by Lucas, Helen
“All thanks to you, Powell,” Doug finished. We were in his office—his new office, since he had been promoted after the sting—and it was getting near evening. As we talked, the parking lot outside continued to empty, car by car at first, and then faster and faster as employees left in droves.
“And Fang,” I pointed out. “He did as much as I did. More.”
“And Fang,” Doug conceded with a smile.
My parents took Misty in as a foster child, since she refused to go back into the “system” as she called it. She was doing well, even though she still rarely spoke—she was in a special class at the local high school for kids who had experienced especially terrible trauma. I had seen her just the last weekend: she had gained weight, I’m sure in no small part due to my mother’s Cuban cooking.
But Fang? I hadn’t heard from him. I wasn’t supposed to try and contact him, nor was I given any details as to where he had gone. And I knew if he were to contact me, I was obligated to ignore him. Witness protection only worked if the people in it cut all ties to their previous lives.
And, as strange as it was, I was now part of his previous life. I was part of his time with the Damned MC.
I was no longer an active agent. Instead, I was given a desk job, analyzing intelligence on organized crime. It was fine—much more boring than being a special agent, but also a lot less dangerous. And, unsurprisingly, I had to cover up all my tattoos. The bureau offered to pay to have them lasered off, but I couldn’t bring myself to erase that part of my life.
“You know, Claire,” Doug said suddenly, as I realized I had zoned out staring at the parking lot. “I heard of a good opening at the Bureau’s Seattle office. Organized crime work, like you’d be doing here, but at a higher pay grade.”
“Seattle? What’s in Seattle?”
Doug smiled and shrugged.
“No idea.”
My eyes widened.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
He gave me a hard, almost expressionless look.
“I’m telling you that there’s a very good job for you in Seattle if you want it. And now, I’m going to leave this folder on my desk and go to the bathroom and I’m not going to ask any questions when I get back.”
With that, he rose and walked out of his office without looking back once.
The folder in question was your standard, boring manila envelope. I opened it up and realized it was Doug’s own collection of documents related to the case: there were my notes on the Damned, transcripts of court proceedings, expenditure reports, a therapist’s report on Misty… It was a strange, chaotic collection of the textual trace of the last few months.
And then, there it was: a request for the transfer of an informant into witness protection. The informant wasn’t named in the application—he was just “Applicant 4958242.” But he had been transferred to Seattle.
It had to be Fang. This was Doug, giving me Fang’s whereabouts. Seattle.
I rested my hand on my belly as I stared at the file. My stomach had grown in the past few months. I had to go to Seattle.
EPILOGUE: FANG
“Okay, Spider Monkeys, line up!”
About a quarter of my kindergarteners on the playground perked up. They dashed off to stand in a neat line beside the dull brick of the school.
“Now, I want to see my Great White Sharks lined up!”
Another quarter. And another, and another. I divided my class into groups named after animals and the kids loved it—it inspired them to behave, to work hard for the honor of their group. If there’s one thing I knew about, it was groups, loyalty, and honor.
The Feds had asked me what I wanted to do once I got to Seattle. They lasered off the tattoos on my face and hands—imagine sticking your hand in a bonfire and then leaving it there for a few hours and that’s getting close to what it feels like—but left the ones that I could cover up. They would also pay for graduate school and that’s what I wanted—they sent me to get my teaching degree and now, I was student-teaching a class of kindergarteners.
This school was supposedly the worst in the district but I never had any trouble. My kindergarteners were little angels once I had a week with them, and I had become the de-facto enforcer of good behavior for the entire school. The seventh and eighth grade boys were particularly wild—or, at least, they had been, until I had a good, hard talk with them and made them run laps around the parking lot until they puked.
After that, instead of hating me, they ended up loving me. A lot of boys just have too much energy and if you don’t let them run around and act a fool, they’ll turn into little monsters.
Speaking of little monsters—the Great White Sharks were pointing and giggling at something off on the street.
“Are we being focused?” I began, raising my eyebrows at them. “I see Jamal is focused… I see…”
“Mr. Watt, there’s a big fat lady coming over here!” one of Spider Monkeys, Keisha, cried out.
I turned around to see who this big fat lady was and my heart nearly stopped.
“Mr. Watt?” Claire asked as she came to a halt in front of me and my students. “That’s what they call you now?”
I recovered my composure right away. I grinned.
“What are you talking about? I’ve always been Mr. Watt.”
“Well, in that case…” Claire said, taking my hand and putting it on her swollen, pregnant belly. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Watt.”
Did you enjoy this sexy story of passion and romance?
Then sign up for Helen Lucas’s Star Crossed Alpha Romance mailing list, and you’ll get EXCLUSIVE access to FREE advance review copies of all the great novels Helen has in store, plus updates about a carefully curated selection of the best ROMANCE and NEW ADULT fiction out there today, from Helen and the authors she loves.
Sign up today and you’ll get a FREE short story—don’t you dare miss this one!!!
If you enjoyed The Broken and the Damned you’ll love Billion Dollar Bastard, a steamy alpha male billionaire romance guaranteed to press all the right buttons!
Excerpt from Billion Dollar Bastard:
KAREN
This was where I really belonged. This was better than sex.
“Harriet Jacobs escaped her life of slavery by using the only resources she had as a woman of color in pre-Civil War America…”
My voice rang out over the lecture hall. The students were quiet, for once, their phones down, practically no eyes focused on their computer screens. For once—for one, brief, shining moment, I couldn’t see the pale blue glow of facebook in the reflections on their glasses, couldn’t see their young, otherwise life-filled eyes glaze over.
It was these moments that I live for. It was these moments that made me glad I had become a professor, made all the years of studying, research, and writing worth it.
Yes, this was my career, my calling. It was worth it.
“So, she slept with not one, but two white men? She manipulated them sexually. And she wrote about it. The significant thing about Jacobs is not that she slept with white men to save her children, to save her own life, but that she wrote about it, in her own voice. In her own words.”
The lecture was almost over but no one was moving to leave. And it was one of the last lectures of the semester before Thanksgiving break. All across the university, students were getting antsy, antsy to be leaving, to be going home and seeing high school friends, to be trading stories and gossip, to kiss the boys they had always wanted to kiss in high school, to see favorite dogs and cats back in their childhood bedrooms.
But still, they stayed with me, through to the end.
“White people tried to stop her, tried to silence her. ‘We’ll write the story for you, Harriet,’ they said. Harriet Beecher Stowe—if you remember, she was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which we will not be reading for this course—“ I hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I had already written far too many papers about it. It’s an important book that people should still read,
but I wanted my students to like me, not hate me after slogging through six hundred pages of overwritten 19th century prose. “—even told Harriet Jacobs, a black woman of her own name, that she wouldn’t help her get published—but she would take Jacobs’s story and incorporate it into her own work.”
Grim chuckles danced through the lecture hall as I reached for a sip of water.
“But Jacobs persevered. She was a survivor, and she was published. So, as you read her book, her ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ remember her story and her background—how difficult is was for her to get this story into your hands, now, today, over a hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”
I paused, allowing those final words to sink in.
“See you all on Monday,” I said with a smile, allowing myself a deep breath as the class collectively exhaled and began to rustle around, began to collect their things and trickle out. I took a seat, sighing. Lecturing always took it out of me.
You see, I’m honestly pretty introverted. That’s what you get, I guess, growing up the daughter of a fierce lawyer. My mother is far more the gung-ho, take charge type. She demanded that I be allowed to skip a grade in grammar school when my standardized tests showed that I was reading at more than three grade levels above where I should have been at. She demanded that I be allowed to take seven AP classes at a time in high school, and that I be allowed to take time off to travel to Europe to compete in violin competitions. She’s always been my biggest booster and maybe, as a result, I haven’t had to advocate much for myself.
But no. I’m a woman in academia. Virtually every one of my colleagues is a man, or a woman nearly fifteen years older than me. I have to advocate for myself, for the very worthiness of my existence, every single day.
“That was incredible,” Masha, one of my graduate students and teaching assistants, murmured to me, leaning over from her desk at the head of the class. “You managed to keep them in their seats for five minutes after the end of class—I didn’t see a single lacrosse players sneak out.”
I allowed myself a grin.
“High praise when even the lacrosse players want to hear what you have to say.”
“I’ll let you know if anything comes up in the discussion section,” Masha said, rising. “Have you heard anything more about the budget for next year?”
I froze. The department budget for next year. God.
What a shit show.
“No. Have you?”
Masha shook her head sadly. “No. Just, you know, rumors. But from other graduate students. Not from anyone… In the know.”
I raised an eyebrow. I was, supposedly, in the know—even if I were only a twenty-nine year old junior professor barely beginning my second year of teaching—and I hadn’t even heard the rumors.
“What kind of rumors?”
“Oh… Nothing… I mean…” Masha sighed. “Rumors that we might be combined with Modern Languages and Literatures. Or that the university might hire a team of consultants to come in and ‘restructure’ us.”
At the sound of the word ‘restructure,’ my heart stopped and my stomach churned. Restructure. I hated the influx of disgusting, corporate terminology into education—education should be about students, about students learning and discovering themselves and great writing, great reservoirs of knowledge. Not about profit margins. Not about… Structures and restructuring.
“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t pay it any mind. This is still one of the largest, one of the best English literature departments in the country, even with the lawsuit. These things happen. The longer you spend in academia, the more you’ll see that this is just a phase.”
A pained smile took hold on Masha’s sweet, young face. She was only twenty-four, which made her only five years younger than me. I was charmed and little frightened that she was able to look at me with such trust and confidence, her eyes wide—literally, wide!—with admiration.
“Karen, you’re totally right. I won’t worry about it. I’ll email you before Monday.”
She gathered her things and glided out of class, leaving me alone with my empty lecture hall.
My name is Karen O’Lowry, PhD. I got my degree a year and a half ago, at Harvard, in American Studies with a focus on American literature. Since graduating, I’ve been teaching here at Silliman University, one of the finest in the country—a rival to Havard in so many ways, and a school that even surpasses my alma mater in others. I’m in the English department, one of the few professors who focus on American women’s literature and, in my personal and very humble opinion, a welcome addition to a world of mostly male academics determined to talk themselves to death about Shakespeare.
The big reason I’m here, the reason I even got the job in the first place, is that my mentor, Anthony Kennedy, another scholar of American literature, was just appointed Chair of the Department. As one of his first orders of business, he began a faculty search, looking for fresh new voices focusing on areas of literature that weren’t old, weren’t traditional, weren’t boring.
He had been a fan of my work ever since I first began going to conferences and doing presentations. When I took harsh criticism from the male scholars I found myself engaging with, he offered me advice, taught me how to outthink them, out-argue them. Everything I have today—my job, my career, the book deal I just signed with Oxford University Press last week, everything—it’s all due to him.
But it could all fall apart, if the university fell apart. If the department fell apart. God. Scandals.
I began to pack up my things. I noticed on my phone that it was almost four-thirty. There was a departmental meeting at five I was scheduled to go to. Maybe I would find out more about the budget, about the bankruptcy. Maybe.
There was also a text message from Tyrone, my ex. A picture of his abs: chiseled, and dark, like chocolate melted over a marble statue sculpted so perfectly by one of the Renaissance Italian greats. I found myself hesitating for a moment.
He did have a great body.
I could just…
No. No, I needed to focus on my own life. On my own interests. On my career. I couldn’t be Tyrone’s babysitter anymore. I wouldn’t stand for his cheating, for his immature bullshit anymore.
“I want u back” the text said. I replied. “It’s still over.”
And then I blocked his number. Boy, that felt good. Almost as good as lecturing.
Almost as good as sex.
KYLE
“Liana’s at it again, Kyle,” Nicholas grumbled as he strode into my office. I took my eyes off the Wall Street Journal for just a moment to see his hands fling a copy of the latest issue of the National Inquirer down onto my desk.
I sighed, bracing myself for the headline. It showed me guiding Liana into a taxi but it had been photoshopped to make it look like I was slapping her. The headline read:
“BILLIONAIRE BADBOY BACKHANDS BAWLING EX IN BOWERY.”
“They did so well with the alliteration, except for the word ‘ex,’” Nicholas noted to me, pulling up a chair and pouring himself a glass of scotch from the decanter I always kept on my desk. “You’d think they could have found something else to call her?”
I spun around in my chair, taking in the panoramic views of Manhattan that my office, a corner unit in the headquarters of Stone Equity, allowed me: the city stretched out before me, farther than any idea could see, a magnificent kingdom of the rich and powerful and wealthy, of whom I am one of the richest, the most powerful, the most wealthy—because, I am, after all, Kyle Stone, the richest man under forty in America and newly single, owing to the shenanigans of the woman featured on the front page of the Inquirer.
“I mean, bitch is too easy. What else? Broad? ‘Backhands Bawling Broad’ sounds good,” I mumbled, watching a helicopter drift by lazily in the cool early autumn sky. I often wondered what it would be like to be a bird, to fly away… To live free and be able to fly away from my problems…
A
s it was, I was more inclined just to buy a plane and live life in the sky, but you can’t buy everything. Though, you can damned well try.
“If only you had knocked Liana up,” Nicholas suggested, his face screwed up in a cynical smile, half-helpful, half-joking. “Then it could have read ‘Bad Boy Billionaire Backhands Bawling…”
“…’Babymama.’ You’re right. I really should have had a child with Liana. That would make this whole divorce a whole hell of a lot easier, wouldn’t it?” I shot back with a grin over my shoulder. I turned away from the beautiful skyline and returned to my desk.
“Tell it to me straight, doc. What do I have to do to make this go away?” I said, eager to get back to work but not so eager to be rid of Nicholas. Nicholas Blink is maybe my only true friend. A prep-school classmate, we grew apart after college, but after I began Stone Equity and I found myself looking for a chief public relations officer, who should be on the market for an exit from his high-paying but stifling Edelman gig but Nicholas? After a round of drinks at the Union League Club here in Manhattan, I had given him the job and every week since, we’ve had these informal meetings to discuss my public image, and, more importantly, the image of my company.
