When she gives me a look which says I must be going crazy, I shake my head. 'I won't let him hurt you. If it comes to that, I'll kill us both. Hang in there for me. It won't be for much longer now.'
'You're crazy,' she whispers, wiping away her tears. 'There's no way this can end well.' She sniffs and looks up at me. 'If you think there's a chance, I'll wait.' There's a sad nod before she holds her head up high, all business again. The fighter I know and love is back. 'Go on, tie me up.' Placing her hands behind the chair, she indicates with a flick of her head that I should get on with things. 'If you don't finish this before he gets back he won't be happy.'
Harper is still dressed in the oversized T-shirt I put her in when we left here. Mal will be able to rip it off without a second thought. It's riding up her legs so most of her thighs are exposed, and I can see the cuts and bruises that cover her. I put most of them there. I should have ended this long ago. I cannot watch her being hurt again. What am I letting myself in for? What if my plan backfires?
Picking up the reel of rope that rests on the concrete floor, I begin winding it around her wrists. I make sure it's not too tight, mostly because her wrists are still red raw from his earlier mistreatment. Besides, she's not going to fight him. She's not stupid. This is bullshit. Still, I have to try for her sake.
'What's the first thing you're going to do when we get out of here? Go find a house and move in with Brandt?' I don't know why I'm torturing myself with this, but the small talk passes the time and stops me thinking about... other things.
Harper snorts. 'We aren't getting out of here.' She seems quite convinced of the fact. I hope she's wrong. I can't bear the thought of Adley winning this round. Anyway, I'm not letting her get away with that defeatist attitude.
'Just supposing we do. What's the first thing you're going to do?' I walk back around the front so I can see her. My eyes are drowning in hers like a lost puppy's and they are taking their fill. I have no idea how much time we have left, so I'm going to make the best of it.
'Grab a decent meal.' She laughs bitterly, but then she smiles and continues. 'I want three kids, maybe four, a house near the sea, and someone who'll love me. That's all I've ever wanted. It's not too much to ask, is it? I'm not greedy. The trouble is, nobody loves me. I'm unlovable. People treat me as a possession, not a person. They want to walk all over me. They want to own me. I never wanted that.'
Her comment takes my breath away. Is that what she really thinks? Oh my God. She doesn't realise how beautiful she is. These men have stamped all over her self-esteem until there is nothing left. I daresay Brandt and his fucked-up family didn't help with that, but it had nothing to do with Brandt not wanting her. I can't think there are many blokes who are immune to her, and he's not one of them.
'It's not too much to ask, no,' I say. 'And as to the other matter, you are not unlovable. Your trouble is that you are too beautiful. Everyone wants you, and some will go to extraordinary lengths to have you. If you had family, they would have looked out for you. On your own you were a sitting target for every mad man out there, and oh boy can you find them. You've just been unlucky, Harper. You're all too easy to love, trust me.'
She doesn't get a chance to respond because Mal comes storming back into the room, and he looks pissed. Great, that's just what we need. I take a moment to think about that. Hmm. Actually - that's probably exactly what we need. This might work in my favour.
Mal turns to me. 'Get the whip!' he barks. 'Might as well make a mess of that T-shirt as I'm going to be ripping it off in a few minutes.'
I cross my hands over my chest. 'Nothing doing,' I say. 'I'm not hurting her. She's close enough to death as it is. You can do your own dirty work for a change.' I mean it, too. I'm done here.
Mal gives me a sneer. 'Do as you're fucking told, or you'll regret it,' he barks. Of that I have no doubt, but I'm not changing my mind. We stand there, giving each other the eyeball, as Harper watches on. This time I'm not backing down. If Mal wants to give it to me, I'll take it. I'd much rather he focused his energy on me than her.
'You sure this is how you want to play it? Is she really worth getting yourself killed over?' Mal pulls his gun out of the back of his jeans.
Harper yells from behind us, but it's too late for that.
To add fire to the flames I say, 'She is. So do your fucking worst, Adley.' I'm kinda counting on him not to shoot me. If he shoots me we've had it, but everything leads me to believe he'll play with me first. This is what I'm hoping for. Actually, hope is the wrong word, but you get the idea.
Mal's face darkens. I can tell he's angry by the way his jaw hardens. I hope Brandt has something good up his sleeve, else my last few moments are not going to be very pleasant. I must be mad.
'You're going to regret that, Rodriguez.' He moves forward, crowding me out, and I let him. As long as the focus is on me I'm buying us a little time. It won't be much, but anything is better than nothing.
'Kill me, asshole. I've had just about enough of this shit anyway. You'd be doing me a favour.' That's a lie, and if his trigger finger even thinks of squeezing I am diving for his ankles, with the hopes that he doesn't hit anything vital in the meantime.
Tense seconds of silence follow. Mal doesn't relax his hold on the gun, but he doesn't fire it either. Interesting. Where do we go from here?
'Who said I was going to kill you? I have another fucking chair, asshole. Why don't you take a seat?' He steps back a few feet to reveal another plastic chair, and with his foot, he slides it forward. 'Sit,' he barks. Now there is no way I want to sit on that chair, but if the alternative is to watch him cut Harper up, I guess I'll take it. So I sit down on the hard red plastic.
He beckons several of his thugs over. They stand behind him, training their guns carefully on me. I grin up at them. I'm buggered if he thinks he's going to intimidate me.
'Ah, tough guy, is that it?' Mal stands in front of me scrutinising my expression. I'm not going to give anything away, and if he hopes I'm about to burst into tears, he is much mistaken.
'Not particularly.' I run a hand through my hair and debate my next choice of words carefully. I should keep quiet, but I don't think I'm going to. 'But I do know that when I love a woman and she doesn't love me, it's time to move on. You're flogging a dead horse, Mal.' That's not far from the truth.
He doesn't respond. He simply shoves his booted foot between my legs and presses so hard my eyes begin to water. It looks like we've finally dispensed with the chitchat.
'Want to know the first thing I'm going to do to you?' he asks.
'Not particularly,' I admit. 'In fact, I'd rather you kept it a secret. It kind of spoils the surprise, otherwise.' Yeah, I'm playing with fire, but if you're going down you might as well do it in style.
Mal shakes his head at me. 'Oh, Gabriel,' he says, with mock concern, 'and I had such big plans for you. I thought you were going to fit into my little world quite nicely. Your friend was hopeless, so I'm going to have him killed, but you? Well, you had promise.'
'Yeah, I know, I'm such a big fucking disappointment. Story of my life.'
He continues as if I haven't spoken. 'The first thing I'm going to do to you is glue up that smart mouth of yours. When I've done that I'm going to glue all of your fingers together, because it will make them much easier to chop off. I can do a couple at once that way. Then I'm going to glue your eyes together because that will make the next part much more fun. Now ask me what's the last thing I'm going to do to you?'
I answer in a bored fashion, knowing it will piss him off. 'As I've said before, I like surprises.' I have no idea what he plans to do for my grand finale, but I don't think I'll like it much. Brandt had better come through for me. Once my eyes are glued my options are severely limited. Ideally I want to be dead before that part.
'And don't think I've forgiven you for that last cocktail you served up in my whisky,' Mal continues. 'I was lucky you didn't kill me.' The aim had been to kill him. I put enough drugs in that whisky to ki
ll a horse, but somehow the bastard is still here. Bloody man is a bit like a whack-a-mole. You bang him over the head, and he keeps bouncing up again for the next round.
'That would have been terrible,' I say, twiddling my fingers - the same ones that are shortly going to be removed from my body. I'm quite attached to them. The thought of them decorating Mal's floor is not a pleasant one. One or two I could cope without, but it sounds like he's planning to take them all. Still, I'm going to be dead when all of this is finished, so who the hell cares?
Pulling his tube of glue out of his pocket, he waves it at me. I don't flinch. I refuse to give him the satisfaction.
'Think you're a tough guy, Rodriguez? We'll see soon enough. It doesn't usually take me long to make grown guys scream, and I have a feeling you won't be any different.' Hah. That's where you're wrong, I think. I've had years of practise of not screaming. I'm a street rat. We learn the hard way that life isn't fair, and I didn't learn to fight without taking a few punches in my time.
'Are you still talking?' I waggle my fingers at him. Sometimes when you anger the beast you get them to do stupid things. That's when they slip up. Yes, I'm certifiably nuts, but at least Mal's attention is fully on me. I'm going to pay for my outburst, but it will be worth it. I think he's forgotten Harper's still here.
A fist flies in my direction, aimed at my jaw, and while I could avoid it I don't see the point. He'll just keep going until he's done some damage, and sure enough, that's exactly what he does.
All the while this is happening Harper is screeching behind us, but neither of us pay her any attention. Mal doesn't because he's too focused on making a mess of me, and I don't because there's no way I want this shit happening to her. I do have a conscience, after all. Who knew?
The fists keep flying, and I take them all. I'm going to have one or two wobbly teeth when this is finished, but that's the least of my problems. When the glue comes back out of his pocket and he takes the top off, I know I'm really in trouble. The fun and games are about to begin.
Chapter Twenty-Two - Brandt
You don't learn much in prison. Letting go of control is probably the first thing you come to terms with, swiftly followed by the second, which is to trust no one and keep your head down. When you find yourself behind bars, the last thing you want is to be the centre of attention. You also discover that there are consequences for every action you make, and to mitigate the effect of this, you learn to become very observant.
When Helena told me she'd become involved with Adley to pay back her gambling debts, I naturally didn't believe her. Oh, I looked like I believed her, and I nodded my head and said all the right things, but the cogs were turning. Helena's family has money. Even if she'd done something really stupid, they'd have bailed her out one way or another. Some people might have been too proud to go to their parents, but not Helena. She's smart. She knows how to play people. Sure, she can act the clown, but behind the bleach-blonde hair there are plenty of brain cells calculating how to do a hostile takeover of your brain, without you actually realising it. Unfortunately for her, I spotted her game a mile off. It helped that I have a friendly private investigator, the same one I used to find out Harper's whereabouts, and I used him to track down all the information he could find on her. As it turns out, there's quite a lot.
For starters, there is no gambling debt. Helena fell in love with a bad boy, plain and simple. No surprise there. What is it with women and bad boys? Maybe she just wanted some filthy sex, or maybe she wanted to piss her parents off - whatever the reason, she's been in league with Adley for a while. To make sure, my PI hacked into her phone. It was full of cute little love notes from Adley, if you can call extreme sadism that, depicting exactly what he was going to do to her if she was successful in setting me up. He also bet her fifty-thousand pounds in cash to sleep with me within three days of the wedding. There was no way she was going to win that one in a hurry. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I knew she was going to set me up.
Normally, in that situation, the best thing to do would be to run, but that wasn't an option. Harper and Gabriel were being held hostage, and besides, this thing had gotten personal. Adley had preyed on Harper for years, and there has to be some kind of payback after something like that happens. If there was any chance of a future for us, Adley needs to be out of the picture - permanently, if you catch my drift.
Trying to find a way out of this mess has been almost impossible. Whichever way I looked at it, we'd have to spend the rest of our lives running. Even if we kill Adley, his replacement would never let us live, and there is always a replacement. That's another lesson prison taught me. You can kill someone, but it doesn't get rid of the problem. I've pondered this for a while, but I think I've come up with a solution, although I'll probably get a broken nose for my troubles.
On the drive to the police station the thugs don't say a word, and I'm not in a particularly chatty mood either. I'll give my voice a rest until I'm assigned an arresting officer. Boy, is he going to have a field day with me. At the moment I'm just thanking my lucky stars I haven't been searched. If Mal had caught up with me I would have been. But Helena is nowhere near as smart as she thinks she is, and for that I can be grateful.
The four blokes take no chances with me. They stop right in front of the police station, have a word with the station chief, and I am then handcuffed and led away. Believe it or not, I am relieved when this happens. I stand a chance here. If I'd been taken back to Mal's the only thing being dealt up there would be death.
'I need to talk to someone urgently,' I tell the female officer leading me to one of their holding cells. 'I have crucial information that will help you break up a drugs gang.' This is the one area I am uncertain of. If I don't get the police to Mal's ASAP, Harper and Gabriel will be dead. There's the added worry that Gabriel will take matters into his own hands if he thinks the situation is hopeless, and from where he's standing it is. This is why I can't wait. I want to send Mal down, but it will be a horribly hollow victory if Harper and Gabriel aren't around to share it with me.
'You think you're special, huh? You and everyone else in this joint.' The officer looks at me with disdain and then jerks my body forward painfully. She's heard all this before. I need to say something that will get through to her.
'I'm not kidding. I know where the guy is right now, and he's just had a fresh haul of heroin in. Someone needs to get out there, before it's gone. I'll happily tell you all the details, just get me someone who will listen.' This is all lies of course, but when they arrest Mal, Harper can tell them everything else they need to know which should get them what they want; a high profile arrest. My dad will be very happy with that, I should think, now that he's the Mayor of London. Think of that. The black sheep of the family will be doing him a favour.
'Save it, kiddo. You'll get seen when you get seen. Let's hope you get lucky and we don't have a busy day. For now, get your ass in there and don't give me any trouble. We clear?' I nod because there really isn't anything else I can do, but there's a look of desperation in my eyes. This could all explode in my face if I'm not seen quickly, and I'll never forgive myself if that happens.
My cell is a tiny, white square box with a concrete bed and a plastic mattress. This is just like old times. Sitting down gingerly, I try not to think about what might be happening while I'm here twiddling my thumbs. I couldn't have played this any other way, I try to tell myself. If Mal had been suspicious he'd have run, and if the police don't have him, Gabriel, Harper and I will never be safe. We need him either dead or under lock and key. I'm partial to the former if I'm honest.
Time moves slowly in a cell. I alternate between imagining worst-case scenarios and best-case. It doesn't do much for my blood pressure. Every time I hear a pair of footsteps go down to the corridor I almost jump up and hammer on my cell door, but even I am aware of the futility of that. I have to be patient. Someone will get to me in time, they have to.
I am left waiting for what must be hours. Eve
n the footsteps up and down are getting less frequent, and I'm beginning to wonder if they've forgotten about me. It would be just my luck if the Met were short-staffed today. Try to stay positive. That's easier said than done. I haven't even begun to explain what I need to in order for them to get out and go do something. Meanwhile, Harper and Gabriel are out there taking everything Mal can dish out, and I'm well aware that it isn't going to be pleasant. Come on, people. Someone give me a break. Placing my head in my hands I nearly give in to screaming out loud, when there is a sudden rattling of my cell door.
I don't dare hope that someone has come to question me. I suspect it will be some lackey who's come to throw food at me, following government protocol, but the door opens and an officer is standing before me.
'Brandt Browning?'
'Yes,' I whisper. I wonder if he can see the desperation in my eyes, because the man then smiles.
'I hear you have some information for me that might be useful. Most people who say that are wasting my time, so you have three seconds to give me a name before I move on to someone more interesting.' There it is. Short but sweet. Let's hope I can impress him.
Clearing my throat I say, 'The guy's name is Mal.' God, I hope he's heard of the bastard or I'm in deep trouble. If he walks away from me I'm liable to commit a real crime and it won't be pretty.
The officer's head snaps back as if in shock. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It'd better be a good thing.
'Mal Adley?' His mouth is now hanging open.
Of course, Mal Adley. How many people named Mal can be running drugs in London? I decide not to let my mouth run off. I don't think that would be the smartest move here.
'The one and only,' I confirm instead.
The officer nearly yanks my arm off, dragging me out of my cell. 'Why the hell didn't you say something earlier? We've been after that bastard for years. Do you have something concrete for us? We're not interested unless you can give us something solid. He's as slippery as an eel. Most of the city is in his pocket.'
Beautiful Tyrant (Enemies to Lovers - Dark Romance Book 3) Page 21