by Allen, J. C
“Oh, my, God,” Derek said after he finished, pressing his face into mine. “Who knew public sex would be so great?”
“It’s a thrill, isn’t it,” I said with a smile.
I felt him pull out of me, drawing gasps for both of us. I turned to him, smiling at how sleepy he looked.
“It’s like, the ‘we shouldn’t be doing this’ part of it makes it so much hotter,” Derek said. “Of course, it’s you that makes it the hottest part.”
“Shut up,” I said with a smile as I leaned in to kiss him.
And that’s all I did for about a full minute. I just kissed him. Sometimes, the simpler action was best, and in this case, the kiss said everything I could have with words.
I loved him. I wanted to be with him forever. I wanted to start a family with him soon.
And I couldn’t have him tonight if I wanted any of those things in the long run.
I pulled back with a tender smile, kissed him once more, and collapsed into him.
“We should get going,” I said with a sigh. “Not that I want to.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, sighing as well. “Not much else left to do here. But damn. Nothing else I would want to do here.”
He went silent for a few more seconds. I listened to his heartbeat seeming to decelerate with each passing moment, feeling a bit surprised at the ease with which he seemed to be comfortable. Public sex? Talking about Falcon? Splash wars?
Nothing fazed Derek when he was with me.
It’s just when he’s out on his own…
He stood up and then looked at me with something resembling appreciation, but it wasn’t a perfect match.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m… I’m alright,” he said, smiling warmly. “It felt kinda good to get the story out, I guess. Haven’t spoken about Falcon to anyone new in a while.”
“I’m glad then,” I said before going for the encouragement.. “And we’ll take him down together, won’t we?”
He smirked and gave a nice laugh.
“I suppose we will,” he said, taking my hand in mine. “I promise, Eve, once this is all over, we’ll go on a trip. Somewhere far away and for as long as we want.”
“That sounds amazing,” I smiled. “I’ll hold you to it. Italy, perhaps?”
His eyes lit up and he did the right thing—he just kissed me. Actions speak much louder than words.
With that, we packed up, turning from what was such a beautiful day and night and heading straight towards the real world. Back to the world where both of our lives were still in danger, where death had become such a regular things.
A world where monsters were very real and closer than they appeared.
I glanced over, seeing Derek’s intense stare as we headed back to the car and realized that, as long as I had Derek in my life, we could take on anything. Smiling, I took his hand in mine, feeling stronger at just having his hand in mine and knew that we would win.
Somehow, we would pull through and life would be that much better.
Monsters be damned.
7
Derek
Dropping Eve off at my place never got any easier.
In fact, it was getting harder by the day, knowing that as our love grew and we got closer, my chances of dying were also growing and getting closer to becoming a reality.
When we got back to my condo, I went to the elevators and pushed the up button. But when she got on, I stayed behind.
“Baby, I can’t go up with you,” I said. “We both know that if I go upstairs, I ain’t coming down. And we got a mission. Roost’s orders.”
Poor Eve looked on the verge of tears as I told her this. I’m not sure what was sadder, this, or that I knew she knew I had to do this. She was so ingrained in the Saviors that by now, she probably could have partook in our strategy meetings.
“OK,” she said. She came out of the doors, leaned forward, and kissed me. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She pulled back, refusing to break eye contact with me as the doors began to close.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
I didn’t get the chance to respond, but if ever truer words were spoken, I wouldn’t want to hear them, because they wouldn’t have been as relevant as Eve’s were right there.
“I guess I have no choice now,” I said, smiling to myself as I got on my bike and hurried over to the shop.
Despite the abrupt ending, something had changed between Eve and me on our date. Something good. I felt stronger from it, felt the surge of excitement at going out on the chase. Maybe it was as shallow and crude as finishing inside of her without any shame, but I think it was something much deeper than that.
I’d briefly gone over Falcon at the dinner after the neighborhood raid, but this conversation went into the full extent of it all. It was a much more detailed insight into what I knew—really, close to everything I knew—and it could have been too tough for me to say. Perhaps before Eve, it would have been too tough to tell it as raw as I had been, but now?
It was… well, not easy, but certainly manageable.
Nevertheless, such sweet sentiments needed to be put to the side. It was time to go to war. It was time to investigate another potential lead.
I parked in the back of the shop as other Savage Saviors drove off to explore their own potential leads. When I got inside, I saw Roost standing, arms crossed, with three of our biggest, toughest, most badass men we had.
“Derek,” Roost said, nodding. “Ya know these boys, but just so I can remind ya not to be a damn fool, let me reintroduce ya.”
I didn’t bait into the trash talking if Roost was going for that. It was too serious.
“We got Rucker, real name Mike. Rucker, like the other two, served in the Marines and did a tour in Iraq. Ya ain’t gonna get anyone tougher than him. Middle man here is AK, real name Alex, cuz he loves his rifles. Third man is Bones, aka Brett.”
“I know, I recruited all of you,” I said.
Still, the reminder had its purpose, and it wasn’t because I had suddenly developed amnesia. The message was pretty blatant, actually. You have three Marines who have killed people, faced terrorists, and gone against the worst of humanity. If you think you’re better than them, you’re a goddamn idiot.
It was hard to feel more secure than having Rucker, AK, and Bones by my side. It was like arming yourself with three layers of bulletproof armor—that was, if said armor could also fight back, make tactically sound decisions, and advise you of proper operations.
“Well, ya don’t need to break no ice then,” Roost said. “Get a roll out!”
“You heard the man!” I shouted as the Marines headed to their bikes, hopping on and following me off the road.
Getting possibly one step closer to finishing off Falcon and his Black Falcons, I glanced in my rearview mirror as I sped down the highway, heading in the direction of where more bodies had been found.
No more playing stupid, we were in the big games now.
And the big games required the biggest, baddest boys possible.
If our hypothesis was right, we’d find our next “clue” in the location of where the newest bodies had been found. I wondered if we were right, even with what I had found yesterday, how likely was it that I was going to find something again tonight. And for that matter, would I really want to find something like I found the previous night?
I couldn’t fight the thought that we were just being led on some chase, some game that Falcon had all the control in. I’d told Eve about Frank and his connection with my father and it had felt better to get it out, but it’d also given me that much more purpose in finally stopping the bastard. He’d taken so much, had even killed more of my men, and I wasn’t going to let him continue to play games.
Still, by now I had learned the harsh lesson that just because I had more reason and more enthusiasm to kill Falcon didn’t mean I was a better, smarter leader in the process.
If any
thing, the opposite was true.
As I came to the highway exit of the next location, I took the offramp, coming to a more secluded area of the city. I wondered if Falcon had any connection to all the construction that had begun in the areas. Both locations so far had been heavily under construction.
I shook my head, deciding that it could also just be coincidence. Obviously, “could also just be a coincidence” wasn’t reason enough to abandon all my plans, but it was reason enough to focus on what I could control—my recon of the area.
We parked our bikes just at the first stoplight, something without any difficulty giving the lack of people around us.
“What do you think, boss?” Bones asked as he pulled up beside me, looking around the location to scope out anything.
“Doesn’t seem like much,” I said, giving the place my own once-over despite how quiet it seemed. “But, then again, it was like this last night too. Quiet doesn’t always mean quiet.”
The three men didn’t say anything more. I trusted that this was because, as trained soldiers, they were doing their jobs to perfection, not for any other reason.
Then Rucker shouted.
“What’s that over there?”
He pointed towards the darkened depths of the nearest building.
“Old office building,” I said, noting the crooked “Space for Rent” sign that hung in one of the first-floor windows.
At first, it seemed like nothing, the kind of building that didn’t merit any further investigation, as empty as the space and streets before us.
But then its presence was notable just for being present—there weren’t really any other buildings nearby, nothing that would suggest a place to kill someone and leave their corpse. It was like going to Las Vegas and seeing a tree in the middle of the desert—we’d be fools not to at least investigate it.
“Seems like a good place to hide the next clue,” AK said, shrugging a shoulder as he did.
“Might as well give it a go,” Bones said, pointing to the building. “Whoever was last there left the door wide open for someone. Boss?”
The three looked at me with an intense, almost frightening stare. I knew that everyone who worked for me had to have the potential to kill, if not having actually done so, but… fuck…
Yeah, Rucker, AK, and Bones were all business. Long as I was being honest with myself—and, who the fuck else was I gonna tell this to? Eve, maybe?—they scared the shit out of me. I reminded myself that they were on my side and took in a wealth spring of confidence for that fact.
Just don’t do anything to lose their faith, numbnuts.
I was glad for the help and having these three was definitely the best plan in case we were ambushed. They knew how to fight and, from what I had watched, fought well. They also had a good eye for things, knowing how to scope an area from their time in the military.
In short, they had all the skills that I lacked, and there was no degree of overstatement in that. If anything, I was selling their skills short.
I should be asking them if it’s OK. But, well, you might as well play the part if you’re gonna be president of the Saviors, bud.
“Let’s go,” I said, perhaps pitching my voice a little bit lower than normal.
While “wide open” wasn’t exactly right, the chunk of cracked brick that had been purposefully set into place to leave the door propped open certainly seemed just as much an invitation.
If nothing else, it seemed an even greater hint. Sometimes doors just got left open, after all; someone may forget to close it behind them—maybe they didn’t check to see if the latch secured—and the wind does the rest. Hell, maybe a faulty hinge or a busted spring keeps it from closing without a helping hand.
But that was a door that somebody had put some effort into keeping open, going so far as to retrieve a blockade to keep it from notbeing open.
I watched as each kept their arms at their sides, arms near their guns and other weapons as needed. I was armed too, having made sure to pack two handguns and a pocket knife, just in case. While I hadn’t been much of a gun person before, I couldn’t deny that the feel of the weapon against my chest did make me feel a ton better.
I couldn’t say my father would be especially thrilled that we’d engaged in such battles, but I think even he would have called me a fool if I had gone into this mission without the proper firearm protection—and I know he would have called me a fool if I told the Marines not to have guns out of some misguided philosophy.
I sighed, running a hand through my hair, wishing I could be back with Eve in our bed. Do this for her. Be her shining Knight. Succeed, and then come home and make love to your woman again.
We pulled up to the building, Bones, AK, and Rucker doing a quick scan of the surroundings.
“No windows,” Bones said.
So less avenues to shoot at us, I thought.
“Cuz they shot ‘em out,” AK said.
Well, shit, that’s what I get for not listening.
“Looks clear,” Bones said. “But we gotta be careful, boss. We’re moving in blind. They got everything.”
“Understood.”
We dismounted a safe distance, the Marines pulling their guns out, and we headed for the opening door. I went to step through the door when Rucker stopped me, pulling me back by my shoulder and shaking his head at me.
“What?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Do you see something?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head before pointing ahead of us with his sharply angled chin before adding, “But you don’t just walk into enemy territory without surveying the area. Easy to do outside. Let us take care of it inside.”
“Fair enough,” I said, nodding and glanced around. “So, what do we do then? You want me—”
“Wait.”
The word seemed to imply that we all wait, and I was about to argue that it didn’t seem the proper course of action.
Then, without a single word or prompting of any kind, the three slipped into the shadowy depths. I watched, stunned, as three tall, bulky men faded into the darkness like the inhuman creatures from one of Eve’s books. And then I was left with nothing but silence and my spooky, unnerving thoughts.
It was beginning to occur to me just how little control I had over my men—and I didn’t mean that in a bad way. Given their skills, my lack thereof, and their experience, I was pretty confident I wanted to call all of them daddy and put me to bed.
A moment later, though I still couldn’t see any of them, I heard Bones’ voice—unsettlingly close despite still being, as they might say, “one with the shadows”—as he called out, “All clear.”
“That’s eerie as shit,” I informed him as I stepped inside.
“Ain’t nothing to it,” he said gruffly.
I thought I heard a chuckle.
But the soldiers didn’t flinch.
“You hear that?”
“Hear what, boss?” Bones said.
I knewthe Falcons were there, but if I had to provide my brain with any concrete evidence of that fact, I’d likely come up dry.
“That laugh, did you hear it?”
“No, sir,” AK said. “Might be hearing what you want to hear, boss.”
I bit my lip. If the three Marines didn’t hear something, then yeah, it probably wasn’t there. But…
“Understood,” I said, even if I didn’t fully have my senses and my words in agreement.
Just be glad that they’re on your side, Derek.
I was now fully realizing I had definitely been stupid in going alone last night. If there had been anything more than a dead body waiting, I could’ve very easily wound up dead, most especially since it was likely the Falcons also had former soldiers in their team. I chastised myself for my arrogance as I watched the three begin to step through the threshold, heading into the dark building.
“Got the night vision gear, Bones?” Rucker asked as he slipped into place beside me, using his forearm to guide me forward through the blackness.
>
“Yeah, here,” Bones, who had somehow fallen into place behind me, said.
I heard the hushed whisper of a zipper, and I had a momentary flash of memory of the many, many pockets that his cargo pants held.
It also flashed into mind that seemingly literally every single moment was serving to remind me just how far out of my league I was and how foolishly I had acted when I went out alone the previous night.
Or, really, any other night in the past month or so.
A moment later, after a faint rustling that could have just as easily been a pair of rats fighting over a scrap of food in the walls, I heard him begin to distribute several somethings. One of these somethings found its way against my chest, and my hands came up to claim it. I’d heard “night vision” and almost immediately after disregarded it, figuring it was a code of some kind.
It was the same sort of response I’d have if one had suddenly told the other they’d need a light saber to cut a lock—nothing more than military-man jargon, right?
Nope.
I appreciate these constant reminders of my ineptitude.
Fumbling blindly with the bundle that had been passed to me, I realized I was holding a pair of goggles with an expensive-feeling network of straps that fit over the top of my head.
I clumsily worked the thing on, began to fidget with the thick, elongated apparatus that now hovered over my forehead, and muttered, “Are these really necessary?”
“Can you see?” Bones asked.
I didn’t feel like answering, not wanting to advertise the point that had just been made against me.
“Exactly.”
Not only did I not begrudge the matter of factness, in any other circumstance, I might have started to develop a man crush of sorts on these three.
A pair of hands swatted my own away, expertly swung the lenses into place before my eyes, and, following a mechanical click as a switch was flipped near my temple, the blackness that had enveloped me exploded into a blinding wall of green.
“Shit!” I gasped, feeling like my retinas were being melted out of my skull.
