by Scott, Ada
Why in the ever-loving fuck I agreed to come back to this place I’d never know. It had only been abandoned for about seven years by this stage, but it already looked like a relic from a past civilization.
The lead car, with three of my security detail in it, headed around the other side to monitor the other entrance. The men from the following car stayed within sight, but mostly looked outwards. They were all carrying guns, of course, as were the men in the decoy convoys that would leave from the underground parking lots of wherever I stopped for more than fifteen minutes. Lorenzo and I had reinstated the procedures from the early days after I seized the Picollis’ assets and heads.
Kendall and I walked across the cracked concrete and stood almost in the shadow of the stained brick building that didn’t have a single window intact. I should have had the place demolished and built a giant public toilet facility here.
Kendall took out her notebook and pen. I was giving her the information she needed for an article, but I’d still be damned if I wanted my actual voice recorded on a Dictaphone talking about anything at all.
“So it’s been eleven years since you lived here. How do you feel being back?” she asked.
I looked around the area the staff had called the basketball court, but what we’d called the-place-where-you-get-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you. The ghost voices of chanting kids echoed in my mind.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
“Pissed off.”
“Why?”
“This place. This fuckin’ place. Kids shouldn’t be here. It wasn’t a home. It was a cage for animals. You put kids in, you get animals out.”
“What do you mean? It didn’t turn you into an animal.” she asked.
“It did. You see that ladder over there?”
I pointed at the rusty iron rungs that were bolted to the side of the building. A fire escape at one point, that ladder was already a relic in my day because there wasn’t a single fucking window anywhere near it that didn’t have permanent bars on it. Kendall nodded.
“See how one of the bottom rungs is missing? I ripped that off and changed the way this kid’s face looked with it. He never came back to Wellfort.”
Kendall stopped scribbling and looked up, horrified and confused. “Why?”
“Because he was fucking huge. I was in fights every week, Lord of the Flies had nothing on this place. The guy started hearing rumors that some people thought I could beat him. Well, he was almost eighteen by that point. He’d ruled the roost for so long, used to kick my ass all the time when I was younger, and he didn’t like people talking like that. People start talking like that, you have to watch your back a whole lot more.”
“What did the staff do to stop all the fighting?”
“Stop it? You kidding me? They took bets, this was their fucking entertainment,” I spat.
“You can’t be serious!”
“Look at me. I’m serious. I got a scar here where a kid hit me with a brick. I had a scar here on my neck, it’s faded now, from rope burn when another motherfucker tried to strangle me.”
I shook my head in disgust, remembering the staff who used to hold back, waiting until somebody was about to get killed before they “noticed” the fight and “took appropriate action” as per state guidelines.
“Couldn’t you just… not fight? Stay out of their game?” she asked.
“No.”
“Everybody fought?”
“No. I tell you what though, the kids that didn’t fight had nothin’. If you’re here, you already don’t have much, but those poor fucks had nothing,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This place taught me that at least. If you don’t fight, then somebody is going to come and take away whatever it is that you care about. Those kids didn’t have a shirt on their back most of the time. Yeah. It taught me that alright. Nobody is ever going to take what’s mine without a fight, without payback.”
“Is that why this place got shut down in the end?”
“I have no idea, never looked into it.”
Kendall wrote something in her notebook, and when she looked up at me again her eyes were glassy. She spoke with a choked voice.
“What was it like? You know, one day you’re at home with Mom and Dad, you’ve got your own room, your toy box in the corner, maybe a bunch of books your parents take turns reading to you at night, you’re safe. You were just a little boy and… the next day you’re here. Did you ever think about that? About them? W-wonder h-how this happened?” Kendall’s lip was quivering.
I looked across the-place-where-you-get-the-shit-kicked-out-of-you to the-place-where-kids-shove-sand-in-your-mouth. In my day, there had been a swing set there. Now there was just a rusty death-trap frame. That was where that guy sat me down and told me what really happened that day.
Hey kid, they’re feedin’ you bullshit here… That car accident wasn’t an accident, it was a mob hit… You don’t remember some guys blastin’ your folks after the crash? You musta knocked your head good… Well, fuck it, I just wanted you to know the truth… the Picolli family did this to ya…
Trench coat, hat and sunglasses like in a shitty spy movie, he dropped that bomb on me and left. I never saw him again, but that was the day my life regained purpose. I would turn myself into a weapon that could take down the Picolli family. Nothing else mattered.
“Not much,” I said.
Chapter 21
Jace
Going to Wellfort was more nerve-wracking than going to the Ex Machina headquarters with a twenty percent chance of them gunning me down on sight. I stood behind my bar and filled a shot glass with scotch, knocking it back and pouring myself another.
“You want one?” I asked.
Kendall, sitting at my table, was pulled from some inner thought. She looked up from the notebook in front of her and shook her head. She hadn’t written anything for several minutes.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Suit yourself.”
I downed the second shot and then brought the bottle to the table, sitting down across from her. Like me, she’d been a lot quieter on the way back from Wellfort than on the way in.
Leaning back in my chair, I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the scotch thawing the iceberg in my stomach. It was a bad idea to go there today, there was too much other shit going on.
Not just that shitstorm at the biker bar, either. Word was that some of my guys were turning up dead here and there. Not many, just higher than the average level for people in their demographic, the active criminal demographic.
Things were ramping up, and I had an entire fucking country to search so I could find where the Picollis’ new base of operations was. So far we had one lead. My contacts in the police said that one of my cadaver mugshots was almost certainly a known thug from Chicago.
That’s where I had to focus my… I got the feeling I was being watched. When I opened my eyes, the mystery was solved. Kendall was looking at me with such obvious pity that I felt a flare of anger.
I was Jace Motherfucking Barlow. I owned this city. Pity me? I felt my skin prickling as my blood rushed. Kendall stood and walked around the table until she was standing beside my chair. She hitched her skirt up a bit before she lifted a leg over and straddled my lap.
Good girl… that’s just what I need. Fuck my problems away…
I reached between her legs, cupping that sweet pussy of hers through her panties, and felt my middle finger nestled in along the length of her slit. My God, I wanted to touch her every second of every day.
“Wait…” she said.
Kendall held my wrists and pulled my hand away from her, placing both of my palms around her upper thighs just below the hem of her high-riding skirt. If any other girl had ever told me to wait, I’d have thrown her out of the room and had the next one sent in. I clenched my jaw and looked up at her.
Once she was reasonably confident that my hands weren’t going to wander when she let go, she reached up and cradled m
y head, with her palms along my jawline, her fingers near my ears and her thumbs gently stroking my cheeks. Her touch was so tender, so soft, that it was almost as if she was handling me like a Ming Vase, something precious and breakable.
I looked at her with the most incredulous expression I could muster, and she just looked straight back at me. Straight through me, almost, into my soul.
“Jace? Listen to me, because I… I don’t think anybody ever told you this. I am so sorry for what happened to you-”
“It doesn’t m-”
“No. Listen. I am sorry for what you went through, Jace. Look at me. You were just a little boy. You didn’t deserve to have your home and family ripped away. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t have been thrown into that hellhole. Somebody should have been there to tell you that everything was going to be OK.”
Kendall’s face was streaming with tears by now, but she didn’t let go of my head to wipe them away. With a jolt of shock I realized that she was, in fact, using her thumbs to wipe tears off my face.
What in the fucking hell was this? I thought I knew what power was… but this girl had me mesmerized, enthralled. She was the powerful one, and she had more to say.
“I wish I could, I don’t know, travel back in time so I could tell you. I’d tell you that all this… all this shit, isn’t forever. I’d tell you that there’s nobody in the whole world like you and everything is going to be OK and I’ll be waiting for you.” Kendall pulled my head against her chest and I shut my eyes, shut out the world.
This penthouse was supposed to be my bomb shelter, my safe place, and my home. Being in Kendall’s arms felt more like those things than the expensive surroundings ever had.
How was that possible? I had billions of dollars that the IRS had no fucking clue about, more weapons than my two and a half armies could wield, and I could probably throw Kendall thirty feet one-handed. But I needed her as much as I needed oxygen.
After some unknown quantity of time, Kendall pulled my head away. I opened my eyes to see a wet spot on her shirt, where it stuck to her perfect body, before I looked up to her face again. She held my gaze for what seemed like forever before she spoke again.
“Jace… I love you.”
Panic and fear froze me like the first time somebody held a gun to my head when I was sixteen. My heart was probably hitting three hundred beats per minute and in my mind I reached for any weapon I could find. The usual one. Anger.
Put this bitch in her place, Jace. You tell her love doesn’t fucking exist and she better get used to the idea that she’s just a tight-pussied little cum dumpster and you can get a thousand more just like her before the end of the day.
I was just about to stand up, send Kendall tumbling to the ground and tell her exactly that when another part of my brain spoke up with a ‘hold on, what about this?’ and an image flashed through my mind of what Kendall would look like if I said that.
That spark in her eyes would be snuffed out. That glow. Gone. She wouldn’t look at me like a hero anymore.
Oh for fuck sake. Well say something, you stupid cunt.
“Kendall… I...”
Don’t just sit there like a fucking moron. Fuck it, tell her the truth if you have to.
My stampeding heart made my voice waver with every beat. “I love you too.”
I hadn’t said those words in over two decades. But if I was telling Kendall the truth… how could I tell her the whole truth?
Chapter 22
Kendall
For the first time in my life, I was in love. I didn’t simply have a crush on somebody, I wasn’t on the outside, I was in love. Jace loved me right back.
There’d been times when I’d lay by myself in bed wondering what it felt like to be in love, to be in one of those exclusive two-person clubs. It was hard to remember exactly what I’d thought, but it probably involved running through a field of flowers in slow motion and soft-focus, before Prince Charming lifted me up and we twirled around.
The reality was so much better, yet so much more difficult. Most of the time I was so excited that I could have burst. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, stay in bed with him every moment of every day, have silly little talks in hushed whispers in the dark that nobody else would ever hear, and bask in his love forever.
All that and more was beyond my wildest dreams, but the fantasies didn’t prepare me for everything. They didn’t tell me that Prince Charming might not have grown up in a castle with loving parents. They didn’t tell me that he might have had to fight for his life before, maybe more than once.
I’d felt helpless and alone for so long that I felt almost ashamed of myself when I managed to put enough pieces of Jace’s early life together. Somewhere along the line I’d become so scared and wrapped up in my own issues that I’d forgotten that other people were hurting too.
So I told him some things that I wished somebody had told me. I couldn’t do anything about where he came from, but I hoped the words combined with all the love I had for him would be something at least.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t too late to help heal some of those old wounds, because I knew in myself just how different I felt about everything now that we were together. He seemed so relieved that day after we visited Wellfort too, like a piece of broken glass had been pulled out after hurting him for years.
If life was even a little bit fair, that should have been the only issue Jace had to deal with, but there were other things blatantly weighing heavily on his mind. The resurgence of Mafia violence that had started with the biker bar had escalated. The Picolli Crime Family seemed to take extra special interest in hitting locations that were, via various holding companies and other complicated corporate structures, ultimately owned by Jace.
It was really terrible luck. At work, Lucile was scrambling to follow up with her flop of an article by covering the new crime wave, and the police were saying that the Picollis were probably targeting businesses that refused to pay for protection.
Several times I asked him about it. I could see he was down and all I wanted to do was make him happy again. My own happiness depended on it. That was a cliché I’d heard but, again, I couldn’t have been prepared for the reality.
More than once he looked like he was going to answer, as if he’d come up with this big speech to explain to me what was going through his head. Every time, he seemed to think better of it, told me not to worry. It was just boring business stuff.
Today was no different. This afternoon, officially, we were celebrating the impending publication of my article, which had been written, re-written and polished to perfection by myself and Mr. Kinsley, and appropriately fact-checked by the research department.
Jace didn’t look to be in the celebrating mood though. He sat there, looking out at the city as it went by the tinted windows of the town car, alternately looking sad, pissed off and frustrated. Hopefully our evening at AquaVell would relax him a bit.
A blowjob in their Zen Garden would probably cheer us both up. I stifled a laugh and was just about to reach out and touch his knee to tell him my great idea when we stopped at an intersection and he looked in my direction with fierce concentration.
At first I could have sworn he was about to accuse me of something, but then I realized he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking out the window on my side. I turned just in time to see the windows rolling down on a black SUV that had pulled up alongside us.
“FUCK! Floor it!”
The driver, behind the privacy barrier, couldn’t hear him and was probably looking ahead at traffic rather than the horrific sight of men with big guns leaning out of the SUV. Panic so intense that it transcended any ability to react gripped me, and I sat there with wide open mouth and eyes as they swung their weapons around to point right at me, though I was probably invisible behind the window.
Jace dived across the car and pulled me towards him as a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before almost deafened me. If somebody had told me that this was wha
t it sounded like when the earth ripped open and all the demons of hell were unleashed, I wouldn’t have argued.
“Go! Go! Go! Fuck!”
My eyes were shut so tight that I thought my face was going to cramp up. I could barely hear Jace above the cacophony, as a thousand bullets hammered into the side of the car.
It might have been a few seconds or it might have been an hour, but although the assault continued, I was still breathing. Our car leaped forward and crashed straight into the back of the lead car in the convoy, coming to an abrupt halt again.
“Get outta the fuckin’ way!”
If I could barely hear him, the people in the front car had no hope. I cracked my eyes open and peered out in terror through the narrow slits. Jace was holding me against the far side of the car from where the men in the SUV were attacking, covering me as much as he could with his back to them.
Under his armpit I could see that the windows on that side were all rendered impossible to see through because they were shattered with a fine network of cracks. Somehow, aside from the occasional tiny chip that launched off as a bullet hit the outside, they were still intact.
The driver floored it again, and the lead car must have moved out of the way because we didn’t crash into anything this time. Suddenly a bright orange flash coming from behind us lit up the inside of the car, and a split second later I heard the rumble of an explosion. Even in our car, accelerating at top speed, I felt the explosion too.
I was breathing so fast, and my chest hurt with the ferocity of my pounding heart. That was one of the only things that led me to believe I was probably still alive.
Jace pushed himself up and looked back as the car weaved through traffic that I couldn’t see. I tried to get up, but Jace held me down, never taking his eyes off the scene behind us.
I didn’t have the strength, coordination or coherent plan to struggle against him. I was delirious and might have just opened the door and stepped out while we were going full speed.
Through back streets and over sidewalks, Jace’s driver managed to get us back to Jace’s building in record time, driving down the ramp into the underground parking lot so fast that the car bottomed out and I screamed.