by Aidy Award
Santa Maria, madre de Dios. Sálvame.
Foster stood and slowly moved across the room toward me. He had a cane and a limp, but no wheelchair in site. “Don’t bother with your phone. I’ve set dampeners all around your apartment. No signal is getting in or out of here.”
“Stay away from me.” I threw the phone at him and grabbed a knife from the block on the counter.
Maybe I didn’t want him to stay away. If I could lure him closer, I could stab him. Kill him.
He deserved to die.
Foster laughed at me. “I can’t do that anymore. See, I’ve gotten stronger playing this cat and mouse game with Baker. Chasing him has done more than years of physical therapy. You’re the key.”
My hands shook. Good. If he thought I was afraid of him, he would come closer. “You’ve already had your revenge. Gray is dead. What more do you want?”
“Is that what they told you? Pretty lies for a pretty stupid girl.”
Pendejo. He wanted lies? I’d give him lies. Instead of backing away, I pushed away from the wall I was pressed against and I pointed the very sharp tip of the knife at him, right at his cold dead heart.
“You can’t hurt me anymore. You think you’re broken? I lied back at the club. Whatever you had with Serena wasn’t love. You don’t even know what that word means. You… vete al demonio. I had love.”
Foster had taken it from me. Not the way he thought Gray had hurt him. Foster didn’t know what hurt was. He would.
He continued to advance on me. “Put your toy down before you hurt yourself. You wouldn’t want me to have to kill you before you get to see him again.”
A rush of blood and a ringing, like the day of the explosion, burst through my ears. The knife clattered to the floor and I dropped to my knees.
Lies. Foster had to be lying. “Gray is dead.”
“He will wish he had been.”
His cane bashed down onto my head and my last thought before I passed out on the cold tile floor was only blackness.
I couldn’t breathe right. Something was stuffed in my mouth. Either the room was dark or I was blindfolded. I couldn’t move feel my hands, something had cut off my circulation. A hot burning drip, drip, drip fell on my shoulders. On bare skin.
“I thought that might wake you.” Foster’s voice sounded from behind me. But also from far away. Like he was talking through a speaker. “This wouldn’t be half as fun with you unconscious. Besides, I know how you like predicament play.”
“Where’s Gray?” The words were muffled through the material blocking my mouth, but he got the gist.
“I thought you didn’t believe me? Let me show you.”
He definitely wasn’t in the room with me. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
A beam of light came from that direction and spread out across the room. Oh Dios. We were at the club. It was either very early, or very late because no one was here.
I was in one of the glass voyeur rooms, tied to a chair, naked.
The light was from a projector and shined up onto a screen on the stage. It showed a picture of Gray.
He was crossing a street and talking on a phone. His normal scruff had grown into a beard like I’d never seen on him before and one of his arms was in a sling. I recognized the street he was on. It was the one outside of The Asylum.
I hardly noticed the dripping of the hot liquid on my skin now.
“That was taken last month. Sixty days after our little showdown right here.”
I shook my head. It couldn’t be. Gray wouldn’t do that to me. I used my tongue to push at the gag. It wasn’t tied in and eventually I worked it out.
“This is all fake. Gray would never—”
“Push the button, Angelina.”
I looked down and in my numb hands was some sort of remote. For a bomb?
“It’s for the projector. Push the button and you’ll get to see more of your precious Dom. But, be warned. There will be consequences. Your predicament. Your choice. Pain for your pleasure.”
He thought this was pleasure? Seeing Gray alive was pure and absolute torture. Still, I concentrated very hard and made my fingers push that button.
A new image flashed onto the screen and I cried out as a new splash of the burning liquid hit me, dripping down my chest and over the ropes binding me. I could turn my head just enough to be able to see red hot wax snake its way down to my belly and then pool on my leg.
I didn’t care.
Foster’s voice and words faded from my awareness. I pushed the button over and over, seeing pictures of Gray from close up and far away over the course of the last three months. Each time I advanced the show more wax fell on me from all different angles and places.
It burned. I felt nothing.
“Baker was good at staying away from you. Even I thought he was dead for the first month. This one is the picture that gave me the idea to grab you for bait. He just couldn’t resist seeing you again.”
The picture, so lifelike in front of me this time was Gray walking toward Jim’s car in the parking lot of Devils and Angels. A white envelope in his hands.
“Yes, he was here. Only yards away from you. He watched you find that note. He watched while you cried. As did I.”
“Bastardo—” I screamed the word not sure if it was meant for Foster or Gray.
“He always was a sadist.”
Foster didn’t know Gray at all. If anything Gray had always taken all the pain from everyone else around him. He’d torturned himself waiting for me to understand who I was. He’d hurt himself over and over trying to save Foster’s estupido ass from his death spiral. “Where are you, you coward. Untie me and let me show you what sadism means.”
I got no reply.
I jerked against the ropes and the chair, screaming every curse I could at Foster. Something moved near the stage and I thought finally he was going to be man enough to come torture me himself.
It wasn’t Foster. It wasn’t Gray either. A tall woman, with dark skin, Middle Eastern or Asian maybe squatted behind a chair a few feet from the glass room door. She wore a dark suit and flashed a badge at me then held a finger to her mouth to indicate I should remain quiet.
Had they caught Foster?
She looked right and left, then bolted across the remaining space and put her back to the wall next to the door.
She cracked the door open slowly. Angelina Cruz?” Her voice wavered.
“Yes. Is it over?”
She sucked in a breath like she hadn’t done it in a long time. “No, when’s the last time you saw Foster?”
She didn’t say Foster Bennett. She didn’t say the perp or the unsub. She’d called him Foster. Like she knew him.
I didn’t like this and had a bad feeling. “Who are you?”
She didn’t respond but turned her head and nodded to someone in the shadows.
“Your safe now, Angel.” A low voice, gruff and tired, said my name.
The remote dropped from my hand crashing to the floor. Time and space and the universe flipped upside down and then right again.
Gray stepped from behind the wall, pushing past the woman, and used a tool to slice the ropes holding me under the drip of the candles.
“Gray?”
My vision blurred. I couldn’t see him. Was he here, or had my brain broken from the torture and reinvented him in my mind?
I’d stay locked up in a mental institution for the rest of my days with my imaginary Gray.
“My love.”
My body wanted to pass out, but I didn’t want to lose a moment. I swallowed the tinny taste in the back of my mouth and found my equilibrium again.
I reached up and touched his cheek. The beard there scratched my skin, the heat from his body seeped into my hand. “Are you really here?”
“I am, and I’m never leaving you again.” Gray picked me up from under the legs and carried me out of the room.
My heart fluttered in the way it does when we meet a new lover for the fir
st time or find an old flame again. My skin tingled, from my scalp to my toes. All the fine hairs stood up all over my body, reaching, asking to be soothed.
He was here. Gray was alive.
I couldn’t comprehend it. Nothing made sense. “But… how?”
“First, let me get you out of here. Then I’ll explain everything.” He carried me toward the exit.
“You’re alive.” My grip back on reality lingered just out of reach. Because reality had taught me a hard lesson, a very painful one.
“You’re not going anywhere, Baker.” A shot reverberated through the club and we dropped to the floor.
Oh no. This couldn’t be happening. Gray’s body was on top of mine, crushing me under him. I didn’t feel any blood and I could feel him breathing.
“Are you shot? Are you hurt.”
“Go, Angel, go, go, go.” He rolled and shoved me toward a plush couch.
Foster’s voice filled the club from every speaker in our sound system. “Don’t be like that Baker. You’ve been hiding long enough. Let me end your misery and your girlfriend can get back to her depression.”
Gray did some hand signals to the woman and looked back to me. “We’re going to distract him, and you run for the exit.”
This was déjà vu all over again.
“No. Fucking. Way. That’s how I lost you last time.”
“Do as I say.” This wasn’t his Dom voice, this was pure desperation.
“No. You do as I say. We are going to get this pendejo once and for all.”
The barrel of a gun pressed into the back of my head. “Not this time, Angelina.”
Gray’s Final Battle
“Don’t move, Baker. I will blow her brains out right here before you can even blink.” Foster pressed the gun harder into my scalp. “Time for you to do as I tell you, for once, Angelina. Stand up.”
Gray made the tiniest of head nods indicating I should do as Foster said. God, please let him have a plan. Just in case he didn’t –
“Grayson Baker. I love you.” I was pissed as hell at him for letting me think he was dead. There was a real chance we were going to die right now, and I was not wasting whatever moments we had together.
“Shut up, bitch.”
Either he was going to shoot me now, or not. I had to chance it either way. “I want you to know that in your heart and soul.”
“I said shut up.”
I ignored Foster. Wouldn’t be the first time. “Someday I want you to say it back to me. Not when we’re fucking, not even when we’re making love, and especially not while this hijo de puta is around.”
Gray swallowed and tears glistened in his eyes. He was clenching his jaw so tight and I swear I saw the tiniest shake of his head.
“Enough.” Foster shoved me back toward the glass room keeping his back to the wall and Gray in his line of sight.
Where the hell was that police lady? Foster obviously didn’t know she was here. Come on, element of surprise.
Gray put his hands over his head and slowly rose. “Let her go, Bennett. I’ve got something you want even more.”
How Gray was remaining calm, I couldn’t understand. We were about to die. Dammit. There had to be something we could do to stop Foster again. Somebody needed to shoot him in the face.
“I’m going to torture and kill her while you have to watch and then I’m going to shoot you, first in the knees like I should have years ago and then end you. You have nothing I want.” Foster’s tone was beyond batshit crazy.
“Not even Serena?”
Serena? The woman this whole damn thing had started over?
The woman with the badge stepped out of the shadow of the bar and Foster’s gun moved from me to her to Gray and back to me.
“This is a trick.”
“Hello, Fos.” Her voice was soft, like that of a lover caressing the words for only him.
The color drained from Foster’s face. His shock didn’t last nearly long enough. His eyes went from wide and surprised to angry in a second.
“Come back to fuck with me some more, Serena? Or have you and Baker been shacking up all this time?”
Gray interrupted. “You know we haven’t. Angel is the only woman for me.”
Foster continued to move the gun between Gray and Serena he gripped my arm hard with his other hand. “Of course, you two have always been in on this plot to destroy me. That makes a lot more sense.”
Serena approached very slowly. “Fos, it’s time to end this. Let Angelina go, and you and I can talk.”
I hope by talk she meant go to prison.
“Maybe Angelina and I should have done the same. I’ll enjoy hearing her scream my name when I’m fucking her with every damn plastic cock in this charade of a club. She’ll like that too. She’s mine now.”
He had seriously gone off the deep end, because fuck that.
Gray stepped closer lowering his hands and forgetting their was a madman with a gun. “She is her own woman. I tried my damndest to own her. I’ve been scared of losing her since the day we met. Even knowing all along possessing a women like her would destroy her. No one can own Angelina. Seeing her get over me proved that more than anything.”
What was Gray saying? He didn’t really think I was over him, did he? I know I had a gun inches from my head and we were in dire straights here, but a different kind of feeling bubbled up in my chest.
It was sadness.
It literally hurt my heart that Gray had been living in fear of hurting me and that he thought not being together would ever be better.
If we got out of this alive I was going to clear that up, help him understand we were the best when we were together. Then I was going to slap him upside the head for ever thinking otherwise.
All’s fair in war as they say.”
“Love and war, Fos. I did love you.”
Uh-oh. That was not the right thing for Serena to say.
He got a new clarity in his eye and aimed the gun directly at her.
She raised hers as well, but then dropped her arm to the side. “This is all my fault. I should have told you everything. I should have been there for you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Noooo.” Foster howled and shoved me toward Serena using me as a shield.
She dropped her gun and grabbed me.
I was strange how I could see every tiny movement that happen in the next second. The muscles in Foster’s arm and hand tensed as he fired. The kickback from the bullet leaving the gun. The way his entire body jerked and crumpled to the floor as Gray rushed him and they barreled into the glass.
Tiny shards sparkled through the air and the glass tinkled as it scattered. The light from the projector glinted off the gun and I saw two flashes even before I heard the gun go off.
I’m sure I screamed and tried to pull away from Serena, but all my movements were in that same slow motion.
No one moved. Not Serena. Not Foster. Not Gray.
Por favor. Don’t let me lose him again.
The world whooshed back and even though I had bare feet and skin and pulled away from Serena and rushed to Gray, grabbing his shoulders and yanking him to me.
“Gray? Gray?” Was he hurt? He was breathing. He wasn’t dead. “Grayson.”
The gun was in his hand and two huge blotches of blood and torn skin and clothing marred Foster’s chest.
He was dead.
Gray had killed him.
For real this time.
The gun dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor. Gray looked at it, glanced at Foster, and then to me. “It’s over, you’re free.”
I wrapped him up in my arms and held him so tight because I was never, ever letting him go. “We’re free, my love. We’re free.”
“Angel, I’m sorry. I never should have left you alone. I thought I could protect you better. I failed you all over again.”
His arms wrapped around me and he lowered his head to my neck. I’d never tell anyone about the tears that flowed over my skin.
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“No. You listen to me. You have never failed me. There have been a lot of times when we didn’t always do right by each other, but we were together now. I don’t want you to ever be afraid of losing me ever again. I am yours. Always yours. Do you hear me?”
“Ah, love. How can you be? I’ve hurt you so many times. I watched you heal these last months. You’re so strong, stronger than you know. You don’t need me. You never did.”
Imbécil. “Grayson I-don’t-know-your-middle-name Baker. If I wasn’t so happy you were alive I would fucking kill you. Don’t be stupid.”
He held me tighter and didn’t say a word.
“Gray. Do you love me?” I knew the answer to that. I hoped he did too.
He finally lifted his head and looked so deep into myeyes. “Yes. I always have.”
“Then say it.”
“I love you.”
I kissed him because it was lovely to hear, but those weren’t the words I wanted from him. “I love you more. But, that’s not what I want you to say. You’re mine, Gray. You belong to me. There is nothing more to hold back, or hide. You. Are. Mine. Say it.”
He blinked, slowly. When he opened his eyes again, I didn’t see fear, or need, or domination. Only love. “I’m your.”
“I know. Now take me home and explain to me why in the hell you decided to die on me while I beat your hot ass with flogger and then a whip, and then a paddle, and then a cane.”
He pushed his hands into my hair and kissed me. Soft and sweet and then hard and needy. Just like I liked it.
He kissed me until I almost forgot about being mad.
Almost.
Serenity
We were back in the loft and I had not yet let him take me to bed. Don’t get me wrong. We were going to spend a long, long, long time fucking each other’s brains out.
I had a little more mad to get out first. “You tell me everything right this second.”
“It’s a long story, and I’ll tell you all of it.” He sounded exhausted, as exhausted as I’d felt for the last year.
He’d never offered to tell me all of anything before. A burden had lifted from him. Good. About time.
