by Nicole Snow
I chase him like mad, giving every bone below my waist a burn it hasn't felt since Sierra Leone. I'm out the door, closing fast. He's quick, almost as fit as I am, but I have more endurance.
Four blocks away from the boutique, he slows when his heel hits a crack. I leap like a mountain lion, closing the gap, hurling my elbow around his neck as he goes down fighting.
Mr. Peeping Fuck doesn't last long.
No man has a chance once my hand grips his throat. We hit the ground together and roll. My knee goes in his back. An agonized groan is my reward.
No more games. I'm lucky there isn't a crowd out tonight.
“Who the hell sent you? Wright?” We're cutting straight to it.
I ease my grip just so he can nod. Next question.
“What are you? Some kind of PI?” I wrack my brain, considering the possibilities. He's cut too clean for a dirty merc after a tougher job.
Detective, then. Again, his head bobs up and down meekly.
“He's looking for a slip, isn't he? Sending goons to prowl around, capture my every move, bring him scraps that show I was never serious about this family thing?” The rest is easy to piece together.
It's too much, or he's recovered his wounded pride. Peeing Fuck doesn't answer. Not until my knee digs deeper into his spine, close to a satisfying crunch. “Talk, damn it. Also want your phone.”
I don't wait for him to do me the courtesy. My free hand slips into his pocket, ripping out the black Android device I saw earlier in his hand. It's in a flimsy case, thankfully.
He groans. “Let go, Knox. Do it. Both know...you won't...do shit.”
He's right. I can't leave lasting damage, or his boss will have all the evidence he ever wanted to steal my little girl. It's hard not to collapse this idiot's lungs.
I let him stand, awkwardly, before I slam him into the nearest wall. His split-second hesitation tells me he's waiting, thinking I'll actually apologize and give back his property.
“Move along, asshole,” I growl. “If you're smart, we're finished here. You'll collect your hazard pay and go, without staying on his payroll. Because if this ever happens again, if I ever catch you sniffing around my people, we'll find a nice spot in the Sonoran desert for you, me, and a shovel. We both know you've done your homework. I know that you know how unholy I can and will fuck you up.”
I pin him with one hand, skimming his pockets with the other, checking to make sure there isn't a secondary listening device. Then, I dispatch him with one last hateful look, watching as he takes off running.
It's a small miracle Sunflower hasn't caught up to me yet. My greatest fear after losing my daughter is her ever seeing this side of me.
They probably turned down the wrong street, if they're not waiting inside the boutique, expecting me to send a text. I count my blessings, seize every spare moment, and throw his phone on the sidewalk. It rattles like rotten wood underneath my boot, blown to smithereens by the impact.
When I'm confident there isn't a single circuit in that thing left un-warped, I draw out my own phone and fire off a message.
Meet me at the car. Hold your questions until we're home.
For once, Kendra listens. Her sweet lips stay silent, as much for my benefit as Lizzie's, who's fallen asleep in the backseat. She doesn't even wake up as I grab her from the seat, carry her into the house, and lay her gently into bed. Always leave my nightly kiss on the forehead before I close her door, and tonight is no exception.
Some rituals, a man never breaks.
“Okay,” she whispers, as soon as we're in the hallway. “Why the 007 stunt tonight? Who was he?”
I keep walking. Don't say anything until we're further down the hall, closer to her room, where there's no chance my sleepy little girl will overhear us. “Loose change you don't need to worry about. Told you before, Sunflower, by doing this, we're stirring the pot all kinds of fucked up. Victor won't go easy.”
“Yeah, but so quickly? Do I need to start checking under my bed?”
“That's a start.” I watch with a flicker of amusement as her eyes pop wider, giving up their emerald perfection. “I'm kidding. Mostly.”
“Idiot.” She punches me in the arm, causing a smile like a reflex. I haven't heard her use that tone since we were both kids, or I was still nearer to the innocence she could relate to. “Seriously, where does this go from here? If he's got men like that following us around, watching our every move...”
“We take this more seriously than ever. It's the only way,” I say quietly, cornering her against the wall, one arm over her head. “Listen to me, Kendra. Every word. Follow my lead. Believe in us. Trust the lie so much it starts seeming real, like we're truly something special, embarking on our long and happy lives.”
She blinks a little too fast to be natural. “I don't know how to walk this line. You're asking me to up the ante, but you don't want Jamers and your mom finding out? Jesus. Such a tight rope.”
“Better brush up on gymnastics then.” I stare through her, cock rising in my jeans.
Throwing the nosy fuck on the ground hasn't given it amnesia. It remembers full well how cruelly delicious she looked tonight. “You looked hotter than the days I remember you bouncing around in those tights for dance squad your senior year.”
“Ew, I barely lasted a year! And since when were you looking?”
“Since always.” I stop right there, looking away. If I stare a second longer, that blood red splash gleaming on her cheeks is bound to tell me how she is to the touch. I can't put my hands on her, or they won't stop. “You were born tight. Destined to be eye candy for every immature fuckwit with his tongue hanging out in our old days, or were you blind to that too?”
“Obviously not. I just chose...not to explore my options.”
“You were too good for them,” I growl, letting my eyes roam her throat, everywhere my tongue aches to follow. “Just a hot, shy, puritan piece of ass too busy with her nose stuck in a book to give her first handjob to some hairless little chimp holding the winning numbers to your panties.”
She's blazing quick. Her palm flies across my cheek, razor sharp against my stubble. Goddamn, that feels good.
“Thanks. Now, look at me like we're still in love,” I say, boxing her face in with both my hands, back where they belong against the wall.
“Huh?”
“You're failing my test, Ms. Four-Point-Oh. If I don't believe you still want to be with me after that, how the hell will the creeps Victor has watching us every time we're outside this house? How will anybody else?”
“Knox, please.”
“Sunflower...” I bring one hand softly across her face, lifting her by the chin. “I'm not playing games.”
Oh, but I am.
“I can't lose my little girl.” I'm completely serious about that part. “Show me the fire in your eyes even when I don't deserve an ember. Show me you get how serious this is, and you're willing to punish me for being a bastard later when I act up. Because we both know I fucking will be sometimes when it's all I'm good at. Show me, darling. Your mask, your game face, your best poker scowl. We're in this together, and the stakes could not be –“
Higher? That's where I'm flying the instant her lips reach for mine. Kendra grows a few inches on her tip-toes, more than a tentative little peck when our mouths collide.
Hot. Sweet. Surprising.
On second thought, screw the pep talk. I take what's mine, giving it back to her better than she gives, throwing her against the wall with my chest. Our lips dance with hunger, find their delights together, and skip to the moon on a ten second mote of x-rated fairy dust.
My hand is in her hair. Her moan is in my mouth. I'm pulling, sucking, and biting her all at once, manic like I haven't been for years with the need to mark a woman inside and out.
And I do, down to this flower's roots. She groans, soft and supple, when our hips grind once.
Then it hits me how far this is bound to go if I don't stop.
Stop, you ba
stard! I tear myself away, hoping a swallow of oxygen will ease with the withdrawal breaking away from her lips. It never has a chance.
Kendra looks at me, her eyes lidded, bright, and wanting. Takes everything I've got to hold her gaze without my hand between her legs, pushing them open, finishing where we just left off.
“I have to go. Early day tomorrow. Watch what you say when you're outside in the gardens if you decide to take a walk or whatever. Victor shouldn't have had the time to get his place bugged. It was clean the other day when I checked, and I'll do another sweep in the morning. But until then...you never know. Didn't expect him to send the dogs after me so fast, trailing us in town tonight. You wait for my all clear, understood?”
She nods, slow and messy. “Jesus, Knox. I –“
“If the next words out of your mouth aren't goodnight, then we've got nothing to discuss.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. Then disappointment.
She doesn't get it. I have to shut her down cold, or we will fuck.
And if the lid comes off this sick attraction we've been nursing for years, I know I won't have nightmares knocking at my brain. I'll be living them.
“Whatever,” she murmurs, barely under her breath. “Goodnight.”
We share one last look before she backs into her door, walling off our tension when it closes.
That last look, I recognize. Not across the years, but in the present. It's in my blood, my bones, fogging up my mirror when I look into my own strange eyes.
It's fear. It's hatred. And it's love – the forbidden, impermissible, fucked up thing with a thousand consequences.
Every last one a new disaster.
I can't sleep. When counting sheep and melatonin won't work, ritual does the trick.
My office has a secret in the bottom drawer that's gnawed at me since shortly after Lizzie was born. I sigh when I open it, pull out the little box, and wonder why I think I'll do anything except work myself into an exhausted frenzy.
There never are any answers. The FBI team dedicated to Sam Wright's missing person's case gave up and put it into cold storage years ago.
But there I am, three o'clock in the morning, sifting through everything I know about the last days on earth of a woman I despise.
She left me with something beautiful. Lizzie deserves closure about her mother someday, and that's half the reason I keep trying to break the enigma.
The rest is hoping I'll find something damning about Victor, blunting his threats forever. Even after all these years and not a shred of proof backing it, I think the chance he was involved in her vanishing is greater than zero.
My hands go to work, faster than my brain, flipping pages. Old photos, investigative field reports from the countless detectives I've hired, test results from a forensics lab I paid out the nose for.
Always the same damning artifacts.
Never any conclusions.
I see the name Jake Burton, the fucking bum who fed her addictions. We played pool a few times at the same watering hole attached to the back alley where my beautiful little girl was conceived. He opened his new place in LA to her when she blew Phoenix without any notice.
Supposedly, she stayed with him for under three weeks before disappearing forever. The beat up gas station across the street from Jake's place took her last photos on a crappy security cam.
Her eyes are too grainy, too dark to really see in those photos. But I've tried to stare, even hovered a magnifier over them.
I don't need a picture perfect view of her crazy eyes to know she looked like hell. I want to regret, worry, fear – emotions that might lead me somewhere on this maddening chase.
Wright made sure Jake was hauled in for questioning and held for months as the main suspect. Or at least he gave the appearance.
The bum had nothing. Just a half-cocked story about how she went out for beer one night and never came home. Too much corroborated it. He was released in under a month and moved upstate to Redding. Never had the opportunity to question him myself. Running dope for a rival gang on Grizzlies Motorcycle Club turf got him beat to death in a biker war roughly a year later.
My fingers move with an angrier energy the longer I flip through the pages. An hour passes, and I'm no closer to anything. Not even sleep.
When I hit the last page, I stop as I always do, my lips turned up in a vicious smile. My greatest mistake smiles up at me, the last decent picture she ever had taken, laughing with her drunken eyes. “Where the fuck did you go? Someday, you'll tell me.”
I shove the pile off my desk and hear it clatter on the floor. I see the other box tucked under my desk while I'm cleaning the mess up I've created. By the time I've finished tucking everything back into its neat folder, I'm smiling for real.
Why suffer more agony tonight when I can have a little fun before sunrise?
I pour myself scotch night cap and sip it slowly while I grab my finest stationary, plus the pen I only use for multimillion dollar deals. I scrawl a quick note on it, pop the container open, and tuck it inside.
Then I carry the box with Sunflower's dirty little secret upstairs, bend down next to her door, and leave it for her to find in the morning.
I can't decide whether imagining her reaction when she finds it makes me want to stroke my cock or laugh more. So I hit the sheets and sleep instead.
It's the first time in a good, long while I drift away without the steady darkness staining my soul.
7
Wretched Thief (Kendra)
I'm awake and yawning, totally ready to shower, and maybe find a quick breakfast in town before I'm due at the studio. It's one of those mornings I sorely miss sleeping in. But Gannon doesn't give me that luxury when he starts work at six o'clock, punctual and demanding as ever.
I clean up and change in a hurry. The new bumblebee dress I bought in Scottsdale last night fits wonderfully. It's everything I like in one elegant black stripped ensemble. Maybe part of me is still asking myself if it's a little tacky, but the fashion world demands a little classy eccentricity. That goes double at the public gallery I'm helping with tonight.
Time to go. Taking a deep breath, I leave my room, and nearly walk over the box sitting outside my door before I see it.
Now, what? I wonder, reaching down. Holding it up, I shake it gently.
Something dense and heavy rattles inside. It's a silver box with a luxury name in men's cologne stamped on the front. Certainly not something I'd order. I duck back in my room, sliding a fingernail under the tape.
It pops open, revealing a lump tucked under a note on thick cream paper in his handwriting. As soon as I hold up the page to read it, I'm horrified.
My vibrator stares me in the face. It's one of the few I keep around to sate the urges that come without a good man in sight.
Just because I'm a virgin at twenty-three hardly means I'm pure.
“Ass,” I mutter, unsure how I'm able to conjure the strength to read what he's left me, but I do.
Mornin' Sunfower. Never took you for a size queen until this rolled out when I was packing your bags. Thought I'd return it.
P.S. Good news: mine is bigger. Also a whole lot more fun to ride.
“Idiot!” I mutter, angrily slamming my vibrator into a dresser drawer. I head out, hoping to God he's still asleep, so I won't have to leave more mortified than I already am. Fortunately, he is. It'll be another hour before he wakes Lizzie and they're dressed, making breakfast, heading over to his mother's place to drop her off before he goes to the office.
After the morning ambush, Gannon's orders are actually a relief. They take my mind off the total privacy violation Knox just delivered, the last man on earth who should know anything about my masturbation habits.
We spend our time prepping for the public exhibition tonight. It's been thrown together quickly, ever since Gannon found out several big names from Europe were due in Phoenix. I guess they think there's some creative merit in experiencing a 'real Arizona summer.'
Well, th
ey've picked a perfect time. I'm barely able to walk two blocks to my favorite Mexican grill for lunch.
These are the dog days, broken only by short nights and sudden monsoons. The pavement burns your toes when it's been in the hundred and twenty degree sun. The nicer places have their mist turned on, and I stop at an upscale French place next to the grill, catching the spritz pouring off their patio above.
My phone pings. It's amazing how fast the burn moves inside me, and I forget all about being comfortable when I see the name on the screen sending me the text.
Knox: Still expecting a ride home tonight from the art shindig, or what?
I grit my teeth, tapping out a response, and really hoping this line starts moving because anger makes me hungry.
Kendra: Don't bother. I'll Uber to your place whenever I'm done.
I don't want his help. Sure, he might have Lizzie in the car with him, easing the awkward tension, but I don't know if I can see him today. Not after his nasty little 'good morning' shock.
Knox: The offer stands. So does the chance to get something between your legs that doesn't run on batteries.
Kendra: Not in this lifetime, or the next. You're crazy, crude, and a complete ass.
I flick my screen off, silence its tone, and plunk it in my purse before he has time for more torment. I'm able to eat my burrito in peace and work the rest of the evening, doing some final checks before the show tonight.
“Hey, we're shorthanded.” Gannon taps me on the shoulder an hour before it's supposed to open. “See to the refreshments and snacks, please. Our esteemed guests have no tolerance for vending machines and fast food, Kendra, particularly Mrs. Brunwick.”
Great. Not only am I pulling a double shift for this stupid internship, I'm now I'm a glorified waitress too.
I also can't walk out on him and blow my experience. That would mean even more sucking up to Knox so he'll expedite the rewards he's promised for this insane fake engagement. And after this morning, I'm honestly afraid he'll want me to put my money where my mouth is when the time comes to cash in.
