by Wasp, A. E.
“Danny, my brother and his, uh...” He trailed off with a look at me.
“Business associate,” I supplied. “Temporarily.” Fellow victim of a dead man’s blackmail seemed a little bit TMI.
Breck rolled his eyes. “My brother and his friend-”
Ridge snorted. “Hell no,” he muttered.
I clapped a hand over my heart and shook my head sadly. “And here I was picking out matching BFF tattoos.”
Breck slapped me in the stomach.
“They’re insane, but I think they can help us.” Breck looked at Ridge. Ridge nodded, sure and confident. Breck’s shoulders sagged. “I’ll come to you instead.”
“I don’t know. Snow White’s got guys looking for me.” Danny’s voice was barely a breath of sound, but he was petrified.
I started to grab the phone again, and Breck turned away, shielding the phone with his body. “Cut it the fuck out,” he hissed. To Danny, he said, “What happened, Dan? I was unconscious for most of it, but I remember you were hurt pretty bad.”
I took a deep breath. “Bre...Rocky,” I amended at his quick head shake. See? I pay attention. “Please, may I talk to your friend? I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I’m getting a general idea.”
“And it’s not good,” Ridge added unnecessarily.
I glanced over at him and nodded before turning back to Breck. “Yeah, not good. And the kind of shit that you shouldn’t be talking about on the phone, okay? We need to get you both to a safe location, and then we can get into the details of what the hell you’ve gotten involved with... and how we can unfuck it.” And how I can get my freedom back, I thought but didn’t say.
“Danny, did you hear that? We’ll come and get you, okay?”
“N-no, man. I gotta go. It’s dangerous, and...”
Breck gripped the phone with both hands. “One second. Please. For me, Danny. Please.”
There was a long pause. “Do you trust these guys? Really?”
“It’s my brother,” Breck said as if that were explanation enough.
Danny snorted. “So? Family doesn’t mean anything.”
This time Ridge yanked the phone out of Breck’s hand before I could and put it on speaker. “Danny? I’m… uh... Rocky’s brother. And that means something to me. So when I say I swear we’ll help you, you can believe it. Now just tell me where to meet you, and we’ll come and get you.”
“A crowded public place with a lot of security cameras,” I said.
“Fine,” Danny agreed. “Not like I have a lot of options. Tell Rocky I’ll be at the place where we trailed that guy we thought was Adam Rippon.”
Breck smiled at that. “Okay.” He raised his voice so Danny could hear him. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes or so, depending on traffic. We’ll text you when we’re somewhere close, somewhere away from the cameras. Okay?”
He hesitated. “Rocky, you gotta be careful, man. If they’re after me, they’re probably after you. You shouldn’t show your face.”
“Is that so?” Ridge asked Breck. He shook his head in a way that suggested Breck had a lot of explaining to do.
Breck ignored his brother. “My brother’s friend will come get you. He’ll give you a code word…” He paused for a second. “I know! The name of your pet turtle!”
“Okay,” he whispered. “Be careful.”
“You be careful, too.” Ridge hung up and handed his brother the phone.
“Come on,” Breck said. “Let’s go.”
“Not so fast. We need a couple of answers first,” I told him, laying my hand flat on his chest and pushing slightly.
Breck collapsed onto the leather couch with a sigh. He ran both hands through his curls, the same way I’d seen Ridge do when he was thinking. “Thank God. I thought he was dead. Jesus.” He slumped forward, dropping his head into his hands. When his shoulders started shaking, Ridge sat down next to him.
He put an arm around his brother, pulling him into a hug, and Breck went easily. Proof that no matter how pissed off they still were at one another, they were a unit. I hadn’t known Ridge was capable of that kind of loyalty, and my opinion of the guy shot up considerably.
“Brekkie, who’s the old guy in the photos?” he asked.
Breck inhaled. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. Cisco, he arranged all the...all the dates. We didn’t use real names. We called the guy Snow White. Stupid name, right? But he liked me and Danny. We’d been with him a couple of times. He was… fine. I mean, kinky as fuck, but then lots of guys are. He’d never been into the really rough shit.”
He wouldn’t look either of us in the eye, but I could see the red creeping up to his ears and down his chest. I swore one day I would see that flush from passion, not from embarrassment.
I also swore one day, I would kill this Snow White. Or at least break his dick.
“So you don’t know his name? Would you recognize him?”
Breck nodded quickly. “Anywhere. In the dark.”
Snow White had better hope he didn’t meet Breck in the dark. The kid had murder in his voice.
“That night.” He pointed at the pictures that had brought us to D.C., and his mouth trembled. “That night, we were at his house. For the first time ever. And he - something was different. He wasn’t really hiding who he was? Like, not really. And I mean, he even said it was his house. Like I can’t use the internet? Anyway. He was different that night. Meaner, saying really nasty things, calling us whores and sluts. He has this assistant… bodyguard… whatever, who’d usually wait out in the hall, and even that guy looked surprised at the way Snow White was acting when he let us into the bedroom.”
“Fucker,” Ridge growled.
I was going to cut off Snow White’s dick slowly. With a dull knife. Everything about Breck made me want to protect him. To take care of him and keep him safe. To make him mine. It was a feeling that had gotten me in trouble many times before. Guys didn’t always appreciate the caveman thing.
“Let me finish,” Breck begged. “Or I won’t get it out.”
“Did he hurt you?” It was time to cut to the fuckin’ chase. “Did he hurt Danny?”
“Yeah. I thought he was going to kill us,” Breck said, voice flat. “He was on something. Had to be.” He smiled without humor. “If there’s one thing I learned from Mom, it’s how to spot when someone’s fucked up. His eyes were like little pinpricks. And he tried to get me to do lines, but I… I said no. Screamed it, actually. Which is when he backhanded me onto the floor.” He swallowed. “I was mostly in and out of consciousness after that. But I know he whaled on Danny. Left him bloody. I tried to get up and help him, but I was useless. I, uh… woke up on a bench outside Union Station. And I had no idea what happened to Danny.”
“Fucking bastard! I’ll kill him,” Ridge said through clenched teeth.
“You can’t!” Breck grabbed Ridge’s arm as if his brother was going to leap off the couch and run out the door. “I think he’s a senator!”
Jesus fuck. Of course, he was.
“What makes you say that?” I demanded.
“It’s not exactly uncommon around here, you know? Cisco’s guys are the best in town, which means his clientele is connected.” He shrugged. “But I overheard his bodyguard dude. He came in at one point when Snow White was passed out on the bed. He tried to wake him up, and I’d swear he called him Senator.” He shook his head. “As much as I could swear to anything from that night.”
“Which senator?” Ridge asked as I pulled up a list of senators on my phone. One hundred senators. I eliminated twenty-three women and two black guys. Given how much skin I saw, I was fairly confident we were looking for an old white guy.
Breck studied the picture, enlarging it with his fingers. “That one,” he said, shuddering as he pointed. “With the white hair. That’s part of how he got his nickname. Well, that and the blow.”
Ridge grabbed the phone and studied the caption. “Senator Harlan,” he spat, jaw set. “Fucker.”
Of course, he was fucking boys on the side.
“I’m going to kill him.” I could easily make it look like an accident. I dusted my hands together, and I could practically feel the man’s neck between my fingers. “No charge. I’ll enjoy it.”
“You can’t just kill him,” Breck said.
“Why not?” Ridge asked, looking at me as if to confirm that I could do what I said.
“Are you kidding?” Breck looked at me, and I shrugged. I’d beaten people up for way less. And while I’d always drawn a line between personal security and assassin for hire, I was pretty damn fine popping my cherry for this guy.
Plus, honest to God, this kid had riled every protective instinct I had. There was something about him that drew me in, something beyond the curls and the big eyes, beyond the bubble butt and the sass. Ridge was just as pretty, and he’d never affected me the way Breck did.
Breck needed me, whether he knew it or not. And… I kinda dug it.
“Okay, first of all, did you get the part where I said he was a senator?” Breck demanded, folding his arms and glaring at me. “There are only a hundred of them, you know? So folks tend to notice when they go missing.” He rolled his eyes.
All I could think was that he was perfect for me. The idea of me killing the senator in cold blood didn’t faze him at all. He was more concerned that we might get caught.
I opened my mouth to argue, to tell him that I knew a hundred ways to immobilize a guy without arousing suspicion, but he kept talking.
“Besides, that would be letting him off too easy.” Breck looked at Ridge. “Those pictures on your phone. You saw what he did. He knocked me unconscious. He beat Danny to a pulp. I want him to suffer.” He looked at me, and his eyes were burning with an emotion I knew intimately. “I want to take everything from him, and I want him to know who did it.”
Yeah. I understood that. Breck needed vengeance.
And I wanted to get it for him.
“Damn right,” I said loudly. “That’s what we’re going to do.”
“How?” Ridge asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I gave him a wry look. “But we know people who do.”
It all became clear to me at that moment what Charlie’s ultimate motivation had been. These weren’t personal vendettas or petty crimes he wanted to be solved. He wanted justice, the kind he couldn’t get from inside the system.
6 Breck
My life had pretty much been a series of slow blinks and jump cuts, where I closed my eyes in one reality and opened them in another one entirely.
Like, ever since we’d learned there were forty-nine other states and six separate continents outside of our own, Ridge and I had talked about putting as much distance between us and Alamosa as possible someday. But then Ridge had gotten a huge score on some paintings — big enough to bring him some heat — and he’d come home yelling, “Breck! We’re leaving. Now.” So we’d left town in the dead of night like we were fleeing the zombie apocalypse.
Two days later, I’d found myself strolling a cold, empty beach in North Carolina, more than a little dazed, thinking, “Okay. So… this is my new life, I guess.”
Same thing last fall, when my mom had come calling. The pitiful whines of “I need money, Brekkie,” hadn’t worked on me, no matter what I told Ridge, but the vindictive threats that followed had been pretty damn effective. She’d threatened to ruin everything Ridge had worked for. So I’d paid up… and then I’d taken the only kind of job I could find that had any hope of making that money back before Ridge found out and literally killed our mother once and for all. And as I was doing the walk of shame out of the Capitol Inn after servicing my first john, I’d had another of those weird moments of vertigo. “Wow. Okay. So this is what I’m doing now.”
You might have thought I’d learn to roll with it, to accept my status as fate’s fucktoy, but I hadn’t. So when I found myself laying on the shaded area of a pool deck overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-six hours after Ridge barged back into my life, I was not admiring the incredible view of the water, or the majesty of the huge-ass mansion we were staying in, or the way the sun glinted off the infinity pool overlooking the beach. And I was definitely not thinking, “Oh, well! I’ll just make the best of it!”
I was fucking pissed.
I slammed my palms on the arms of my chair. “How much longer are they going to keep us here?” I demanded.
Danny, who was floating on an enormous pink raft in the center of the pool, lowered his sunglasses and squinted at me like I was insane. He was naked except for the tiniest pair of red Speedos, and practically glowing from whatever oily shit he’d basted himself with before coming out to soak up rays. “Um… Honey? I think the question is how much longer will they let us stay?”
I shook my head, fuming silently.
I didn’t expect Danny to get why I was upset, not really. I mean, when we’d met up with him at Union Station yesterday morning, he’d looked bad. Gaunt and twitchy — not like he’d been using, but like he’d spent way too many nights looking over his shoulder, without a hot meal or a safe place to sleep. And unlike Ridge and me, Danny hadn’t grown up making do with scraps of food or stealing shit to keep himself fed. He’d been a soft, suburban twink before his uber-religious parents had kicked him out. Hooking was the closest he’d come to a life of crime. He’d taken one look at Steele, ten feet tall and bulletproof as he was, and had practically fallen to his knees in gratitude at being rescued. Now he was Team Steele all the way.
Not that I could totally blame Danny for that, if I were being honest. When Steele had taken the seat next to me on the little leather loveseat in the private plane that had collected us from Dulles, thrown his arm around my shoulder, and hauled me up against his side for the entire ninety-minute flight, I hadn’t exactly protested. Or moved, except to rest my head against his shoulder. Or tried to hide my smile at the way Ridge glared at Steele from across the cabin the whole time, like he was daring him to make a move on me. Steele’s attention had been more comforting than sexual, but damn if I didn’t like it.
There weren’t a lot of guys who could stand up to that look from my brother, but Steele was either oblivious or he cared more about sitting next to me and offering me support than he did about my brother being pissed.
That idea made my stomach flip in a way that anyone who knew me as Rocky would find comical. I was the exact opposite of a shrinking virgin, but there I was, sinking under the weight of my crush on Castille Alvarez.
Josie, the housekeeper Steele had introduced us to, wheeled out a little metal cart with drinks. “Strawberry daiquiris, boys?”
Danny’s eyes lit up. “God, yeah. Totally!” He paddled his raft closer to the edge of the pool, and Josie smiled fondly as she handed him the hurricane glass. It was impossible not to be protective of Danny.
But when she turned to me, I shook my head stubbornly. Sure, the drink looked delicious, and I was already sweating even though it was barely ten in the morning. But I wasn’t here on vacation. I was here under protest.
She sighed and thrust the drink in my direction. “You’re not hurting anyone but yourself, honey.”
She was right. I knew it. My problems with Ridge and his high-handedness wouldn’t be solved by refusing her.
I rolled my eyes and took the drink. “Thanks.”
“It’s not so bad around here,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”
“They took my phone,” I said. And I’d understood it, mostly. They wanted to make sure we were untraceable. But it was another sign that I was a prisoner, not a guest. “Not sure I’ll get used to life without the internet.”
&n
bsp; “I may have a solution,” she said, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “Talk to me this afternoon.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “Drink up. Leo’s back, and they’re getting the media room ready. Steele asked where you were, so I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before he comes looking for you.”
I frowned but nodded. I had no clue who Leo was, or what the fuck we were going to do in the media room - watching Weekend at Bernie’s seemed unlikely - but if Ridge or Steele wanted me around, it was a sure bet they were going to pump me for more information on Snow White.
I took a deep sip of my drink, ignoring the threat of brain freeze.
Danny heaved himself off the float, landing in the shallow water with a splash. Holding his drink above his head, he made his way to the steps and threw himself into the lounge chair beside mine.
“Hey, watch it!” I said as he rubbed his fingers through his long-ish brown hair, spraying water droplets all over the khaki shorts and polo I’d stolen from Ridge.
Danny looked at me, then deliberately repeated the move.
I reached over and shoved his head until he sank onto his own chair. I put my drink on the glass side table next to my chair and stood, huffing.
“Lighten up, Rock,” Danny said, relaxing back into the seat and taking a long sip of his drink. “We’re in paradise. Cisco has no idea where we are. Snow White can’t find us. There are fucking walls around three sides of this place, man. Cameras on every door. There are worse things than being safe, you know?”
I frowned, looking down at him.
Like me and Ridge, Danny had one of those innocent baby faces that would keep him looking sixteen even when he hit thirty. But unlike Ridge’s, or even mine, Danny’s face was expressive and open. He couldn’t lie for shit. The little line of tension around his mouth, despite his relaxed pose, and the way his gaze shifted quickly away from mine to stare at the horizon, said that something had happened that night at the senator’s house, while I was in and out of consciousness. Something besides the beating and the trauma it had caused.
