Angels & Assassins: BWWM Romance

by K. Alex Walker

  “We’ve got a PSG on a mount. Maybe two.”

  “Secure the perimeter.”

  The son of a bitch had been there the entire time. He’d been lying in the woods for God knew how long, probably even while Katia had stumbled through on the verge of death, waiting for Tayler to show up.

  A bullet whizzed by his ear.

  “We’ve got to take out that Heckler.”

  “Stay low. He has two fucking rifles on an automated mount.”

  Tayler was clutching the children to her chest, neither of them awake. She was completely encircled in Eric’s grasp and Eric was outfitted in camouflage gear from head to toe, which was why Tayler hadn’t seen him…why no one had seen him.

  As Gage got nearer, they seemed to get farther away, and he realized that Eric had hooked a pulley mechanism to the back of his gear. The white paint of a vehicle suddenly raced through the trees and the pulley drew them toward the bed of a pickup truck whose speed was quickly accelerating.

  Tayler’s gaze locked on his. She tightened her grip around the children.

  She was going to throw them.

  Gage pumped more energy into his legs and tucked away his weapon.

  Liam came first, a straight shot into his chest. Michaela came seconds later, and due to the increasing speed of the truck and her weight, she seemed to float in the air. He would have to dive to catch her, but if he dove, he would lose momentum. The truck would get away. He would lose Tayler.

  Michaela’s body began to descend. He lurched forward and caught her, secured her next to her brother against his chest, and shifted to roll onto the ground so that his back would hit instead of their bodies.

  He immediately jumped back to his feet and started after the truck again, but it was moving too fast. Eric lifted one of Tayler’s arms, aligned it with his, and made a motion toward him as though he was shooting a gun. Pulling out his piece, Gage took the cleanest shot that he could find—it made a precise hole through Eric shoulder, right through his trapezius, jerking him to the side.

  But, it wasn’t enough. Tayler was still in his grasp. She fought and jerked, but remained trapped. He was still going to lose her, and they both realized it at the same time.

  Her eyes became balls of white. She screamed toward him, her voice laced with the terror that was present when a person knew that they were going to die.

  “I lov—”

  Eric’s hand covering her face stole the rest of her words, and the truck continued to barrel through the woods until she disappeared. The only evidence that she’d been in front of him just seconds before was the sound of her voice echoing between his ears.

  “Get an ambulance,” he growled at the footsteps that approached.

  The man behind him yelled off some commands and Joel’s voice crackled in his ear.

  “He pushed through the roadblock, but we still have him in our sights,” Joel said.

  Gage tugged the piece out of his ear and continued to stare in the direction the truck had driven.

  He’d promised her one fucking thing.

  -18-

  Tayler woke up with her head on a pillow in a very small, but well-maintained room. The room was narrow, leaving just enough space on either side of the queen size bed to fit a pair of legs along the edge. A blanket was pulled up to her chin. The ceiling looked like red bricks that had been painted white. The walls were cinder blocks painted pink. Lighting came from strategically placed lamps around the room, which looked battery operated. There were no windows, which meant that she was probably in a basement or dungeon of some sort. She had no idea where nor any idea how long she’d been drugged. Her last memory had been of watching Gage’s frame get smaller and smaller until he’d eventually disappeared.

  Everything from her shoulders down was dead. Not even her toes bent when she tried to flex them.

  She turned her neck and noticed that there was a toy stove in the corner. In fact, nearly the entire length of one of the long walls was packed with toys and a storage shelf unit complete with chevron and polka-dot decorated bins of varying colors. She could make out the top of a small head and dark, curly hair somewhere along the floor.

  “Excuse me? Excuse me, can you help me?” she called. There was no movement to indicate that the mop of hair had even heard her. She tried to flex her muscles again, but felt absolutely nothing.

  She called out again, but still, the hair didn’t move. Then the person stood and walked to the play stove. It was a little girl dressed in blue denim overalls and a white shirt with a scalloped collar. Her complexion, a yellowish sandy-brown along with her coiled hair indicated that she was most likely a mixed child. Eric’s daughter, Kendall, was mixed, but she hadn’t seen Kendall in months. Plus the last time she’d seen her, her hair had been braided and hidden. However, what were the odds that it would be someone else’s child in the room with her unless Eric also abducted children. Then again, she didn’t put it past him. He’d killed Aja.

  Suddenly, the girl’s large brown eyes darted to her. They narrowed at first and from the distance, Tayler couldn’t tell if it was out of suspicion or just plain curiosity. Now that she was facing forward, it was definitely Kendall. The constellation of brown freckles covering her face was a dead giveaway.

  Kendall ran over to the bed and squeezed her body between the mattress and the wall until she was close enough to touch Tayler’s arm. Then she began to sign.

  “I’m sorry, baby, but I don’t understand,” Tayler replied, shaking her head.

  Kendall’s hands stopped. She tapped her chin, ran to her toy area, and came back with a miniature chalkboard. She studied the board closely as her fingers made large gestures over its surface with a piece of chalk and turned it toward Tayler to share what she’d written:

  Kendall

  She opened her hand and touched it to her forehead as though saluting. Then she touched her chest, made a cross with her index and middle fingers on each hand, and ended it by pointing to her name on the chalkboard.

  “Oh, hi Kendall,” Tayler answered.

  Kendall erased her name, tapped her chin again, and began to write something else. When she turned the board around this time, even though some of the letters weren’t in the correct place, Tayler realized that she was trying to write her name.

  “Yes! Tayler!” she replied. “Do you remember me?”

  Kendall studied her lips and then nodded. Before Tayler had a chance to say more, she ran from the room and out of a door that Tayler hadn’t initially noticed.

  “No, come back!” she yelled, but blew out in exasperation when she realized that Kendall couldn’t hear her.

  This, she hadn’t counted on. She’d been prepared to fight if she’d wound up tied to a chair in a basement somewhere. She’d read dozens of books on essential survival skills after her parents’ ordeal in Chile because she never wanted to be the person in the middle of a forest who didn’t know poisonous plants from edible ones, or what rock formations indicated water could be just up ahead. None of the books had said anything about surviving a kidnapping situation where the abductor had used some form of a synthetic to paralyze his victim.

  Before inserting the earpiece, Joel had informed her that it also had a GPS tracker in the event that she was taken, but Eric had destroyed it before tossing it into the grass. Then he’d brought a cloth over her face and she’d fought as best as she could. Obviously, it hadn’t been good enough.

  Now she was alone and defenseless. The moment she’d realized that Gage had safely caught Michaela and wouldn’t be able to catch up to her, accepting death was no longer as easy or noble as it had been in her head. Her only hope now was that Gage had heard her last message. If all odds pointed to her eventual demise, at least he knew that he was loved and mattered to someone. Hopefully, it would be enough to prevent him from returning to the place that he’d explained as going dark.

  The door reopened and Kendall’s head poked in. She smiled, and the door pushed the rest of the way in. Eric st
ood behind his daughter with his arms folded and his legs shoulder width apart, a deceptively warm and inviting smile on his face. One of his shoulders looked higher than the other, and a bit of white gauze peeked from his shirt. He’d patched where Gage had hit him.

  Everything about him was a complete waste. He was intelligent, attractive, and charming. His accomplishments would have been limitless. Out of everything that he could have been, she couldn’t believe that he’d chosen this.

  “You’re up,” he greeted, lifting both brows in a seemingly innocent gesture. “I knew I hadn’t gotten the dosage wrong, at least for your weight, but I was still getting a bit concerned there. You hungry?”

  “Fuck you,” Tayler spat.

  “Kendall’s about to have lunch,” he went on, unfazed. “I packed some grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. It’s enough to hold us over until we leave. I’ll bring you some.”

  “I don’t want your damn food, Eric.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, you do.”

  Kendall looked up at him and signed.

  “Yeah, she is coming with us,” he responded.

  He left the room, and Kendall bounded back over to the bed. She climbed in, wrapped her arms around Tayler’s body, and rested her head in the hollow of Tayler’s stomach. Eric was a special kind of sadist to bring his daughter into the mix of his depravity.

  He reappeared with sandwiches and soup as promised, a kitchen towel tossed over his injured shoulder. He looked so commonplace that it was sickening. Kidnappers were supposed to be overweight, of average attractiveness, and slightly odd. He was easily the man sitting at the bookstore reading Nietzsche as though reading a pamphlet, unknowingly harboring the attention of every sighted woman within a five mile radius.

  Kendall sat up and started signing to her father.

  “You want to feed her?” he asked. “Can you let Daddy do it this time?

  She pouted and crossed her arms.

  He jerked his head toward the corner. “I told you about that pouting shit, Kendall. Time out. Five minutes.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “It is not up for discussion.”

  She threw her body from the bed, stomped over to the wall, folded her arms and faced the crease.

  “At least she likes you, Tayler,” he said. “That makes it easier for you to be with us for a while. That man that you were always with? Gage? He’s going crazy, by the way. He’s been going crazy for the last three days.”

  He moved half of the grilled cheese sandwich toward her mouth, and she turned her head.

  “I don’t like defiance, Tayler. Eat the damn food. I don’t have time for both her shit and yours.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Tayler insisted.

  “You’ve been out for three days. The only thing you’ve subsisted on in those three days is saline and glucose. This is not a discussion. Eat it or I’m going to kill you.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyhow.”

  He dropped the sandwich onto the plate, closed his eyes, and bounced his knee until the bed vibrated. When he visibly calmed, his eyes opened.

  “Sweetheart, I don’t like ending human lives. I don’t have an evil bone in my body. I do, however, like the thrill of the chase, and your abduction has been my favorite so far. It was like something straight out of a movie.” He shot his hand in the air as though it were a rocket. “They never saw it coming. Had a similar rescue in Afghanistan. Tried it on a whim here.”

  “So you are military,” Tayler said.

  “Ex-military.”

  “If you’re ex-military, then why are you abducting women within a certain proximity of military bases?”

  He looked at her as though she had a negative IQ. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s your modus operandi,” she goaded. “Or didn’t you realize that, since you were using your military status as a cover-up for why you and Kendall moved around so much, you were also creating a pattern for the FBI to figure out?”

  The seconds that passed between them were so motionless that Tayler felt as though she was stuck in plate glass. Then he shook his head and smiled.

  “You ready to eat?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “So, you’re ready to die? The quickest of them all?”

  “Thought you said you didn’t have an evil bone in your body?”

  He turned around. Kendall was facing him. “Good. Time-out is over. I did not want to have to walk over and tap you.”

  She grabbed a Barbie doll before crawling back onto the bed next to Tayler and sitting along her side.

  “I won’t ask you again.” He brought the sandwich to Tayler’s lips and she choked back tears. She’d promised herself that she would fight. The last thing she’d wanted to do was give in to any of Eric’s ministrations, but despite herself, she took a bite.

  “Can I just say something?” he piped up. “You are very beautiful. It was the first thing I thought when I saw you. You’ve got this,” he extended for her to take another bite, “natural beauty. I’ve noticed a lot of deep-skinned women have that natural beauty. It’s probably why Kendall here is mixed.”

  Then he lowered his eyes and laughed. Kendall held up her Barbie for Tayler to see that she’d fashioned a braid in the synthetic hair, and Tayler began to understand the true meaning of the phrase “twilight zone”.

  When she reached forward for another bite of the sandwich, she realized that she could feel the muscles stretching all the way down her back. Previously, she’d only been able to feel the stretch in her neck. Her fingertips now also recognized the cottony feel of the sheets she was resting on.

  “Kendall’s mother was black,” Eric went on. “I didn’t kill her, though. Wish I had. No, her new boyfriend did that. After her carelessness led to her giving birth to a daughter whose only imperfection is a hearing impairment, she decided that she didn’t want to be a mother anymore and left us. Can’t say I felt sorry for her.”

  His face saddened for all of three seconds before his expression evened out.

  “That’s not why I do what I do, though,” he quickly clarified. “I know it may seem that way—that I’m getting revenge on black women because of what Kendall’s mother did. That’s not it at all. I don’t know why I do what I do, or why they die. I guess you could say the plus side is that I couldn’t tell you the last time a woman who looked like you, or Amira, or Jacqueline, or any of them made national news. It’s not saying much about the world we live in, but it is the world that we live in.”

  “Which is what kept you under the radar,” Tayler pointed out.

  “For a while.” He smirked as though unimpressed.

  Tayler finished the sandwich and he picked up the spoon to stir the soup. She checked to make sure that the feeling in her fingertips and down her back hadn’t been a fluke. She could now even feel the lightweight of what felt like a cotton sleep shirt on her stomach.

  “Is that why you need a warm body?” she asked. “Because Kendall’s mother left you, you want these women to stay but you also know they wouldn’t if you didn’t drug them?”

  “You want to feed her the soup?” he asked, holding the bowl toward Kendall and ignoring the question so well that for a split second, Tayler felt as though she hadn’t asked.

  Kendall crawled up to Tayler’s head and situated it in her lap. One hand lovingly cradled the back of Tayler’s head while the other carefully took the spoon from her father’s fingers and brought it to Tayler’s lips.

  She smelled like a child—cookies, Crayola, and baby detergent. She didn’t appear malnourished, and with the way she’d stood up to her father, she obviously didn’t fear him. There were no overt signs of abuse except for the fact that one day, she would understand what her father was doing and had done. Then she would be forced to live with that knowledge.

  When a bit of the soup spilled onto Tayler’s chin, Kendall snapped her fingers at her father for the towel on his shoulder and dabbed the spill with the tenderness o
f a child’s small hands.

  “She wants to know if it’s yummy,” Eric said.

  Kendall’s face was inches from Tayler’s, her large eyes waiting for an answer.

  “Delicious,” Tayler replied.

  She glanced up at her father and he nodded. Then he signed something that caused her to beam with delight and reach for another spoonful. Tayler forced a smile which seemed to please Eric. It was too damn creepy that the most abnormal thing about him had been his crimes. For a person with his history, he seemed sane and ordinary. She supposed that this was how Stockholm Syndrome developed.

  When the bowl was finished, Eric left the room while Kendall returned to a position where Tayler could see her. She started on another braid, this time more slowly as though she wanted Tayler to pick up on the braiding technique. Tayler nodded and smiled. Then she tried her toes again. This time, they bent.

  *****

  Gage didn’t want to hear anything else about Eric’s stint in the Air Force, his technical expertise, or his background. None of those things would tell him where Hall had taken Tayler or what he needed to do to get her back.

  The living room looked like organized chaos with piles of notes, maps, phones, and exhausted officials strewn about in neat piles and sections.

  “No properties anywhere?” he heard Joel say into his phone. “Not just residential. Still nothing? Okay. Okay, fine.”

  “You think he’s going to take her to a place that he has on file somewhere?” Gage asked.

  “At least I’m making myself useful.”

  “The fuck did you just say?” Gage crossed the room in a few steps. “You mean useful like how your men lost the damn pickup truck that had been right in front of you? A white pickup truck?”

  “If I recall correctly, you were also right in front of her.”

  His hand wrapped around Joel’s neck. Joel’s hand went to the piece on his hip.

  “Go ahead. Shoot me.” He tightened his grip. “By that time, I’ll have already collapsed your windpipe. Odds are you won’t hit a vital organ.”