by Brook Wilder
“Where’s my sister?” he asked.
“I don’t know who that is,” he coughed out through his suffocation.
“The Caracals having been taking girls, kidnapping them,” Roarke said, grabbing the man by his hair and pulling.
“I don’t know anything about that shit, I swear,” he said. “I was hired to take out some people. Loose ends or some shit. Don’t know anything else.”
“Who hired you?”
He hesitated.
“Use your tongue or lose it,” Hanna said sharply.
“Some chick. Thin. Black hair. Dark eyes,” he said. “I didn’t get a name I swear.”
Roarke and Hanna’s eyes met, somewhere in the middle, in the air between them, the realization was there. Roarke felt his blood run cold, his stomach turn into knots. He felt himself start to sweat and his hands shake. He saw an image of Isabelle in his mind’s eye. He saw her there, innocent and smart and everything he never was but hoped someone in the family would be.
“What chick?” he demanded, through gritted teeth, his face inches from the gunman’s, “What else?”
“I don’t know. Fuck man,” he said, fighting for breath under Hanna’s grip. “She had a butterfly tattoo on her wrist.”
“What the hell?” Roarke breathed out, calmer and quieter than he’d been since this began.
He looked up at Hanna, imploring her to have some way out of this, some way to make it all not real. But she looked just as lost. Her grip in the gunman faltered and he managed to get a clean shot from his elbow to just above her eyebrow. She let out a grunt as she fell back and he broke free.
He rushed over to the wreckage of his bike and let out a growl.
“I’m coming for a replacement bike from you fuckers, don’t forget it,” he said. He ripped the license plate off the back of it and then took off running down the street. Roarke let him go.
Hanna got herself to her feet, holding the point of impact. Underneath her fingers a bruise was already forming and blood was trickling out from between her digits.
“Bastard,” she hissed.
Roarke needed a drink. Several, actually. He didn’t say a word as he walked over to his bike and got on, sitting there waiting for Hanna to come over before speeding back to his apartment.
***
“You’re taking this pretty well.”
“Why? Because I’m a girl? If we actually got squeamish about blood we’d have a real problem every month.”
“I just meant that facial wounds bleed like a motherfucker and you’re sitting there like it’s a papercut.”
“Not my first time wounded.”
She thought about the first time she managed to slice open her forehead. It wasn’t even in the line of duty. She was twelve and she fell off the swing set James had made for her in the backyard. She’d been terrified then, all the blood that seemed able to pour out of her head. It took ten minutes for her uncle to calm her down and tell her it was normal. As an adult she was wary just to make sure it didn’t get in her eye while she chased down a perp with a gushing forehead wound.
In Roarke’s apartment he was applying gauze to it between bouts of cleaning it. Eventually, the gauze took and the wound began to clot. The gauze stuck to her forehead of its own accord but his hands remained. He was no longer looking at the cut on her head, but his eyes were traveling over the expanse of her face, taking in every inch he could see there. She very quickly felt self-conscious and fought a squirm. He seemed to read her mind, his free hand coming up to push back a stray piece of hair, brushing her cheek softly in the process.
She fought the urge to sink into it. It was impossible to fight now. She knew what the rippling currents between them were and she knew she wasn’t the only one feeling it. It would be so easy to lean in and just let it happen. No one would know, no one would see them. They could release everything that was bottled and building, she could act on all those things she thought about while watching him sleep, pretending not to see how hard he was in the morning when he woke up.
She saw heat in his eyes, when they finally met. She could see what he wanted there, the things he might imagine. She wondered what it would be like to watch those eyes over top of her while he moved inside her, while he fell apart from the feel of her around him.
But a ring from Roarke’s phone broke the tension and she realized it was probably for the best. He went to answer it, and she thought about the massively long cold shower she would be taking later tonight.
Chapter 9
“I know asking if you’re okay is probably annoying--”
“Yes it is.”
“But someone has to ask.”
“Since we all know the answer, why don’t we just leave it at not asking and calling it a day?”
Hanna had gotten that cold shower when she got home. But not before setting to work with her own fingers and relieving the built up energy between her legs that was going to burst whether she wanted it or not. So she decided to help it along, thinking about the crevices of his muscles and the power of his eyes.
She’d hated him. Part of her still really did. She found him continually irritating and insulting and all sorts of other brands of awful. But she couldn’t deny there was something underneath those layers that called out to her, quiet and fleeting as it might have been, and now she couldn’t stop seeing it. Couple his secret attractive qualities with his overtly obvious rippling and cut muscles and handsome face and she had a recipe for disaster. She felt incredibly guilty about the things she thought and the actions she took to relieve her tension, only a few moments after getting off the phone with her uncle to give him an update.
But this was a few days later and she was past that moment of weakness. Luckily for her, right now Roarke was pouting into a can of cheap beer and it made incredibly easy to bury all those feelings she was thinking about.
“You brooding over it at every bar in town isn’t going to help anyone,” she said.
“I’m not in the interest of helping anyone. My sister hired a gunman to take out some kid not even old enough to buy a beer,” he said.
“You’re surprised? Look at the family she comes from.”
“Isabelle was never like us. She was the one who was going to make something of herself in this world. She was going to go places.”
Hanna sighed. Everything about Isabelle’s character profile pointed towards a quiet young woman. She had good grades, managed to hold jobs in the process. She had plenty of friends who weren’t drug users or hookers. With the exception of being guilty by association, she had nothing of a criminal record, not even vandalism or trespassing. Not even a speeding ticket.
So had they all gotten it so wrong?
“This is why they say you should never meet your heroes,” Robert said, saddling up to the bar to sit next to Roarke. “We build people up so much they’re bound to disappoint in the end. Even when it’s our own family and we’ve known them forever. Nobody knows every part of everyone. Sometimes it ends up bad.”
“Not Isabelle.”
“And that is the exactly attitude I’m talking about. Life bites you right in the ass and you can get up and move on or you can focus on how it can’t be true. Live in the past or move towards the future, Roarke. Your decision.”
Robert reached over for a handful of pretzels from the communal bowl and shoved them into his mouth. He wiped the bits from his face and hands, brushing them on the floor for some bar back to clean up later. He smiled ruefully and gave a sarcastic chuckle.
“Isabelle was intelligent, that right there is red flag number one,” he said, shaking his head.
“What do you mean?” Hanna asked, leading in. It would be too suspicious if she tried taking notes on a napkin.
“She’s a learner. She was learning from us the whole time. She just didn’t show her hand until it suited her,” he said. “For what purpose, who knows? That should be our next goal to find out, I think.”
A beer appeared in front of Robert
and he took a sip, the white foam from the head clinging to his mustache as he pulled the glass away. He wiped a sleeve across his face and sighed. He lifted his wrinkled, knobbly hands that had seen too much work, and rubbed at his tired face and eyes.
It was hurting him too, Hanna could tell. But Roarke was a control freak and this was the most out of control things had ever been for him, she imagined. Not to mention he was now publically dealing with the fact that his sister had been conspiring against the family for some time and he never noticed it once. It didn’t exactly inspire devotion in a leader who couldn’t see deception right in front of his face, from his own family.
Robert, for his part, seemed to be dealing solely with heartache. His granddaughter was someone he never imagined. His silence was all about grief. Between the two of them, Hanna felt useless. This wasn’t her fight, nor her family. Yet she was sitting there trying to think of ways to console the two men.
“I’m going out for a smoke,” Roarke announced, downing his beer and sliding off the bar stool.
Hanna and Robert watched him walk away before they both turned to face the bar once again, though through the corner of her eye she could feel Robert watching her from the empty space that now sat between them.
“If you were hoping to get through to him,” he said. “Now is an excellent opportunity.”
“I don’t need him throwing another hissy fit at me,” she said with an eye roll. Robert laughed.
“He does have a temper when things don’t go his way, which is more often than he likes to admit,” he said. “I’m proud of him. For all his faults, he is a natural leader. But sometimes he needs a little help and right now I don’t even think my sagely advice is going to be enough to get his mind back on a productive track. So why don’t you give it a go? I’ll even get you some liquid courage to start with.”
“Now that is an offer I can’t refuse.”
Robert smiled. It was hard to imagine him as the leather clad leader of a bike gang when he looked so much like a proud grandfather on the holidays. He was what Hanna was always envious of her friends and peers for. She never had real grandparents, none that she knew who brought her presents for no reason and gave her candy when her parents weren’t looking. She was a little old for all that now but a shot from this man might fill part of that gap.
An ounce of Wild Turkey sat in front of her and it disappeared just as quickly as it came. It brushed down the back of her throat in a burning massage. She felt it settle in her stomach and, just as quickly, she gave into the spread of the warmth.
It was enough to get her out of her seat and headed for the door after Roarke.
She found him only steps into the alleyway. He had a cigarette hanging limping from his mouth, it was building ash as he stared off into the constellations made from the brick wall staring back at him. It seemed have all sorts of answers for the way he was watching it so intently.
She stepped up and pulled the cigarette from his mouth, knocking off some of the stray ash, and placing it back in his waiting lips. The only sign that he registered any of it was a blink.
“You really need to get it in gear,” she said. He snorted. “I mean it. Moping, pouting--which, no grown man should be doing--that’s done with. We have shit to do and it would be easier if you weren’t dead weight right now.”
He turned to look at her with a scowl but she wasn’t fazed by it.
“You don’t scare me.”
“You sure?”
He stepped into her space. She could smell the shaving cream he used on his neck that morning. She was afraid to swallow or blink because he might feel the disturbance in the air and he’d know he’d won this round. She felt the warm swirl of the whiskey in her stomach and tried to turn it into some kind of steel against him. She couldn’t tell if he was drunk or just out of his mind from lack of sleep. He’d stopped letting her come over.
“We have a job to do,” she said, evenly. “Yes, it didn’t go the way you wanted but you can’t act like a child about it forever. You had your mourning period for whatever innocent little flower you thought your sister was and now it’s time to get going.”
He watched her. This was the moment that would dictate how the rest of this entire ordeal would go. He could hit her, he could kiss her, he could walk away without a word. Any one of those options would lead to a completely different place and Hanna had no idea which one was coming. He was unpredictable. She realized that now. That was an asset to himself she couldn’t belittle in her head. Only he really knew how his brain worked and not being in privy to it, ready for it, some way in control, was wearing on her ability to approach this correctly.
She was a cop. She was wearing the name of a woman who was a gang member, who beat people up, who road bikes, and shot guns off without a permit. Laura was the real one underneath. She was the cop, the child of a broken home, raised by a man who loved her enough for the parents that abandoned her and more. She was loyal. She was good at her job. She wouldn’t let Roarke’s eyes get so far in her head she couldn’t get them out. She wouldn’t let the smell of him get so familiar that she couldn’t shake him of her. She wouldn’t let him stand this close without retaliating, taking back control of the situation.
But Hanna was the one standing there.
“What do you want?” he asked quietly, seriously.
“I want to find those missing girls and answers,” she said. It was the truth. She wanted those girls safe and sound. When that was done she could worry about the confusing cesspool of feelings brewing in her stomach like a bad mix of alcohol. “What do you want?”
He looked like he expected that question. He looked at her calmly, taking even breaths and blinking. He took the cigarette from his mouth, half gone, and tossed it to the side where it sizzled out in a puddle on the ground.
“I want the same thing,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Yes. We need to get those girls back. I can worry about figuring out what happened to Isabelle and my failures as a brother afterwards.”
She knew she should say he wasn’t a failure, that sometimes things happened, that his family loved him and was better for his leadership and protection. But she didn’t have the time to deal with his moping a second longer. So she nodded, took a sharp breath, and turned down the alley.
She moved back into the bar on legs more shaky than the ones that carried her outside.
Chapter 10
Several days went by and Roarke didn’t see or hear much from Hanna. It was for the best. His self-control when it came to her went from dwindling low to practically nonexistent. He could see it in her too, she was fighting the same white hot demons inside her stomach and chest. In any other world he would have fucked her until she couldn’t remember her name, several times, by now. He would have bought her drinks and danced with her so close there would be no way to tell where their bodies began and ended.
But instead he was struggling to keep his own raging blood under control. He had to fight every single wet dream, every single time his eyes wandered over her, every time their gazes met and he felt like she was holding onto him with nothing but the energy between the pair of them. Pushing her away wasn’t working when he saw her eyes swimming around in his head at night and his hand seemed to have a mind of its own as it slid its way down his abs and grabbed onto to where he was hard and already aching for her.
It was a completely fucked situation and he had no idea how to get out of it, or even if he wanted to. So he took to meeting her only in public places, areas where he was less likely to jump out of his seat and shove his tongue into her mouth.
“I don’t see what the big deal is here,” she said, licking barbecue sauce off her fingers and he had to look away.
“Now you’re just being stubborn.”
“Wings are wings. These taste like any other.”
“They taste like fucking heaven and you can admit that you were wrong, it won’t kill you.”
“No, but lying might.
They’re okay.”
He shook his head and smiled. She winked at him as she went in for another wing. Her teeth pulled and thrashed at the soft meat. Once or twice he considered trying to steel or muscle the recipe for these wings out of Tony but he was a loyal cook to his owner.
He had to force himself to realize that relaxing wasn’t the end of the world and that taking a break from his relentless chase down the complete lack of paper trail his sister left, was okay. She learned from the best, clearly, because her loose ends were tied up in knots that would make a sailor jealous. Who knew she had all this potential hiding away inside her?
