A sense of release flooded through him—Matt’s cock spasmed as if in fright, and Vic wondered what powers, if any, could be drawn from such an anticlimactic ejaculation. Jordan must’ve somehow pushed Matt beyond the realm of normal sexual activity: his orgasms were fading, his body over-sensitized, his cock and balls exhausted from constant stimulation. When Vic found that asshole, even the police wouldn’t be able to hold him back.
* * * *
Azalea Road was draped in dusk that fell over well manicured lawns like a fine sprinkling of sand one didn’t notice until a porch light clicked on, pushing back the growing night. Vic squinted, looking for house numbers as his mind reached out to flicker across the homes, seeking Matt’s familiar presence. When the road ended in a cul-de-sac, he turned around and retraced his route, looking for the house he’d seen in Jordan’s mind during the phone call…
There. At the end of the second block, a long rancher sprawled across a corner lot, the numbers 256 written in gold script on the mailbox at the street. Vic slowed to a stop and stared past the rusting chain-link fence that hemmed in the lot to the house beyond.
Every window was dark, making the house seem…deactivated, or something. Turned off. Abandoned. The grass had been cut recently, and the garage door buckled a little on one side, not quite closing flush with the driveway. If they had to break in, Vic thought maybe that would be the way to go. Some people closed their garage doors but left the door inside, leading to the house, unlocked. Was it too much to ask that Jordan be that stupid? If he wasn’t, at least in the garage, the neighbors wouldn’t see or hear Vic force his way inside.
A quick glance down the street showed no movement, and no cop car. Cutting off his engine, Vic took a deep breath and closed his eyes, focusing on Matt. His lover’s scent washed over him, a fresh mix of sporty cologne and soft, clean skin and, beneath that, the lingering smell of chlorine from the pool. A summery smell, that went well with the cottony feel of his dark curls and the sweet flavor of his mouth. Vic sighed, opening his mind farther, letting his lover’s scent envelope him. Then he stretched out his mind, unleashing his thoughts at the house beside him. He felt like a tidal wave breaking over the roof and rushing into every crevice, every nook, every opening he could find. Through the windows, through foundation cracks, through the slightly open garage door—Vic stormed the house with his mind, laying every room bare to him, seeking out the closets and the basement and the attic in his relentless search for Matt.
Each room he entered sat lifeless, like a long forgotten sound stage in a television show that wasn’t picked up after the pilot episode. Vic’s mind whipped through room after room like a high wind, sometimes so palpable that papers fluttered to the floor or curtains stirred in his wake. His emotions rose in him like a crescendo—anger warring with frustration, indignation, disappointment. ::Matty?:: he cried out, his presence so strong that in the kitchen, copper pots rang with the reverberation of his mental voice. ::Matty, where—::
The quick rap of knuckles on the windshield of his car startled him. Like a measuring tape stretched too far, his mind snapped back into his body, and he shook his head to clear it. A police car sat in front of his, facing him, lights cold and silent as requested. Officer Jones stood beside the hood of his car, one hand on the gun at her waist, the other raised to knock on his windshield again. Vic exited the car. He cut a menacing figure beside her petite frame, but she didn’t step back, even though she had to look up to see his face. Wisps of blonde hair escaped her cap to frame her face, softening it against her crisp, harsh uniform. “Mr. Braunson…” she started.
Vic held up a hand to stop her. “It’s Vic.”
With a nod, she indicated Jordan’s house. “So you’re telling me Mr. diLorenzo is being held in there.”
“No.”
She gave him a sharp look—in what little light remained of the day, her brown eyes flashed in warning. Vic caught a strong wave of distrust from her, a feeling of being used, so he hurried to explain, “This is the address I have. The guy lives here, I know. But no one’s inside.”
“Just because it looks empty—” she tried.
Vic shook his head. “It is. I know.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know? You just got here—I saw you pull up. You haven’t even been inside yet.”
“Physically, no.” Vic sighed—did she plan to fight him every step of the way? “Look, I can…I don’t know, sense things? With my mind. It’s one way of putting it, anyway. Despite whatever you may think, I wasn’t dozing while I waited for you to show up. I was—my mind was—inside the house.”
She opened her mouth to say something but Vic held up a hand to cut off her protest. “I’m not asking you to believe it,” he said, “but you can’t deny it.”
A muscle in her jaw clenched in defiance. “Prove it.”
Anger rose in Vic. “I don’t have the time—”
“Prove it,” Officer Jones said, crossing her arms in front of her chest, “or I’ll drag you in for…loitering. False accusation. Suspicious activity relating to the whereabouts of a missing person.”
Vic’s emotions coalesced into a hot, tight ball of rage in the center of his chest. For a moment they squared off, face to face—he glared at her with a look of pure hatred at her inability to believe him and she matched that stare with her own, waiting to be proven wrong. ::We’re wasting time.:: When Vic directed that thought into her mind, Officer Jones snapped her head back as if slapped.
But that wasn’t enough, and he knew it. He needed her to trust him, and with a deep breath to disperse his annoyance, he glanced around inside her mind. When he spoke, his voice was low, congenial. “I remind you of someone.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. “Your father,” he said, reading the images in her mind as they flickered past him, one after the other, as if taken with a stop-action lens. “The man in the photo on your desk in your office. That’s you and him, isn’t it? You always thought he was invincible.”
“Stop,” she whispered.
Vic didn’t stop. She wanted proof? She’d get it. “He was always there to catch you,” he murmured, his gruff voice soft. “Every time you tripped and skinned your knee, or fell in love and broke your heart. Daddy was always there to pick you up, set you on your feet again. A few extra dollars in the mail when times were tight. A shoulder to cry on when you were so sure you couldn’t make it through another day on the force.”
“Shut up.” Her nostrils flared, her lips disappeared into a thin white line, and her eyes wavered in the scant light. “Just shut up, Mr. Braunson. You’re full of shit.”
“Am I?” Vic countered. He saw it all—the argument she’d had with her father hours before he was scheduled to leave town on a business trip. Five years ago now, yet the memory still stood out in her mind as if it had just happened yesterday. The long hour she’d spent after he should’ve arrived, trying to raise her father on his cell. At the hotel. At the conference. The news reports of a plane down in Colorado. The phone call that came just before dawn, confirming her worst fears and tearing her heart in two. Her father, dead. And her apology to him unspoken.
The one time he had fallen, and she wasn’t there to catch him.
She turned away from Vic as she drew one finger under her eye to wipe at a tear without smudging her makeup. His question hung between them, unanswered. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion she struggled to keep under control. “When we’re done here,” she said, drawing in a deep breath to steady herself, “you’re telling me everything, is that understood? This mind-reading thing, the super strength, the bulletproof bit—I want answers to it all.”
Vic started, “When I find Matt—”
“Oh, we’ll find him,” she promised.
* * * *
Her resolve seemed to crumble when Vic opened the gate and the creak of rusty hinges filled the air. “This is trespassing, you know,” she informed him.
“I don’t see a sign,” Vic countered. He enter
ed the yard without hesitation and started up the walk.
She hurried to keep up with him as they headed for the front door of the house. “This is private property,” she said. “The purpose of the fence is to keep people out. The citizen doesn’t have to post—”
“So write me a ticket already,” Vic growled. “Just stop going on about it.”
The sidewalk cut a straight path from the road through the trim grass to the broad concrete stoop that served as a porch. Ignoring the handful of stairs leading to the door, Vic jumped onto the stoop, but the officer’s heels clicked as she took each step. This close, an air of anticipation hung over them like a meniscus, as if the whole house held its breath, waiting to see what Vic would do. Officer Jones watched him warily, wondering the same thing.
Vic tried the front door—locked. He wasn’t surprised. Three small windows sat up high near the top of the door; Vic raised himself up on his toes to peer inside. The hallway was dark and deserted, and looked as it had in his head when he’d probed the house with his mind. Though he knew it’d do no good, he still twisted the door knob in his fist, aware of how fragile the metal felt in his grip. One good jerk would break open the lock, get him inside, but if Matt wasn’t even there, why bother?
Where the hell else could he be?
The answer lay inside the house, Vic just knew it. But he couldn’t tear off the front door and storm the place—what if a neighbor were watching? Or if Jordan came back, saw the door ajar, and kept on going? Vic would never know he’d lost his chance…
With a start, he remembered the garage. Following his lead, Officer Jones leapt off the stoop after him and trooped through the grass. Her hand never left her hip, where her holster was unsnapped, her gun ready to be drawn. “Look, Mr. Braunson—”
“Vic.” He stopped at the garage door and squatted down to fit his hands into the space where the metal didn’t quite meet the pavement. The door had been closed improperly, perhaps in a hurry, and had jumped its track.
“Vic,” she conceded, “look. This is breaking and entering. If you’re sure your boyfriend’s not in mortal danger—”
“I never said he wasn’t.” The gap was narrower than it appeared; Vic had to wiggle his fingers to work them beneath the door.
“But he’s not here,” Officer Jones tried again. “Let’s go back to the station and file the necessary paperwork for a search warrant, and I’ll put out an APB on your friend, and…”
Metal screamed out as Vic stood, arms straining beneath the weight of the door. He pushed past the resistance in his own body, fighting against the human limitations that wanted to strangle the lingering strength that came from Matt. For the first time in a long while, he was all too aware of his own weakness and just how much he relied on what powers his lover imbued in him. A familiar energy surged through him, reinforcing the muscles that stood out like cords in his biceps, his forearms, his neck.
He raised his arms, higher, higher, and the metal garage door crumpled like a tin can beneath his strength.
Beside him, Officer Jones stared, mouth open. When she found her voice, it was tiny, awed. “You know this is breaking and entering.”
Vic flexed his hands, feeling the strength diffuse throughout his body. “We haven’t entered yet.”
Then he saw just why the door had been so hastily closed, and he knew he was close to finding Matt, because his lover’s black Jaguar sat parked in the darkness of Jordan’s garage.
* * * *
Chapter 25
The door that led from the garage to the house was also locked. Vic hadn’t expected that. Six rectangular windows sat in the top half of the door, through which he could see an empty kitchen as still and silent as the hallway beyond. Copper pots hung above an island countertop, and a small bistro-style table took up one corner, hemmed in by four tall, high-back wooden chairs. The sink was stainless steel and devoid of dishes, though a washcloth hung over the spigot as if to dry. On the refrigerator were a myriad of sticky notes, and more were tacked to a corkboard by the doorway that led to the rest of the house. Any one of those notes might contain a number or an address, a clue to where he would find Matt. Seizing an old dirty rag from a nearby workbench, Vic told Officer Jones, “Stand clear.”
She obliged, then took a few extra steps back when she saw him wrap the rag around his fist. “I don’t think we should touch anything…”
With a controlled swing of his arm, Vic punched out the window closest to the door knob. The sound of shattering glass interrupted her lecture.
She lowered her voice to an angry hiss. “You shouldn’t have done that!”
“Oh,” Vic countered as he picked the larger pieces of glass out of the wooden frame, “you had something else in mind?”
“I think we should leave,” she said. When Vic ignored her and stuck his arm through the empty window to unlock the door, she sighed in disgust. “You’re going to slice off your hand.”
Vic groaned. Why had he brought her again? “Yes, mother.”
Beneath the rag, his fingers fumbled blindly over the deadbolt, but when he twisted the bolt, it turned in his hand and the door swung open beneath Vic’s weight. He stumbled into the kitchen, his shoes crunching over the glass, and felt something scrape along the inside of his wrist as he extracted his arm from the window frame. A sharp shard, stuck in the wood, sliced him like a razor. Before he could even feel the wound, blood welled up along the scrape. This was just what he needed—for her to be right.
When Officer Jones entered the house after him, her gun drawn, she saw the cut on his arm and a fierce joy radiated through the sweat that shone on her pale face. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Vic didn’t answer. As she moved through the kitchen, cautious, he headed for the sink. It wasn’t a deep wound, but it stung, and dark blood beaded along the length of his forearm. Turning on the faucet, he dampened a handful of paper towels and wiped the blood away, then pressed down hard on the cut to help it close. He didn’t hear Officer Jones approach until she spoke from right behind him. “How’s it look?”
“I’m bleeding to death,” Vic joked dryly. “Is that what you want to hear?”
Officer Jones leaned on the counter beside the sink and watched him clean the wound. Her eyes were dark and wide, her mouth twisted in disapproval. “I thought you were invincible.”
Grabbing another paper towel off the rack, Vic held it under the running tap to get it wet, then pressed it to his arm. “I never said that.”
“What about the bullets?” She looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time—there was something hard in the shadows on her face, but something inquisitive, as well. Something eager to know. “You can deflect shots to the chest but a tiny piece of glass does you in? What kind of superhero is that?”
“Yeah, well.” Vic studied the wound, which had already stopped bleeding and even now seemed to be closing on its own. Another gift from his lover, he suspected. Thank you, Matty. When he realized the officer was waiting for a reply, he told her, “These powers of mine just sort of come and go. It all depends—”
“On what?” she asked.
Vic didn’t reply. He’d promised to tell her, yes, and he planned to, he would, but he found it difficult to just spit out the answers she wanted to know. For so long now, the powers had remained a secret shared between himself and his lover. Though others knew of them—they had to know, all those people Vic had helped, the children who saw his displays of strength and thought him a hero like in their comic books, the police even—despite that, there was still a part of Vic which refused to admit out loud where they came from, if only to protect Matty. Vic had grown complacent about his abilities, used to the powers, and look what happened when he let his guard down. He should’ve expected Jordan to want the powers back, he should have never let Matt out of his sight as long as that…that viper was still around.
Somewhere, deep inside where no one else could hear the doubt and despair that nagged at him, Vic wondered if maybe he
wasn’t more pissed at himself than at Jordan about this whole mess. Jordan was doing what, when Vic thought about it, he must’ve been planning to do ever since he saw Matt’s name in the paper a few days back. Vic should’ve been more vigilant. He should’ve done more to protect his lover.
And some small part of him worried that whatever had happened to Matt was Vic’s own damn fault.
* * * *
None of the notes on the fridge meant anything to Vic—they consisted of grocery lists, and phone numbers for businesses around town, and schedules for work or the Y. Though he told himself Matt’s name wouldn’t be listed, Vic couldn’t help but feel disappointed when he couldn’t find it among the day to day scribbles.
With a paper towel in hand to keep from leaving fingerprints, Vic headed out into the hallway. Officer Jones followed, gun drawn and ready to aim. There was a lamp left on in the living room, illuminating a sofa and chair set that could’ve been cut straight from a Sears catalog. The only personal items were a trio of golden trophies on the mantle above an empty hearth. Vic suspected the trophies were constant reminders of what Jordan had been able to accomplish, once, when he’d first discovered Matt’s secret. When he recalled the scenes he’d seen in his lover’s head of what had happened all those years ago, of Jordan beating Matt into having sex with him just so he could win some stupid track meet, Vic’s hands clenched into unconscious fists at his sides, and he wanted to hurl those trophies into the fire, burn down their fake metal, set the whole house ablaze with his rage.
Bonds of Love Page 21
