The Vigilantes Collection

by Lake, Keri

  An empathetic voice called out from somewhere deep inside of me— I’d had it ingrained into me from an early age to heal others, thanks to my beautiful mother. It was that which’d led me to work as a therapist, the desire to help ease someone’s pain. Staring at Nick, although he was my kidnapper, had me feeling no less compassion. An ache bloomed inside my heart as he cradled his carved arm.

  As fierce and dominating as he seemed, the man was broken. Tortured by something. Wracked by some kind of pain.

  What?

  It was a question that plagued my mind as I padded back to my room.

  * * *

  I folded the book, laid it on the bed beside me, and sat up when Nick appeared in my bedroom doorway, nearly a dozen bags hanging from his grip. Entering, he set them down before returning to the hallway, from where he grabbed shoe boxes and a blue milk crate, arranging all the items in the center of the room.

  Though it remained covered, I couldn’t help but stare at his arm where I knew a scar had begun to take form.

  I slid my legs over the side of the bed, still unsure of what the hell was going on, but curiosity got the best of me, and at a slight nudge of his head giving me approval, I crawled toward the bags.

  Each one carried an assortment of dresses, shirts, jeans, tanks, panties, and toiletries. There were two shoe boxes—a pair of Chucks and combat boots, exactly the style I’d worn before meeting Michael. As if he’d somehow reached into my past.

  “I didn’t … pick those out,” he said.

  “No, it’s … it’s good.” Gaze glued on the bags of clothes, I offered a half smile. “Thank you … for doing this. I missed simple clothes.”

  So badly, I wanted to ask him about the night before—the nightmare and cutting, the names he called out. Thanks to the concealment of his coat sleeve, I caught no more than a glimpse of where thin scars lined his forearm.

  “You used to wear this kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah, before I became a politician’s wife, and my wardrobe changed to cashmere and linen. And pearls.” I shook my head at the thought. “Twenty four years old, wearing pearls. The only woman in my life who wore pearls was my grandmother.”

  Stuffing his hands into the pocket of his jeans, Nick shrugged. “I don’t know, seems fitting for the job of stuffy politician’s wife.”

  I toyed with the laces on the Chucks. “It actually wasn’t fitting at all for my job. Not exactly the kind of thing you wear to get down and dirty.”

  “What the fuck were you, a mud wrestler?”

  Laughter burst from my chest, the sound so strange to me. I hadn’t laughed in a long time, and by the frowned surprise on Nick’s face, it must’ve struck him strange, too. “No. I was a therapist. I only got to go once a week, and it was usually on one of Michael’s off-site meetings. Every Wednesday, I was given precisely three full hours of bliss.”

  “What did you do there? Pass out pictures of your husband’s face to young, impressionable future voters?”

  I dropped my gaze and my smile faded. “Seems I fooled everyone into thinking I was nothing more than a puppet.” Pulling my knees into my body, I wrapped my arms around them. “Good for me. It’s how you survive that matters most. I like to think some days that perhaps, in those three hours, I did more good than I’d ever done in my whole life.”

  “So, what made you get into therapy?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall.

  “Well …” A hiccup of laughter escaped me. “Inside every therapist is a patient.” I shrugged, still toying with the shoestring. “I needed to cope with a few things myself, so I thought helping others would teach me how.”

  “That’s why you cut yourself? Trying to cope?”

  Why do you cut yourself, I wanted to ask. It’d been a week since he’d seen the scar on my wrist, and I’d have thought he’d forgotten it by then. “You first.”

  He shook his head. “No. Tell me. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

  “What does it matter?” A couple of days earlier, he’d asked what made mine special. “Does that put a monkey wrench in your plans, or something? Why are you stressing over it? Does that make me damaged goods to whatever bald, fat bastard you’d planned to pawn me off on?”

  The twitch in his cheek confessed that he wanted to laugh, but, wisely, he didn’t, and my muscles bunched with the anger rolling through me. “I didn’t say I was stressing.” The flat, no-bullshit tone of his voice clawed at my patience. I wanted to know his secrets, not spill my own. “I said I want to know why you did it.”

  No. That was a box I’d been good at keeping locked shut, and I didn’t intend to open it for anyone. Especially not him. As a therapist, vulnerability was something I’d learned to keep to myself. It was one thing to relate to a student, but another to spill a dark box of secrets. That was my box. He could have any other story, any other box inside my head, except for that. “Something else. I don’t want to talk about that one.”

  “All right. How ‘bout the one on your back?” Another deeply brutal wound, though one that caused more anger than pain.

  “I snuck away to my father’s funeral. Never told Michael.”

  His face rumpled to a brief frown. “He scarred you for going to your father’s funeral?”

  “No. He scarred me for breaking one of his rules. I failed to tell him where I was going, so he strung me up to a post in the basement and whipped me.” Scooting backward on my butt, I leaned against the wall beside the bed, next to where he’d set the bags of clothes. “He left me down there for three days. The doctor made a house visit to check on my wounds and treat me for dehydration.”

  “A doctor visited you and never reported what Culling did to you?”

  “To whom, Nick?” I mindlessly rubbed my thumb on the inside of my palm. “He owns the police. The doctor wouldn’t tell a soul, or risk having his tongue severed with a chainsaw. There is nowhere to run. He has all kinds of connections.” Living with Michael was like being trapped by a dictator in a foreign country, surrounded by people who didn’t speak the same language.

  “What the fuck made you fall in love with this asshole in the first place? Why’d you marry him?” he asked.

  “People marry for different reasons. Mine had nothing to do with love. I’ve lost my faith in romantic love. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

  Nick didn’t say anything, just stared at me.

  “Now you.”

  His gaze fell away from mine, and I expected him to avoid the question, to be a dick and leave me sitting there with my open wound as he walked away. Surprising me, he stroked a hand across his head, over his scar. “I took a bullet to the skull. Spent a year in physical therapy, mental therapy, bullshit therapies. Still have trouble with some words on occasion, and I can’t really do shit with my right hand anymore. Had to learn to shoot a gun with my left.” As if he could anticipate my next question, he shook his head. “’Sall I’m sayin’ about that.”

  Small steps. In time, I might learn what plagued him in sleep, but at that point, I knew a little more about him. He knew a bit more about me, which I’d hoped would help change whatever preconceived thoughts he’d developed from the fake persona he saw on TV. That woman wasn’t me. Hell, I’d be disgusted with her, if I didn’t know a decent person lay buried somewhere beneath.

  Lowering my gaze, I peered into the milk crate and my eyes widened. Books lay stacked upon one another, and as I investigated each one, I couldn’t help but smile. Faulkner. Shakespeare. Tennessee Williams. Harper Lee and, my favorite, Poe. Even a few romances thrown into the mix. I lifted my eyes once more. “You bought me books?”

  “There’s a place I used to go to a long time ago. Kingston’s Books. They have a lot of old classics.”

  I reared back at that, crossing my arms. “You used to hang out at a bookstore? I’m shocked.”

  His eyes fell away from mine and dimples caved his cheeks. “I wasn’t necessarily there for the books.” The smile on his face shriveled to
something more serious. “It’s where I met my wife.”

  The horrible exercise of trying not to stare at his ring finger must’ve had my eyeballs bouncing like a crack addict. “You’re … married?”

  He sniffed and cleared his throat. “She, uh … she’s dead.”

  Was that Lena? The name he’d called in his sleep? I’d never been good with words, so I locked my stare on the books in my lap, pressing my lips together, before I finally said, “Nick, I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway, the owner of the store said these were some of his favorites, so I grabbed all of them.”

  “I love them. Thank you.” Once again, our stares collided, and I felt something different about Nick—a curiosity that burned inside my head. Dead wife? Shot in the head? The questions had begun to mount—which meant I’d begun the jigsaw puzzle inside my mind, piecing together the edges first, in hopes of eventually getting to the center. “You’re keeping me for a while, then?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  Of course, his cold and distant demeanor would make it one of the more challenging puzzles I’d had to work. “For what, exactly?”

  His brow winged up. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you. Let’s keep it on good terms.”

  29

  Aubree

  Somehow, a week had slipped by, and aside from bringing me meals, Nick remained distant. Hadn’t touched me since the episode after my shower, and didn’t say much. I kept to myself while he was around, drawing in my sketchpad, or reading for the most part, and wandering the house as soon as he’d left. As long as I stayed away from the front door, Blue seemed content to let me explore a bit.

  Wearing dark jeans and a white fitted T-shirt that hugged the bulging muscle in his arms and chest, Nick stood in the doorway, his leather jacket slung over his elbow. “I gotta run out. Something I have to pick up. Shouldn’t be long.”

  Well, this is new. He’d never once informed me when he planned to leave. It was almost as if we were becoming more like roommates than kidnapper and kidnappee.

  “Okay.”

  When he snapped his fingers, Blue shot to his feet, and Nick ushered him into my room. “Just don’t talk to him like a baby. Don’t want him turning into a pussy.”

  Laughing, I patted the bed beside me for Blue to sit down. The dog took a stately pose next to me and licked my cheek. “Thank you,” I said, scratching behind Blue’s collar. “What made you change your mind?”

  Nick rubbed his thumb across his nose. “Wish I knew,” he said, and left the room.

  I stared after him for a moment, still trying to wrap my head around the last three minutes. One week later and, still, I knew nothing about the man. The edges of the puzzle still sat waiting for more pieces to fall into place. It was what kept me there when I should’ve been devising an escape plan.

  I’d always been planning escape, living with Michael. Always on the lookout for holes in the walls he built, or ways to break his rules. He’d have never left me alone in a house unsupervised while he freely came and went. I had a track record of escaping. A few times, I’d even come close to freedom. Yet, there I was, sitting alone with a dog that I’d befriended with the same charm I’d used on every predacious species that seemed to fall in my lap.

  Still, something kept me from escaping. Something inside of me that made up excuses why I couldn’t yet leave.

  I had to know why. Call me a flippin’ masochist, but I needed to know who Nick was and why he’d chosen to kidnap me. Why did he wake from nightmares? Did it have to do with the scar on his head? His dead wife? Who was the mysterious man that seemed to have bigger plans brewing outside of this dark sanctuary to which he came home in the early hours of morning? Like a creature of night, he stayed out, stumbling back alone, hiding in his room until the following afternoon. I’d studied him for a week and still knew as little about him then as I did a week before.

  As if he practically begged me to try to escape, he’d kept a rather loose watch over me. Yeah, Blue might’ve tried to stop me, but I certainly didn’t see the dog as the monster from a week ago.

  As soon as the click of the door told me Nick had left, I got up out of bed and made my way into the hallway. Blue followed behind me, down the staircase, and when I reached the front door, he shot in front of me, as though in a standoff, and barked.

  I threw my hands in the air. “Damn, dog. You’re as touchy as he is.” I stared through the skinny side-lite window adjacent to the door, trying to make out a street sign or some kind of landmark, but all I could see through the darkness out there was the silhouette of one other house and a few trees.

  Some parts of Detroit were like ghost towns—not a single soul for miles. Running for help could be hit or miss with all the crack houses and drug dealers. I could very well end up in a worse situation, and I didn’t even have a cellphone on me for if that occurred. Escape would take planning—starting with how to subdue the big fucking Cane Corso blocking my way. Unfortunately, I’d gone and made friends with him, so trying to hurt the dog was no longer an option, not that it ever had been.

  With his shoulders bunched in warning, Blue watched me dance around the slim window, until, at last, I made my way back up the staircase, but I paused at the top of the stairs.

  Only one place I hadn’t yet explored. Like some unsaid case of Beauty and the Beast and the don’t go exploring the west wing crap. Well, to hell with that. Answers lived behind that locked door, and damn it, I needed to know.

  I crouched to the floor and slid the bobby pin from where I stored it in my bra strap. Though his bedroom door was the only one that remained locked, it didn’t hurt to keep hold of my emergency skeleton key. With a click, the lock popped. As I stood and twisted the doorknob, a waft of Nick’s cologne assaulted my senses like a delicious attack.

  I’d been in his room a few times to shower, but only ever when he was present, and somehow the knowledge of him standing just outside the room while I stood naked, showering in his bathroom, struck me as slightly erotic. Yet, he never made a move. Never invaded my space. For the first time, I realized, in spite of being confined to an old, run down mansion, I’d been given more space than I ever had before.

  I moved to beside his disheveled bed, imagining his body tangled in the blankets. I’d heard him some nights, yelling in his sleep. The nightmares.

  He’d told me his wife had died, but I knew none of the details. I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I never asked him. It could’ve been that I didn’t want to pry, but perhaps the true reason was that I knew he wouldn’t have told me anyway. Both of us had our secrets, like vests of armor, keeping us insulated from the other. Exposing secrets made a person vulnerable, opened them up to questions, probing little inquiries that ultimately didn’t mean anything. He’d given me a small taste of his past, by revealing he had a wife, yet, a week later, it hadn’t made a damn bit of difference.

  Still, the curiosity rapped at my brain. I couldn’t let it go. I thought about him most of the day, had sketched his face in my notepad. Searched the house for evidence of who the man might be. All I’d found was a cupboard full of liquor and some weights for working out. It was as if he lived two separate lives, interacting with me here, sober, serious, but not cruel— then stumbling around the house, knocking into walls before the sun came up every morning.

  Who was the man who called himself Nick? Why hadn’t he killed me? Touched me? Asked anything about me, aside from what I tossed to him in brief conversation? It was as if he had all the information he needed.

  I wandered his room and opened drawers, smiling at the copy of The Grapes of Wrath that’d been dog-eared. I set it back in the drawer and found a small scrap of paper, written in faded red crayon. James Nicholas Ryder, Ms. Waddell’s class. Nicholas—for Nick? Ryder, the name echoed inside my head. The paper didn’t look too aged to have been from his own childhood. A son? Though he hadn’t mentioned a child. He couldn’t have had a child somewhere as much as he came and went.

  An image
lay amongst the other items. I lifted it from the drawer, exchanging it for the note, and studied the subjects sitting on the front porch of a bungalow-style home. In it, a young-looking Nick sat with his arm around a beautiful brunette, while an adorable little boy with bright blue eyes sat on his lap. Beside them, a small puppy stood with his nose to the ground, sniffing, and I glanced down at Blue, who stared back at me, sat back on his haunches.

  A pang of sadness stabbed my chest, and I closed the picture back inside the drawer, feeling as if I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.

  The corner of a manila envelope peeked from behind the book when I returned to that drawer, and I carefully slid it out. From inside, I pulled out a stack of photographs.

  Stood with the blur of a building at his back, Michael held a cellphone to his ear in the first image. The sight of him twisting my stomach, I flipped to another picture, taken months ago, where the two of us had attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new casino downtown. In yet another, the photographer had caught me exiting the cemetery on the day of my father’s funeral.

  My breath hitched. Realization struck my head in a dizzy jumble of thoughts, and I gripped the lip of the dresser to keep from stumbling back.

  Nick had been watching me for months. As far back as a year, from what I could determine from the remaining images. My kidnapping wasn’t some haphazard attempt to steal the mayor’s wife. He’d followed me—or, at least, someone had, and for a long time.

  Another image had been taken through the window of my art studio at the hospital, where I stood before a classroom of students. I remembered the day. Vividly. One of my students had forgotten his medication and threatened to stab me with a pencil, until a distraction outside the window had thwarted his attack long enough to call security, to escort him back to the psych ward.

  What did he want with me? To barter? Had Michael taken his son? Murdered his wife? Was I to be used to negotiate a deal of some sort?