“Yeah, the case is still technically open,” I remark as Cassandra and Lila come trotting down with the dog. “Budget cuts made it not worth the police’s time to close it. Formally, anyway. I’m surprised teenagers haven’t torn the tape down already.”
“Not a lot of people know about this place,” Cassandra remarks, glancing between Jon and I. “By the way, which one of you is ‘Chains’?”
Lila suddenly fights to hold back a smirk, Sandy doesn’t hold back an eyeroll, and I arch an eyebrow at the two before slowly raising my hand. Cassandra looks me up and down briefly, then glances at Lila, who hurriedly steps forward to gesture among all of us.
“Cass, this is Chris, my…friend, and Sandra, my mom. And this is Jon, the homeowner. Chris, Jon, S- Mom, this is Cassandra, my bestie.”
There’s a moment of awkward silence among all of us as we trade nods and smiles, and I can sense that a lot of the people here would dearly like some time to talk about all the people they’ve just met. But time is a factor here, so I decide to step up and be the bad guy who gets things moving.
“Alright, everyone, let’s try to get in and out of here as fast as we can,” I say. “The longer we’re messing around in here, the more likely a pedestrian is to see us and call the police.”
The house itself has a sad, forlorn energy to it. I can feel it the second we step close to the place. I can still make out the individual rooms, all laid bare and open by the fire that tore through it all. The concrete foundation is obviously still intact, but all the rest looks like it’s been eaten away by flames and time. There are footprints leading in and out of the building, telling me we aren’t the first people to come here by a long shot. I imagine mostly kids and photographers come through here, which can be destructive, but it doesn’t make this a lost cause.
Jon looks especially uneasy as we approach. He keeps letting his eyes linger on different parts of the building, looking thoughtful and saddened. I can tell he had a lot of memories here that he wasn’t ready to let go of, and he might not be ready to dredge them up here today. Still, our combined efforts here are our best chance.
“Any leads on what we’re looking for?” Cass asks as we step past the police tape and into the wreckage.
“Information is best,” Lila answers as she walks through the house with us, letting Henry off his leash to start sniffing around. “Which makes this tricky. Any paper that was loose in the house has definitely been either burned or worn away by the weather over time. So if you can find any containers, that would-”
“Bark bark bark!”
Our attention turns to Henry, who has wasted no time wandering down what used to be a hallway and into a room past the living room. There, he seems to be circling around a burned, blackened object I can’t make out, but it’s large.
“Oh my god,” Jon says, and he hurries over with Lila to see what has Henry so excited.
Jon stoops down in front of it while Lila tugs Henry away, petting him and shushing him peacefully while I approach Jon and look over his shoulder. Here, I can see that he’s standing over a warped, half-crumbled wooden desk.
“I can’t believe this survived,” Jon says with a growing smile as he gives the drawer a firm tug, and it pops open to reveal what looks like a stack of folded papers. “These…this is where I kept the love letters me and my wife Helen sent to each other. Before internet,” he adds, smirking back at those of us under 30.
“Why was Henry barking at them?” Lila wonders out loud.
“Does your wife wear perfume, Jon?” Sandy asks.
“Well, yes, actually,” Jon chuckles. “She’s from Georgia, after all.”
“Henry smells the perfume,” Sandy says with a broad smile, nodding to Lila. “Lila probably wears something similar, and he recognizes it.”
I give Sandy a very surprised look, and she laughs, shrugging her shoulders.
“I read a lot of detective books.”
Lila gives her mom a proud smile, and I chuckle before looking back to a teary-eyed Jon, who’s busy fawning over the old letters.
“Can’t wait to show these to Helen,” he says, trailing off.
But the next moment, his eyes go wide, and he sets the letters aside, going back to the drawer in a hurry.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“This desk— the reports told me the fire destroyed everything of value, and I wasn’t in a hurry to come revisit this place all burned to ashes, so I never thought to check. But this lower drawer here has a false bottom.”
“What for?” Sandy asks as the lot of us gather around the desk, watching Jon pull one of the side drawers out entirely, pushing past some charred office supplies to open a false bottom.
“Official documents,” Jon explains, flashing us a grin. “You know, tax records, receipts for big expenses, that kind of thing. More importantly though, this is where I kept all the letters that moved around that had to do with the foreclosure battle.”
“Oh my god, that’s perfect,” Lila says, stepping forward and helping him start taking out handfuls of letters. “Everyone, take a stack— let’s start sifting through all this.”
Huddled in a charred, open-air ruin of what used to be a very diligent man’s study, we start reading through everything. My stack contains mostly the financial details. I’m impressed that Jon was able to hold the line in the neighborhood for so long— the bank was waving a lot of money at him for this place before they went to foreclosure. He must have known that they were doing something shady and dug his heels in for the sake of the rest of the neighborhood.
“Hey, Cha- Chris, can you come over here and double-check this for me?” Lila asks, sounding reluctant and almost suspicious.
I step over to crouch beside her and look at what she’s reading, and she hands it to me. My eyes scan over it, and as they do, I realize why she seemed so stunned by what she was reading.
“What is it?” Sandy asks, looking up at us.
“This…can this be right?” I say, squinting. “It lists the bids that were coming in for the house, and one of them is obviously Ed’s, but…it’s not Ed’s company.” I look up and to everyone else. “The company is registered under Lila’s name.”
“Why would he have his company under Lila’s name?” Sandy asks, furrowing her brow.
“I know he wanted me to be his successor, I guess, but that doesn’t really explain this…” Lila says, scratching her head.
“Can I see that?” Cass asks, approaching to look at the paper. “I know a site where I can look up public info about registered companies. I learned about it in a business class I had to take, long story.”
Cassandra furiously types away at her phone, glancing at the paper every now and then, and I pace with my hands on my hips while we wait with baited breath.
“Okay,” Cass says, “this company was registered in Lila’s name…not long after she was born, actually. It looks like he set it up as one of those things where, for tax purposes, it’s in his child’s name until she’s old enough to assume full ownership once she reaches a certain age. It’s actually not that unusual, for people like him, I mean. In this case, Lila assumes full ownership on her 21st birthday.”
“That’s…tomorrow,” Lila says, looking disoriented.
“There’s no way that information is current,” I say, shaking my head, not willing to believe something that good so easily. “A guy like Ed covers his basis. He must have had that changed recently.”
“I’m not so sure, now that you mention it,” Lila says, rubbing her forehead. “He always thinks my birthday is the week before Christmas, not the week before Thanksgiving. If he planned on changing it, he thinks he has a few more months still to go.”
“That bastard was using you for some kind of tax scheme and didn’t even bother to tell you about it?” Sandy says, going red in the face.
“But if this is current information, that means you’ll be the one who runs your dad’s business as of tomorrow,” I say, barely able to believ
e it myself.
“And I’ll have access to all his records,” Lila says, looking at Jon. “I could get any of the info I need to incriminate him!”
I open my mouth to reply.
BANG.
I can see everyone’s shocked faces around me, and I watch Jon grab Cassandra and Sandy grab Lila to get down. But I can’t hear any of it. All I can hear is the loud, sharp ringing in my ears. I put a hand to an odd feeling on the side of my head, and I feel something warm and sticky.
A bullet just grazed my ear.
I get down at the same time that my hearing starts to come back to me slowly. I hear the shouting of Jon and Shirley as I reach for the pistol I have hidden in my pant leg, and I quickly grab Lila and help her and Sandy get down.
“What the fuck was that?!” Sandy shouts, looking ready to kill a man with her bare hands as Jon helps Cass take cover behind the ruined desk.
“Gunshot!” I bark, and I gesture sharply to the edge of the house. “Get out of the room, take cover behind the foundation!”
“Who shot at us?” Lila shouts as she scoops up a madly barking Henry and shields him with her body.
That’s one thing I can guess the answer to before I even look. I turn my eyes to our cars, and I see that we’ve been snuck up on. There are men heading our way, all of them dressed in black, all of them armed with pistols, all of them trained on us.
“I think your dad’s been watching us,” I growl before I fire off a couple of shots back at the men.
They must not have expected me to be armed, because one of them goes down immediately, not even taking cover. The others catch on very quickly, though, and soon, they’re hurrying into positions behind the cars.
“They’re moving, get to cover, now!” I bark at the others, and this time, they listen. Two by two, all of them disappear behind the concrete foundations of the house, and the second they’re safe, I start charging in the opposite direction.
Fear means nothing to me anymore. I’ve faced the worst the world has to throw at a guy like me, and now, I have the beginnings of something that I care about, right here with me.
I take cover behind what used to be an oven as shots start whizzing overhead and pinging off my rusty barrier. The door of the oven is missing, and I look inside to see a large cast iron skillet sitting inside. I reach in and toss it out from behind the stove to the left, and immediately, shots start hitting it.
At the same time, I lean out from the right side of the oven, and I manage to drop one of the men hiding behind Cass’s car. Once he’s down, the other guys look over in shock, and I use that distraction to drop another before darting out of cover and running for the living room.
This time, I don’t have the benefit of something big and metal to hide me, but I have to keep moving forward. I have to keep them firing at me, away from where the other, unarmed innocents are hiding. These thugs are from Ed Hawthorne, and I know they won’t shy away from killing them.
Hell, the feeling in my gut tells me that if they’re here, that means Ed has decided he wants no survivors. Lila was standing close to me when that shot grazed my ear. He wouldn’t have taken that shot if this hit squad meant to leave anyone alive.
I’m glad we parked so close to the house. I race past the remains of a heavy bookshelf, fake out, and dart back through the front door. I have one more shot left in my gun, and I’m going to make it count. In the meantime, that’s not the only weapon I have.
My knife has served me well before, and it will again.
Adrenaline is coursing through me by the time I reach the cars, and I know there’s more than one gun barrel trained on me, but I don’t care. I couldn’t care if I tried. I’m seeing red now, and I’m not about to let a little gunfire stop me.
As I vault over the hood of Sandy’s car, I feel a couple of what feel like bee stings in my shoulder and leg, but that can’t stop me either. I’m closing in on one of the men, and I hear him swear when he sees 6 and a half feet of big, burly, bearded man lunge at him with a knife in hand. I tackle him to the ground, and by the time his body thuds under me, the knife has sunk into his neck and out the other side.
I rip it out and turn around me to the man standing behind him, and before he can get the shot off, I raise my pistol and fire the last round into his eye.
A third bullet hits my shoulder from behind, but I don’t turn around. I dive for the gun in the hands of the man who I just killed, and I wrench it from his dying grasp before spinning around.
I freeze.
The last man standing is much closer than I anticipated, but he’s frozen too. We’re at a standoff, and neither of us is willing to move a muscle.
“Drop the gun, and you might live,” I growl.
“Tough words for a man losing that much blood,” the assassin retorts.
I clench my jaw, feeling the warm ooze down my chest and legs. I’m starting to feel woozy, but I can fight it off…for now. But soon, my injuries are going to catch up to me. I wonder if they hit anything vital.
If I’m already a dead man, I might as well kill this bastard and take him down with me.
Click.
“He said drop the gun.”
It’s Lila, standing over the body of one of the men I’ve killed, holding the gun and pointing it at the last assassin. I don’t think she knows how to shoot, but at this close a range, that’s not a risk any sane man would take.
The mercenary glares me down for a few seconds…then drops his weapon, raising his hands and putting them behind his head.
Sandy immediately races over and snatches the gun, adding to the number of people keeping the man at gunpoint, and I smile.
“Shit, you did great,” I say. “You’re…great.”
“Chains!” Lila shouts, and it’s the last thing I see before I look down, see my white shirt drenched in my own blood, and feel myself pass out.
Lila
I finally appreciate the quiet, dark, cozy solitude of the comfort of my own room, kneeling on my soft bed…and waiting for the new addition to my daily life.
The black silk blindfold is weightless on my face, but it blocks out any light in the already dim room. My hands are cuffed behind my back, and the cuffs are linked by a thin chain to a collar around my neck. Every time I shift, I’m reminded of the soft, scant, frilly lingerie hugging my body and exposing me like a work of art to the dark room around me.
But there’s only one set of eyes that deserves to look at me when I’m all bound up like this.
Chains’s heavy footsteps make my body shiver as he comes close to the bed. I can hear him breathing, looking my body up and down and murmuring in soft approval. It has been over a week, and seeing how quickly he recovered from the bullet wounds he took to his muscles has shown me just how powerful and terrifying his body really is.
He told me it was just because he couldn’t keep from touching me any longer.
I believe it with all my heart.
“Do you like it?” I breathe in a weak whisper into the darkness as he paces around the bed like a hungry animal, taking in my scent and drinking in my silhouette.
“Bold question,” his deep voice rumbles.
He steps close to the bed from behind, and I feel the mattress under me shift as he kneels on it and approaches me. The next moment, his huge, rough hands are running up from my hips to my breasts. He gropes me, feeling their weight and rubbing his fingers around the rich fabric of my lacy bra. I suck in a sharp breath and realize how hard my nipples are when he touches them, even through the bra.
He chuckles and runs his thumbs along the edge of the bra, teasing me gently as he brings his mouth to my neck and breathes on me. His beard tickles my shoulder, and my heart races.
“Do you trust me?” he growls.
“Yes, Daddy,” I reply softly, obediently.
“Good girl,” he growls, and squeezes my breasts a little harder. “What’s the safe word?”
“Pepper,” I breathe.
“That’s right,
” he says. “Say that word, and everything stops.”
He takes hold of my chain and pulls me back by the leash very gently, letting his fingers show how much control over me it gives him. Every time he moves me around, I feel a shiver of delight go through my body. I’m not holding the reins here, he is.
I’m Daddy’s plaything, and the thought of that is getting me wet.
“Show me your neck, girl,” he commands me.
I bite my lip, hesitating as a devious thought crosses my mind. Instead of yielding immediately, I turn my head away, shying away from his command. I can’t help but enjoy testing Daddy’s authority. The rebellion gives me a thrilling shiver.
Who am I kidding? I do it because I like the consequences.
I hear a low growl from Chains’s chest, and he tugs at my leash in a firm, steady pull that makes me arch my back for him as he unhooks the chain from my cuffs to hold it like a leash.
The next thing I know is the sharp crack of his hand against my ass as he spanks me, and I let out a whimpering yelp.
“Feeling disobedient today, pet?” he snarls at me, making me quiver like a leaf. “You know what happens when my little girl doesn’t give me what I want.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I whisper.
He wraps the chain around his fist and guides me back, and he takes one hand away from me. That would be enough of a punishment— denying me pleasure is one of his favorite ways of making me squirm.
But then, I hear the metallic shink of a switchblade popping open, and a ripple of excitement runs up my body.
“You know what that sound means, girl,” he growls.
I do. He brings the knife to my shoulder, letting the flat of the blade trace over my skin and wander its way down my soft, exposed chest. He drags the tip across the fine lace, and I feel my heart pounding.
“If you don’t give me complete obedience,” he says, gripping my breast with his other hand, “I take something from you. It’s too bad. I liked this outfit.”
“No, please! I’ll be good!”
He brings the knife to where my bra meets between my breasts, and in one swift motion, he cuts it open. I gasp, remembering the price tag, but how casually and ruthlessly he rips it open excites me. He doesn’t stop there, either. He brings the knife up to the shoulders and cuts them loose too, then some of the straps at the back. He makes sure I can hear the sound of the expensive fabric ripping as he lets it fall to the sheets in pieces.
Stealing Her Page 16
