Toxic

by Nicole Blanchard

  The questions give me a bitch of a headache, which probably shows on my face since he closes the shades and dims the lights without my asking him to.

  “Get some rest. We can talk later.”

  “I don’t want to go to dinner,” I shout at the woman who’d come to invite me down. “I want to leave. Now!”

  My imperious tone does little to intimidate her, though she’s five foot nothing if she’s an inch. If anything, she absorbs my rudeness, and her fierce scowl intensifies.

  “Master Kingsley would like you to join him for dinner. Six o’clock sharp.”

  The implication that tardiness is a mortal sin is implied. She leaves, and I throw myself back on the bed, muttering obscenities I don’t have the balls to say to the tyrant’s face.

  Three weeks have passed, and I haven’t left the room once. At first, I was too listless, too emotionally and physically drained to do more than the bare minimum: sleep, eat, bathe, repeat. Once the good doctor gave me a clean bill of health a week after arriving, I thought it would either be time for the conversation Gracin and I were supposed to have or time for me to leave if I wanted.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  As soon as the doctor left, I showered, dressed in the clothes provided for me, and went to leave. But the door was locked. It stayed that way until the woman, who I only knew as Marie, delivered my meals. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions and only speaks in orders.

  I get the feeling Gracin knows how I am doing, but he hasn’t come back to visit—not that I actually want him to. He could go to hell first. He’d have to starve to death before he found me willingly joining him for dinner.

  Four o’clock comes and goes, then five. Then six. My apprehension grows with each ticking of the second hand. The television he must have had installed while I was sleeping only entertains me for so long, and then I’m right back to watching the clock. Ten minutes after, then twenty.

  The clock strikes half past and the lock on my door clicks. I expect to see Marie; I get Gracin.

  He leans against the door. “Now the only reason why I think you’d refuse dinner is that you’re still too sore to walk yourself downstairs. I wish you’d said something. I would have come up sooner, little mouse.”

  The reminder of the prison, of what had transpired between us, is almost too much. I launch myself to my feet. “Don’t call me that. I’m fine. The doctor says the burns have healed nicely. You don’t need to keep me locked in here anymore.”

  He studies me as if he doesn’t quite understand me but is desperate to figure me out. I don’t like it. In fact, I want him to stop.

  “If I go to dinner, will you let me leave?”

  “If you come to dinner, I’ll consider it,” he says.

  We both know he negotiates deals only to renege after he’s gotten his way, but I don’t have any other choice. I glance around the room, hating these four walls and knowing that his consideration is about all I’ll get. Besides, at least this time, I’m going down on my terms, not his.

  Gracin waves an arm, inviting me outside into the hallway. Part of me is afraid of what I’m going to find. I take hesitant steps past him, and my jaw nearly drops. There are elaborate hallways in both directions with dozens of doors on either side. This isn’t a house—it’s a goddamned mansion.

  What the hell was a man who could afford a house like this doing in prison?

  I shiver as I remember Sal and decide that maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe I just want to get out of here and as far away as possible.

  When he puts a hand on my arm, I jerk back. Touching hasn’t been easy for me since the night with Danny and Co. Gracin must realize that, because he doesn’t try it again. He just says, “This way,” when we have to turn a corner or go through a doorway.

  I rub the spot on my arm where it came in contact with his hand and try not to remember where else his hands have touched me. He leads me to an intimate dining room with a view of gardens, which are bursting with color. It’s a far cry from the cold grays of Michigan. It’s funny how you don’t know you miss something until you don’t think you’ll ever see it again, not that I ever thought I’d miss the snow. But in this moment, I do.

  Silently, he offers me a seat at the table, and Marie brings out the platters of food with a smug smile in my direction. “Anything else, Master Kingsley?” she asks Gracin.

  “Thank you, that will be all. See that we aren’t disturbed.”

  I help myself to the steak and salad as he watches. After weeks of bland hospital-like food, my mouth waters at the mere sight. I keep my mouth full so I don’t have to talk to him, but it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. He doesn’t eat, just watches, still with the curious expression on his face.

  “Why didn’t you tell them anything?” he asks when I’ve finally cleared my plate.

  As I reach for seconds, I consider the man across from me. The dressings may have changed, but the air of brutality sure hasn’t. He’s violence wrapped in a pretty bow. Danger made to shine. Only instead of the prison jumpsuit, his warning label is an Armani suit and a Rolex. Money is power, but on him, it’s also lethal.

  “They only would have killed me faster,” I tell him as I take a bite.

  “Some people would prefer a quicker death,” he says.

  “Some people are also cowards.”

  He chuckles, surprising me. “I guess we both know you’re far from a coward.”

  “Are you going to tell me who they are? I think you owe me at least that.”

  He leans back in his chair, his legs spread and his hands resting on his thighs. Posed that way, he owns every syllable of his nickname.

  “Telling you any more than you already know will only put you in more danger.”

  The rope. The blood. My murdered child would say otherwise. “I’d rather know what I’m involved in than be in the dark. Besides, it’s about time you tried honesty for a change.”

  “Sal,” Gracin begins, “the man who hired Terelli and the others?”

  I carefully place the fork on my plate—food forgotten—and gesture for him to continue. I keep my hands in my lap so he can’t see them shake. Even hearing the man’s name causes a tumult of emotions to rise in my chest.

  “You’ve met his son.” His fingers clench on his thighs, the first sign of emotion I’ve seen from him since I woke up in his house.

  “I have?”

  He nods and takes a sip of his glass of scotch. “Sal—Salvatore, from Blackthorne.”

  I can’t say I’m shocked about that connection.

  Gracin continues, unheeding of my silence. “I guess you could say he didn’t take it very well. He was never fond of his son, but the slight to his family . . . his name, isn’t something a man like Sal forgets.”

  He gets to his feet and goes to the window, leaving his food untouched. “I told you I wasn’t a good man, Tessa, and I meant it.”

  “You did tell me that.” I reach for the glass of water and chug several gulps as he goes on.

  “The men who hired me to kill Sal’s son planted me at Blackthorne. I did the job I was hired to do and planned to get out as soon as the opportunity presented itself.”

  “Do you break out of jail often?” My tone is sarcastic, but I’m genuinely curious. I know how hard it was to get him out. I can’t imagine anyone who’d willingly get arrested on the chance that they could escape.

  “Not jail, but I’ve had to get out of sticky situations before. If you didn’t help me, I would have figured out another way. The paramedics that drove me away? They were mine.”

  I don’t even want to know how he orchestrated that one, so I move on. “Why didn’t Sal just have you killed himself?”

  He smiles then, and the quirk of his lips is so achingly familiar it causes me physical pain. “They tried, remember? I’m really hard to kill. Plus, they couldn’t find me.”

  I don’t have a response. I mean, what do you even say to something like that? So, I hastily serve myself some of the
sponge cake Marie placed on the table instead. Gracin keeps looking out the window.

  “How did they even know I was in Los Angeles?”

  At that, he turns and shoves his hands into his pockets. “If I had to take a guess?” he asks, glancing at me. When I nod, he says, “Because I’d been spotted there. The fact that you were even still alive told them you meant something to me. They are good at what they do, almost as good as I am, so they knew if they found you, I would be close behind. You weren’t hard to find.”

  I wince, the sponge cake turning to dust on my tongue. The news reports hadn’t been kind in the weeks following Gracin’s escape and Vic’s death. They spun a story of a whirlwind romance that drove me to break Gracin out of prison and murder my husband so we could run away together. It wouldn’t have been hard for Sal to draw conclusions from there, mistaken though they may be.

  “But how did you track me down to California? It 's not really near Michigan.”

  He turns, hands tucked casually into his pockets. “If you thought you could hide from me, you were very much mistaken. I’m very, very good at what I do, Tessa.”

  “What, exactly, do you do?” I was afraid to know, but I’m done hiding from my fears.

  “I kill people for money, Tessa. Lots of money.”

  “So, Salvatore. He was what? A job?”

  “Yes.”

  I shove that away for another time as my brain starts to spin. “But how did you find me?”

  With a sigh, he gestures with one hand. “I knew when I got back to the house you were gone. There are only so many outlets from Michigan, and I assumed you’d stick to a well-known city you thought you could lose yourself in.”

  I swallow thickly, waiting.

  He glances down at my hand where my wedding ring should have been. “I knew you’d need money, so I checked all the pawnshops around your house first. When that didn’t work, I started in Detroit. It took a couple of days, but eventually, I found where you unloaded your rings. You got taken on that deal by the way.”

  Son of a bitch. “And they just gave you my information? Just like that?”

  He lifts a brow. “Anyone can be bought. You just have to find the right price. From there, I checked the nearest transportation, which of course were buses. Of the hundred or so possible choices, only three fit—New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. I figured you would have gone as far as you could. I was right.”

  “The police? Why aren’t they looking for you? Us? Did you buy them off, too?” At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “I work and do business under an assumed name. Gracin Kingsley is my real name, one with a verifiable history for those who thought to check, but that name won’t lead any of the authorities to this place. I own it and several others under the name I use to do business.”

  My head spins. “What about me? Why did you do this to me?”

  He pauses, his first during my little interrogation, and then says, “I needed help getting out.”

  “I was just collateral damage, is what you’re saying.” I nod, furious with myself that a confirmation of what I had already known makes me want to cry again. “I guess I already knew that.”

  He doesn’t apologize. Maybe he already knows it would be pointless.

  “You can stay here until I neutralize the situation with Sal. Whatever you need will be provided for you. Whatever you want,” he says.

  “I want to leave.”

  He sighs. “That’s the one thing I can’t let you do. They’re still looking for me, and letting you go now would just put you right back in danger. You are free to explore the property, though.”

  “What does it matter if I’m in danger?” He just looks at me. His electric green eyes heated with whatever words he’s refusing to give me. When I’m certain he isn’t going to answer, I say, “Then I guess we’re done here, aren’t we?”

  He starts to walk away, and I call out to his back. “You’re no better than Vic was, keeping me locked up, thinking you know what’s best for me, pushing me around, manipulating me. You told me I deserved better. I guess what you really meant is that I should exchange one prison for another.”

  He walks out of the dining room instead of answering.

  Marie appears to lead me back to my room.

  The doors are kept locked at all times. You’d think with a house this size that someone would forget to close one of them . . . or at least leave a window cracked or something, but no. Gracin must have trained them well because over the next week, I test them all for points of weakness to no avail.

  If I’m let outside to get some sun or fresh air, it’s only to go to the back gardens, which are walled off and the only gate is padlocked. Scaling them is an impossibility unless I want to risk being sliced and diced by razor wire. It reminds me a bit of Blackthorne.

  By the end of the week, I think I’ve scoured all the grounds and searched through all the rooms that aren’t locked. If there’s a trace of who Gracin is behind all the masks he wears, I don’t find one. I do find the libraries, as in more than one, a glass-paned conservatory, and an indoor pool. It would almost seem like a vacation if I weren’t being shadowed by one of Gracin’s men night and day. On the handful of occasions that I’m not being watched by a person, I know there is a camera recording my every movement. Sometimes I flip them off just knowing he’s watching.

  Each day starts with breakfast in the south conservatory. The fare varies, but it’s always served at seven. Coffee steaming, fresh fruit, and spicy sausages or crispy bacon with eggs. After I eat, I go to my room and change into a swimsuit that just showed up the day after I found the swimming pool, and I swim until my limbs are numb and my brain is comfortably fuzzy. If I weren’t so incredibly wired all the time, I would have enjoyed exploring the library, but I can’t seem to sit still anymore so if I’m feeling up to it, I do a couple rounds in the gym or prowl the mansion back and forth until it’s time for dinner.

  Sometimes Gracin joins me, but sometimes he doesn’t. Our conversations never vary past what I’ve been up to that day, and they never last long because I give clipped answers to all of his questions. He’s lucky I haven’t taken the silverware and stabbed him in the neck. Maybe that’s why he eats at the farthest end of the table across from me.

  I don’t want to question him about why he saved me that day. I’m afraid if I do, I may kill him instead of just imagining it.

  I don’t know what it will mean if I kill someone in cold blood. That’s a lie. It will mean I’m no better than him.

  I’m exploring the third-floor rooms the following weekend when I come across another locked door. I look around, surprised to find my shadow gone and not a single camera pointed in my direction. I turn back to the door, curious. This one is different from the others. I can’t say why. Maybe it’s the lack of surveillance, as if Gracin doesn’t want any record of who comes and goes from this room, or maybe it’s a gut instinct. Still, I know this place is special. I know it belongs to him as surely as I am aware I’m going to open it, regardless of the consequences. It’s by pure luck that I manage to open it using pins from my hair and a hard shove with all my weight.

  His scent assaults me first, and I nearly stagger backward. It’s the one thing I can’t fight whenever I’m near him, and it only makes me hate him more. The fact that he still, after everything, can make me want him without doing a thing is infuriating.

  His room is huge, maybe double the size of the one I’ve been given. The bed is situated in front of me, and it has a sleek nightstand on each side, and atop each nightstand is a contemporarily styled lamp. A long chest of drawers sits to my left with a tall mirror at the top. On the opposite side, there is a wall mounted flat-screen.

  I start with the drawers since they’re the most obvious place for him to store all his secrets, which is probably why they’re only full of useless things—bits of paper, change, business cards for landscaping and the like. Closing them in disgust, I move to the dresser and snoop through ea
ch drawer, even pausing once to bring a white T-shirt up to my nose. Furious with myself, I throw it back in the drawer and slam it shut.

  My next area of attack is his closet, but I have to stop in awe when I see the shelves lined with meticulously organized clothes. My memories of him are so rooted in our time together at Blackthorne that the image of sophistication is jarring as a reality. The drawers and shelves in the closet yield no more than belts, cuff links, and shoes. As I investigate his bathroom, I’m starting to think I won’t find anything after all. I pull out drawer after drawer until one thing does catch my eye. As I pick it up, dumbfounded, I almost can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  It’s my security ID from Blackthorne. The one he’d read the first day we met. Probably kept it as a trophy when he pulled off his big escape, the sick bastard. I leave the ID where I find it. The reminder of what I’ve done may get him off, but it makes bile rise in the back of my throat. I was such a stupid, stupid girl.

  I put everything back in its place and double-check to make sure it’s all just as I found it. Usually, I’d feel guilty for invading someone else’s privacy, but as far as I’m concerned if Gracin didn’t want me snooping in his things, he shouldn’t have locked me in his house.

  “Find what you were looking for?” Gracin says from his bedroom doorway. He doesn’t seem upset, but based on the significant amount of control he’s shown over the past few weeks, I couldn’t tell even if he were. Not that I give a damn.

  “I wasn’t looking for anything specific,” I say.

  “Weren’t you?” he returns.

  Rolling my eyes, I make to move past him, but he blocks the doorway. My heart kicks into high gear. “What are you doing?”

  “I just want to talk,” he says.

  “I don’t. I think we did enough talking the other day. You made yourself perfectly clear.”

  He boxes me in, one arm wrapping around my stomach to maneuver in front of me. “I don’t think I did,” he says and pushes me backward so he can close the door behind him.