by Angel Payne
“Goddamnit.” My terror explodes into furious tears. “You don’t!” I lunge for her, only to be wrenched back from behind. A beefy male arm swings around to engulf my neck, chin, and mouth, restraining me and muffling me in one move. Still, I scream, “Let her go!”
Butterfly hikes her skirts and jerks her head, apparently instructing the henchman to get me into the van too. “Get in without any more fuss, Miss Crist, and we will discuss it.”
For one more second, I debate whether to fight. I can probably get a meaty bite into this asshole, which would earn me a few seconds to scramble free and scream like my life depends on it.
And maybe it does.
Because while I’m sure the Consortium won’t kill me, they are clearly, definitely pondering plans for me that go beyond being bait for Reece.
But they won’t even give Lydia that consideration. She’s expendable. A pawn. Not even a butterfly on the board.
I know my choice now.
Because the truth is…I have no choice.
Part 6
Chapter One
Reece
“Fuck!”
It’s at least the thirtieth time I’ve bellowed the word in the last five minutes. As if I give an actual shit about keeping count. Nothing matters right now except pulling a clue, any clue, from the ninety seconds’ worth of grainy video footage that Sawyer Foley has managed to isolate from the feed off the cheap camera mounted over this building’s ramshackle service entrance. But as of right now, at the end of the fifteenth replay we’ve given the footage, there’s nothing more than the basic facts about the incident that has turned one of the best nights of my life into the worst nightmare of my existence.
Foley freezes the frame. If only the same could be done to my horror, rage, and despair. But it all plays on like an endless loop from an eleven o’clock newsfeed covering a crappy accident on the interstate, sensationalizing the carnage of my soul over and over and over again.
Still, I force myself to push back from the little office’s corkboard wall, watching a thumbtack give up the fight against the force of my punch, falling to the floor along with the motivational words it was holding up: Jolt it Like Bolt.
Fucking wonderful.
I stomp back over to the desk where Foley is seated and rivet my gaze on the screen of the computer connected to the security camera. In a low growl, I order, “Play it again.”
At first, Foley only throws back a deep rumble of his own. “Damn it, dude. You really think we’ll learn anything from the sixteenth play as opposed to the fifteenth?”
“Play it again.”
“But the sooner I can send this to my buddy at the New York bureau office—”
“Play. It. Again.”
I mean it. There’s something I’m missing in the footage, and I’m as sure of it as the lightning still crackling in my blood, no matter how thorough a struggle it is to keep my synapses charged at this high level. Ninety minutes ago, I was accessing the blood cell batteries to put down a gang of thieves who’d used my own security force to infiltrate the charity fundraiser organized by the love of my life, Emmalina Crist. Forty-five minutes ago, she and I were dealing with the resultant power surge to my system in my favorite way of all: screwing each other like there was no tomorrow.
Now, there really is no tomorrow.
Because while I was jamming my dick back into my leather “superhero” suit, she’d come back downstairs in response to an urgent text from her sister—whom we now watch in our sixteenth replay of the footage from a security camera that had to have been bought off the back of a truck on Canal Street. Despite the crappy quality, it’s easy enough to recognize Lydia Crist, still dressed in her frothy gown from the gala, which is the only similarity shared with the young woman who joked around with us all before the evening took a fast train to Shitsville. Lydia enters the video feed with her wrists already bound behind her back, her shoulders shaking from sobs, clearly pleading something to the statuesque woman who strolls into the frame with her.
“Who…are…you?” I grit through my teeth while scouring my memory bank for the connection to her. She’s dressed in a long, beaded dress, meaning she was a guest at the fundraiser, though the only person I focused on in that room was Emma. That means this woman, now blithely tapping a message into a phone—likely Lydia’s, and likely the urgent text that coaxed Emma out of my arms—is someone I’ve met before. But where?
Is she one of Mom’s friends? No. Too young.
Another New York society wife? Perhaps a climber who successfully maneuvered her way into spoiled second-wife status? No again. She’s too slick. Almost as if she doesn’t belong here.
A light bulb forces its way through the chaos of my brain.
That’s it.
She really doesn’t belong here. Because she’s not from here. Or anywhere else in this country, for that matter.
Meaning this whole clusterfuck really is becoming my worst nightmare.
“Wait.” I clutch Foley’s shoulder while barking it. “Freeze the frame.” I scour the screen with my stare, tearing it apart pixel by pixel, letting another violent snort escape from the piss-poor quality of the picture.
“What is it?” Foley grills and then adds when I’m still silent, “What do you see?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “Yet.”
But now I know I will see it.
And when I do…
“Advance it another couple of seconds,” I murmur. “Again.” A new search, then a fresh growl. “Again.”
After that, Foley learns my cues enough that the demands aren’t necessary. We watch, frame by excruciating frame, as Emma comes onto the scene, dressed in the sweatshirt and leggings she’d thrown on after I destroyed her gown in the throes of our lovemaking. There’s a slight scuffle, and the mystery bitch flings Lydia into the van. Though Emma’s entire body flinches as if about to launch herself at the woman, she checks herself, complete with strained shoulders and clenched fists.
Good girl.
My silent message goes out to her from the middle of my soul, as it has during the previous replays. My hands ball against the top of the desk, but I force myself to keep watching the other woman, noting every millimeter of her mannerisms as the video advances, frame by agonizing frame. What the hell is so familiar about her? All the most notable aspects—the femme fatale stance, the appraising stare, the ruthless red sneer on her lips—are persistent nicks at the edges of my memory, though nothing digs in hard enough to penetrate recognition.
Until the bitch tips her head.
On a replay in normal speed, the movement was likely nothing more than a glitch of motion—a subtlety meant to economize time they were rapidly running out of. The grimace the woman succumbs to, lasting no longer than that frame, confirms that much. But it takes her longer than that to swing her head back down—and in that moment, with her neck still stretched, I finally see the image that clicks into the lock of my memory.
“Stop.” Every muscle in my body works to get the word out. “Right. There.” As Foley jams on the pause button, I lean forward without blinking. Frozen. Fixated.
I slowly raise one hand, pointing to the area of the woman’s exposed ear.
“Shit.” It’s an extended sound on Foley’s lips. “What is that? The bitch in beads really hiding horns under that mane?”
I expel a harsh breath. “That’s ink.”
“Shit,” Foley repeats, standing and peering closer for himself. “You’re right. That’s a tatt. But with this craptastic video quality, I doubt we’ll be able to figure out what that shit is.”
“We don’t need to.” I straighten. “I already know.” Just as my mental key finally turns, unlocking an avalanche of memories—making me realize exactly why I’d kept them so tightly sealed.
She’d been there.
That night.
She’d been there.
When the thugs in white had strapped me down, stripped me naked, and injected me in a dozen place
s. She’d stood there, stroking the hair from my face, murmuring to me like a Spanish mother to her child…words of calm and comfort and pacification, while my veins were ignited with agony and my mind felt like a transformer ready to blow.
She’d been there all the other times, as well.
To the point that every time she returned, I knew the experiments were about to intensify. The torture was about to get worse.
“Richards.” The prompt is so impatient, I realize Foley’s likely on his third or fourth attempt. When he adds a sharp snap of his fingers, I’m sure of it. As soon as I refocus, he charges, “So you do know her?”
I incline my head. “If you mean like a rat knows an insane scientist, then yeah.” I gaze once more at the monitor.
“What the hell does that—”
“It’s a scorpion.” I get to the point because the metaphor isn’t worth explaining. You’re not there anymore—but Emma just might be if you don’t pull your shit together and help Foley work the sole clue you have to this thing so far. “The tattoo is a scorpion,” I elucidate. “And what we’re seeing there is the tail. The rest of it disappears under her—”
“Hairline.” Foley issues the conclusion in a deep, jarring growl. The apprehension isn’t eased when he studies the monitor as if beholding his own revealed ghosts. I watch with an extra resonance to my blood as the guy’s face is overtaken by violent angles. “The tattoo extends around her head, because at one point, she had to shave it all off for the inking.”
As his tone gets thicker and tighter, so does my posture. “And how the hell do you know that?”
A rough swallow takes over his windpipe. “Because I know more than I want to about the Scorpio Cartel.”
Now I want the chance to indulge that gulp. But I don’t. I can’t. Past the desert my throat has become, I growl, “Excuse the fuck out of me?”
“Excuse granted.” Sarcasm is the guy’s way of working around his stress. I know him well enough to figure that out by now. But the explanation does nothing for the dread taking over my senses. “Fuck.”
Especially when his voice dips to new octaves to snarl that out.
While ordering myself to pull in a full breath, I stab a hand back against my skull. “Okay. Just for giggles, let’s get this straight. You’re talking about the Scorpios? The scumbags who have people bought off in nearly every major transportation hub and police force in the world? Who, because of that, dominate the globe in moving illegal drugs, guns, jewelry, art, women…”
My larynx clutches on that as the implications of my words completely set into my psyche. Through the shit soup of a silence that follows, I wait. And wait. And command myself not to hurl what little contents my gut contains at the moment.
Finally, Foley utters, “Yeah. Those assholes.”
I wheel away from him and punch the wall hard enough to topple the corkboards.
After it all crashes to the floor, I finally spit, “Fuck.”
“About sums it all up.” Foley turns back toward me with a scuffing step. “How the hell do you know that bitch?”
I let my head fall between my shoulders, which are now as stiff as I-beams. “Remember what I said about the insane scientists?” After he lets his grunt suffice as a yes, I growl, “Well, I was that one’s favorite lab rat.”
“The fuck?” Another scuff. “You mean, when those Consortium bastards had you on lockdown in Spain?”
Flimsy nod. “Yeah.”
“But it took you this long to recognize her?”
I lift a burning glare. “Can you readily remember every cocksucker who tortured you?”
The question is a jump out on a limb. While the guy’s never openly shared, the faint scars on his legs and the marks he attempts to cover with his “groovy” wooden bead bracelets have had me wondering about what his life was like before the FBI experience for which I hired him. Foley doesn’t strike me as being ex-military, but a person who’s been through trauma can sometimes, somehow, sense it in another. And yeah, my Spidey sense has often pinged high with him.
“Got it,” he finally mumbles and then turns away before plummeting heavily back into the desk chair. After another long pause, he finally grates, “Jesus.”
“You really think he’s listening?” I stab back.
“So the Consortium…and the Scorpios…”
“Are so tight in bed together, they don’t need lube,” I snarl.
He has no sarcasm, even of the darkest slant, to fire at that one. The truth I’ve just declared is too glaring. Too huge. Too terrifying. It doesn’t just demand our silence. It robs our abilities to create any worthy sound or reaction other than our mutual mental Novocain, wondering when the numbness will wear off and the reality will set in.
And hurt like hell.
Like now.
The moment I compel my stare back up at the monitor, my senses scream again. To behold the image now, with the bitch of my sickest horrors that close to the essence of everything good and right in my world, brings on a pain in my heart unlike any torment I’ve ever known—even as that witch’s helpless lab rodent. Only now, as a peculiar afterthought, do I realize that I never even knew the woman’s name. Not that the detail will subtract one fucking drop of the pleasure I’m going to get from killing her with my bare hands.
The resolve is galvanizing. I’m back in motion, lurching from the tiny office next to the kitchen back out into the main ballroom area, which I behold with eyes much different than my glower of twenty minutes ago. Don’t get me wrong. I still see the East Village space that Emma called “trendy” and I called “seedy,” and I still fight the urge to throw my head through one of the walls as punishment for not insisting she relocate this thing to one of the eight Richards-owned buildings in the city. I still see the two hundred Chiavari chairs that I want to snap into kindling, and I still see the two hundred bowls of unfinished soup at the now-empty place settings because all the guests have gone.
I still battle the dark ache in my chest, mourning the loss of my woman’s dream.
No.
No, goddamnit.
Not lost. Just…delayed.
I refuse to believe anything differently. I shove aside any intuition or feeling that contradicts that certainty, totally focusing on the bizarre hope behind the horrific conclusion that Foley and I have just reached. It’s a strange goddamned silver lining, but I’m shooting at the damn thing with every logic-bearing laser in my arsenal.
With that in mind, I spin back on the guy once he emerges from the office behind me. “Enough wallowing. Now let’s figure out how to use this to our advantage.”
Foley stops, strangely looking as if he’s about to bust out on the comedy act. “Use…this?” he challenges. “To our what?”
I shoot back an equally caustic glare. “Come on, Mr. Expert-on-the-Scorpios.” I tap at his temple. “Access it. Use it, goddamnit. What are they doing? Where are they taking the girls? What’s the MO in a situation like this?”
Now Foley does laugh. Not hard and not loud, which makes me wish for either in place of the mirthless grunt he shoots before pushing past me, hands laced at the back of his head. “What, in any conceivable universe, makes you think the Scorpios are dumb enough to have MOs?”
While my muscles absorb the bitterness of his tone, clenching in any way they can, I shake my head hard, refusing to let a single dart of that energy take hold where it counts. “Fuck that,” I snap. “They have to have patterns. Even small ones. If you were working for them—”
He spins back around so fast, his face so virulent, that I’m already cut short. “I don’t work for those goddamned animals, and I won’t ever pretend that I do.” Just as viciously, he stomps toward the stage area of the room, where the police are still dropping evidence flags like E.T. with Reese’s Pieces. I follow him, not giving myself a second to grimace about the fucking metaphor, but am halted short when he stops again, tearing off his tux jacket and hurling it across a table with an unintelligible curse. “The MO
is that there’s no MO, okay?” He fetches his jacket, now dripping in cold pumpkin soup, and wads it up. “You don’t find the Scorpios. The Scorpios find you. And only where they want to find you and when.”
I’m about to walk around the table and square off against him with at least three different ways of expressing why and how I refuse to acquiesce to that, when my pocket begins to play a song. “Superheroes” by The Script.
The song Emma personally picked out as her identifier on my phone.
The song gets louder in direct proportion to Foley’s shrewd look. I ignore him, homing in on the part of the song Emma always loved the best. About a hero who’s stronger than he knows, and from that, his heart of steel grows…
From the strength in that heart, the one she’s taught me to believe so thoroughly in, I press the green answer button on my cell. Yeah, even knowing she’s not the one who’s calling. Even knowing that for all my chitchat with Foley about torture, I haven’t begun to know the true meaning of the shit until now.
As soon as the line opens, I take a verbal lunge. Yeah, making the first move is the suckiest strategy, but rational thought and I said bitter goodbyes the second I watched the first loop of the security feed.
“What do you want?”
There’s a hitch of a female’s breath, as if my malevolence has found its way through our connection. I can only hope. At last, a voice like dark syrup oozes back at me, “Reece. Darling.”
“If you mean the guy who’s going to greet tomorrow’s sunrise with his hands around your neck, then yeah, ‘darling’ works.”
Her petulant huff fills the line while raw fury swells my blood. “Now is that any way to speak to your creator…Señor Bolt?”
“Sorry,” I rebut. “I missed Frankenstein’s TED talk.”
Her syrup spins into a light laugh. “Ay. You were never this funny in the lab, darling.”
“Sorry again. I was a little busy being turned into a fucking one-fifty-watt freak.”
“But have you not heard? Freaks are all the fashion now. And as for fucking…” Her mirth turns sultry. “I would like to think that some pleasures are worth waiting for.”
