Son of a Beard

by Lani Lynn Vale

  Getting into my car, I drove to Truth’s place first, then to the police station.

  I didn’t know why I went there. I didn’t really know anybody on the force except Big Papa. I knew for a fact that he’d talk to me.

  He may not tell me where Truth was, but he’d tell me if he was okay…which at this point was what I really needed.

  Confident in what I was about to do, I pulled into a spot next to a police car and turned off my own car, staring at the big brown building with a look of foreboding.

  This likely wasn’t a good idea.

  Truth knew people in there, and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

  But I was concerned, and a little bit mad.

  I wanted answers, and I wanted them now.

  As I got out of the car, I was determined to get my answers.

  I had my bad ass face on, and as I marched into the police station, head held high, I headed toward the first officer I could find and demanded to see Big Papa.

  “BP is in a meeting.”

  My sails deflated.

  “What about Aaron?”

  The hard-nosed woman sneered. “I can help you.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “No offense, ma’am, but I’m looking for someone, either Aaron or Big Papa. You aren’t a substitute for them,” I admitted.

  I could tell I’d offended her.

  Her badge said Stephanie, and just when I was about to offer an apology, Aaron appeared around a corner, his phone to his ear.

  He saw me immediately, and his eyes narrowed.

  Coming straight to me, he latched onto my elbow and started to pull me in the direction he wanted me to go.

  Which, apparently, was outside and around the building.

  All the while he maintained his conversation he was having on the phone.

  “Yes, Sir,” he said. “I’ll talk to my wife about it, and after we discuss it, I’ll get back to you. Tomorrow morning, afternoon at the latest.”

  We’d just rounded the corner when Aaron’s K-9 partner appeared, startling the ever-loving shit out of me.

  “Sorry,” he said as he pocketed the phone. “Tank likes to stay outside when Stephanie is in the vicinity.”

  I snorted.

  “I believe I offended her,” I admitted.

  Aaron didn’t even try to deny it. “You probably did, but she gets offended easily. And nobody likes her, so I don’t really care.”

  I blinked.

  “Okay,” I finally settled on. “What’s up with that, though? And where are you taking me?”

  He was leading me down the side of the building toward the woods.

  I didn’t know the man all that well, either. Maybe he was going to take me to the woods and put me out of my misery. Maybe he was going to lead me to some super-secret camp where all the recruits went to learn Batman stuff that they would be able to utilize while on the job as a police officer.

  Hell, maybe I just had a good imagination.

  Whatever the reason, I wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the woods. I was expecting to be led to my doom…or something.

  So when I saw Truth, decked out in black tactical pants, black boots that laced up all the way to mid-calf, a skin tight black t-shirt with Mooresville Police emblazoned in white vinyl on his back, and a black cap with MPD stitched on it, I froze.

  Literally froze.

  Stopped right in the middle of the trail, causing Aaron to stop and turn.

  “What?” he asked, worried that I’d seen something disturbing on the ground.

  I waved him away.

  “Nothing,” I licked my lips. “Does he always dress like that?”

  Aaron’s gaze shifted from the ground to where I was staring, and he snorted.

  “You women are always the same. The man’s working. His clothing choice is purely functional, not fashionable.”

  I shrugged.

  “You…”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I froze, looking away from Aaron to see Truth twisted and looking at me from about ten paces away.

  “I’m looking for you,” I admitted. “Do you have a minute?”

  He didn’t even hesitate to answer.

  “No.”

  I blinked.

  “You…what?” I was confused. “Are you sure you can’t spare me just a few…”

  “Go home.”

  I blinked.

  “But…”

  “Go. Home,” he ground out. “Aaron, escort her to her car.”

  “Wait, Truth,” I held up one finger, trying not to stare at the pitying faces of the men and women standing behind Truth.

  “Go home.”

  I ground my teeth together.

  “I will not go home,” I snapped.

  “I’ll come over later,” he said once he realized I wouldn’t budge.

  I stared at him for a long time before I nodded. “Promise?”

  He gave one quick nod. “Yes.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, took one last look at the men and women staring at me, and then started back across the parking lot toward my car.

  I got in, but I knew in my heart that he’d just lied to me.

  He wouldn’t be coming to see me later, and I was pissed off and hurt that he’d blatantly lied to my face.

  But I knew one thing for certain. He wasn’t getting off that easily.

  I’d be going to his house tonight, whether he wanted me to or not.

  ***

  I waited until nine that night before my impatience could no longer keep me in my home.

  The drive to Truth’s place was short, and it gave me practically zero time to prepare what I was going to say.

  I’d been trying to compose a few words to tell him, but each and every time I came up with something, I dismissed it because it made me sound like a whiney child.

  But now, whiney child sounding or not, I was going to make the man listen to me.

  And he was going to listen to every single word I had to say, or I’d make him.

  At least, I was going to until I walked into his house and found him drinking straight from a half empty whiskey bottle.

  He was sitting on his couch, bottle dangling from two fingers over the arm, his head leaned back staring at the ceiling.

  “I told you to go away.”

  “How do you know it’s me?” I challenged him.

  “Because your car sounds like a fucking bus that’s ready to kick the bucket. It backfires as it shuts off, which is another distinctive tip off,” he mumbled darkly, not bothering to make eye contact with me.

  My car was bad. That’d been why Kenneth was buying me a new one, because it was in need of something more than I could offer it.

  I could, I supposed, buy myself a new one. But I had a sentimental attachment to the old girl. She’d been the one constant thing in my life all the way through my high school years. She’d been my safe haven.

  After Kenneth cheated, though, I couldn’t find it in myself to look for a new car. So I stuck with the same old piece of shit that I’d been driving for years.

  I closed the door behind myself and walked further into the room, wondering idly when the last time he cleaned up after himself was.

  Shit was everywhere. Clothes. Shoes. Boots. Guns. Ammo. If Truth had used it at some point in the last two weeks since I’d been there, it was laying out where he happened to put it down.

  It hadn’t been cleaned since the last time I was there.

  “The doctor told me to start drinking more,” he told me, bringing my attention back to the pitiful state he was drinking himself into.

  Tommy, the doctor of the club he was a member of, would not do that…especially with everything that’d happened to Truth over the last few weeks.

  “I think he meant water, Truth,” I offered darkly. “Not whiskey.”

  He shrugged.

  “Semantics,” he rumbled,
then pulled the bottle up to his lips and took another swig.

  I gritted my teeth.

  “I was a bad guy once,” he murmured into the darkness. “What my father says is true, but I’m not that man anymore.”

  I froze where I was standing.

  “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  He laughed humorlessly.

  “No,” he admitted. “But since you won’t go away, I guess I’ll have to share my sins with you.”

  I walked slowly forward and took a seat on the opposite arm of the couch that he was leaning against, and waited.

  He started slowly.

  Then picked up speed until he spilled every single one of his sins.

  “When I got hurt two weeks into my final deployment, they medically discharged me.”

  “What happened? How did you get hurt?” I interrupted, suddenly concerned and unable to hide it.

  His head rolled on the back of the couch, and he smiled in my direction.

  “I burned my retina during a firefight and couldn’t see down the barrel of my gun for about three months,” he told me. “It was severe enough at the time to discharge me.”

  I nodded my head.

  “Okay,” I said, making a ‘go ahead’ motion with my hand. “What happened then?”

  I felt like a freakin’ shrink with the way I was urging him to move forward.

  “I couldn’t settle into civilian life, so my grandfather suggested that I go work for his best friend. He ran a rescue and recovery black ops organization, and I thought he was one of the good guys, in it for the right reasons.” He swallowed. “Turns out, I was wrong. He was only in it to make a buck, a whole lot of bucks, actually. He had his own agenda that he didn’t share with the rest of us grunts unless or until he felt like sharing it.”

  I didn’t reply, waiting for him to continue. And he did.

  Bitterly.

  “One day, I was sent on a mission by Elais Beckett, the owner of the company and my grandfather’s friend, and it all went well. Intel was good. We found the kid. It was great, right up until it wasn’t.” He took another drink of his whiskey. “We were seconds away from making the recovery when the man came in, took hold of his son, and put a gun to his head.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “Then what?” I pushed.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should urge him to continue talking or not, so I just did what I thought was best. Which was encourage, but not interrupt.

  “Then I shot him. Shot right over that kid’s head. My bullet entered the man’s left eye, and expanded like it was supposed to do, which caused his brain to scramble and the bullet to leave out his left ear. Brains exploded, all over his son’s face and body,” he swallowed.

  “I don’t see why that was bad,” I finally said. “I can see why it was ‘bad’ but not bad, bad. I mean, he was holding a gun to the child’s head, right?”

  He nodded. “Right. But what I didn’t find out until moments later was that the gun the guy was holding was a plastic Airsoft gun, and it still had that stupid orange cap on the end of the barrel.”

  I hummed in understanding.

  “The guy was fucking crazy,” he said. “Probably would’ve killed the kid, but had I been paying better attention, we could’ve apprehended him and taken him in to get treatment, and that kid wouldn’t have had his father’s brain explode all over his face.”

  I bit my lip. “I’m still not seeing why that’s so bad.”

  His eyes broke from mine.

  “I did research on that kid. Found out later on that the father had signs of PTSD, and reacted badly when startled. Which I’d done. Had I not entered the building like I was ready to storm the place, he would’ve likely answered the door just like any other normal human being.” I watched him swallow. “The mother, from reports I’d later read, had called it in not as an ‘emergency’ but as an ‘I want him back, get him here’ kind of call. Which Elais Becket had neglected to tell me about.”

  My stomach was sick for him.

  “What about the ‘killer’ part that your father was tossing at you?”

  “I did research on the other ops we’d done, and apparently that one case wasn’t so isolated. I’d performed four ops that went sour. Four people were mentally impaired, sick, but generally good people.” I was sick to my stomach. “Two of them died. Two of them are paralyzed. I killed them, and didn’t even have any reason to, because they weren’t bad guys. They were just lost. Like I’d been at one point.”

  He scratched his head with the lip of the whiskey bottle, and then leaned forward abruptly.

  “And why does your dad call you a killer?” I asked, confused.

  “Because I am.”

  “How does he know that you are?”

  “Because I told him. One day I needed to unload, and he was convenient. But, he didn’t make me feel better…only worse.” He cleared his throat. “My words, and actions ruined our relationship, and I’ll never have that back.”

  I felt terrible for him.

  “What happened next?”

  “I hunted Elais Beckett down,” he said. “Hooked up with a man named Raphael that I knew from my SEAL days. He pulled some strings, and we got Beckett charged, tried and sent to prison after catching him red-handed pocketing ransom money from a rescue and recovery op that I actually think he orchestrated in the first place.”

  Okay…

  “Truth…”

  He held up his hand. “Let me finish.”

  I fell silent and waited for him to continue, which took a very long time.

  “Elais Beckett made a vow to me the day I went to visit him in prison,” he moaned and leaned forward, letting his head hang. “Should’ve fucking known that he’d get out. He should’ve been denied parole. He was the last two times he came up for release. Unfortunately, the only crime he was charged with was racketeering, and he got twelve years for it. He’s served six of it, and the parole board obviously thought that was enough this time and let him go. Something that the detectives on his case failed to mention to me.”

  I frowned. “They don’t normally ‘forget’ to do that, do they?”

  His head came up.

  “No.”

  The way he said it made my gut clench.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Dead.” He looked me straight in the eyes. “Just like my grandparents.”

  Nausea boiled in my belly.

  “He killed your grandparents.”

  One nod.

  “And you think he’s going to come after you, next,” I assumed.

  Another nod.

  Another swig of the whiskey.

  “And getting drunk is going to help you fend him off if he is coming?”

  His jaw clenched, and he scratched the back of his neck.

  “I’m a depressed mother fucker. Give me a goddamned break,” he snapped, eyes flaring hotly with anger.

  I held up my hands and stood from the arm of the couch.

  The first thing I did was clear the table of the empty beer bottles and trash from his food over the past week.

  “Gross,” I said, holding up a piece of stale pizza.

  He shrugged.

  “I’m out of trash bags.”

  He was. I found that out almost immediately.

  He did, however, have eight million, three hundred, and forty-seven Wal-Mart sacks stuffed into an old Dr. Pepper twenty-four pack box, so I started filling them up with the trash I could find around the house.

  I didn’t stop until I had eighteen bags filled.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a slob,” I told him, indicating the pile.

  He set the bottle down with a clank, and stood.

  His impressive height towered over me, but I wouldn’t be intimidated.

  Not this time. Not with this man.

  “You need to get the fuck out of my house,” he snapped. “Now, before I make you get out
.”

  I knew for a fact he wasn’t going to make me do anything. He wasn’t that type of man.

  But he would say stuff to purposely hurt me to get me to leave. And I had to keep him from doing that right then, so I shut him up with my mouth.

  One second I was standing in front of him, and the next I launched myself at him.

  He was either going to drop me or catch me.

  Thankfully, he chose to catch me.

  I was glad he did because otherwise I would’ve hit the floor hard with how high I’d jumped.

  He grunted as my body hit his.

  Curving his arm underneath my ass, he pulled me close to him, and slammed his mouth down onto mine.

  One deep, long, wet kiss that showed both of our frustration over the situation.

  His anger paired with my annoyance was enough to shoot that kiss to the next level.

  I’d never, not ever, had angry sex before, but the second Truth shoved his hand up under my dress (yes, I’d planned this out incredibly well) and ripped my panties free from my body, I knew I was about to experience what angry sex was all about.

  And I was right.

  It was better than anything I’d ever experienced before in my life.

  Emotions were heightened, making everything more forceful, more powerful, full of more feelings, just more everything.

  His hand under my dress immediately honed in on where I was wet for him, and he teased my clit once before circling his large finger around my entrance.

  “You should leave,” he grated out.

  I grabbed a hold of his beard roughly and pulled his mouth back down to mine.

  Tomorrow I would have a beard burn.

  Tomorrow I’d be sore.

  Tomorrow I would deal with that, but right now I just didn’t give a damn.

  Truth was mine, and I was his, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  I wasn’t letting anybody, not even him, come in between us.

  And as his fingers roughly entered me, I gasped into his mouth.

  His head then dropped down and his teeth clenched the top of my dress and I heard a slight tearing sound. I didn’t even care.

  His mouth encircled my bare breasts (yes, I told you I planned well—no bra equaled easier access), and my mind was on only one thing.

  Getting him inside of me. Something in which he gave me seconds later.