City Under Siege

by R. J. Prescott

  “You got it. What do we do with her while we’re running the sims?”

  “She comes with us,” Tom replied.

  “Seriously?” Eli exclaimed in disbelief.

  “Can you think of any place safer?” Tom asked, making Eli chuckle.

  “Fair point, but the brass are gonna have a field day over this one.”

  “They won’t have a problem with it as long as she’s under SAS close protection,” Tom reassured him.

  I guessed the conversation was over when car doors slammed and Tom started walking. At around five foot five, I had curves in all the places women were meant to. Although I hated gyms with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, running regularly allowed me to continue an avid adiction to chocolate dipped doughnuts. My obsession with the sugary devil would last a lifetime. They might not be the best substitute for a healthy relationship, or even a healthy diet, but God help the man who parted us. Of course, when I embarked on this love affair, I never contemplated that I’d be carried princess style by a giant of a man with washboard abs and zero body fat. The urge to hold my breath, as though I could somehow forcibly suck into my body every excess pound, was strong.

  I shouldn’t want him to be attracted to me, but I did. I wanted him to crave my touch in every way that I craved his, so I wouldn’t be alone in suffering this constant ache. The way that he cradled me, like I was delicate and precious and light as a feather, made me feel all of those things. The delicious scent of his skin called to me, inviting me to nuzzle my nose against his neck, but even in my sleepy state I resisted. Our “almost kiss” had us perilously close to crossing a line we couldn’t come back from. Already that line was becoming blurry and faded. If we weren’t careful, someday soon we would forget it ever existed at all.

  He laid me down on the softest of beds, and I dared to open one eye. Light spilled into the darkened room from the hallway, but I couldn’t really see past him. With very little assistance from me, he peeled away my coat as I toed off my shoes and collapsed back against the luxurious feather pillows.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  I shook my head, too exhausted to contemplate eating.

  “Get some sleep then, buttercup. I’ll bring your bag up later so you have something to change into tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” I whispered on a yawn, so drowsy I was a hair’s breadth from slumber. The room was completely silent for a few moments, and I could only imagine he was watching over me, before strong, gentle fingers tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. His touch was barely a whisper across my cheek, but it was so intimately personal that I carried it with me to my dreams, and I was asleep before he reached the door.

  When I woke, sunlight streamed in through the gap in the curtains, bathing me in its warmth. I’d slept more deeply and restfully than I had since before the accident. Like my system had undergone a much needed reboot, I felt invigorated. Walking over to the window, I found myself looking over a huge garden, dusted with an early winter’s frost that looked so unearthly I yearned to sketch it. The past few weeks were the longest I’d ever gone without a pencil or charcoal in my hand. It was such a huge part of my life, but the weight of grief and responsibility had plunged me into a monochromatic darkness. Now I wanted colour and light. I wanted to claim back the parts of myself that would remain when Vasili was long gone.

  As promised, my bag was by the side of my bed next to a stack of neatly folded bedding that had me wondering whether Tom had spent the night on the floor next to me. It would explain why I’d slept so soundly, realising subconsciously that I hadn’t been alone in the dark. Everything about my room was designed for comfort, from the thick, luxurious carpet that tastefully complimented the pale cream walls, to the beautifully appointed oak doors and windows enhanced with bespoke ironmongery. The wrought iron bed fit the moderately sized room well, and along with an oak wardrobe and matching bedside tables, it made up the only furniture in what was a modern take on a traditional cottage bedroom. Add in a few brightly coloured cushions and throws, and it would be exactly the sort of place I could see myself living in. A quick bit of investigating led me to a tiny bathroom, just big enough for me to wash up and dress. I was just about to go and look for everyone when Crash knocked and poked his head around the door.

  “You decent?” he asked.

  “You should probably ask a girl that before you walk into her room,” I replied, smiling.

  “Honey, the sort of girls that have me in their bedrooms are never decent.”

  I rolled my eyes in reply, because there really was no answering that one. “Where is everyone?”

  “Battle planning,” he replied. “We heard you up and about, so the boss wanted you to know we’ll be about fifteen more minutes, then Eli’s drawn the short straw for cooking a fried breakfast if you’re interested.”

  “Why don’t I start breakfast so it’s ready when you finish? I’d rather be useful than sit here twiddling my thumbs,” I offered.

  “I’ll probably get lynched for letting you do anything other than sleep, but fuck it. Eli can’t cook for shit, and I’m bloody starving. So if you’re half decent in the kitchen, have at it.”

  “By the way, where’s the kitchen and where exactly are we?”

  “Turn right at the bottom of the stairs and follow the corridor to the end. And we’re at the boss’s place,” he replied, before disappearing back the way he came, as though that useless little titbit told me anything.

  “Would you mind telling me who you are, and just what exactly you’re doing in my house?” The stocky, fearsome woman addressing me was more than a little intimidating. I’d guess her age to be late sixties, but honestly it could be ten years either way. Her thick hair, of a beautiful colour that rested somewhere between bleach blonde and white, was scraped back in an elegant chignon. A perfectly made up face, the primary reason her age was indistinguishable, made it glaringly obviously that this was someone with both time to spare and money. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, but what she lacked in size she made up for in stature, carrying her figure with a powerful confidence. One arm rested on the other in a pose reminiscent of Tom, while her free hand puffed away on a cigarette, completely uncaring of the fact that we were indoors.

  “It was my house last time I looked,” Tom replied, taking in my bemused expression, “and no smoking in the house.”

  “Good luck with that,” she replied, but moved over to the French doors so she could flick her ash into the garden.

  “I gave you this house, and the least you could do is keep an ashtray or two in here for me. God knows I’ve bought enough of them over the years,” she replied.

  “I throw them out when you’re gone to discourage you,” he answered. “Smoking will kill you.”

  “Like you’re one to lecture me on what’ll get you killed,” she retorted, and was answered with the death stare I was fast becoming accustomed to.

  “Chuck out the next ashtray I buy, and I’m disinheriting you!” she threatened.

  He rolled his eyes and smiled, and without knowing a thing about their relationship, I knew he’d keep doing it.

  “Hey, Nan, how’s my favourite girl?” Crash asked her, striding across the kitchen to grab both of her cheeks between his hands and plant a noisy kiss on her lips.

  “Keep your lips to yourself please, Benjamin McCaffrey. Lord only knows where they’ve been” she admonished, making Crash chuckle.

  “Don’t be like that Nan. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I’ll do my best to live with the loss,” she replied, sarcastically. “You know it isn’t compulsory for you to hit on a woman just because she’s sharing oxygen with you. Try saving up all that charm for a girl you really like.”

  “Fuck, I think my mojo must be broken,” he admitted. “The only person I’ve hit on lately is Sarah here, and she isn’t interested in getting any action. Now, you don’t even want my kisses.”

  “How about you show some fucking respect
please?” Tom’s amusement at Crash’s smart mouth had finally run out.

  The scary lady looked from Tom to me, then back again. “Interesting,” she said, raising one eyebrow smugly, as though there were secrets of the world that only she was privy to. Eventually, she seemed to come to some sort of a decision and turned her attention towards me.

  “As I was saying, would you mind telling me who are you and what you’re doing in my kitchen?” she asked me.

  “My kitchen,” Tom corrected.

  “Fine, if you’re going to be difficult,” she conceded. “Who are you and what are you doing in the kitchen I gave him?”

  “This is Sarah, our new housekeeper,” he said. I guessed he hadn’t expected to have to explain away my presence, and from the death stare he was giving me, I figured keeping my mouth shut was probably the most sensible option. Unfortunately for Tom, I never was much good at keeping quiet.

  “Can’t she speak for herself then? And why may I ask do you need a housekeeper anyway? Or is housekeeper some code you kids have these days?” she asked, eyeing me up as though I was some bacon frying prostitute.

  “I speak just fine thank you, and as a housekeeper, I do exactly what my title suggests, I keep the house, cook, and clean, and despite what you seem to be suggesting, I manage to do all that with my knickers on,” I replied.

  By the end of my angry retort, my hands were on my hips and I was staring at her just as hard as she was staring at me.

  “You’re a proper little bitch, aren’t you?” she said, finally. Her heated glare morphed into a smirk. “I like that.”

  “On the contrary, I’m very nice normally. Or I try to be,” I added. I hadn’t been very nice when I was running my mouth off, but I hated the idea of her thinking that I’d slept my way into my imaginary employment. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt so self-righteous if I’d stopped to think about how many times I’d thought about a naked Tom in the last twenty-four hours alone. Only then did it occur to me that this was someone he probably knew well and that I might have pissed him off with my runaway mouth, though a quick glance his way assured me that wasn’t the case. In fact, he looked more amused than I’d ever seen him.

  “Well it’s nice to meet you Sarah. Now tell me, do you play poker at all?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t go anywhere near that woman with a deck of cards if I were you,” Eli chipped in. “She’s a shark.”

  “How about you mind your own business Elijah Spears! And now I think of it, you and Benjamin owe me twenty-five pounds from poker last Friday, now ante up,” Nan said, throwing the last of her cigarette outside before filling up the kettle and putting it on to boil.

  “The fuck I do!” Eli replied, and they launched into a full-scale argument, which she won. He was counting notes out of his wallet and mumbling about senile old people when she placed a hot cup of tea down next to me with a wink. It’s a good thing I didn’t take sugar, because she didn’t ask.

  “How come you don’t call Crash by his nickname?” I asked her, noticing that Crash hadn’t blinked when she’d called him Benjamin.

  “I’m not using bloody ridiculous code names, like they’re some twelve-year-old Boy Scouts, and if you had an ounce of sense, you wouldn’t encourage them either. Thank goodness you’ve got a normal name. If you were a ‘Destiny’ or a ‘Chardonnay,’ I’d insist that Tom fire you on principle,” she replied. Slightly bemused by the strength of her conviction, it was the first time I could ever say I was pleased to have a relatively normal sounding name.

  “Not liking someone’s name is not a reason to fire them,” Tom argued.

  “Of course it is. It means they have stupid parents, and who wants to employ someone who’s genetically predestined to be stupid,” she replied.

  “This is Nan by the way,” Crash told me.

  “Took you long enough to introduce me,” she scolded him.

  “Like I could get a word in,” he replied.

  “Are you Tom’s grandmother?” I asked, having guessed that must be why he called her Nan.

  “Do I really look old enough to be a grandmother?” she asked, clearly horrified by my presumption. “My name’s Nancy, which they all shorten to Nan, and I’m his mother,” she explained, before I had a chance to apologise.

  “Adopted mother!” Tom chimed in.

  “Like you’re good looking enough to have been birthed from these loins,” she scoffed, making him grin.

  “Now tell me dear, are you single?”

  “She only arrived yesterday, and you’re going to scare her away,” Tom warned.

  “Not at all. Sarah and I are going to get on swimmingly. I can tell,” she said, leaving me more than a little scared.

  Sarah

  “Your housekeeper?” I said, an eyebrow raised in disbelief.

  “I panicked,” Tom admitted.

  “You’re in the SAS. Isn’t panic pretty much bred out of you in the selection process?”

  “Yeah, well, selection would be a lot tighter if they had Nan running interrogation-resistance training. I’d take waterboarding over half an hour under the spotlight with that woman any day of the week,” he replied, giving me a fake shiver.

  “What’s waterboarding?” I asked, envisaging how something that sounded so much like surfing could be considered torture.

  “Ugh, forget I said anything, buttercup. You don’t want that in your head.”

  “It’s already in my head. And you know I’m just going to google it, so if you think what I’ll find on the net is worse than your explanation, you’re obliged to give it to me.”

  He sighed deeply, like I was being a royal pain in the arse. “Fine. It’s a kind of water torture that simulates drowning. You tie someone down, cover their nose and mouth and pour water intermittently over the cloth.” It astounded me the way he described it so matter-of-factly. The fact that this form of torture existed, and was used often enough to necessitate it being named, upset me profoundly. Truthfully, it was the idea of Tom suffering that fate that upset me the most.

  “Why would someone do that?” I asked, making him shrug.

  “It’s simple and effective. Best way to extract information from someone quickly,” he said, bumping my arm to hurry me along with the dishes. Shaking myself out of my stupor, I handed him a wet plate for drying. It seemed so surreal to be doing dishes while casually discussing effective torture techniques. After a moment or two of silence, I asked him a question I dreaded hearing the answer to.

  “Have you ever been waterboarded?” He nodded, but didn’t explain, so I asked, “Does it bother you to talk about it?”

  “No. I couldn’t give a shit about that. It bothers me for you to hear it. You look like you’re about to burst into tears.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you be upset at the idea of me being tortured?” I asked, making him frown.

  “That’s never going to happen. Anyway, it’s not like it was in a combat situation. I volunteered.”

  “Why the fuck would you volunteer for something like that?” I asked, shoving a plate at him angrily.

  “Most people fear what they don’t understand. They don’t know how much it will hurt and how they’ll survive it, so they fear it. Now I know what it’s like and how my body and my mind reacts against questioning under torture. I don’t fear it,” he explained. “Anyway, it’s pretty good incentive never to get captured. I’m not in any hurry to repeat the experience.”

  “You must’ve had some shitty career advisors at university to make your job sound appealing.” My reply made him chuckle.

  “What about you?” he asked, changing the subject. “How’d you end up as an illustrator?”

  “It was all a bit of an accident really. Much to Dad’s disappointment, I was always kind of flaky and unfocused in school. I wasn’t a troublemaker or anything. I mean, I never really made waves or acted out, but there was always somewhere I’d rather be than where I was. Art class was pretty much the only time I took an interest. Anyway, Dad let me ke
ep going with the art on the condition I joined the family business after college, but while I was there, a friend of mine told me she was writing a children’s book. She was strapped for cash and asked if I would illustrate it in exchange for co-credit and a share in the royalties. That went on to be an international bestseller, and I had a way out.”

  “A way out?” he asked, and it was my turn to shrug.

  “I didn’t want to be part of Tatem Shipping, but Dad insisted. I think he hoped to give me some nice little admin job where he could keep an eye on me until he could marry me off.”

  “So you walked away from it completely?”

  “Not from Dad and my brother, John, just the business. I never wanted to be estranged, but I guess we were halfway there before it happened anyway. There’s ten years between John and me, so once he went off to university, I barely saw him. After Mum died, Dad wasn’t the same either. It’s like a light went out in his heart when she left us, and he never figured out how to turn it back on again. I think, especially in the beginning, it hurt him to see me because I look so much like Mum. But in the end, Aunt Elizabeth had driven a wedge so big between us, neither of us knew how to close it. Maybe his wanting me to work for him was his way of bringing us back together, but I guess we’ll never know now.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “At the moment, all I can think of are the wasted years between us. I was a kid when I lost Mum, and I needed them. Desperately. And they weren’t there. So, I felt like all my family had died. When I think of them now, I want to be able to remember how they were before. I’m just not there yet.”