by SR Jones
“Red?”
“The man… The one who… In the bedroom.” I can’t say the word rape. I’ll be sick again if I do.
“What did he say?”
“That my father is involved in trafficking women.”
“I don’t know. Some of the men your father works with are … or were. To what degree your father was, I don’t know. I do know he had a strong disagreement with them regarding the business model, and that’s why you’re in this situation.”
“I can’t have him in my life if he does that,” I say and hate myself when a tear falls down my face.
Camo stares at me, and his gaze turns almost angry.
What did I do wrong?
Chapter 4
She’s crying.
Tears stream down her face. I can’t deal with it. It twists something deep in my gut. I also don’t have time to deal with it.
We don’t have the luxury for this bullshit.
Shit, how to comfort her quickly, so we can get back to me driving and her being silent? I should have lied. I don’t do lies, but in this case, I should’ve smoothly told her that no, of course your father doesn’t do that.
This is why I don’t do relationships. I suck at peopling.
Her crying does something to me. It touches a part of me I thought long dead. A part that cares.
I’m not as well-adjusted as most seem to think. They call me Priest, and Cole jokes I’m like a Buddhist monk, but I’m not. The surface shit, the meditation, the working out, they’re all there to calm the raging waters underneath. They are there to stop me from feeling because not feeling is the safer option. During the day, I have my shit together. I’m in control.
At night, when I sleep, my demons take over. The night terrors have never gone away. I tried it all. Meds. Therapy. More meds. Even tried drinking them away a few times. Nothing worked. So now? Now, I enjoy the days and try to survive the nights. The way I do that is to lock shit down. I run myself ragged. Lift weights until I ache. Meditate. Read dense, wordy books. I tire my body and my mind the fuck out.
Each night before bed, I meditate some more, until my mind stops screaming and then, if I’m lucky, I get five or six good hours sleep before I wake up yelling and shouting.
Oddly, the only place I don’t have night terrors. The only place I sleep. Is on the ocean. Put me on a boat, and I’m lulled. It’s getting to the point where I’m seriously considering living on a boat.
Bricks and mortar don’t seem to be working for me. Put me in four walls, and I wake up wandering the place, holding an imaginary gun, looking for imaginary combatants. It’s fucking tiring.
What I do know is that if I lose my calm, my daytime Zen, then the night shit gets worse. This girl, this beautiful, lost, crying, girl is fucking with my Zen.
Torn between wanting to gather her in my arms, but knowing that’s a very bad idea, and wanting to tell her to shut the hell up, I go for the middle ground.
“You have to pull yourself together until we get to the safe house,” I grunt.
She looks at me as if I’ve slapped her, but to her credit, she nods. “Yes, of course.” She sniffs. “Sorry.”
Her apology kills me. “Nothing to be sorry for, but we need to get going, and I have to focus.”
“Of course,” she says again, then turns to stare out the window.
Shit. Maybe I should have had someone else with me on this. I know I can keep Roze safe, but can I keep her whole? Mentally and emotionally? I’m not good at this stuff. I can listen, and she can tell me anything and it goes to the grave. But responding in the right way? Not my bag.
Her father is a piece of crap, and I don’t lie well, or do platitudes.
“Maybe you ought to speak to your father about all this once it’s safe,” I say.
She sniffs again and nods, but she doesn’t turn away from the window. Is she still crying?
“Did they hurt you?” I ask her. “Before I got there? They had you for a few days. Do we need a medic?”
I’m asking her more than that. I don’t know how to put it into words, though, without re-traumatizing her, and she’s hanging by a thread as it is.
“No. They slapped me around a bit.”
Jesus fuck. I’m glad they’re dead. I’d like to kill them all over again, especially Francis, or Red as she calls him.
“He was going to … hurt me,” she says quietly. “Your timing is impeccable.”
“I got there as soon as we had intel on where they were holding you,” I say. I would have been there two days earlier if I would’ve had the chance.
“So they didn’t hurt you in that way, before I arrived?” How bad can one person be at putting shit into words? I grit my teeth at my own ineptitude.
“No,” she says.
Relief floods through me. I had thought as much. Her eyes aren’t dead in that way I’ve seen before. If they had? I don’t know how to help her with that. I’ve seen what it does to people, men and women alike. Rape is a terrible and awful weapon used indiscriminately in some wars. It’s fucking illegal, as it should be, but that doesn’t stop some people when their hate and rage wipes out all humanity.
The shit I’ve seen.
Suddenly I feel world weary and every single one of my thirty-something years. It cuts me up that this young woman next to me, who shouldn’t know the seamier side of life, will now carry internal scars and a knowledge of just how ugly humans can be.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow,” she says, apropos of nothing. “I would have been dead probably if you hadn’t come.”
Then she glances at me, and I see it. The hero worship in her gaze.
“You’re the best birthday present I’ve ever had.” Her voice is small, awestruck.
Oh, no. She needs to cut that shit out. I’m no hero. I couldn’t save my best friend when it mattered, and I’m still paying for that. Worst, I couldn’t hack normal life when I tried it. I don’t want this girl staring at me like I’m her savior.
“In a few days you can go back to your normal life and do whatever it is young people do to celebrate their birthdays. Starbucks probably,” I mutter. I’m being a dick, but better she thinks I’m a dick than her hero. I gun the engine and put the car back onto the road.
“Starbucks?” she snorts. “Most young people go to clubs.”
“Not much point if you can’t drink,” I point out.
“Erm, Mr. Know-it-all,” she says, sounding exactly like the young adult I’m accusing her of being. “We can drink here from age eighteen. We can get married. Drive. All the things. I am an adult by law. Your country is backward when it comes to things like that. How come you can’t drink in America until you’re twenty-one, but you can join up and go get killed, huh?”
And just like that, this woman I’m trying to make feel immature puts me in my place. It’s a damn good argument, and not one I have an answer to.
“In Europe most of us drink wine with our families from a fairly young age. A small glass on Sunday with lunch is not abnormal for most teenagers. Anyway, as of tomorrow, I’m twenty. Not that it makes a damn bit of difference as to what I can and can’t do by law. I live alone, you know?”
She turns to me, and when I glance back, her face is a picture of outrage. It seems I’ve hit a sore spot.
“My father helps me financially, but as soon as I’m working, I’m stopping that. I live alone, I study, I shop for myself, cook for myself. I’m more of an adult than a lot of the men I know who screw around, drink too much, but still live with Mummy and Daddy.”
“Okay, so you can legally drink. Good for you. You’re still a kid, though, so far as I’m concerned.”
For a man who thinks he doesn’t lie, I seem to have managed that whopper rather smoothly. She’s not a kid. She’s beautiful and distracting, sitting by me with her short t-shirt nightdress riding up her thighs. She’s traumatized, though, and hurt, and not in her right mind. The hero worship she seems to have going on is surely part of that. I need to stomp on
it whenever it rears its ugly head. So long as I keep telling myself she’s a kid, and so long as I keep showing her the dickish side of myself and making her hate me, we’re good.
“Where is this house you’re keeping me at?” she asks.
“Another twenty minutes away.”
“Wait.” She twists in her seat, and her night dress rides up higher. “We’re staying here? On the island? Alone? The place they brought me to? That doesn’t seem like a smart plan if I dare say as much.”
“It’s a highly defensible position,” I tell her. “We scoped it out, and it has high fences, electric, all sides, guard dogs, and a drone.”
“A drone. Wow. That’s all a bit sci-fi isn’t it?”
“No, drones are very much not fiction anymore.”
She shrugs. “I know the stupid kind aren’t. I see kids at the park with them, but guard drones.” She shakes her head. “Wow.”
“Why is there only you?” she asks after a long beat of silence.
“I’ve done this many times before. The others, not so much. You could say it’s a specialty of mine. There’s a big difference between going into a situation to take hostiles out and going into it to complete an extraction. If someone has an itchy trigger finger, for example, they might screw things up. I don’t know the rest of the team well enough yet to know whether or not they’d be good in this situation, so I prefer to work alone.”
I don’t tell her the details because it’s none of her business. She doesn’t need to know that I’ve read both Andrius and Konstantin’s backgrounds. As the men who set the company up, and who I’d be working for, I had a friend do some digging before I said yes.
If I’d needed back up, I’d be happy to have either of them on board. Andrius, though, is back home with a baby and a wife who will likely kill him if he leaves again so soon, and Konstantin is injured. Reece, their third partner, is a good man, but he’s coordinating from the Corfu base on all the IT stuff with some Greek guy he works with. Bohdan, Vasily, and Alexei are all Russians who were in the mob, one way or another, and I wouldn’t have any of them work with me on this.
Alexei will be working with Roze’s father anyway soon. A quid pro quo demanded by Andrius for rescuing his daughter. That way, Andrius figures, we can keep an eye on what the mob does in the future.
As for Cole, my brother in arms, he’s someone I’d work alongside in a heartbeat, but right now, he’s as distracted as a man can be. Cole is obsessed with finding a woman, Pamela, who used to do some work with us and the FBI at times on helping de-program extremists, and now she’s missing. Cole is probably a liability more than an asset, with his head always focused on her. He isn’t fully online I don’t think right now.
All in all, it’s far safer for Roze here that I came alone. There were only three or four hostiles, if there had been more then that might not have been the case, but I knew I could take out the number there were easily enough. Untrained gang bangers are no match for my skillset.
“You seem awfully calm for someone who has been through what you just have,” I tell her, taking a right onto another road.
She glances at me and laughs. “Crying and throwing up is calm, is it?”
I don’t tell her that by now I’d have expected either full-on hysteria or shock. I have meds in my bag in case she went into shock on me, and for a while there, thought I might need them. She’s a mess, but all told. She’s holding up damn well. “You’re doing a lot better than most,” I say.
She shrugs and bites her lower lip. It draws my attention for a moment. Her mouth has a pouty, slightly downturned look that adds to her air of sadness. It’s her huge, liquid brown eyes that really make her look sad, though. She’s stunning. I look back to the road.
“I experienced many things when I was young,” she says. “My mother died. Friends of the family died. A lot of them I don’t remember. Some I do, but it all seems like a dream, you know? Times were violent when I was a child. I was conceived in a literal warzone, and then my father and his friends carried on fighting for their cause even when the war had officially ended. I moved around a lot. Saw things. A lot of it I don’t fully recall, though. It’s why I’m interested in psychology. I have nightmares, and sometimes I don’t know what’s real and what’s imagined. It intrigues me.”
I glance at her again. She’s brave. I prefer to lock my memories down. I don’t take them out and examine them or let them get the disinfection of sunlight. No, I keep them hidden away, even from myself. A great many people would say that the route Roze has chosen to deal with her trauma is a damn sight braver than the one I have. They wouldn’t be wrong.
She carries on, almost as if she’s talking to herself. “He moved me to Italy when I was young, with my aunt, and we lived there for many years. I loved it.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?” I asked.
“My aunt died. I wanted to be where I had a sense of familiarity from my childhood, but Dad said Kosovo was too dangerous for anyone in his family. We’d spent time in Croatia when I was young, and I had loved it. The university is good and offered the course I wanted. Also, Dad has friends in Dubrovnik, and he said they’d be able to help me if I needed it. It’s also beautiful and safe. He has a place there, and it means he can visit me a few times a year. It seemed like the best bet. It was that or go to England or even America, and I didn’t want to. Or not yet. I’d like to eventually.”
“You want to go to America?” I ask.
“One day. I’d like to see the sights. The Grand Canyon. New York. I want to take a paddle boat down the Mississippi.”
I glance at her again, and her face is animated now. Not so sad.
“The Golden Gate Bridge too. I’d love to explore all around there. On land and on sea. Then there’s Chicago. New Orleans. Savannah. Seattle. So many amazing cities.”
I chuckle. “That’s a lot of miles you’d be covering,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “I’d quite like to hire a massive camper van type thing and drive all over the United States and Canada. That would be epic. I want to see Europe too, and I’ve mapped out train routes. I don’t want to fly. You miss so much when you fly. I’d take the train and boats and travel all over.”
I like her talking. It distracts her from what’s happened. She carries on telling me about her travel plans, and her soft, accented voice soothes me as I drive us toward the safe house.
When we arrive, Roze has just finished explaining to me the difference between the various trains you can take to see the Swiss mountain passes. I open the door, and the interior light flicks on. She flushes as I cut my gaze her way.
“I’ve been rambling on, haven’t I?” She shakes her head. “I do that when I’m nervous.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I liked listening to you talk.” It’s not a lie.
I don’t say much, but I like low level noise around me. At night I listen to talk radio because I can’t stand the silence. I play music throughout the day much of the time. The only time I don’t mind the silence is when I’m riding my bike, cleaning my guns, or meditating. Even when I’m running, I have something blaring out of my headphones. Silence makes me think, and thinking is bad.
Thinking means my chest gets tight, and I struggle to breathe.
Roze is like those radio stations, or the music I play in the background; she’s soothing. Her voice is nice. I find a lot of folks annoying, but not her.
Or, not so far. Only her hero worship moments make my skin itch, and she seems to have knocked that shit on the head for now.
Sweeping the surroundings, I don’t see anything to make my antenna twitch and I focus on getting us inside.
I grab my shit out of the car. “There are some clothes in here for you,” I nod at the large hold-all on the backseat. “I had a store to send some things in your size, which your father gave me.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
Taking the bags, I head to the gate. There’s a box where I enter the code given to me. The gate s
wings open, and I usher Roze in ahead of me. Placing the bags on the floor right inside the gate, I let it swing shut without touching it. The damn thing is electric.
“Don’t touch the gate or the fence,” I tell her. “I’ll give you the code when we get inside. You need to get out of here fast, only use the code, and stand back when the gate opens.”
Loud barking sounds from the right of the house, and Roze turns to me with wide eyes.
“It’s okay,” I say to her.
Five dogs tear around the corner of the house.
“Halt,” I state firmly. The dogs stop. “Platz.” The five dogs all lie as one. They aren’t barking or growling.
“Have you worked with dogs in the Army … sorry, Navy,” Roze asks on a whisper.
“No, but we had dog handlers and their dogs around us a lot, and these are highly trained personal protection dogs. I’ve been given the basic commands.”
I tell the dogs to stay and guide Roze to the door. There are massive lights sweeping the perimeter of the house. A drone buzzes overhead, and the dogs stay where they are but on alert. Damen, the Greek guy, and Reece both have the security feeds from the cameras on their laptops, and there is a fully stocked panic room in the house. This shit cost a fortune, but Gezim is paying.
Once we’re inside, I close the door and activate the alarm. I’ll go fetch the bags and release the dogs from their order once I’ve checked Roze over to ensure she’s okay and get her some water. She must be thirsty.
“We’ll stay here for a few days,” I explain. “Make sure the threat is neutralized, and then we can see about returning you home. I think your father wants to get you a new apartment in a gated, guarded community, and he’s planning on you having a driver who will take you anywhere you want to go.”
Gezim has told me the man will be more than a driver. He’s going to hire close protection long term for Roze. I think he might hire one of Andrius’ Spetsnaz guys from what I’ve learned. Roze won’t be told that, though, as he wants her to feel as safe as possible.
She sighs. “Great, so after this I go home to a totally new place, when I love my old place, and this new place sounds more like a prison.”