I reached out and he flinched as my hand landed on his arm. One touch, my touch and he was wrapping me up in his arms, carrying me away from the scene in the bathroom.
Shuddering as he walked to another room, he set me down in the bottom of a shower. He turned the water on, letting the warmth of it spray over me before he crawled in with me, still clothed in his sweats and shoes.
He lay there against me, holding me, lips caressing my face and repeating his apologies. When I began to cry, he let out a muffled grunt and pulled me into his lap as his chest began to shake with his own sorrow.
My arms wrapped around his neck as he cradled me. When I looked up, his face wore a mask of pain as he let me see his sadness. He stroked my face wiping droplets of water and tears from my cheeks and I returned the gesture.
“I don’t know what I'd do without you. I can’t imagine what I would have done if he’d killed you, if he’d touched you. I’m so sorry.”
Nodding, I laid my head against his neck as he stroked my back. My fingers skimmed down the side of his neck in comfort for both of us.
After a few minutes, we heard someone yelling in the loft.
“Mick!” Mason called as his voice got closer.
He stumbled into the bathroom, took one look at my nude body in Mick’s arms and turned away to stare into the bedroom.
Mick’s arms tightened around me, then he reached up to shut off the water.
With his back to us Mason asked, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Mick grunted, his arms still holding me against his chest. “Check the other bathroom. How’s Paul?”
“A graze on his shoulder. Jack has him. Says he got hit with something after the guy shot at him and lunged. Says there were two of them.”
“Bill maybe? Doorman?”
“I’ll have Paul confirm. Sounds right, but why would the other guy kill him?”
“Witnesses. I need to get her out of here. Guy in the room tried to drown her.”
“Fucking shit!” Mason yelled as he stalked out of the room. We heard him lumber through the hallway as Mick picked me up and carried me to the guest bed. He wrapped me up in the comforter and stripped down, throwing his soaked clothing on the floor of the bathroom before he too walked down the hall completely nude.
I laid there for a minute listening to a muffled conversation, trying to process the events of the last hour.
I’d been both furious and hurt when Paul had escorted me out of the office earlier. Livid over the assumption that he was driving me to the apartment that Alex helped me with. Coldly dismissed based on my words to him. I was harsh, blunt, but truthful in what I told him.
Thinking that he was pulling out a huge, terrible lie to make me run, I’d overreacted, but with good reason. I’d assumed he was just playing one last card. And after the rough sex we’d shared in his office, it stung. One last fuck before he delivered the final push. I’d felt used in the most awful way.
Then we arrived at this place. Furnished and clean, smelling faintly of fresh paint, with items that I liked arranged on countertops. His boxes along the wall in the bedroom, my clothing in the closet. Yet I’d been pissed, so miserable, I’d started packing a bag to leave for Alex’s house. But I’d wanted a bath and some time to think first. Screw the stiches. I needed some solitude and I knew he wouldn’t be home anytime soon.
As I lay there in the warm water, I heard a crash, then yelling. Two loud sounds and then the man had barged in and went straight for me. I’d had no time to think, no time to react. I screamed and fought, thinking of only one thing. Mick.
Shuddering, I pushed the memory aside, Mick had gotten there in time. But what he'd had to do...
Jack’s tall frame walked past the door. He turned toward me, his face so closed down that he barely registered any reaction. I’d met him a few times and his expression was always the same. He was like Mick sometimes. Cold, but I could tell there was something behind his strangely sad eyes.
Mick walked in and shut the door behind him, dressed in a pair of jeans and a tight black shirt that hugged his muscles. I blinked up at him as he came to rest on the side of the bed.
“Hey, baby, sorry to leave you alone. I brought some clothes for you. I wasn’t sure what you wanted to wear so I took them out of your suitcase.”
He helped me sit up and slid the blanket off my shoulders. His hand caressed the side of my arm before he started handing me things.
I dressed stiffly as he watched my movements, repetitively glancing back at my face. When I finished, I sat back down beside him in my knee length skirt and blouse.
He sighed and ran a hand down his face. His eyes avoided mine as several emotions rolled across his face.
“Do you want to go to Alex’s house? I don’t want you to, but right now I can’t think. If you want to go, I’ll take you. Or I know some people, they live south of here. You’d be safe. Your choice.”
“No,” I replied, reaching for his hand. “I want to stay with you.”
His eyes met mine before he looked down at our linked hands.
“You’ll have to talk with some detectives about what happened. With Bill being an employee of the realtor and the cameras, we can’t hide this. I don’t know what you want to tell them, but we’re doing something here that will make you an accessory to a crime if you stay. Fuck.”
“What are you doing?” I said as I squeezed his hand.
His eyes briefly slid to mine then darted away.
My hand reached out to his jaw and turned his face toward me. “Mick, I told you. I love you no matter what. I just didn’t know what that meant when I said it.”
He held my hand to his lips as he placed a kiss in my palm. He pulled it gently away and stood up pacing toward the bathroom.
“Well, you do now,” he said with his back turned toward me. “I don’t want you to go but…”
His voice trailed off and I prodded. “Talk to me, Mick. But what? I’m trying. What happened…I don’t care. I mean I do and I don’t. But the thing is, I’m not thinking about that guy in the other room, and that should make me a monster too. The person I’m thinking about is you.”
“I’d never give you up, Alisa. Not in my heart. You’d always be there. But things have gotten complicated. You see what I'm capable of. How can you love that? How can I let you? It’s been the main debate in my head since the first time I saw you. You’re such a beautiful person and I never wanted any of that part of me to touch even one inch of you.”
I let out a mirthless laugh. “Well I’ve seen it now. The other thing I saw? You. And the thing is, what I saw, wasn’t terrifying in the way that you think.”
He stalked back to me, dropped to his knees and embraced me with his head in my lap. My hands ran gently through his hair, pushing the thick, dark locks away from his face.
“What did you see?” he whispered.
“The very edge of what you could be versus what you are. I didn’t see some things before. What you did...it was for the right reason, no matter what twisted origin it came from. I saw you. I know you struggle with doing the right thing, while doing something that seems so wrong.”
“I’m as corrupted as your family, Alisa. I’m not clean.”
My hand ran down the back of his neck as he buried his face against my leg.
“Why would you say that?”
“I killed my partner on a case,” he mumbled. “I won’t go into details, but he was responsible for the death of four women by the time I ended him. He’d been my friend and so was his accomplice. I shot his friend, then put a bullet through his head out of anger. I should have arrested him. Had the ability to, and I was close enough to take him down, wound him at the very least. But I put a bullet in his brain. Then I lied about it.”
I frowned, unsure of what to say.
“I stood by his family, held the hand of his little boy at the funeral, wondering what would have happened had I only arrested him. There was an inquiry, they cleared me. But it was a lie. I killed
him, no regret. And the thing is, the really fucked up thing, was that I didn’t do it because he was reaching for his weapon. I didn’t even do it because of his victims. I was just so tired of seeing that kind of evil in the world. And now look at me.”
I slid onto the floor with him, straddling his hips and held him. “You’re not evil, Mick. You didn’t do it out of compulsion. You did it for me, and there’s a part of me that wanted you to. So, I’m just as evil.”
“No,” he whispered as his arms held me tightly against him. “No. You’re my life, there’s not a cruel bone in your body.”
“I’m a King, Mick. It’s written into my genetics that I’m something different. Maybe not cruel, maybe not evil. But my darkness sees yours and I’m not afraid.”
His hands grasped both sides of my face as he gazed down at me. Time was suspended for both of us as we explored the depths of each other’s eyes.
“I know,” I said to his unspoken words. “You love me. What do you want me to say to your dad? Or the police?”
“What do you want to say? I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Alisa, even if you want to send me to jail, I’ll do it.”
I sighed, knowing he meant every word of it. He wasn’t a man that dealt in grey half-truths most of the time.
I could send him to jail, tell him to fuck off, and sign a movie deal about it. And he’d do it for me. Oddly, it made me feel powerful. As a person who’d had no power over the course of my lifetime, the feeling was heady. I appreciated every bit of what he was giving me, and might use it to my advantage at some point if we were in an argument someday. But not for this. I’d never take the one person out of my life that gave me that sort of gift.
“No, Mick,” I whispered. “I want to be with you. Just tell me what to say.”
He chewed his lip. “Two men broke in. They assaulted Paul, and in the scuffle, one shot the other. One fled, Bill died. Do not mention a dead man in the bathroom. He fled.”
My mouth opened then shut again, hesitant to agree outright and trying to think of a different way. “He tried to kill us, Mick. Couldn’t I just tell them that they broke in and tried to murder both of us?”
He shook his head. “If they find that body in the bathroom, they’ll know it was me. Fibers, hair, the force of my cut. They’ll know. More importantly, I want whoever is behind this wondering where his hitman disappeared to.”
I nodded. “What about the body? Won’t there be evidence anyway?”
He smirked. “There’s always some evidence. Two ex-law enforcement officers and a retired FBI agent? Believe me, we can handle it, but why would we lie? And you’re a King, why would you?”
My eyebrows shot up. “For once my name is convenient.”
He nodded, looking at me softly. “When this is done, Alisa, I want you to be a Galloway. Not a King.”
It was my turn to smirk. “It’ll never be done, Mick. Better just set a date.”
His lips pursed before he spoke again, letting my remark hang between us. “Is that a yes?”
I nodded, giving him a small smile.
His lips crushed mine in a rough kiss. His tongue slid in when I opened to him and he slanted his mouth over mine. It was a deep kiss, the type that lingered and wasn’t hurried. It seemed like one of possession and affirmation that he was more than happy with my answer and better still that I’d accepted who he was.
“Tomorrow,” he whispered against my lips. “Right now.”
“Mick, go do what you need to do. I’m tired and I have a feeling that the day isn’t quite over yet.”
He grimaced and touched his forehead to mine. “I have no idea why you’re still here.”
“You know. Hurry.”
He nodded and slid me off his lap. I sat on the edge of the bed as he turned toward the door.
“Alisa?” he said as his hand landed on the doorknob. “We’ll have to go someplace for a few days while they go over the evidence. But do you want to keep living here? Were you happy when you walked in?”
“No, I was pissed at you. But I do like it. We can talk about it later.”
He nodded. “I’ll pack a few things for you. Just don’t leave the room.”
I wasn’t going anywhere. The last thing I wanted to see, or know, or hear about was how to get rid of a dead body and a few pints of blood.
Chapter Nineteen
Mick
I pinched the top of my nose as I sat with Mason and Holly going over the receipts and expenses.
“Look, it’s not rocket science,” Holly said. “The reason why we’re saving money is the back-alley deals Randy made. The question is, are you going to keep those deals?”
Mason looked up at me from the three invoices we’d been talking about for the last hour. Any other time I might have been interested in discussing it as a distraction, but my eyes kept drifting to the couch and thinking of Alisa. She was due back any minute and I was in a mood.
Three weeks had passed since the police were called to our house for a report of a home invasion. Fortunately, Bill the bumbling killer had done us a favor by turning all the cameras off in the building before he’d led his accomplice upstairs to kill Alisa. One item that we hadn’t had to worry about. All the “evidence” pointed to a burglary gone wrong and with Alisa’s sterling name and statement, it’d been the shortest investigation I’d ever seen.
It also helped that our father showed up, took one look at Mason and me, and sped things along. He knew. I could tell from his expression that by some sort of cosmic magic, he recognized when his sons were lying. It was a strange phenomenon I assumed, that nature had given parents the ability to see through their offspring’s attempts at deceit.
He could tell since the day we were born when we attempted it. And if I had a guess, he was the one that stood between an actual investigation and our freedom. I didn’t understand him, didn’t particularly like him, but I had to admit that he might have done us the world’s biggest favor. It still put a bad taste in my mouth when I thought about it. Mason said he was clean, didn’t take bribes, fine. One part of me wanted to tell him that I wouldn’t have let us go as easily, just to be a dick, but the other part felt indebted and relieved. Either way, I still didn’t like him.
“We’ll keep the deals,” Mason replied as he handed Holly back her precious paperwork. She stuck it in a color-coded folder that would go back in her color-coded file cabinet that Mason and I had yet to figure out.
“We need to pay the Andersons more for their shipments. We can’t just keep paying them bare minimum. One of these days, if they get upset enough, they could turn us in.”
“You know they wouldn’t do that, Mick.”
I gave Mason a flat look. “Do I? I’ve met them, they’re nice. But from what you tell me, the King family has been pressuring them for more money. If we tell those two idiots that come around that they’re working with us as a main source of liquor, do you think they’ll back off or pressure them more? How long do you think it’ll take for the Andersons to flip if they were threatened? Pay them more.”
Holly rolled her lips between her teeth and tried to look distracted.
“You disagree?”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “No, I completely agree. Randy was a douchebag, you guys aren’t. Tried to tell him that a year ago. I know it’s illegal, but it just seems like the right thing to do. They’re happy with what they have right now, you pay them more, they’ll be loyal.”
“Okay, settled. Agreed?” I asked between Mason and Holly. They both gave me a nod.
“I think we’re agreed on everything else,” I said as I glanced at Holly. “But I need you to tell me about the two brothers working on staff. Are we going to have any trouble with their extended family or them?”
“Ben and Eli?” she asked. “Not that I know of.”
“Mason?”
He shook his head. “They’re fine. Jack said the gang canvases this neighborhood and Randy apparently bought protection by employing them. Their brothe
r wanted to see them do something other than work the streets, I guess. Jack said they were clean as far as gangs go, but mean as hell about their territory. They have family here.”
“Hmm,” I said as I tapped my chin.
“What are you thinking?” Mason asked.
“Holly, did you say we were over in budget on bouncers?”
She flipped open a green folder and pulled out a sheet. “Yeah, we’ve got too many, most of them are looking for more time. Rotations are good, but we’ll lose a couple if that doesn’t loosen up.”
“Tell Ben and Eli I’d like to personally hire them for some work.”
“What?”
“I’d like them to work with Paul. He’s got a life, and he’s going to burn out if he’s on constant security.”
“He loves that woman,” Mason mumbled.
“I realize that everyone loves my fiancé, but he needs a break from time to time. And frankly, I think we both need some protection too.”
Mason shook his head. “No way, I don’t need a bouncer driving me to the club.”
“Didn’t say that. You can drive yourself to the club. But if you get in a pinch one of these days and Jack is having an off day, then you can call Ben and about fifty of his posse will show up. Understand?”
“Are we taking over a gang now?”
“Didn’t say that,” I responded again. “I don’t know what they’re into and don’t want to know. We give Ben and Eli a boost up, though, better wages, and maybe their brother would consider it a sign of deep respect and gratitude. They work for us, and if the need ever arose, I’m sure they could call in a favor.”
“Paul takes care of them?”
“Yeah, he’ll give them plenty of work, so will I. I’d like that to start tomorrow, Holly. I want Eli posted in front of the entrance to this office downstairs. No one gets up unless he clears it. Obviously a few people with priority status. Make a list.”
“You gonna put them on Alisa?” he asked.
“I’m going to get to know them first. So are you. Take Ben everywhere for a while. Do we have any tech for them? Earpieces, phones and whatnot?”
Mick: Kingston Corruption, Book One Page 20
