The Edge of Obsession

by Diana Muñoz Stewart

  The man had accused her—her—of killing his mother. It was unbelievable. And though she knew Sion had played along with Armand, she also worried that Armand’s lies had taken her opportunity to tell Sion the truth.

  She should have spoken up, spoken her truth when she’d had the chance.

  The squeak of the door opening behind her stopped her dead. He must have come straight here.

  His distinct gait announced him as he moved across the room to her. She dared not turn. She felt his hands land on her shoulders. Dared not turn. The palms of his hands pressed against her, turning her with a gentle push.

  She looked into his face and saw a wash of raw and tender emotions. He bent and kissed her, full and deep and possessive.

  He pulled back, ran a thumb across her wet cheeks. “Your name?”

  “Dada Parish.”

  “Please to meet you, Dada,” he said, bending to her lips and whispering against them. “Name’s Sion Bradford.”

  She took his lips with her own, moving against them with the same feeling she’d seen in his eyes bubbling inside her.

  He began to fiddle with the button on her jacket. “I need to—”

  “Yes,” she said and let him steer her back toward his bed.

  #

  “How do you know Armand?”

  Tucked in bed with Sion, Dada was ready for the question. And, for the first time in her life, she wanted to tell someone outside her family. “He kept me prisoner as a child. Well, his mother did.”

  The temperature in the room seemed to change as Sion tensed beside her.

  She went on before he could ask. Before she could lose her courage. “My earliest memory of when things started to change was when I was nine. Walking home from a doctor’s appointment with my mother, a wealthy man smiled at me. It had been happening a lot of late. I’d grown quickly. So tall. Gangly and thin and uncoordinated. Some men noticed. I remember my mother stopping. I thought she would yell at him, but she introduced me.

  “From then on, my mother took me regularly to meet him. He doted on me. I was too young to realize that what he saw in me had nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.”

  At his silence, she pulled back. Seeing the fearsome look on his face, she ran a hand along his jaw. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  He exhaled a breath that mingled with hers, then braced his hands on her shoulders and drew her closer. “If you see anger in me, it is at myself, for allowing men like Armand to do what they have done. I have been spared enough, luv. Tell me.”

  She dropped her head onto his shoulder, breathed him in, and allowed herself to go back in time. Back to when her beloved black shoes had been taken from the garbage and her dress was handmade. “My mother explained how I was going to go live with…” She swallowed. She couldn’t do it, use his name. “…the Frenchman. I imagined us living in a fine house. Me and her and him. I didn’t understand. He already had a family and had arranged for me to be kept by a woman who ran a brothel. Stoker’s mother. A slight woman, with a breadth of cruelty—all bitterness and bones—only surpassed by her son. After I was taken—”

  “After? Don’t skip. I want the details of that day.” He shook his head. “Want is the wrong word.” He took his hand from her shoulder and rubbed his chest. “I need the details. What do you remember most from that day?”

  Closing her eyes again, she leaned her head on the pillow, and took a series of deep breaths that smelled of him. “Mother put every piece of jewelry she owned on me that day. My neck, wrists, on my fingers. The bracelets and rings were so big, they slipped off my wrist and down my fingers.

  “I probably looked ridiculous, but I felt so pretty, all excited by the jewelry and fancy clothes made from an old dress of hers. I didn’t notice her tension. My first notion that something was wrong was when I saw the man who now calls himself Armand, step out from a truck parked along the city block.

  “He was a boy then, a teen, but his eyes were already cruel. They ran up and down my body as he waited for me.

  “Before my mother left, she told me, ‘Do what the Frenchman says. He will keep you safe if you please him. It is a better life than starving.’”

  “Fuck. How could she—”

  Dada placed a hand over his mouth. “Don’t.” Though she knew he only wanted to defend her, she couldn’t bear to hear a word spoken against her mother. “My mother was sick, dying from uterine cancer. She thought if she gave me to him, a man who seemed kind, I would at least be educated, fed, taken care of.”

  “No excuse. She—”

  “Shhh.” She pressed her fingers to his mouth. “The life she had… She left Suriname during the civil way. She—” She stopped herself, stopped from over-explaining and settled for what she had come to understand. “She could imagine no other choices.”

  “I’m sorry, luv. So very sorry, but I can’t bear to think of you as that child, dressed in your finest, feeling beautiful, only to experience some of the worst the world had to offer.”

  She brushed a tear from his face. “I have also experienced some of the best the world has to offer.”

  His eyes dropped to hers. She saw him hesitate, fearful now that he knew part of her truth.

  She waited.

  He dipped his head, gently kissed her lips. “How long....”

  She felt him tense. Heard his heart pounding.

  “How long did you live that way?”

  “Four years.”

  “Fuck.” He rolled her into his arms, then ran a hand along her back. “How did you get out?”

  She breathed in his musk, his warmth, his concern and compassion. “When I first came to be held prisoner, I was conditioned to want and long for… this Frenchman. I was not allowed out of my room. I rarely saw anyone else. I was given the food and gifts he sent or brought to me. By the time he would come, I was desperate for company. He would bring me books, give me lessons. He became everything. Years passed that way. And then I got pregnant.”

  Sion’s breath rushed past her ear. “He stopped coming, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But he still he paid for me to be kept.”

  “So you were left alone in that room?”

  Alone? She drew back, angled her head, tried to understand. “No. I wasn’t alone. I had my child inside me.” She held up the arm with her leather bracelet on it. “I made this for my child from an old hair band. I placed it on my wrist but promised the baby that one day it would be his. I sang and read to him every day. I had never been so bored, and hungry, but so very content.”

  He ran fingers gently over her bracelet. His mouth tightened. “Hungry?”

  “The man you know as Armand was in charge of bringing me food. He was diligent when he knew the Frenchman would come, but when he stopped coming, Armand became sloppy. He stayed away for long days. I believe he was trying to kill me. He wanted my room.”

  “Luv,” Sion choked out. “Please…Come closer.”

  Hearing his anguish, she put her head back into the crook of his shoulder, let him hold her as tightly as he needed. She rested herself against him, curled into him.

  Softly, she said, “I screamed for food sometimes for days. Sometimes he would sit right outside the door laughing as I cried of hunger. I survived only because my room had a bathroom and water.”

  “Sinister fuck.”

  “Yes. Until that time, I hadn’t sought to escape or rescue myself. It had never crossed my mind. But then I had the child. And we were starving. I began to drop notes from the bathroom window of my prison. Sheer desperation.”

  “No one saw?”

  “Someone did. A boy. He came into the alley every day, picked up my notes, and ran off. I thought he’d bring me food. Help. What I didn’t know, what I learned later, was that he’d kept the notes. He stored them in his house.”

  “He kept them?” Sion’s voice was disbelieving and horrified.

  “When I went into labor, I cried for help, but no one came. I couldn’t understand what was happ
ening to me. A few blocks away, the mother of the boy who had taken and stored my letters, was murdered by her husband.

  “The police were called. While investigating, an officer found my letters. He read them. Right then and there. Something in him motivated him to act. Not in a year. Not at the end of the week. Not even when he was done his shift.

  “He ran out of the house, down blocks to where my letters told him I was imprisoned. He burst into the home, bullied his way past Armand, raced up the stairs, searched, came to my locked door, broke it down, and found me bleeding to death on the floor.

  “Dear God.”

  “Yes. And on that same day, a day when I should have died, a day when another woman had died, a day when my son also died, I lived. Armand ran away but his mother was arrested. And I was taken to the hospital.”

  “Oh, luv,” Sion’s voice was ragged, choked with tears. “A bit more luck than being rescued by a dog. A bloody miracle.”

  She began to laugh gently, even as the tears rolled from her eyes, down her face to combine with his tears. “That is not the most miraculous part. What happened next delivered me from hell to heaven.”

  He squeezed her. “Tell me that, because I need to hear the part where you were safe and loved.”

  Chapter 21

  Sion reminded himself again and again that Dada was safe. Safe in his arms. But as many times as he repeated this to himself, he could not let her go. Thankfully, she put up with his embrace.

  He kissed away her tears, grateful for her in a way that he thought might make him a fan of God. “What is the miraculous part?”

  “That night…”

  “The day you were rescued and taken to the hospital?”

  “Yes. Later, at night, the police officer who rescued me worked overtime, serving as security for a visiting dignitary, a woman named Mukta Parish. Hoping to impress her, a wealthy woman who championed women’s rights, he told her how he’d arrested a man for killing his wife and then had saved a girl held prisoner all in the same day.

  “Needless to say, when he told her the story, she was impressed—and curious about the girl he’d saved. So curious that, instead of going to the gala where she was scheduled to speak, she insisted he take her to the hospital to meet me.”

  Someone walked over Sion’s grave, so said the gooseflesh rising across his body. “That’s the woman who adopted you, Mukta Parish?”

  “Yes. Momma told me when she arrived at the hospital and saw me, gaunt and haunted, it was love at first sight.”

  Pulling back from her, he ran his hands along her face. Her eyes shone with tears. His heart felt as if it might break. “Can’t rightly blame her.”

  She smiled. “I never believed her. I didn’t believe in love at first sight.” She brushed aside a tear. “Until, as a love-struck young woman, I saw a man driving down the pitch. And a seed was planted. And then one day, you walked into my life and it bloomed.”

  “I felt it, luv. Couldn’t name it then, but I felt it too. Feel it now.”

  “I love you, Sion Bradford.”

  He couldn’t breathe for love of her. “I love you too, Dada Parish. I love you.”

  He kissed her, sweeping his tongue into her soft mouth, possessing and cherishing her with everything he had. The feel of her against him, her warm tongue, sent his head spinning and his heart sprinting. She was his miracle.

  He cupped the side of her face. “Must’ve been odd, walking into your new life.”

  “I went from the poorest, most base of situations to being adopted by the wealthiest woman in the world. I flew to a home where I was surrounded by love and understanding and healing. A home where I never longed for anything. Well, I longed for one thing, to help free others from situations similar to the one I had endured. And this too, Momma made sure I was given.”

  “Ah,” Sion said, freezing as it all clicked into place. She hadn’t been overstating it. It was dangerous what she did. Dangerous in dealing with criminals. Dangerous in being outside the law. “You work for yourself. Your mum. Is that who pays for you to investigate these things?”

  “Yes. Not just me. My siblings. And others.”

  “Okay.” She was part of a global vigilante network. Un-bloody-believable. “We have two things going for us with Armand. One, he’s a stupid, sadistic bastard. And two, we have backup.”

  She drew in air with a hiss. “Not really. There are rules against taking certain actions. Things like making assumptions, acting without hard proof, or leaving one case for another. And chasing someone who I have past ties with. All against the rules.”

  So it was just the two of them.

  Grabbing her hand, he put it over his heart. “Do you think it’s him? Armand. The one who took Rosa?”

  “I do. And I think it’s likely he’s setting us up. He knows you’re not playing along with him.”

  “I had the same thought when he told me his plan.”

  “You mean his ridiculous plan to have you drug me and leave me in your car with your car keys? Like that wouldn’t end badly for both of us.”

  “Aye. Tidy way to get rid of you and blame it on me.”

  “We need a better plan. One that plays to his weakness and anger. Do you have the device?”

  “Right. Yes.” He reluctantly pulled away from her and searched the floor for his hastily discarded jeans. There. He took the device from his pocket. It looked like a thumb drive. “So what does this do?”

  She took it and palmed it. “It copies information from a cell phone or other technology. It has a short range, but you were close enough.” She held lifted it. “I can’t bring my family in on our plan, but I can get my sister Gracie to use her cyber skills to track where the phone has been. By narrowing down choices, we can hopefully discover where Rosa is being kept.”

  The unspoken possibility of if she’s being kept echoed in the air around them.

  “And they’ll help with this, your family?”

  “I might have to call in a favor or two.”

  “If they won’t help,” he hated to do this, “we could ask Geraldo.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “He’s done enough.”

  And this was another reason that he had fallen for her. She cared, even if it could cost her.

  #

  Because of the nondescript wall behind Sion’s bed, Dada sat there with her laptop and sent a text message to her brother Tony—as team leader he’d need to approve Gracie helping locate Rosa.

  Transferring Armand’s phone records to her computer, she logged into the secure site. Keeping that window open, she searched through Armand’s records in a smaller window. The secure site beeped.

  “My brother’s here,” she told Sion, so he’d remember to keep quiet.

  Tony came on, black hair askew, blinking and rubbing his hazel eyes. “What’s up?”

  Had he been sleeping? Dada looked at her clock. “It’s 10:30 there.”

  “Forget what it’s like here. I’m teaching lessons tomorrow. Including yours.”

  A stab of guilt worked its way into her chest. “There’s an issue.”

  “Fill me in.”

  She paused before answering, something in Armand’s text history catching her eye. There was a message from Walid. “A woman,” Dada began, trying to let go of the words of the text, “someone I had taken under my wing has gone missing. She left behind her child. I’m worried for her safety.”

  “You sure she didn’t leave her kid?”

  Why did everyone assume the woman abandoned her child? “Would I waste your time if she had? Give me some credit.”

  Her eyes drifted again to the text message of Walid complaining about missing product. That was it. How Armand found his women. He stole them from Walid. Walid would not be happy to learn this. Could she could get one snake to eat the other?

  Tony grunted what might’ve been an apology. “Fine. But the point is the same. We’re trying to take down a guy who does that to a thousand women a year.”

  �
�I believe Walid’s head of security, Armand Stoker, kills women for his own pleasure. I found a tomb with at least thirty women buried.”

  No longer looking the slightest bit tired, Tony leaned toward his monitor. “Shit, D. I’m sorry. You okay?”

  “I’m alive, and would like to find this woman before she ends up dead.”

  “I get it. I do, but you can’t divert from an intelligence-gathering mission to find one woman.”

  “I have a wealth of information on Walid already. Tonight, I managed to copy information from the cell phone of his head of security.”

  “Did you transmit it?”

  She first needed to make sure Armand had never mentioned her. Her brother would never allow her to risk herself in what he would see as an unexpected and highly emotional situation. “I will. Meanwhile, I’d like your approval to act. A woman’s life is in danger.”

  “Thousands of women’s lives are in danger. And you want to take out Walid’s head of security?” He shook his head. “Please tell me you’re joking. That’s not recon. That’s straight out attack. We don’t want to alert these guys before the actual attack.”

  He had a point. One she needed to dispel. New plan. “If done right, Walid will never suspect me, but he will need a new head of security.”

  Tony chewed on that for a minute. “You’re saying we could try to get our own person into Walid’s organization?”

  “Yes. Two birds. One bullet.”

  “Bullet? You’re an okay shot, but you’re not Justice.”

  Insulting, but true. “Yes, but I won’t need a bullet.” Not now that she had this information anyway. “Armand is stealing from Walid, so what do you think Walid would do if he discovered proof of that? Say, a tomb with thirty women buried.”

  Tony’s eyebrows rose. “If we alert Walid, he’ll take this fucker out, leaving us an opportunity to place an operative into his organization.”

  “Exactemente.” And instead of planning Armand’s murder, she could concentrate on finding Rosa. “So, is it okay to move ahead with my plans?”

  Tony’s eyes honed in on her. “This can’t be a trap, right?”