Cassandra drove up the street until she came to a stop sign. Hardy’s head popped up in her rearview mirror.
“Okay,” he said, his voice sharp and tense. “Turn right up here.”
Cassandra felt as if she had somehow managed to suffer frostbite in her brain; her hands and feet moved in a kind of automatic reaction to the words that Hardy barked at her.
The residential neighborhoods began to fade away, replaced by longer and longer stretches of empty lots and almost-rural patches, cordoned off with industrial fences, as Cassandra followed the directions she was given. She never knew how long the drive was, but by the time she could sense that they were reaching the end of their journey, it felt as though they’d lost almost an hour.
“Turn in here,” Hardy said. His demeanor had relaxed somewhat as the space between them and Riley’s house had increased.
Cassandra reached the gate that Hardy wanted her to turn in at; a low complex of concrete and metal buildings lay behind a chain link fence. At the gate there was a metal box with a keypad.
“Okay…” Cassandra glanced back at Hardy. He frowned, hesitating a moment.
“Three-one-seven-five-two-nine,” he said quickly. Cassandra rolled down the window and punched in the numbers. The box beeped, and then the gate rolled aside with a metallic squeal. Cassandra pulled through, and then she was inside of the compound.
“Turn right,” Hardy said.
Shaking her head at the cryptic instructions, Cassandra did as she was told, turning right as soon as she fully cleared the entrance.
“Where are we going? What is this place?”
Hardy didn’t answer. Cassandra looked around; taking in the concrete walls, the pull-down doors, she realized it was some kind of storage facility. Isolated and anonymous, it was exactly the sort of place Cassandra would have expected a bounty hunter like Jack Hardy to know about.
“Follow the road down to the end and then turn left,” Hardy said.
Cassandra kept the car moving forward, watching row after row of austere units file past her windows.
“At the second intersection, turn right.”
Following Hardy’s instructions, Cassandra made so many turns that she couldn’t imagine being able to find her way out of the facility again. Hardy sat up in the back seat once they were well away from the road—at such an early morning hour, nobody was around.
“It’s up ahead,” he told her quietly. “Bay number 328A.”
Cassandra pulled up to the storage unit, glancing behind her in the direction of her trunk.
There’s a human being in my trunk, hopefully still unconscious. There cannot be anything good in this storage unit.
Cassandra’s stomach twisted inside of her, roiling with too much caffeine and the certainty that what she was about to participate in was much more than just a kidnapping.
“I think…I think I want to stay here in the car,” she said quietly. “And maybe get some sleep.”
“You’re coming with me,” Hardy told her. He opened the back door and in a quick, fluid movement he was through it.
Cassandra pressed her lips together, fighting down the misgivings she felt. Nothing about the isolated location, the sterile concrete and metal buildings, gave her any sense of comfort about what Hardy intended to do with—or to—Riley.
“Pop the trunk,” Hardy called from outside.
Closing her eyes, resigning herself to what she was fairly certain she was about to see, Cassandra reached down under the steering wheel and pulled the lever that unlocked the trunk.
Chapter Eight
Riley was, mercifully for them all, still unconscious. Cassandra watched as Hardy carried the big man towards the roll-up door of his unit. She took a quick, deep breath and opened the driver’s side door, unbuckling her seat belt and getting out of the car.
I hate this. I hate this. Why am I going along with this? What will he do to me if I refuse to watch what he’s about to do?
Closing the car door behind her, Cassandra slipped the keys into her pocket and watched as Hardy opened the padlock attached to the storage unit’s door.
If I’m a kidnapping victim, can I still be an accessory? The question swirled around in her mind as she walked towards the door, making her skin crawl.
“What is this place?” Cassandra asked quietly as Hardy started pulling up the door.
“Keep an eye on Riley,” he told her. Cassandra glanced at the unconscious man on the ground. “It’s one of a few storage places I have,” he continued. “The police don’t know about it—they never found it because I rent it under a fake name, and I pay cash.”
“Why would you rent a storage unit under a fake name?”
“Sometimes I need to do things without having my name attached to them,” Hardy said absently. “And I need a nice, isolated place to do them in.” Cassandra shivered.
As the door opened, she peered into the unit. It was obvious that there was very little being stored inside of it: she saw a chair, a beat-up lamp, and some restraints, including two pairs of handcuffs and the plastic strips the police sometimes used. Off to one side of the little room was a storage locker.
Hardy crouched down and picked Riley off of the ground, and Cassandra heard him grunt softly at the effort. She stood back and watched as Hardy carried Riley into the unit, depositing him in the lone chair and letting his arms fall to the sides.
“Pull the door down,” Hardy said, quietly, without even looking at her.
Cassandra hesitated for a moment; it was one thing to watch as Hardy did whatever it was he planned to do to Riley, but closing the door would be too much like actually participating.
“Did you hear me?” Hardy glanced at her. “We don’t have a lot of time to fuck around, Cassandra.”
She closed the door with a thump, her hands trembling slightly and her mouth dry, then turned around once more to see Hardy finishing up with Riley. He had tugged the tee shirt off of the other man, stripping him down to the waist. Riley’s tattoos, Cassandra learned, continued up his arms and along his shoulders onto his chest. She watched as Hardy secured each of Riley’s wrists and ankles to the arms of the chair with plastic handcuff strips, and then stepped back to evaluate his work.
Moments before, Cassandra would have said that there was nothing about the situation she was in that could possibly turn her on. But then, as he moved towards the small, metal locker, Hardy reached down and hauled his own tee shirt up, revealing a ripped, muscular torso; Cassandra thought that she could almost discern individual muscle groups rippling underneath his skin. Her mouth was dry, but in spite of herself, the sight of the man who had kidnapped her made her pussy more than a little wet as she stared in shock at the simple, brutal beauty of his body.
She shook herself, trying to push down the reaction she’d felt, and looked around the tiny, close space. Hardy opened up the locker and Cassandra saw sinister shapes inside: a torch, pliers, a poker, things her dazed, fearing eyes couldn’t quite take in.
Swallowing down against a rising current of nausea, Cassandra looked at Riley. The dark-haired man was still completely out, his head lolling forward, his hands slack on the arms of the chair. As she watched, hearing the clatter and clink of metal and plastic coming from the locker, Cassandra was seized with the suspicion that Hardy may have done his former friend more serious injury than he’d planned. Just as she was about to ask him, one of Riley’s hands twitched.
Chapter Nine
Jack
Jack hesitated in front of the storage locker, looking over the usual implements of “persuasion,” as he considered them.
I have to know. I have to get to the bottom of this. Even if they send me back to prison at the end of it—I have to know.
His hands tightened into fists and Jack clenched and unclenched them, breathing slowly and steadily. The prospect of treating Riley, the man he’d considered his brother for so many years, the way that he treated the scum he took in as a bounty hunter was a difficult one to
swallow. Maybe I can just threaten him—maybe I won’t have to actually use any of this on him.
Jack remembered the daily tension of his life in the prison, the fact of his sentence: thirty years before he could even be considered for parole. Thirty years of his life gone, never to come back to him. Jack took a pair of pliers off of a peg in the locker and gripped them tightly, reminding himself that if Riley was the man who’d done this to him, he deserved to suffer for what his actions had put Jack through. He picked up a hunting knife, from one of the shelves in the locker and started to slip it by the hilt into his pocket.
“J-J-Jack?”
Hardy turned around and saw Cassandra, back against the wall, staring at Riley. He frowned. He had expected that Cassandra—someone who’d only seen the fringes of the ugliness in the criminal underworld—would be squeamish about what he planned to do, but he had thought she’d wait at least until he’d started interrogating Riley to start freaking out.
“Riley!”
Her trembling hand pointed across the room. Jack looked over at his former best friend, just as the man’s eyes opened. Jack unsnapped the strap on the knife and pulled it out of its sheath, advancing towards Riley in an instinctive reaction.
“Fuck,” Riley said, groaning.
Jack watched as the man strained against the handcuff strips, looking around as he slowly came back to full consciousness.
“Where am I?” Riley’s head turned and he caught sight of Jack. “Jack? Is that you? Where the hell am I?” He looked down at his arms, confusion washing over his features. “What the fuck, dude?”
Jack raised the knife, but something inside his brain turned over; Riley looked, to his trained eyes, to be genuinely confused. If he had done something, wouldn’t he know why I’d brought him here?
“You framed me for murder, asshole,” Jack said, trying to maintain the firmness in his voice. “You killed Laura Granger and pinned it on me to get back at me.”
For a second—the span of a few heartbeats—Riley continued to stare at him in confusion, silence stretching between them.
Then, as suddenly as he had awakened, Riley began laughing. First it came as a quick guffaw, before it deepened into a belly laugh, Riley’s head falling back as he howled.
Jack glanced at Cassandra. Her expression had changed from terror to smiling; it was an awkward, nervous grin, but it lit up her face, softening her features, making her eyes gleam. The tension in the room evaporated, and Jack put the knife back into its sheath, stepping towards Riley.
“Jesus, Jack,” Riley said between slowly fading peals of laughter. “I thought I was never going to see you again—I definitely never expected to end up on the wrong end of a knife from you.”
Jack couldn’t help himself; he felt his lips turning up in a grin.
“There was a point when you figured you’d be on the right side of a knife with me,” Jack pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest.
Part of his brain insisted that he still had to go through with this; that he had to know whether or not Riley had been involved. He remembered the way Riley had punched him the day that he’d found out about Adrianna, and the threats he’d got word about.
“That’s in the past, man,” Riley said, shaking his head. “And anyway, everything ended up working out, you know? Why would I hold a grudge?”
“I ruined your relationship with Adrianna,” Jack pointed out.
“Well, for a minute, you did,” Riley said, shrugging as much as the position of his arms would allow. “But…” Riley stared at Jack in disbelief for a long moment. “Oh man—no, you wouldn’t have heard, would you?”
“Heard about what?”
Jack frowned. He knew that since he’d left town, since he had tried to distance himself out of shame for what he’d done, he hadn’t had much chance to hear about anything that had happened in his friend’s life.
“We got back together,” Riley told him, grinning broadly. “We broke up, obviously… but about a week after you and I parted ways, Adrianna called me. We met up at that restaurant—Angie’s.” Riley looked off into space and Jack could see the clear and obvious love in his friend’s eyes. “We talked about our situation; neither of us could stop thinking about the other. We decided to put it behind us and try again.”
“Oh, wow,” Jack said, glancing at Cassandra, trying to see if he was just being affected by his long relationship to Riley or if she believed the man too. He wasn’t sure when he had come to see her as something of a partner in his mission—but he couldn’t deny that she had handled herself better than he had expected.
For just an instant, his mind called up the feeling of Cassandra’s body pressed against the wall in her apartment, the way she had struggled against him. If he hadn’t had the element of surprise on his side, she would have given him a much tougher time. The memory of how Cassandra had felt, the heat of her body, the crush of her breasts against his chest, threatened to distract him and Jack savagely pushed it down. You’ve gone three months without sex before. Don’t let it distract you now. You need to figure this whole thing out, not fantasize about throwing her in the backseat and ripping her clothes off.
“We ended up getting married at the Justice of the Peace about two weeks later. It was no big, fancy wedding, just a couple of witnesses and a clerk.” Riley grinned again. “I wanted to tell you about it, but when things went south between us, I just deleted all your contact info. No one really knew where you’d gone.”
“Really?” Jack pressed his lips together, deliberating.
“Really, bro,” Riley said. “In fact, just a couple months later, Adrianna got pregnant.” Riley smiled again. “We had twins. And you know…” Riley shrugged.
Jack couldn’t quite work his mind around the fact that things had changed so much between him and the man he had once considered his best friend.
Riley tilted his head slightly, flexing against the strain from their earlier wrestling match. “After that…life just kind of got in the way, you know? Everything was the kids, Adrianna, work. I didn’t even think about it anymore.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Congratulations, I guess.”
The man in front of him was happy, and there was absolutely no sign that Riley still resented the betrayal Jack had dealt him years before. There was something about that fact that almost rankled; Jack had put so much thought into the fact that he had ruined his friend’s relationship that the possibility of Riley moving on with his life and forgiving him had seemed almost nonexistent. He had been consumed with guilt; how could Riley not have been consumed with bitter resentment towards him?
“When I heard about the murder charges, I thought about trying to get back in touch with you. But Adrianna thought… She thought if I got in touch with you, it’d drag our family into it too, you know?”
“Yeah, I get that,” Jack said.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what Riley was saying, but he also knew the other man well enough to know he wasn’t capable of making up a lie that was so involved when put on the spot.
“I saw kids’ toys in the front yard,” Cassandra said, breaking Jack out of his deliberations.
“Look,” Riley said, his face shifting into serious lines. “I know the way we left things. I know…that there was a time when I could have killed you happily, man.”
Jack smiled slightly; that at least was the Riley he knew. That, at least, was what he had expected from the man who’d been his brother in arms.
“But that was three years ago, man. Even if I still had any reason to hate your guts, I wouldn’t do something that’d risk me going to jail just to get even. Not with the kids.”
Jack’s hand hadn’t left the hilt of his knife. He gave the pommel a squeeze, trying to decide whether or not he could believe in this changed, family man. He’s let himself run a bit too fat, but it’s the same face. Riley never could lie worth a damn, unless I was backing him up. Could I really torture the guy who sa
ved my life?
“I can’t believe you’re a married stiff,” Jack said, smiling around his clenched teeth.
What if I can’t get to the bottom of this? What if the cops catch up to me before I can find out who killed Laura? I can’t…I can’t just let this go. I can’t go back to prison without knowing.
Jack closed his eyes. Even with the nap he had taken in the back of Cassandra’s car, he was exhausted. He had spent every moment of the last three months thinking about his wrongful conviction, thinking about Laura Granger who—no matter what her sordid involvement with the city’s underworld—hadn’t deserved to be murdered. He couldn’t go back without knowing what had happened.
“Jack,” Cassandra said quietly.
He turned away from Riley, scowling at her. She was holding Riley’s wallet in her hands, and he realized that while he and his former best friend had been talking, she had been going through Riley’s things.
“Look at this,” she told him.
Jack’s scowl deepened, but he did as she asked. He took what looked like a playing card from her hands and glanced at it; it was a picture, taken in some medium-rate photo studio.
He recognized Riley right away, dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. Next to him, he saw Adrianna, dressed in a light summer dress. The two of them were each holding a young child—the two dark-haired girls couldn’t have been any more than two years old, and each one bore a resemblance to both parents, with Riley’s eyes and Adrianna’s nose and cheekbones. Jack smiled down at the picture and then handed it back to Cassandra, turning his attention back to Riley.
“They’re beautiful, man,” Jack said.
He stepped closer to the chair and pulled the knife out of its sheath. He tugged the handcuff strips around and cut them free of the arms and legs of the chair.
“With you as their dad, I bet they’re already a handful.”
Riley chuckled, and as Jack freed his hands, offered his former best friend a quick handshake. Jack pumped his hand and then, in an impulse, threw his arms around Riley’s shoulders.
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