by Amy Faye
He pushed into her one last time before Minami felt him shudder, felt his cock jerk inside her, and then he came. A warm, pleasant sensation came over her, filled her, sent her spiraling out of control once more in one final, triumphant orgasm as her hands scrabbled to find any purchase on the rumpled bed sheets beneath her.
Wes's breaths came in short, ragged pants, like an animal, and the way he'd fucked her, she thought, the comparison wasn't far off. Wes's lips found her neck, first kissing tenderly, and then testing with his teeth, and when she didn't protest, biting down harder before moving to repeat the process somewhere else.
Minami's hand moved to the back of his head, tracing a line through his hair and tangling her fingers in it. As long as he wanted to, she was going to let him. Whatever it was, she wasn't going to deny Wes what he wanted. For a dull moment she thought that sounded remarkably like love, but then she shook her head. The thought itself was patently absurd.
They weren't compatible, and there was no future for them. But then, maybe that was part of the allure. The knowledge that he could take what he wanted, give her what she wanted, and maybe that was all it would be, but at least it wasn't a lie. At least she wasn't fooling herself about what was happening.
Only, she knew, that was exactly what she was doing. And she wasn't about to stop now.
Twenty-Four
Wes
Wes cradled his head in his hands, not quite daring to look out the window, if it could even be called that. More like a reminder of how shit the neighborhood was, with the tiny window only a cat could have gotten through still barred from the inside, with bars fitted into the concrete walls.
It was more like a prison than anything else, but Wes couldn't shake the feeling that he had decided to keep it that way, as if it would somehow help alleviate his history and make it all go away.
He let out a long breath. He shouldn't have kicked her out. Who knows if she has a ride home. It hadn't bothered him before, but something was different this time. Something about her had changed, and that worried him more than anything.
He got up and slipped out the door, not before taking the keys off the wall. He'd made that mistake once, and with the two-hundred dollar charge for getting a locksmith out at 4 A.M. had taught him not to do it again.
He slipped into the leather seats of the Fiero, cracked and kept badly. It was still comfortable, perhaps even softer than it had been when the seats had been brand new. He didn't spend more than an instant thinking about it before he put the keys into the ignition and started to drive.
She didn't have a huge head-start. Five minutes, maybe. Sometimes Wes fucked up, and fucked up big. Sometimes he didn't realize his mistakes until the next morning, or until years later.
New York had been a mistake like that, one that ate up five solid years of his life before he suddenly woke up one day in a room not much smaller than the one he was staying in now and suddenly realized, 'whoa, what the fuck am I doing?'
Time served, at this point. He'd paid the price for that, and it had been a high enough price that he wasn't going to make that mistake again. But he knew there would be others, and he had a sick feeling that this thing with Minami would be one of them if he didn't move fast.
He drove around to the front of the building, hoping to find her waiting for a cab. No such luck.
Wes growled his frustration and stepped on the gas harder and searching the road with his eyes. She hadn't gone up the road to the convenience store, which he still wouldn't have recommended. He turned and kept crawling the streets.
There were better-than-even odds that she'd called a cab, and it had already arrived by the time Wes made it out to the street. He had to hope, had to assume, that wasn't the case in spite of the fact that it was more than likely.
The preservation paid off when he saw her walking into the public library. It wasn't the nice one. It was small and shabby and ultimately nobody went there. In Wesley's old life, years ago, they might have done deals here. Public enough to be safe, private enough—especially in the stacks—that nobody was going to walk in on you at the wrong time. Teenagers probably had their own uses for the place, when someone's parents were going to be an inconvenience.
He pulled into the lot and cut the engine. The odds that she'd seen him were slim at best. Wes wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. On one hand, she wasn't going to run away from him before he could get there. On the other, she didn't know to expect him. She'd still be assuming that he was leaving her well enough alone.
Well, Wes never was that smart. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, the comforting whoosh of stale air and the smell of books filling his nose. The library had always held a sort of mystique for him. As many books as a person could handle, and all you had to give them was a little promise that you'd give it back. Who on earth would ever refuse?
Wes had. What did his promises mean? He didn't take books out. Something about his self-imposed exile here in New York—away from the girls, away from his whole life up to the time with the family—had told him he didn't have the right to take their things, not even with permission. But that didn't stop him from coming in, when the mood suited him.
He looked around the familiar room, a wide open lobby with spokes that came off the center, and then the stairs down in the back. She wouldn't go there, not unless she was looking for something in the stacks. He had no reason to figure he would, which meant that he would probably be making a mistake to prioritize searching the basement.
Wes made a grid of it, starting from the door and working his way so that she couldn't possibly get past him without his seeing it. Not in the nonfiction, at least not as far as he could tell from this distance. Not sitting at a table.
She wasn't in the genre fiction, nor in the literary fiction. She wasn't in the young adult—he turned to check the lobby again, satisfied himself that she wasn't there from some vantage he couldn't see from the door, and kept on moving.
The children's section brought out feelings he didn't want to deal with right now. A little kid, dark-skinned with natural hair, smiled up at him warmly. Wes smiled back and waved. The girls had been almost that age when he'd gone in for the first—and, if he was lucky, the last—time. They'd been into chapter books by the time he saw them again, and then he had to leave them behind, regardless of what he might have wanted for them.
Wes turned and did another lap of the lobby, bending down to take a drink of water just in time for someone to bump into his hips. A very specific someone.
"Minami!"
She turned, ready to run away. He couldn't afford to let her, not when he'd finally found her here.
"Minami, wait, give me a minute."
She turned, her face twisted up in hurt and anger.
"What, so you can tell me that I'm not worth your time?"
"Minami, I'm sorry."
"That's not good enough."
"What do you need from me, then?"
"I don't know, Wes. Just leave me alone. I'll give you a call."
"Minami, I can't pretend to understand what you've got going on. Who was that guy, anyways? But what I'm trying to say is, I shouldn't have flown off the handle."
"You're damn right," she said, finally using her library voice. "You shouldn't have."
"Can you forgive me?"
"Not right now," she answered. He could see she meant it.
"Well, I understand, I guess. I'm just—I'm sorry. I had a weird couple of days, alright?"
"Whatever."
Wes let out a sigh of defeat, and decided to let her go. She turned away for exactly one instant before turning back.
"Wes, you need to get out of here. Now."
"What're you talking about?"
"I don't have time to get into it, but some very bad people are here, and if they find you with me, things will end very badly."
Wes let out a breath. That was how it always was, though. He nodded in spite of himself and motioned for her to follow. The stacks it was. Ei
ther they'd lose him down here, or he'd have his own space to deal with them, but either way, it was the only option.
Twenty-Five
Minami
There was a certain swagger in Wesley's attitude that Minami couldn't help but like, even entertaining, and now it was exactly that attitude that was going to get him killed. She should have separated from him, but he always thought he could handle anything that was thrown his way, and this time he was wrong. Unlike the other times, Minami knew it this time, which made it that much worse.
She didn't know many people in the Higa family, or in the Inafune family, and she didn't know anyone who worked for that American she'd seen Wes and Higa with.
But she knew those three, by sight if not by name. Apparently her father had finally decided to get to the bottom of what was going on with her, and he wasn't going to like what he found out. Nor was Wesley, no matter how much he thought that he was God's gift to the world.
Minami followed him in spite of that, because whether she liked it or not she knew that if he asked her to, she'd follow him anywhere. He turned down a set of metal stairs, even his soft shoes clicking hard on the metal. Minami kicked her sandals off and carried them down. Her sandals would have made far, far too much noise. They'd have been caught in an instant.
There must have been thirty or forty rows of shelves, thick with the smell of dust. Minami took a breath and held it as best she could as he guided her back, finally pushing her into a row.
"Stay down," he whispered.
She realized, suddenly, that he'd completely misinterpreted who was in trouble here. She was fine, and more than that, she knew it. The one who had to worry was Wes, but then, crouching down low, he started heading back toward the entrance.
She waited a minute for him. It wouldn't take that long to get back to the stairs, but she didn't hear the same clanging steps of weight going back up. Another minute passed them by, and still more silence. The curiosity of trying to figure out what was going on in the room was starting to burn inside her chest, but he'd told her to wait, and there had to be a reason for it even if she didn't understand what the reasons were, just yet.
Another minute. She crept to the edge of the row and peered out. Nothing. The place might have been empty, from what she could see. She slipped around into the next row. The dust and stale air was starting to go to her head. Minami forced herself to stay focused. She might not be in any danger, but if she could save Wes from what was about to come down on his head, then she had to do it—no matter what the risk was to her.
Besides that, the odds of there being any risk to her at all were between slim and none, and if they hurt even one hair on her head, it wouldn't be a long time before her father caught wind of it. The threat of that, by itself, would stop them in their tracks. The possibility that she wasn't lying would be too present, and that was assuming that they didn't recognize her straight away.
They had certainly been sent there looking for her, looking to see what she was doing and who she was with. No doubt, Majima had driven them out, and sat right outside, prepared as ever to dig her out of any trouble she found herself in.
Well, she wasn't going to let other people dig her out of this. She moved across the aisle when she moved to the next aisle, to get a better view of the steps.
How long would they have to wait before they could be certain that her father's men had left? She already knew that answer, in spite of the feeling that she shouldn't have been so certain.
If the plan was to wait them out, then those men would wait until the place closed. Then they'd wait outside the exits, until her father called them and told them to stop. That was the way it was, with her father's men. Loyal to a fault, if anything. It was a comfort when there was danger around, but when she desperately wanted them gone—
She moved up another row. If she got out of here, though, then Wes would be fine.
A Japanese man in a suit stepped into view at the top of the steps. Minami stood up and called out to him. "You're looking for me, aren't you?"
The man responded in Japanese. That was how it always was with Yakuza—they wouldn't speak English between themselves, regardless of what country they'd all moved to. It didn't seem to matter all that much to them that they didn't fit in with the locals. Then again, they hadn't fit in with the locals in Japan, either.
"Where is the man who was with you?"
"Nobody was with me," she answered, stepping back into view. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He started down the steps, the other one a step or two behind him. Minami stepped out further, hoping to meet him at the foot of the stairs, so wherever Wes had hidden himself, they wouldn't have a chance to look around.
"As you say, Young Mistress," the Yakuza answered, clearly caught between his orders to look for someone and her instructions that there was nobody there to be found in either case. "But I think we'd better look around anyways, for your father's peace of mind."
"I called to be taken home, and I want to go home now."
"Yes, young mistress."
He stepped down another step, halfway down already. A hand shot out and grabbed the man's ankle, and pulled hard. The Yakuza's foot went out from under him and he fell hard, trying to land on his shoulder as much for safety as to turn and see his attacker.
Wes stepped out and took two long strides to tee off on the guy's head. It snapped back, throwing a spatter of blood onto the spines of the books that had been left down here.
He wasn't lucky enough to get the jump on the second guy, who took the stairs two at a time and hit Wes hard in the back with his shoulder, throwing them both off-balance.
The smaller Yakuza didn't bother trying to shake his partner awake. This was a fight, and if he was going to wake up then he would wake up on his own. He regained his balance before Wes and threw a punch into Wesley's kidneys that landed with a loud thump. Wes slumped down a little way, and in that half-second the bigger Yakuza pushed himself off the ground and turned his attention on Minami.
"We have to get the young mistress away," he said softly. The big guy's arms wrapped around her body and started to pull her out of the basement even as the other guy sent another hard punch into Wesley's ribs. He turned his back on Wes and followed behind, taking the steps quickly to try to catch his partner.
Minami could hear Wes shouting after them, but by the time she left the library, safe and sound and brought back in the arms of her father's men, she didn't see him come back out of that basement.
Twenty-Six
Wes
Wes opened his eyes to the sun streaming down, right across his face. Someone else might have considered moving the bed, but there was more stubbornness in Wes than there was sense, and if the bed was there, then that was how it was going to be.
That was the same thing that had put him into this entire mess with Minami in the first place, and it was his fault that she'd been taken. He'd tried her phone a couple of times, in the days since, but she wasn't answering. Whoever had taken her, they clearly didn't want her talking with him, or seeing him, and that was almost understandable.
After all, if it was someone who wanted to hurt her, to use her to threaten her family, then they wouldn't want outside contact except the stuff under their control.
If it was the opposite, and the Shimizu goons had been the one who did a number on him, then the answer was even more obvious. They were probably right to keep them apart, since there was no way that Wes was going to do any good for her. She should have recognized that the first couple of days together, but whether it was stubbornness of blindness she hadn't done anything about it, and Wes was too cocky to leave something ell enough alone at first, and by the time he knew he'd made a mistake, he was too weak to tell himself not to go after her, in spite of the risk that her association with him put her at.
There was something unpleasantly self-flagellating about the whole situation, one that he didn't want to worry about, but couldn't stop.
He
had to focus up. His body still ached from where they'd hit him. He'd been in worse scrapes. Plenty of them, back in prison, were worse than that. But most of his scrapes hadn't come only a couple of days before he fought one of Higa's goons in a big ol' dust-up match.
Well, another of Higa's goons. The first one, thankfully, had been a pushover. But then again, even if it were the same guy, could Wes take another pounding in the back so soon? If he'd been this busted up in the last fight, things would have turned out different, and there was no denying it, regardless of how much he wanted to.
Wes padded his way across the room to his fridge, ignoring the complaints of his muscles as he moved. No time to worry about hurting. No time to fight against it. He was doing what he had to do.
He didn't have time to worry about Minami, either. Not really. He should have been training, or at least he should've been trying to get was much rest as he possibly could, to manage somehow to counter the consecutive beatings he'd taken in the past week. If he let Bradley know about one of them, even goddamn one, he'd be out of the fight, no question.
Which begged the question: what, if anything, did Higa know? He'd been out with Minami, and he was a guy with connections. That must have been a real embarrassment, getting his girl taken. The two separate times that guys had come by the apartment in the days following told Wes about all he needed to know about it.
The odds that he wouldn't hear about Wesley's beatings was slim. So was he planning on not mentioning it to Bradley?
No, obviously he wasn't planning on mentioning it, Wes reasoned. If he was, then the fight wouldn't have gone ahead, because they'd left Wes in a bloody mess on the floor, and the guys would have gone back and told their boss all about it.
