by Ruby Laska
Then Chelsea realized what she was really looking at and almost dropped the phone in horror.
The man depicted in the photograph—what was left of him, anyway—had been massacred. He’d been stabbed, slashed, defiled. Blood seeped from his body in a dozen places. Appendages hung by thin threads of skin and tendon.
Crouching next to the body was a second man, this one very much alive. His face was shielded from view, but the knife in his hand was sharply detailed.
As was the watch on his wrist.
A gold and steel Breitling, the same one Ricardo wore. And that jacket—he’d been wearing it on the night he’d come straight from the airport to get her, the very same night she’d been threatened in her home.
One by one, other visual details fell into place—the hair, the broad shoulders, the shirt cuffs at his wrists—until Chelsea could not deny that it was Ricardo. And that he’d not only killed a man, something she had made her uncomfortable peace with when he had avenged the violent murder of his friend—but attacked him in such graphic and sickening ways that what was left looked barely human.
Chelsea felt like she would be sick. She went out on the small balcony and drank in the cool night air, taking deep breaths until the dizziness passed. The image, however, was indelible in her brain.
What had she been thinking, only moments ago, when she was contemplating making a life with a killer? How could she ever endure his frequent absences, knowing that he might be taking lives, murdering and plundering, playing casually with stakes almost too high to contemplate?
She had to get a grip. Sleeping a few yards away was a man who made her feel like no one had before. But a few miles away were two men whom she loved, who had raised her as a daughter. What if the men in Ricardo’s dangerous world decided to go after them? Was she willing to endanger Donny and Rufus, just so she could continue the dangerous game she was playing?
Or should she put an end to this now, while she still could, before she was pulled even further into his web?
Her heart leaden with shock and the return to her terrible reality that accompanied it, Chelsea tapped the phone, bringing up her list of contacts. She stared at it for a long time before bringing up the number.
Not Jade’s.
She dialed, knowing the man on the other end would pick up no matter how late it was, no matter where he was.
“Hello?” Stone Everson said.
CHAPTER TEN
An FBI van had come for her once before, when she’d foolishly gone for a jog in a questionable neighborhood on another night when she had been trying to make sense of the chaos that had turned her world upside down when she met Ricardo de Santos. That time, Stone had interrogated her about her lover in an effort to coax her to help the FBI take him down. Stone had brought men with him, a driver and a second agent in case things went badly.
This time, he came alone.
Chelsea waited on the balcony until she saw his familiar unmarked car cruise slowly down the street below, only twenty minutes after she’d made the call.
She didn’t dare take a last look at Ricardo. Not just because she feared waking him…she feared even more not being able to go through with it.
Leaving him. Betraying him. Losing him forever.
She opened the door to the apartment carefully. Luckily, it made no sound. Then she was padding down the hall with her purse hugged close to her body, taking with her only what she’d had when this day began. She broke into a run when she reached the stairs, taking them two at a time and racing across the landings. In seconds, she was pushing her way out of the front door.
The driver’s side window was lowered and she saw a gun—Stone was driving, and he was pointing it directly at her. Not at her, she forced herself to remember as she ran for the passenger door, but at whatever danger might follow her.
The minute she was inside, he hit the gas without putting down the gun, and for the first tense seconds, they didn’t speak as he focused on the rear view mirror and gunned the engine.
But when they’d gone a few blocks, and he’d eased back on the speed and into the traffic of a major street, he turned to her and sighed. “You could have come the first time I asked you to,” he rebuked her. “Now it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to keep you out of the investigation.”
“I know,” she said woodenly, refusing to meet his gaze.
“Then there’s the matter of your timing,” Stone continued.
“I’m sorry,” Chelsea snapped. “Look, I fucked up, okay? You don’t need to rub it in. I have terrible taste in men, blah blah blah, I get it. Can we just get this over with?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Stone said. “Your timing, as in, not two hours ago I got a very interesting piece of intelligence from our Las Vegas office that doesn’t have anything to do with your lawless boyfriend.”
The hairs on the back of Chelsea’s neck stood up. “What was it?” she asked cautiously.
“I may have found Huber.”
He kept his eyes on the road, but Chelsea felt as though he had hit her with a two by four. “Where?”
“In Las Vegas. Living under an assumed name in a shitty part of town.”
Roy Huber, the man who had stolen her childhood—alive and living a few hundred miles away. Chelsea felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the ghosts from her childhood were reaching up and trying to strangle her. She’d never stopped thinking about him, never escaped the memories of the horror completely, but over many years those memories had formed a protective scrim, their impact softening. Now it was as though that protection had been ripped away, exposing the pain and horror underneath.
“I’m going to pick him up tomorrow,” Stone continued. “So your timing is, well, fairly remarkable.”
“How?” Chelsea had been reduced to one-word sentences, and even those single words were difficult to form. The seeds of panic were building inside her.
Perhaps Stone expected that because, as he pulled into the parking garage of the FBI offices, he gave her a sympathetic glance.
“Let’s go upstairs, okay?”
“Just tell me. Please. How did you find him?”
“Well, it’s pretty remarkable, really. We’ve had feelers out all over the country for years. We still get tips from time to time, believe it or not, but it’s always turned out to be dead ends until now. But then I got a very interesting call two days ago.”
A warning bell went off in Chelsea’s head. Judging from the way Stone was watching her, the same thought must have occurred to him as well.
“The caller gave us very precise information, including an address and the name Huber’s ostensibly been using,” Stone continued. “I couldn’t get any other information out of him.”
“How do you know it’s not just another crank call?”
“That, unfortunately, is classified. The Las Vegas office offered to pick him up, but as you can probably imagine, I want this one for myself.”
“Take me with you.”
“Chelsea, you know very well that—”
“Please! Please, Stone, I need to see him.” Need to know that it was really him. That he was well and truly finally going to be locked up. That he couldn’t ever come after her again.
“You can see him when we’ve got him in custody. Chelsea, come on. If all goes well, I’ll be back by tomorrow night. Even if there are complications, we’ll have him picked up within the week if this really is him. I’ve got full support from the Vegas office, even though I’m not going to need it.”
“You can’t know that,” Chelsea said, the ancient fear inside her swelling to take over her body. “He’ll fight back. He’ll try to kill you. He’d rather die than be locked up, and he’d want to take you with him. I know him.”
“Look, I understand, honey, I really do.” Stone hadn’t called her “honey” since she was a teen. “But he’s over sixty years old now, with no resources and no way to flee. There’s nothing around that part of town but strip malls and hundred-fi
fteen degree temperatures. If he runs, he won’t run far or fast. And, as you know, I’m extraordinary.”
It was an old joke between them. Ever since Stone had been commended for his “extraordinary service in a duty of extreme challenge” when he was awarded the Medal for Meritorious Achievement after closing a difficult case many years ago, he had teasingly reminded her of the word whenever she expressed despair that Huber would never be caught.
“I know it,” she said quietly. “But I don’t think I can stand to wait. Not if he’s really that close.”
“Look, we’ll put you up tonight. Somewhere safe, where no one can get to you—not Ricardo, not Huber, no one. And I’ll let you know as soon as I have him in custody. Look, Chels, we’ve got all the case evidence from years ago, and the DA will want this tried as soon as possible. You’ll get to see him in court—in handcuffs, staring down the rest of his life in jail. I promise you that.”
“So what, I just have to…wait?” Chelsea demanded. “You want me to sit in some hotel room somewhere while you drive to the middle of the fucking desert?”
Stone sighed, and she could imagine him rolling his eyes. “It will be a nice hotel room. You won’t be alone, Agent Tabitha Bledsoe will stay there with you. You’ll like her. And to pass the time, Agent Vega will be grilling you to find out everything you know about de Santos.”
“Wow, I can hardly wait,” Chelsea said shakily.
“Maybe we’ll even get you a clean shirt.”
#
Stone was true to his word. By eight o’clock the following morning, after a very restless night of sleep in an anonymous chain hotel near LAX, Marco Vega was sitting across the table from her tapping his pen on his yellow pad.
“You’re sure they’ll call the minute he’s in custody?” Chelsea said, holding her cup of coffee beneath her chin so the steam rose up to warm her face. The air conditioning was impossible to turn down, and the room was icy.
“For the third time, yes,” Vega said, rolling his eyes. “Listen, Everson’s been after Huber for years. He’s obsessed. Nothing is going to stop him. And you know he’s as good as they get. Now can we get back to the matter at hand?”
Chelsea sighed and pulled the FBI sweatshirt they’d brought her more tightly around herself. “Fire away.”
#
By mid afternoon, Vega had come at the subject of Ricardo de Santos from every direction imaginable. Chelsea had told him in detail the locations and dates of every time she’d been with him. What she hadn’t shared was the things they’d done. No matter how often Vega asked her to elaborate, the furthest she would go was to admit to a consensual sexual relationship…the exact nature of that relationship she didn’t plan to share with anyone.
But in the afternoon, when her attention was sagging and the room service club sandwich was sitting like a stone in her stomach, she found her attention wandering. Back to the bar where she’d swallowed a stranger’s cum while Ricardo rammed her from behind. To the house in the hills where she’d crawled on the floor and begged for him to fuck her. To the apartment high above the city where he’d tied her to a chair and anointed her with hot wax…
If she were ever to share these details with Vega, she had no doubt they would be added to the case he was building against Ricardo. That Vega would paint him as a sick sadist who lacked a conscience and enjoyed hurting women. Hell, Chelsea herself might have believed the same if she hadn’t been there herself.
But after sharing countless hours in his arms, after experiencing how carefully he gauged her needs and responses, how he guided her to the darkest corners of her own psyche rather than imposing his own on her, Chelsea had a very different view. Ricardo had been giving her what she wanted. What she begged for. He took her to the limits of her capacity for emotion and sensation and then pushed her beyond, to release so powerful it went beyond her body, into her mind and heart and her very understanding of her self.
And while she was certain that her needs meshed brilliantly with his, that Ricardo was as purely Dominant as she was naturally submissive, she knew that many of the things he did for and to her were selfless. That for all the intensity and occasional brutality of their sessions, each moment was carefully planned to take her higher, to bring her release. Forcing her to serve him was Ricardo’s gift to her.
Vega continued to hammer away at the details, reminding her of the crimes to which Ricardo’s name had been linked, forcing her to look at photographs of dead men, lists of stolen artifacts, grainy images of him caught on security cameras in the world’s busiest airports and glittering palaces and desperate slums. He painted a picture of the future she had narrowly avoided, of being enslaved to a criminal kingpin who would destroy her life if she crossed him and toss her aside when he tired of her, showing her one photograph after another of women he’d been linked to in the past.
Chelsea didn’t even try to argue. It was pointless. Vega’s case was compelling, and the facts were clear.
But it didn’t change what she felt in her heart and, as the afternoon wore on, in her treacherous, needful body. Knowing everything, she was desperate for Ricardo’s touch. She longed to see him, to hold him, and—yes—to fuck him again. Knowing she probably never would stripped away her will, and as Vega drove the final nails into the case he was building to take Ricardo down, she grew listless and monotone.
Hopeless.
Because even if the FBI could guarantee her safety, even if they locked up not just Ricardo but everyone in the violent world he inhabited, she couldn’t manage to feel any desire to return to her old life. His absence was bigger than any dream she’d held dear, and she despised herself both for being able to overlook his sins and for helping bring him down.
At a little after six o’clock, when Agent Bledsoe returned for the night shift, Vega gathered all of his papers, turned off the recording equipment, and called it a day. “Tomorrow, with any luck, de Santos will be in the county jail. With the help you’ve given us, by the end of the week, maybe, we’ll have locked up some of the rest of the major players.” He smirked, oblivious to the pain his words caused her. “Maybe they’ll resolve their differences in the prison yard and save the taxpayers the trouble of sending them to death row.”
“Yeah,” Chelsea said listlessly. She knew that Vega was just doing his job, that he was driven by a thirst for justice and a duty to the innocent. She was even clear that she’d had no choice but to help the investigation to prevent further bloodshed, even if it meant that Ricardo lost his freedom forever. But even though she could accept that her lover was a thief and a killer, she still couldn’t accept the idea that the passion between them was wrong.
“Listen, Chelsea,” Vega said, his voice suddenly serious. “I know this has been difficult for you. But while you were cooped up with me in this hotel room, Everson’s been out there hunting down Huber. I know it may seem like too little, too late, and I wish to God we’d been able to bring that bastard down years ago, but when you walk out of this hotel, tomorrow or the next day with any luck, you’re never going to have to be afraid again.”
“Thank you, Marco,” Chelsea said. “I…appreciate what you’re trying to do.”
What she didn’t say was that as long as Ricardo was behind bars, she wouldn’t ever feel safe.
Without him, she feared she wouldn’t be able to feel anything at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chelsea and Agent Bledsoe—who insisted that Chelsea call her Tabby—were sharing a deluxe take-out pizza and a liter of 7UP and watching television when Tabby’s phone rang at a little after nine o’clock.
“Excuse me,” she said tersely, rising from the sofa and cupping her hand around the phone. “Agent Bledsoe here.”
There was nowhere in the hotel room to go to have a private conversation, so Chelsea could hear the voice—if not the actual words—on the other end. A man’s voice, speaking quickly and urgently.
“Yes…uh-huh…oh my God!”
Tabby glanced at Chelsea, who
saw shock and distress in her expression. Had they captured Ricardo? Had something gone wrong? Chelsea felt her entire body go tense with fear, and she strained to hear the conversation.
“Is he dead?”
Ricardo—he must have fought back, or tried to resist. Had they shot him?
Or had he harmed someone else? The fear inside her curdled to poison, and her throat closed with panic. Chelsea had been struggling to make her peace with the history of violence that followed her lover, who had had to defend his family by spilling blood as a child and, now that he was a grown man, had killed in order to protect himself and for revenge.
This was hard enough to take. But she would never be able to forgive him if he had hurt one of the FBI agents—if he’d killed an innocent man.
Maybe the distinction was meaningless to others. A court would convict him either way. But it made a huge difference to Chelsea.
Tabby was gripping her phone tightly, her face screwed up in an expression of horror. “Yes…yes, I will…okay…”
“Please,” Chelsea tried to ask what was happening, but the word came out as a weak croak.
“All right. Please, keep me posted.” Tabby wiped at her eyes. “I’ll be praying.”
She hung up.
“What happened?” Chelsea demanded.
Tabby turned toward her, misery plain in her eyes. “There’s…been a complication.”
“Is it Ricardo? Is he dead?”
“What? No, oh my God, it’s not that.”
Chelsea’s hands shook with dread and she jammed them underneath her legs to steady them. “Did he…” she swallowed, almost unable to get the words out. “Did he hurt someone?”
“No, Chelsea, this has nothing to do with that case. It’s Stone. Oh, God…Huber stabbed him.”
#
Tabby reluctantly shared what little she knew, once a second call an hour and a half later had confirmed the sketchy information she had received. Stone Everson had apprehended Roy Huber in his apartment building in Las Vegas. Roy had run, and Stone had pursued him, tackling him in a culvert near a pork processing plant. Stone had easily taken two guns off him—but somehow missed the knife he’d concealed in a leg holster.
