When he reached his peak, when it was done and we were tangled in each other’s arms, tears came into my eyes. I’d never felt quite like that before, never been so overwhelmed that I lost myself in the aftermath. I buried my face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, listened to the strength of this man I’d somehow managed to find comfort in.
I was strong. Independent. I didn’t need anyone. And yet… in that moment, I was grateful to have found him.
Chapter 21
Xavier
I ran my hand slowly down her back, trying to imagine this woman in an Army uniform. I’d found it hard to wrap my mind around when Joss mentioned it the night before, but now I wasn’t having the same trouble. She was strong. Independent. I could totally see her in uniform.
It was kind of impressive.
“She said I should ask you why you joined the Army.”
Audra sighed against my chest. “It’s not a big deal, really.”
“It is. Ten years is a long time to serve your country.”
“Would have served longer, but I screwed up my shoulder.”
“How did you do that?”
She pulled back a little and touched a scar on her shoulder I’d not noticed until now. It was a little ropy, one of those kinds of scars that heal thick and ugly.
“I was in a Humvee that ran over an IED. I was thrown clear and landed on my shoulder, shattered the tip of my humerus.”
“Wow.”
She shrugged. “They operated twice, fixed it better than I’d expected. But my range of motion is limited and that made it hard to keep up with my physical training requirements.”
“You talk about it like it’s a simple injury you got from lifting weights wrong.”
“It really isn’t that big of a deal.”
“It is a big deal. You could have been killed.”
She looked up at me, this light in her eyes that suggested she thought I was an idiot or something. “I was a soldier. It was all in the line of duty.”
I shook my head. “That’s not normal.”
“It is. It’s no different than if I’d been shot working undercover.”
“No, it is different. No one was shooting at you at the club.”
“They could have.”
I shook my head again, not sure I understood her attitude about the whole thing. But there was no point arguing, was there?
“What else did she tell you about me?”
“Just that you grew up in a rough part of New Orleans and worked the strip clubs to put food on the table for you and your younger siblings.”
“That’s true.”
“What happened to your parents?”
She shrugged against me, the movement intimate in a lovely sort of way. “My mom died when I was young. My father took off when taking care of me and my siblings proved to be too much for him.”
“What an ass!”
“Not much different from your pops, I suppose.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I guess you’re right. My father was more loyal to Jack Mahoney than he’d ever been to my mother and me.”
“Yet, you ended up drawn into his world anyway.”
“Not by choice.” I looked down at her, saw the curiosity in her eyes. “My mother took me to New York to get me away from Anthony Damico. She knew what he was, knew what he was capable of, but she never wanted that for me. She did everything she could to protect me from him.”
“Did he stay away?”
“It’s the only thing he ever did for me. He died never setting eyes on my face after I was five. But that wasn’t good enough for Jack Mahoney.”
“If your father wasn’t a part of your life, how did you come to run his business?”
“Jack Mahoney. He kept tabs on me, sent people to watch over me. The woman I was engaged to…” I shook my head, my jaw tight with anger. “She lied to me from the beginning. Her father was one of Mahoney’s lieutenants, one of the fools who stuck around long enough to be arrested in the round up after Mahoney’s arrest. Never told me, never told me that Mahoney had instructed her to enter my life, to keep tabs on me. She swore that she never intended things to become intimate between us. She claimed she fell in love with me quite by accident.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I believe her. But it makes no difference.”
She lied to me from the moment we met. Lied about everything from her name to details about her childhood, allowing me to believe she was an innocent girl from Ohio instead of the spoiled brat she turned out to be from upstate New York. Four years she lied to me.
Audra lied too. I was struggling with that, struggling with the reality of what had happened over the last few days. I wanted there to be a difference between the two, wanted to understand that she had better intentions that Claire ever did. I wanted this to be different.
When you’re facing an uncertain future, it tends to turn you into an optimist.
“Did you love her?”
“Desperately.” I looked at Audra, saw the flicker of hurt in her eyes. “But it was all based on lies.”
She was quiet a long moment, her fingers dancing almost absentmindedly across my abdomen. Then she pulled away and sat up so that she could see my face.
“I’m twenty-eight. I was born in New Orleans, the daughter of a former debutante and the sax player she defied her family to marry. She spoke Spanish creole to me in order to annoy my father, making it into a game between just the two of us. After my little sister was born, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died less than three months after her diagnosis, leaving my father devastated despite the volatile nature of their relationship. He took off four or five years later, a drunk who could no longer face the little reminders of his heartbreak.” She tilted her head to the side as she thought through what she wanted to say. “The neighbors and teachers helped us out for a while, but in the end we weren’t their children. They couldn’t take care of us forever. I went to work in the strip clubs because there was nowhere else to go. Nothing else paid enough. I saw dark things there that forced me to grow up too fast. My brother joined a gang and my sister went in search of love in other places, eventually hooking up with an older man who lived on the right side of town. And then I met an Army recruiter who convinced me that there was more to life than stripping.”
She studied my face as I digested that shortened version of her life story.
“I worked hard in the Army, did my best as often as I could. I was promoted, sent overseas, and given a nice position at a base in South Korea. But after ten years, I was discharged because of that injury. After that, I figured it was time to find something more. To try to find something normal in my life. So I came to Santa Monica with the intention of working for Gray Wolf. They have a reputation in the armed services, especially the Army. Ash Grayson—the founder of Gray Wolf—was a Green Beret.”
I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for her to finish. Then I looked at her, saw the fear in her eyes.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me, Audra.”
“You didn’t even know my name until last night.”
“But I know it now.”
“I lied to you.”
“You were undercover. That’s a little different.”
She shook her head, tears filling those beautiful brown eyes. I sat up and drew her to me, resting her head against my shoulder.
“It’s not the same,” I said softly. “Claire never intended to tell me the truth. You never intended to lie to me. There’s a big difference.”
She shook her head, but I wasn’t going to let her beat herself up anymore. I pushed her back, remembering something else Joss had told me about her.
She was broken by the men she met in the strip clubs. Imagine being sixteen and dealing with men in such an adult situation. It’s amazing she got out of there, amazing she survived with even a small capacity to trust still intact.
She was right. I’d only worked in the club for a
year, but I was already too familiar with the sleazy ways in which those men treated the dancers. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a child who had no one to protect her.
I’d forgive Audra for lying to me. I’d forgive her for just about anything as long as she let me into her life.
I kissed the top of her head. “I wasn’t completely honest with you.”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t react much at all, really. But I could feel the tension coming into her body just the same. She was afraid of my next words.
I was, too, if I was being honest with myself.
“I never wanted anything to do with Mahoney and his people. When he emailed me, told me about Claire, I didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to confront her about it. But I couldn’t ignore it, either.”
I ran my hand down her back, remembering that long week in which I debated with myself over what to do. I had no clue at the time that the email was from Mahoney, that it was the first step in a web of manipulation that would land me in the mess I was in at the moment. If I’d known then what I knew now, I would have tossed the email in the trash and gone on with my life like nothing had ever happened. But that’s not what I did.
“I printed it out, handed it to her over dinner one night. She knew exactly what it was, knew who it was from. She tried to explain, but I didn’t want to hear it. I packed her things and kicked her out of our apartment that night, sent her away kicking and screaming. I’d never wanted anything to do with my father and the fact that she was working on behalf of the man who’d owned my father was just too much.”
I shuddered at the memory. She pulled back, her eyes filled with sympathy as she gazed up at me. I kissed the tip of her nose, gaining some sort of strength just from her presence.
“I knew very little about Jack Mahoney, just what I’d read about him in the press and what my mother had told me. She knew him because she had met him often during her marriage to my father. She warned me to never trust anything he said. I kept that in mind when I got another one of those emails.”
He wrote terrible things to me that I would never repeat to anyone else. Things about my mother, things about her youth, indiscretions that should have remained hidden. He wanted to piss me off, wanted to play on my anger. He wanted me to hate him more than I already did, and it worked.
“He was playing with me, manipulating me in ways I’d never imagined possible. He changed my whole outlook on the world and turned me into this angry, dark person. I walked away from my life and went to hide at my mother’s place in upstate New York, the same place where Claire and I were supposed to be married. It turned out I was right where he wanted me to be. He wanted me there when they came for my mother.”
She reached for my face with such a tender touch that I almost couldn’t handle it. I touched the back of her hand and pulled it closer to me for a moment before pulling it away.
“They took her from her bedroom in the middle of the night. She must have woken up and tried to fight them off because there was evidence of a struggle—broken perfume bottles and jewelry knocked off her dresser. Before I could call the police, one of his people showed up and gave me a video of her tied to a chair. She told me in the video in words clearly written for her that I had to come to California, had to take over The Red Door and wait for instructions. Told me if I didn’t, they would kill her. And then they held a gun…” I choked up a little as I said the words. “They held a gun to her head.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“I’ve only been doing what he tells me to do ever since.”
“What is it he wants from you?”
I sighed, sitting back against the pillows again. “I think his ultimate goal is to escape prison.”
“How?”
“That’s what the FBI wants to know.”
Mike Spencer had approached me in the airport as I waited to board my flight to California. He knew everything, knew about the emails, knew about my mother’s abduction. He promised to find her and free her if I worked with him, promised no harm would come to her. It’d been a year and I still had no proof that she was alive. Mahoney sent me the occasional video, but they were so badly done that they could have all been filmed on the same day for all I could tell. She looked okay, but I couldn’t know that for sure.
“He had me doing little things at first. Helping Rahul with his sex trafficking stuff. Helping Selena with a weapons deal she was running. Bringing drugs in and out of the club. Testing me to see how far I was willing to go. And then he set me up with Mitchell Wallace, the warden at Folsom.”
She nodded. “He’s the VIP who comes into the club every couple of days. I thought I recognized him from somewhere.”
“That’s him.”
I pulled her back down against me. She snuggled against my shoulder, her breath sweet on my skin. I ran my hand down the length of her body, my thoughts lost on the events of the last year. Wasn’t it funny that the worst year of my life had brought me here, to this woman? Everything felt right with her in my arms, right in a way Claire could never give me.
“Jack Mahoney’s not at Folsom, though.”
“No. One of his lieutenants—they guy who used to run The Red Door back in my dad’s day—is there. Jack wants him sprung.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. But it must have something to do with Jack’s plans to get out of his own jam.”
“Was he planning to testify against him?”
“Don’t think so.”
“When is he supposed to escape?”
“Wednesday.”
“Why you? Why did Jack Mahoney insist on you being the one to arrange this man’s escape?”
“Mitchell Wallace and my father were good friends. I was the only one he would trust to do this deal with. As it is, it took six months for me to gain his trust.”
My eyes were growing heavy as we lay there, both of us lost in thought. I hadn’t slept all night. We’d sat up and talked about this thing, talked out our options. Joss wanted to call the whole thing off, afraid that this guy would have some plan in place that would allow Jack Mahoney to get out. Spencer wanted to go forward with the original plan, to watch the guy after he escaped, try to figure out what the plan was by his actions after leaving the prison. Neither sounded like optimal plans in my opinion. I wanted my mother freed. I didn’t care what they did with this asshole.
Audra shifted against me just as I began to doze off. I glanced down at her, so moved by the shape of her face, the beauty in the simplicity of her that it pulled me out of my exhaustion for a moment. I kissed the top of her head and she looked up at me, a soft smile on her lips.
“Whatever happens, I’m glad you’re out of that damn club.”
“Whatever happens, I’m by your side.”
I kissed her again, taking more comfort in her words than she meant me to. But I couldn’t help myself. It seemed like it’d been a lifetime since I’d known anyone I could trust.
Things were beginning to look up. And, hopefully, this thing would be over very soon.
Chapter 22
Audra
I sat at the bedside of one of the men who’d been tasked with keeping me safe, a heaviness settling on my shoulders as I listened to the constant beep of the machines monitoring his most basic life signs. I knew I shouldn’t feel guilty for what happened to him, but I did. If he hadn’t been watching over me, this never would have happened. If I didn’t leave those stupid earrings at the club, he wouldn’t be lying in this bed unconscious.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly as I held his hand.
His wife and daughter were asleep in a cot across the room, exhaustion clear in the dark circles under their eyes despite their state of slumber. I snuck in while they slept because I didn’t want to have to explain who I was, didn’t want to have to lie to these kind people who were probably too used to the lies living this life required. Joss told me a little about their lives, enough to add to the burden that now rested
on my shoulders. But I knew this man would have done what he did for anyone working at Gray Wolf. He was a former soldier, a man who understood what it meant to sacrifice for the greater good.
That didn’t take the guilt away. It only added his name to the list I carried in my heart, the names of all the men who were injured or died while serving at my side.
I only stayed a few minutes, reluctant to get in the way of the nurses and technicians who were constantly buzzing in and out of the room. I had an appointment with Joss downtown I was going to be late for. I walked out of the hospital, happy to be in ankle boots instead of heels as I walked across to the parking garage where my personal car, a 2017 Jeep Wrangler, waited. No more bus for this girl.
“Spencer agreed to allow us to be part of the observation team outside the prison on Wednesday night,” Joss announced as I walked into her office. “Just you and I to start with, but it’s a start. At least he’s not cutting us out of this thing entirely.”
“What about Xavier’s mother?”
The joy that had been written all over her face disappeared. “They have no clue where Mahoney’s men are holding her. Spencer’s been looking for her all this time, but Mahoney covered his tracks. She simply vanished out of that bedroom.” She sighed. “I’m hoping this guy will lead us to her when he escapes the prison.”
“What about the Feds? Won’t people be looking for this guy after he gets out?”
“The way it’s been arranged it’ll look like a paperwork snafu. That’ll delay a search for as much as a week.”
“They thought this through pretty well, didn’t they?”
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