by Maren Smith
“His own sister and brother-in-law turned state’s evidence almost a year ago and it’s about to go to trial. He will lose and he will go to jail, and he knows it. So he tried to hire your brother to kill them. But he made a mistake.”
My head was reeling. I pressed my fingers against my own temples, trying hard just to think. “Mistake?”
“Donnie,” he said, his face softening as he came toward me. “Making bad choices doesn’t automatically make anyone a bad person. Donnie took Patel’s offer and brought it directly to the police. Patel found out because there’s—”
“A leak at the station,” I finished for him. I swallowed hard, feeling sick.
“The FBI took Donnie into custody. I was dispatched to get you.” He reached for my arm, but I yanked back.
“You’re lying,” I whimpered, suddenly blinded by the swell of tears I couldn’t for the life of me blink back fast enough.
“I’m sorry,” Brian said, looking at me as if he was feeling every bit of the pain I was going through. He tried to take my arm again, but I yanked back even harder.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I was trying to protect—”
“I don’t need your protection! I don’t want your protection!” Scared and angry and hurt, I got right up in his face, screaming, “I don’t want you!”
I lashed out, slapping my hands against his chest and shoving as hard as I could. I barely knocked him back half a step, because he was Daddy and he was so much stronger than me.
I ran from his bedroom, because if I’d stayed, I might have let him hug me and it just hurt too much. I felt so betrayed. My shop was gone. My life was gone. I had a brother, but now he was gone too, and in the state I was in, the only thing that made sense was how it was all Daddy’s fault. He should have told me, but he didn’t. He should have trusted me; but obviously I was good enough for spanking and sex, just not good enough to handle the truth.
I slammed my bedroom door, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to assuage all the fear and rage mounting inside me. Was this a panic attack? I grabbed my chest, fighting just to breathe, but I had to let it out. So, I did… the only way I knew how.
I destroyed my room. I threw my blankets and clothes, and even my mattress although it hurt my arm to do it. I beat my pillow against the wall until the air exploded with microfiber stuffing fluffs, and then I buried my face in the empty wad of torn fabric and screamed until my throat hurt too much to scream anymore.
Finally, exhausted, I was able to calm myself. Sitting in the middle of my now messy bedroom, I clung to my torn-up pillow and felt very sorry for myself. I was so hurt. I was so betrayed.
I was so unwanted.
I wasn’t going to stay anywhere where I was this unwanted.
My decision to leave wasn’t really a decision at all. No thought went into it. There was no plan. I simply got up, got dressed, and walked out of my room. I collected a butter knife from the kitchen and the tallest glass of water I could find, then I went to the front door and popped the faceplate off the control panel.
“What are you doing?” Marshall asked just before I dumped the water in on his controls.
The whole damn house shorted out. The lights went out, the door locks released, and after that, leaving was as easy as one foot in front of the other all the way down the driveway toward the gate that stood guard at the street.
Halfway climbed up and over the top of the gate, I started to cry. The tears blinded me, which is probably why I never noticed the black van parked down the street that I started walking along. Not until it drove right up beside me, the side door slid open, and I was yanked inside.
Chapter 11
Brian
I sat on the edge of my bed, hands clasped between my knees, hating myself for everything that I’d withheld from her. But no matter how many times I went over it in my mind, I couldn’t find that magical moment where I could have told her and still avoided this whole argument. Not about her brother, certainly not about her shop. That place had meant so much to her and now it was gone. I felt responsible, although I knew I wasn’t.
Closing my eyes, I buried my face in my hands, rubbing and sighing and wondering how much time I should give her before trying to talk with her again. For several long minutes, I thought about it and when at last I opened my eyes again, my room was completely dark. The bathroom light was out, so was the neon display of my alarm clock on the nightstand.
“Lights on,” I said, but nothing happened.
A deep sense of foreboding dropped into my chest. I fumbled through the darkness until I found my cell phone on the nightstand. Using its flashlight app, I went to investigate. My house was not on the city’s power grid. No local power outage should have affected me, and even if it did, I had a secondary backup generator that should have kicked on almost immediately. But it hadn’t, and I got as far as the living room where I saw the front door standing wide open and the control panel in pieces, with sparks coming from inside it and thin tendrils of smoke wafting in the beam of my cell phone light, and I suddenly knew why.
I also knew I wasn’t going to find Angela in her bedroom, but that didn’t stop me from running to check.
“Shit!” I grabbed both sides of the door frame, taking in the damage she’d done before racing all the way back to my room. I threw my shoes on without socks and buttoned up my pants, but never bothered with my shirt. I ran outside, calling her, my eyes searching the dark all the way down to the main entrance gate and even halfway down the public street beyond. I was about to give up, when I spotted something lying in the road.
It was a shoe.
Shit, it was Angela’s shoe, lying on its side where she must have kicked it off.
Because she’d been grabbed, my brain pieced together.
Oh, shit, I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get my thoughts together, but I couldn’t think. Patel had my angel.
He had her, and I had no idea where even to look.
Oh my god, when I got my hands on her again, I was going to spank her ass hard and for a good long time. Screw whoever was watching. I launched into the air and made it back to my house in record time.
“Marshall?” I commanded. Every monitor in the house, blipped and turned to static, but then winked out again. Angela had doused the mainframe motherboard with water. Not only had she shorted out this main security system, but the electric sparks must have arched into other systems, causing shortages all the way through the loop that was my smarthouse until it hit the mainframe.
Note to self: I would need to put my house on separate yet integrated subsystems to make sure this never happened again. Also note: One spanking just wasn’t going to do it. Now she was getting two, and my little angel wasn’t going to sit comfortably for at least a week.
But first I had to get her back from Patel. I needed to find her, and fast. Although Marshall was programmed to fix himself, he’d need time to do it. Time I just didn’t have, and without him, it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Unless…
I ran back to my bedroom, throwing off clothes and struggling into my supersuit while dialing Chief Sturgis on the cell phone.
“Sturgis,” the police chief said, and just then, the generator kicked on and lights began flickering on all over the house. The control panels blipped and Marshall’s staticky voice said, “Brian, I think we have a problem.”
“Marshall, I need you to get your systems back online as fast as possible,” I ordered. To the police chief, I was even more abrupt. “My house has been compromised and Angela’s been taken.”
“What? How is that possible? I thought you had this under control!”
“I did.” The accusation in his tone pissed me off. “I don’t have time to explain. I need the location of the FBI safe house. I need to talk to Donnie.”
“Donnie? Why?”
“Because it’s him they want. They’re going to use Angela to flush him out, but if we can turn that to our advantage…�
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“You want to risk Donnie for his sister? We can’t lose him. If we lose him, we have nothing!”
“You don’t have anything now! If you did, arrests would have already been made. But instead, you’ve been chasing your ass for weeks, and for what?”
My wristwatch communicator beeped.
“Brian—” Chief Sturgis warned, but I was done listening to him and I was done doing things his way.
“I’m on my way to the safe house,” I told him flatly. “You can either meet me there and help me take Patel down, or keep doing the shitload of nothing you’ve been doing for the last three weeks. Either way, I’m putting an end to this tonight.”
I hung up before he could respond and my watch beeped again.
“What is it, Marshall?”
“I’ve been scanning cell phone towers and I believe I’ve heard Angela’s voice. I’ve recorded the call if you’d like to hear it.”
I stopped everything, bringing my watch right up to me ear. “Play it.”
What followed was definitely my angel’s voice, soft and quavering but attempting to be calm as she repeated a list of instructions to her brother, Donnie. Now and then, I thought I could hear a man’s low voice talking in the background. Donnie sounded more rattled than she did, he kept demanding, “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Jesus, I never wanted you involved…” but she never answered him. She just kept repeating what the guy in the background was telling her.
“Come to the abandoned brickyard behind Mueller’s,” she said. “No cops or we’ll send you pieces of your sister for Christmas every year for the rest of your life. We gave you a chance, but you wanted to get cute. Time to pay the piper, Donnie. Either you or your sister, the choice is yours. You’ve got one hour and then we start cutting.”
It was a big city, but there was only one Mueller’s—a turn of the century slaughterhouse that had kept our fair citizens in beef for over a hundred and fifty years. I even knew which abandoned brickyard he meant. It backed up to a now defunct railway switching yard that was now little more than a graveyard for boxcars. It was as remote as any place could be in a city of more than a quarter million people could be.
I hit the air even before Marshall’s recording finished playing. It wouldn’t take me an hour to get there, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I had never failed a mission and I wasn’t about to start now, especially not with the woman I was in love with.
Angela
It was hard not to be scared when you’re surrounded by bad guys, with your hands tied behind your back and a dirty rag that tasted like it had been marinating in the trunk of an oily car for four years, but I was making the effort. I had roughly twenty minutes left of the hour time limit they’d given Donnie. Now and then, the bad guys made a point of letting me know where the clock stood.
“No point in scaring the girl,” one of them said.
Another was cleaning his nails with a switchblade. I could only assume it was the switchblade that would be used to cut me into pieces if Donnie decided not to show.
And then, of course, there was Patel, and the driver of the Cadillac that had brought him. The driver was leaning up against the front of his car, alternately watching the gate leading into the empty slaughterhouse yard and his watch. It was dark, with only two yellow lamps to light the area we were in. It wasn’t quite enough to chase off the shadows. I may as well have been stranded on a deserted island as opposed to the third largest city in our state. I kept looking at the sky, but I couldn’t see anything. Not even the stars.
I’d really screwed up. Most of this wasn’t my mess, but the fact that I’d been caught was. I never should have left Brian’s house the way I did. I never should have lost my temper. I was going to die in a stockyard, of all places, and all because I’d gone off in a snit.
I was going to get cut into pieces.
I was never going to see Brian again.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to feel Daddy’s arms fold in around, pulling me close while he told him how reckless and stupid it was of me to do what I’d done and how he was going to make sure it never happened again. On the plus side, I suppose I’ll never have to worry about him spanking me again.
On the other hand, if by some miracle I did make it out of this alive, I seriously hoped he paddled my bottom until I couldn’t sit down. Like, ever. I even hoped he used the wooden spoon. I more than deserved it.
A tear rolled down my cheek and I couldn’t do anything about it with my hands tied behind my back. Great. Now my nose was running too. I sniffled, wanting to look my best when it came time for them to dissect me.
“If it’s any consolation,” the man named Patel said as he came to stand beside me, “it doesn’t really serve any purpose for me to actually cut you up. I just told your brother that to gain his cooperation.”
It was probably a good thing I was gagged, otherwise any one of the half dozen snarky comments flittering through my brain might have fallen out of my mouth.
“Of course,” Patel added with a shrug, “I can’t exactly let you go, either.”
Oh, of course not. I glared across the empty yard at the gate and tried my hardest not to roll my eyes.
“Still, that’s not to say we can’t come to an arrangement ourselves.”
It was definitely a good thing I was gagged.
He chuckled at the look I gave him. “Yeah, you’ve got more spine that your brother, that’s for sure. That could be a good thing, though. Your brother owes me a lot of money.” Moving slowly so as not to startle me, he picked a wisp of hair out of my gag and tucked it behind my ear. “I’m not unreasonable. If your brother doesn’t show, and if you’re willing to… consider other options, then maybe we can come to an arrangement that doesn’t involve my asking these nice men here to hurt you in all the same awful ways in which they are eventually going to hurt poor Donnie, whether he shows today or not.”
The look he gave me as he caressed my cheek with the backs of his fingers made my stomach feel as if it had just plummeted down an elevator shaft. It wasn’t hard to see the dangerous side of this man through his gentle-seeming smile.
A whistle sounded from across the yard.
Patel tsked, though his smile didn’t fade. “Your brother just arrived. I guess he loves you after all.”
On the far side of the yard, I spotted a shadowy figure walking along the fence line toward the open gate. Tall and thin, I barely recognized Donnie as he made his way toward us, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed down deep in his jacket pockets, gathering Patel’s henchmen as he came. The closer he drew, the more of them came out of the shadows to follow him back to us. Were I in his shoes, I’d have been scared as hell, but his step never slowed or faltered, and he didn’t stop until he’d stepped into the light of the streetlamp where Patel and I were waiting.
This man was my brother. Staring at him, seeing all kinds of apology in his eyes as he stared back at me, it was hard to believe this quiet man who had walked into my shop three years ago looking for a part-time job was my own flesh and blood. And he’d known all that time and never said a word about it.
“I’m here,” he finally said. “No cops, just like you wanted. Let her go.”
“Now, Donnie,” Patel drawled. “You and I both know it’s not that simple. We had an agreement. One which you not only broke, but took to the cops.”
“I’m the one you want,” my brother tried again. “I’m the one who fucked up.”
“Yes, you are,” Patel amiably agreed. “Do you have my money?”
“I’ll get it.”
“I’ll get it. I’ll get it.” Tsking, Patel shook his head. “You know I’m tired of hearing that line out of you.”
“I can’t do anything for you if I’m dead.”
“Oh see, now that’s where you’re wrong. You can do a lot for me if you’re dead, starting with not testifying. Yes,” Patel nodded when Donnie swallowed. “I know about that. You think this is just about cash, but we’ve gone far beyond that,
my friend. Now we’re into points of pride. Meaning, you injured mine when you took matters that were private between us and used them to make a deal with the FBI. What am I supposed to do with you, Donnie? I can’t pat you on the head and say ‘all’s forgiven’ anymore. As my father would say, for every cause there is a consequence, not only for you, but for your sister now too. She’s the one who’ll be taking over your debts once you’re gone.” Slinging an arm around my neck, Patel pulled me in close to him. Without taking his eyes off of Donnie, he even kissed me on the forehead. “You’re probably wishing you’d thought that far ahead before you double-crossed me, aren’t you?”
My skin crawled where his lips touched me, and I must not have been the only one. I saw the flicker of desperation pass over my brother’s face a bare second before he whipped a small handgun out of his jacket pocket. He brandished it at Patel, but even I knew it wasn’t enough.
“That’s not going to happen,” Donnie said through gritted teeth. He was shaking, his gun hand far from steady. “I won’t let it.”
“Donnie,” Patel said gently, as every one of his men drew handguns of their own and pointed them back at him. “Sadly, this isn’t a situation you can win.”
Donnie cocked his gun, and every one of Patel’s men did the same. Shifting his body sideways, Patel held me like a shield between him and Donnie.
“Put down the gun,” Patel warned, seemingly unfazed by the gun pointed at his head.
“Let go of my sister first.”
Patel smirked. “Don’t pretend like she means so much to you. You’ve been using her store to run money, drugs, and weapons right under her nose.”
“I made a mistake.” Remorse flashed in his eyes, before they met mine. “I’m sorry, Ang.”
“I would say you’ve made many mistakes in your life to end up here,” Patel said, smirk growing. “Sadly, it all ends tonight.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
I snapped my head back against Patel’s shoulder, staring straight up into the sky where Brian’s voice had just come from.
