in big block lettering.

“How long do you think it’ll be before he’s out?” I mused.

“I don’t know,” she said, switching off the television set. “It says a week, but he has more charges, so hopefully it will be much more. Are you worried? You think he’ll come after you if they let him go?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine that I’d get so lucky as to have the courts actually hold him in jail and sentence him on new charges.

He was too wily for that, and the acquittal proved it.

My aunt didn’t know the half of the Anthony Markin story.

She only knew what she’d learned from my dad.

The G-rated version. The real version was much more frightening.

I thought about that night. That look in his eyes after I told him I couldn’t take any more.

I’d started off thinking he was the perfect man for me.

Older, with a dangerous, bad-boy streak I found so appealing.

But what had I known about forever? I’d just been a college freshman, after all.

Two years later, I was so broken, I knew that if I didn’t get out, I’d die.

I tried to tell him it was over in the middle of Boston Common, so he wouldn’t pull his fists on me.

He didn’t. Not then, anyway.

That night, though, he’d shown up at my dorm.

Drunk. He’d hit me when he was drunk before, but it was always for stupid, small things, like when I was late to meet with him or when I went to fix him a drink and put too much water in the expensive whiskey he favored.

I’d never done anything big, like trying to walk away.

I had no idea at that point what he was capable of.

“You just going to go off and fuck some other guy, then? Is that it?” He always thought I was fucking other guys, so much so that whenever another man so much as came near me, I ran in the other direction.

The look in his eyes was possessed, wild.

“Over my dead body, Rebecca. You’re mine.

I’ll kill you before I see you with another man. ”

Thank god my roommate had been out that night.

I’d managed to ease his fears enough to get him to lay down with me.

We had sex that night, and the whole time I felt like I was going to throw up.

When he fell asleep in my arms, in a drunken stupor, I’d never been so scared as I was when I lifted the weight of his arm and slid out of his grasp.

I dressed, gathered what I could, and slipped out the door, just as he was waking up.

The car chase through the streets of Boston had felt unreal to me, even now.

He knew Boston like I did, knew the roads and shortcuts.

The fog rolling off the bay was thick and blinding.

I thought that if I could just get out onto 90, I’d be home free.

I could take the Pike straight on to Albany and keep going west from there.

Maybe I wouldn’t stop until I reached Seattle.

But then there was that truck.

It had been in the fast lane. Screaming down the highway at eighty miles per hour with Anthony close behind, I saw the driver beginning to make his way around a slow-moving construction vehicle. Just my luck. It was after one, and the streets were normally deserted.

Then, a window of opportunity. A small one, quickly closing. I’d made the split-second decision to skirt around the truck on its right before it passed the construction vehicle, thinking it was my only chance. My only chance of getting away from him.

And I’d done it. I’d skirted closely around the semi, barely clipping the front of the truck cab with my rear bumper as I made it out onto the wide-open highway. I pumped my fist as I pressed on the gas.

My celebration had been short-lived.

My relief had turned to horror as I watched in the rearview mirror. The truck began to jackknife and crash through the median, heading straight into the oncoming traffic going into the city.

I’d never seen anything more horrible than the way the truck completely decimated that Porsche on the eastbound side, rolling over it like it was a toy, a tin can. Someone probably on their way home from work, unsuspecting.

Knuckles cemented to the steering wheel, I slammed on my brakes. There was an exit nearby. I quickly took it and stopped, feeling numb disbelief. It hadn’t felt real. How had this happened to me?

I’d climbed out of my car and saw the ruin I had created.

Took a step back.

Then another.

Wanted to be anywhere but there. Wanted to believe this was all a nightmare.

In the distance, Anthony’s car had been trapped behind the debris of the destroyed cab.

He’d screamed my name, over and over. In the fog and settling dust, I hadn’t been able to see his face, but his car was folded into the wreckage, trapping him.

I ran toward the wreckage, and when I got closer, his eyes followed my path, his face distorted in rage behind the spiderweb of his broken windshield.

In a puddle of gasoline, the eighteen-wheeler laid on its side.

I crawled over the destroyed median to the innocent man in the Porsche, now hanging out of the wrecked vehicle, bleeding all over the passing line in the center of the highway.

His eyes were heavy, unfocused. Blood crusted in his dark hair and ran down his jaw, seeping into his shirt. He lifted a weak hand toward me.

I hadn’t been able to leave him.

“It’s okay. I’ll help you,” I said, even though I didn’t know if anyone could. Things were far from okay. It was possible he was too far gone. I began to talk to him to keep him calm, saying anything that came to mind.

I pulled, and he shoved, and somehow, he was free of the wreckage.

As he swayed on his feet, I took a lot of his weight and urged him to walk with me to the side of the road.

When I laid him down on the breakdown lane, I dialed 9-1-1.

His blood was everywhere, and he murmured nonsense until he drifted out of consciousness.

I wanted to stay with him, to make what I’d done all right, but I knew Anthony would be after me. And could I ever do anything to make this all right?

When the sirens began to wail in the distance, I climbed back over the center divider, got in my car, and raced away.

It was only the following morning, when I woke up on the side of some backroad in Western Massachusetts and saw the blood on my hands, both my own and that poor man’s, that I fully realized what I had done.

I’d hated myself ever since.

And I’d thought about that man every day too. And Anthony—the dangerous look in his eyes. Try as I might, I couldn’t get that night out of my head.

Not just because of the guilt I’d always felt, either.

Anthony didn’t just hold a grudge. If he felt he’d been wronged, he turned it over and over in his head and brought it back out later, long after you thought it was forgotten.

Once, I’d forgotten it was a special day when the first anniversary of our meeting, in September, came around.

Three months later, when he got too drunk during a New Year’s party, he hit me for the first time, angry because I’d forgotten that anniversary.

I didn’t care enough. I did this wrong. I did that wrong.

It was always me. Never him. Anthony never let anything slide. Not anything.

“Rebecca?”

I shook my head from the memories, focusing back on my aunt. She’d asked me a question. I blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yes. She’d asked if I was worried, if I thought Anthony would come back for me.

“I don’t know. He might come after me,” I answered my aunt, amending my answer because I didn’t want to worry her. But the truth was…yes, he would come after me. Probably the moment he was released. I bet he was even thinking about me right now.

Hair raised on my arms, and I crossed my arms over my chest, rubbing them away.

“I see why you might need to go, Rebecca,” Marie said, biting into her sandwich. “But I’m not leaving. I’m comfortable here, and no big-time mobster is going to tell me otherwise.”

My Aunt Marie was my second mother. After my mom died when I was seven, Marie stepped in to take care of me. It didn’t seem right to just run away without her, now that she was in poor health.

“I’m not leaving you like this,” I said with a sigh.

“Well, then. I guess that’s settled.” She leaned back in her chair, picking up the remote. “ Fifty Shades Freed is on in ten minutes. Want to watch?”

I groaned inwardly, stood, and kissed the top of her head. “I still have some work to do on a story, and I’d like to get in touch with Steve to make sure everything is under control,” I told her. “Enjoy.”

I carried my laptop upstairs to my old room, then picked up my phone to call Steve, who’d sent me a few emails.

Steve was my father’s unofficial business partner.

Unofficial, because my father knew what the Markins could do.

He never worried about himself, only about others, and so he was careful that the Markins never had a reason to come after anyone else.

It had been hard being away from my dad the past couple of years, communicating via burner phone, never able to tell him exactly where I was. I had always hoped that one day, I’d be able to come home to Boston, the city I loved, and be with my dad again.

My throat closed up. He’d worked so hard to raise me as a single dad.

He’d had the help of Aunt Marie, yes, but he’d done so much for me.

He ran Reece Associates, and yet still made sure he was home for dinner with me every night.

When I’d gotten into Boston College, he’d been so proud of me, the first Reece to go to college, that he’d gone out and bought an entire wardrobe of BC clothes. Even BC socks.

After I left, Dad was my one lifeline to the world I knew. Living in Long Grove, I didn’t have friends or connections with anyone. And I’d had to sever ties with all my friends from Boston. He was the one who kept my spirits up as I waited for the trial.

“Don’t worry, hon,” he’d say to me. “Soon this will all be over, and you can come home.”

That never happened. When Anthony was sentenced to twenty years, I’d thought I could return. But then the elder Markin threatened my father, told him that if and when I returned to Boston, I’d be killed.

And now, this place didn’t feel like home anymore.

I put down the phone, no longer feeling like calling my father’s ex business partner. No, I didn’t have a home, and as long as the Markins existed, I never would.