by Rhys Ford
His world—their world—closed in, an aperture closing in tight to focus on only a sea of cotton and entwined bodies. Time slowed around them, every moment marked by a gasp or the slap of Dante’s hips into Rook’s waiting, needy heat.
Every thrust brought Dante closer to the brink, and he fought his urge to bury himself deeper into Rook. The delicious pull of Rook’s edge along his cock feathered away his control, throwing his focus outward until Rook became the only point in his existence.
“Dante, so… damned close,” Rook grunted, folding up to meet Dante’s thrusts. “Fuck, hurry.”
They flowed together, thighs and shoulders straining to deepen the beat they’d created, but the rush of pleasure building in Dante’s balls threatened to break apart and drown them. Rook’s nails dug into his shoulders, adding to the bites and bruises he’d gotten from his lover’s ravenous flirting.
Rook’s trembling, a slight shiver through his torso and down his belly, was all the warning Dante needed. He rocked in, rising to his knees, and hitched Rook’s legs up, setting a pounding pace. Spreading Rook open under him, Dante found his own stars, his own universe unfurling around him when Rook reached down between them and stroked his own shaft.
The pleasure of Rook’s warmth and the erotic hedonism of his lover’s arched back, teeth dimpling his lower lip, and his unfocused, hot gaze broke Dante. He’d brought the flush of pink to Rook’s high cheekbones, wrung out every gasping mewl with a graze of his fingers or a pierce of his cock into Rook’s welcoming velvet clench. His lover’s bite found his earlobe, a quick, decisive nip soothed over with a whisper Dante would never tire of hearing.
“Mi cielo, yes?” Rook’s whiskey-rumble left a resonant thump in Dante’s chest. “Te amo, Dante.”
Dante slowed his thrusts just long enough to return Rook’s nibble, then murmured in his lover’s ear, “I know.”
Rook’s shock of laughter shattered the last of Dante’s control. His unbridled, open joy brightened the shadows in the room, and the kiss he gave Dante stole every ounce of thought from Dante’s already overwhelmed mind. A shudder, then a splash of hot liquid on his stomach and Dante was lost. A few more thrusts, a threading spiral of sharp-bitter pain and he poured into Rook’s body, his cock buried in as deep as he could get. They continued to rock, unwilling or unable to let each other go. The world snapped brittle, and Dante’s mind went white, the tinfoil-on-teeth of his senses overloading fighting with the longing to spend his life wrapped up in Rook.
Lethargy took him down, and Dante reluctantly pulled free, collapsing beside Rook on the bed. They lay there, focused solely on breathing. Then Dante mustered up enough energy to roll over onto his side.
“You’re going to break me one day, cuervo.” It was nice to see the worry gone from Rook’s face, but something lingered, an echo of a problem Dante hadn’t quite eased away. “You were going to tell me something when I got home, but… I think you distracted me.”
“Oh, is that what we’re calling it?” Rook snorted. “Distracting you.”
“You have all my attention,” he admitted with a laugh. “I even forgot to tell you about the box Manny had me drag upstairs. He said it was something from one of the auction houses. Label said Natterly’s. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have brought it up without checking it out first.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything, but that doesn’t mean anything.” He shrugged as best he could in his nest of crumpled sheets. “Davis Natterly sends me stuff all the time to look at. If I want it, I send him a payment. If not, he gets a courier to pick it up. Totally normal. Last time it was a four-foot-tall Gojira rubber suit. Cut him a check before I even checked the damned thing’s history. I’d say it can wait, but now you’ve got me curious.”
“Wait here. I’ll bring it over.” Dante slapped Rook’s thigh, grinning at the slight pink mark his fingers left on his lover’s pale skin.
“Dick.” Rubbing at the mark, he kicked at Dante’s ass, scoring a hit on his thigh. “Let me open the box. Then we can talk.”
The box was still heavy and sealed nearly airtight with thick bands of tape. Bringing one of the utility knives with him to the bedroom was a good enough idea to earn him a murmur of pleasure and a light kiss before Rook’s avarice took center stage. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, a delectably naked Rook sawed away at the bindings, stopping to turn the box around when he found the package’s opening. A piece of paper floated out of the exposed flap, and Dante caught it before it drifted to the floor.
“Probably an invoice,” Rook explained, pulling the flap aside, tearing a bit of the cardboard away. “Shit, it’s like they expected this thing to have a mummy curse or some—”
Dante didn’t need to see the bloody rags and gore-splatted concrete bits sliding out of the box to know Rook needed to be as far from the package as he could get. Reaching for the box, Dante jostled Rook’s elbow, and the flap flew open, sending what was inside tumbling to the floor.
He also didn’t need to guess if the head striking the floor was a prop, not with the amount of splatter it left on the polished wood and the hard crack of its skull striking the floor. There was also no question about who it was. Dante’d stared at that face for more than an hour while Rook was being interrogated about Harold’s death. After a few more bounces, Detective Mark Vicks’s severed head came to a messy rest against the edge of the bookshelves, his open, lifeless eyes left staring up at the loft’s open ceiling.
“Dante….” Rook’s face was nearly as white as Vicks’s bloodless expression, and he gulped, blindly reaching for Dante. With his hand gripped around Dante’s upper arm, Rook stammered, “Help me get to the bathroom. I think I’m going to puke.”
Ten
COPS CARRIED their own visual odor, a social pheromone Rook couldn’t quite place his finger on, but he knew it was there. Some marinated in it, overblown and metallic, ruffling under Rook’s senses until it seemed as if he were choking on his own blood, while others, like Dante and Hank, were subtler, giving off a firm stance of authority with a veiled suggestion things could go very wrong for someone who challenged them.
Detective Dell O’Byrne wore her copness like it was a second skin with no room for anything else in her life besides her badge and gun, and the flick of her inscrutable gaze over Rook’s face when she walked into the room left him with no doubt she’d make short work of him if he fucked with her.
In the time before Dante, Rook would have given her a wide berth. Now he considered his options and decided he’d still probably cross the street if he saw her coming his way. And knowing O’Byrne, she’d probably follow him.
The weirdness at being interviewed in Manny’s office did nothing to erase the image of Vicks’s bloodless face or the wave of sick that followed. Stranger still to hear Dante’s rumbling, softly accented voice outside of the door, but O’Byrne insisted on speaking to them separately in order to get an uninfluenced perspective of what’d happened.
O’Byrne set her phone down on the table, then hit Record on an open app, then rattled off the date, time, and the store’s address. “I’m going to be recording this—”
“And if I said no?” He didn’t have any objections, but something about the cop begged to be rattled, and the crawling panic in his gut needed something to do besides chew on him.
“Then we go down to the station, where you’ll probably call in a bunch of guys in suits who’ll make my life hell for a bit and nothing will get done,” she said, a bit of steel creeping into her voice. “Let’s not make this shitty for both of us, Stevens. Can you state your name, date of birth, and address?”
“Name’s Rook Martin Stevens, birthday April first. Year unknown. License says twenty-six, but it’s a crap shoot.” He grinned at her frown. “Beanie—my mom—wasn’t big on paperwork, so getting me a birth certificate wasn’t at the top of her to-do list. And I live here. Above Potter’s Field.”
“Tell me about Detective Vicks. What happened?” Shifting in her chair, O�
��Byrne’s jacket fell open, giving Rook a peek of her gun in its side holster. “Walk me through this.”
“I don’t know what else I can tell you other than I opened the box and Vicks’s head rolled out. I don’t know how he got there. In the box, I mean. Okay, I know how the box got here. It was delivered, but I wasn’t here when it came in.” Lazing back against the couch, Rook hooked one arm over its plump back and studied the detective sitting across of him. He couldn’t read her face much, but her body language was pure cop with easy tells. Tense shoulders and a bit of a pull between her eyebrows was enough to let Rook know she believed he wasn’t telling her the truth. “Look, Vicks came after me this afternoon. He cornered me at Bergan’s. There were witnesses. Well, one witness but a pretty good one.”
“Did you file a complaint about the attack?” She tilted her head, assessing him. “With someone other than Montoya.”
“No, I didn’t think anyone would give a shit, to be honest,” he replied. “Montoya and I didn’t get a chance to talk about it. Figured we’d get around to it later and he’d push me into it.”
“Why don’t you start with what happened there and then tell me everything right up until I showed up?” O’Byrne uncapped a pen she’d pulled from her jacket pocket. “And then I’m going to ask you about a few things we’ve found out since then.”
It took him less than three minutes to tell her about Vicks’s trying to choke him to death in an interrogation room many years ago, then the recent threats and theories about Harold’s murder, and despite her deadpan expression, he caught a flush of pink across her face when he asked her if she really wanted to hear about how he and Dante passed the hour or so after the detective entered the loft. Moving him along with a muttered grumble, O’Byrne kept scribbling in her notepad as he described opening the package, then stopped when Rook got to the moment Vicks’s decapitated head bounced along the loft’s hard floor.
“And you know this auction house well? You said they send you things often?” She cut through his story, looking up from her notes. “How?”
“I’m friends with Davis Natterly, one of the owners. Well, friendly enough.” Rook shrugged. “I’ve done business with him for years. Mostly high-end stuff. It’s where the falcon was auctioned off. The one Harold stole from me.”
“I’ve read the initial complaint. I don’t know if Montoya told you there’s a bit of a turf war going on over this case. West LA is gunning for someone’s blood over Vicks, but so far it’s in our house. He might have been an asshole, but he was their asshole. They’re going to want to take a shot at who did this.”
“So long as that shot isn’t at me, I hope they find the guy.” The comment got him a long cop look, and he snorted derisively. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a cop’s crosshairs. They’re going to be leaning on me because his head rolled across my damned floor and he’d tapped me for a murder. You think his buddies down in West LA aren’t going to be looking at me?”
“Not if I can prove you didn’t have time to kill him, no. They won’t.” She went back to her notebook, flipping a few pages. “You said you came back to your business after you left Bergan’s? Did you go anywhere or straight here?”
“Straight here,” he offered up. “Bergan’s guys loaded my car up with the toys I bought off of him, and when I got here, I helped Manny get the boxes unloaded. Spent a couple of minutes explaining how I wanted them divided up, then headed upstairs.”
“Why didn’t you stay in the shop?” she probed. “It was still open.”
“First off, it was a shitty day and I just wanted to decompress, but mostly because I don’t work the store.” Rook shook his head. “It’s a storefront for common stuff, throwaway merchandise for browsers. Trendy things or cereal-box toys. Some more expensive stuff, but not the really high-ticket items. Nearly all of the big money is with private collectors, but I wanted someplace solid, a brick-and-mortar store someone could come to if they needed to, and it gives me a spot I can unload medium to low-range items. Manny’s in charge of Potter’s Field. He and Ralph—that’s one of the shift managers—usually price out new things using reference books, but I pitch in on the weird stuff. There were a couple of pieces I saved back, but most of the toys were run-of-the-mill. Nothing special.”
“But you bought up all of Bergan’s tin stock, you said. Why?” She dug in, trying to poke at sore spots in Rook’s story. “Doesn’t sound like it would be worth your while.”
“Because the owner came upstairs with a shotgun and stopped Vicks from ripping my head off.” Rook tamped down his irritation. “Hey, I didn’t shake my ass at him and beg him to bite it. Asshole followed me to Bergan’s, and Thorkenberry told him to take his shit elsewhere. So yeah, I took twenty pounds of toys off of his hands as a thank-you, because it would have been kind of weird if I’d dropped to my knees and gave him a blow job. What with him married to an IA cop and me being hooked up with Montoya.”
He came off sounding aggressive, but Rook was quickly growing tired of a day full of cop games. He wanted Montoya next to him, but the detective firmly told his lover to stay outside while they talked, and now Rook could see why. The questioning sounded less and less like information gathering and more along the lines of setting him up. Rubbing at his face, Rook felt the fatigue in his chest settle down along his spine.
“I didn’t kill Vicks, lady,” he said, dropping his hands down into his lap. “I’m going to keep saying that until I’m blue in the face if I have to, but I simply didn’t have time. I left Bergan’s, came here to take care of the merchandise after calling Dante, then went upstairs. Montoya came home, and I didn’t even think about Vicks until I saw his face staring up at me. And after that, I puked my guts out into the toilet while Dante called the cops. What the fuck else do you want from me?”
“I’m trying to help answer questions a hell of a lot of people are going to be asking, people who are going to want someone’s blood.” Her chin lifted, mouth tightening. Then O’Byrne said, “You seem a bit tense, Stevens. I’m not the bad guy here.”
“Probably because it seems like you’re trying to shove me into some corner,” he replied. “I don’t do well with cops. So maybe I’m taking you wrong.”
“You do well enough with Montoya,” she pointed out.
“Kind of different, I think we both can agree to that one.”
“Agreed. Let’s continue, okay? I’ll try to make it fast.” She consulted something she’d written on a previous page, glancing up when the voices outside of the office door grew louder, but the conversation was still too muffled for Rook to make out anything other than a murmur. “You told the responding officer you recognized the package as coming from the auction house. Didn’t you question him sending you something without telling you first? Or does the owner—what’s his name?—here it is, Davis, does Davis send you items all the time? So you wouldn’t have thought it odd?”
“He’s sent over a couple of things,” Rook admitted with a shrug. “I didn’t think it was that weird, but yeah, normally I get a heads-up on stuff. Jesus. That wasn’t a pun. I swear to God, that wasn’t a pun.”
“It’s fine. But Natterly didn’t send you the piece you claim Harold stole? He let that go to auction, right?”
“Difference between a niche piece worth a couple of thousand and a documented movie prop, even one from a parody. Any Maltese Falcon coming to the market is going to get a stir. There’s a lot of social weight behind it.”
“But the one Harold got was a fake,” O’Byrne interjected. “Not from the original movie, I mean.”
“If you’re counting the Bogart version as the original. There were others, but yeah, the statue Harold got isn’t from that film, but still, the later film cast their statues from one of those used in the Bogie piece, right down to the chips in its beak. I wanted it because there’s some… I was kind of raised by the guy who ran with the bird’s original owner.” Rook waited a beat, expecting O’Byrne to feint the conversation again, a commo
n con verbal trick, and she didn’t disappoint. “And here’s where you change the subject and come back a bit later to feel me out.”
“Bergan’s—” She caught his smirk and returned one of her own. The expression changed her face, softening it, humanizing it, and Rook fought off the wave of empathy he felt toward her in that shared moment when she realized he knew she was trying to throw him off his game. “Okay, not Bergan’s. We’ll stick with the bird. If Davis didn’t send you things out of the blue, why didn’t you question this box?”
“Probably because I was tired, and well….” He shrugged. “I’d just spent some time with Dante, unwinding my brain. The last thing I wanted to do was think. Should I have checked it out? Probably, but I think a part of my head figured Davis was sending a sorry-I-fucked-up present. I get that sometimes if someone auctions off something I’ve already bought or screws something up. His people down there should have known better than to give it to Harold. Technically, he’s already been angling to make sure I don’t sue him for not delivering the goods.”
“What happened with the statue? Why did he give it to your cousin?”
“He didn’t. I’d made arrangements to pick it up after he came back, but Harold convinced the office staff he was buying it for me as a present.” The anger he’d felt arriving at the auction house to find the statue gone resurfaced, and Rook swallowed it back down. “Davis assured me it wouldn’t happen again, but by that time, Harold already had it squirreled away, and he wasn’t going to hand it over.”
“So you came up with a way to get it back?”
“Sadonna offered to let me take it back,” Rook replied. “It was… just a fucking prank. Sure, I wanted to kick Harold’s ass, but mostly because it’s my damned bird. He just did it to piss me off.”