Dawn

by Aleatha Romig

“It makes you an amazing lover,” he said when our kiss ended. “I love being close to you too.” His full lips turned upward. “I like tasting me on your lips and vice versa. What we do together doesn’t make you anyone or anything except mine and me yours. I’m sorry I reminded you of the past. This is new territory for me. I never suspected you had been hurt, and now I’m worried. I don’t want to fuck it up.”

  I shook my head. “Then rule number one, don’t bring him up during...” I changed my mind. “...Ever. Besides, the last I heard, he’s dead. Those memories can die too. What he made me do wasn’t this.”

  “But you said...”

  “Technically, but it’s not the same. You were right, Reid. What he—he and I did—was wrong and the blame lies with him alone. I didn’t want to play his damn game. We—you and I—are different. With you, what I just did was me showing you how much I love you, being intimate and open. I want that. Hell, Reid, I crave it. I want more, not less. That’s what we have.”

  “I believe what we have is called love.” Reid wrapped his arm around my waist and held me against him.

  “Yes, we have love. That isn’t what it was with him.” I took a deep breath. “Back then, I felt dirty and wrong. Right now, I feel” —I tilted my head— “loved and wanton.”

  “So,” Reid said with a grin, “telling you to suck me is off the table?”

  I reached up and laid my palm over his cheek. “Stop overthinking.” It was what my husband did, what he excelled at doing. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was doing it now. “I have no problem with you telling me what you want as long as you’re okay with me doing the same.”

  “What do you want, Mrs. Murray?”

  Though other options were on the tip of my tongue, I answered, “Sixty more years of this.”

  Reid scoffed. “I’m not exactly confident in my physical ability to do this when I’m ninety.”

  “As long as we’re ninety together, I don’t care if we are just holding one another.”

  The bandage he’d been placing when I first walked into the bathroom was no longer in place, the gauze had fallen to the floor and the thick black stitches looked like barbed wire upon his skin. I ran my finger over the threads. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  Leaning over, I gently kissed his wound. When our eyes met, I smiled. “Let me help with that bandage.”

  By the time I had his arm again cleaned, covered in antibiotic gel, gauze, and the ace bandage, I looked at the clock. “Shit, it’s after six. I need to shower and get upstairs. I’m letting my breakfast cooking lag.”

  Reid tugged on the tie of my robe, loosening the knot, and grinned as the soft material fell open, exposing all of me, including my treacherous still-hardened nipples. “Or we could skip breakfast upstairs” —he leaned down and sucked one nipple, pulling back with a pop— “and work on that wanton feeling you mentioned.”

  Though my empty core, heavy breasts, and tight nipples liked his suggestion, I wasn’t sure Reid was ready for more, not physically, and if I wanted sixty more years, I was willing to wait a day or two to have him inside me. And then I remembered something. Pushing his face away as he neared my other breast, ready for a second assault, I grinned. “Nice try.”

  “What?” he asked innocently.

  “You’re trying to avoid Araneae because you went to 2 before breakfast.”

  “I ate a mini-pie.”

  “And I’m sure that will get you off the hook.”

  Allowing my robe to flutter to the tile, I walked to the shower and turned on the water, but not before a large hand made a playful slap at my ass. “What was that for?”

  “Because I can’t keep my hands off of you.”

  Reid

  “You don’t really want to be a part of this,” Mason said.

  “I want to hear what she has to say.” Leaning my head against the leather seat, I sighed. The bumps along the roads were enough to make me consider pain medication. Romero was at the wheel while Mason and I rode in the back seat of the SUV on our way to the halfway house. Beyond the windows, dreary landscapes and scenes of south Chicago competed with an overcast sky for the title of most depressing.

  “I’m trying to remain impartial, but it’s fucking difficult.” Mason turned to the window and then back. “Have you ever wished to have power over someone? I’m talking about someone with whom you were theoretically powerless.”

  “I’m sure I have. I mean, doesn’t that thought occur to most kids?” I considered his question for a moment. “There was this kid in elementary school—I don’t even remember his name. He used to say things about me not having a father.” I shook my head. “I remember wishing each day on my way to school that he wouldn’t be present. His desk would be empty. I’m not sure I took it further in my mind, such as why he was missing. I wasn’t wishing death. I was wishing for a reprieve.”

  “I fucking carried it further in my imagination. I was an eleven-year-old skinny, hungry kid at the mercy of Gordon Maples and his bitchy daughters. The two girls would do shit and tell their dad it was one of us just to get us in trouble. Even then, I took it further in my head, but I was powerless to carry it through. Back then, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing. Now I do.

  “For the last twenty-four hours, that skinny kid has been reveling in the fact that he’s in the driver’s seat. Zella left Maples’s house before I introduced myself to her old man. She has no clue that I’m Mason Pierce. Fucking Maples knew before you gutted him. Now, I’m waiting for that look, the one where Zella realizes she’s fucked.”

  I had no urge to ask Mason what he had planned. My brother-in-law was a complicated man who could quite easily be misdiagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. If I recalled correctly, I believed I’d even heard Laurel joke that she’d mentally diagnosed him with DID before Mason broke free of his Kader facade.

  When I think about the man beside me, the one who loved and admired his wife or the one who cared for his sister throughout their lives, it was difficult to imagine he was also Kader—a well-oiled killing machine. Yet even now, when situations called for Kader, the dark web’s assassin for hire, there was reassurance in knowing that he was close at hand.

  The issue that I wondered about right now was how Kader, a rather stoic and goal-focused individual, would behave when fed by Mason’s childhood traumas. I’d been the one to gut Maples. Mason had been the one to kill him quickly with a slit of the femoral artery. In that move, Mason was cool and detached as a killer should be.

  What would this next encounter entail?

  “What about the kid?” I asked.

  “I looked up Zella’s other kids. They’re both girls. One is twenty-five, married, and living in Michigan. The other is twenty and single, living in Kentucky. There’s no sign that either has had any contact with their mother in the last year.”

  “Does the older one have kids?”

  “A boy a month younger than Zella’s.”

  “Fucked-up family. Zella’s kid would be that kid’s uncle.”

  Mason shook his head. “I talked to Dr. Dixon. She recommends involving DCFS to determine if that household is a safe and viable fit. The way I see it, living with his sister can’t be worse than living with Zella and Maples.”

  DCFS was Department of Children and Family Services, a governmental agency we didn’t need involved in our cleanup. “DCFS brings another layer of inquisition.”

  “I’ve thought about that too,” Mason said. “Wrapping the kid in clean blankets and abandoning him at a firehouse has also occurred to me.”

  That would involve more than governmental investigations, the news media would be all over that shit. I shook my head. “You know what Allister would have done?”

  Mason nodded. “That market is still out there. The Sparrows have connections to adoption attorneys. It seems to me that someone willing to put down fifty to a hundred grand on a kid sounds like a reliable parent who at least has the financial means to take care of
it.”

  “Him, not it,” I corrected. “And Sparrow wouldn’t approve.”

  “You’re wrong. This isn’t sex trade we’re talking about. It’s illegal adoptions, and they happen every day. They also happen without all the digging and inquiry that would happen at the firehouse or if he gets delivered to one of his sisters. The right attorney draws up the paperwork and bam—it’s done and legal, at least on the surface.”

  “You make it sound like the best option,” I admitted.

  “Because in many ways it is.”

  The SUV exited the interstate and came to a halt at a stop sign. I looked at my new phone. The halfway house was less than two miles away. With traffic, we’d be there within ten minutes. I continued to consider Mason’s stance on the subject of adoptions.

  “What if we find the Garcia whom Maples mentioned and he did what you’re talking about with Zella’s kid? He bought Missy.”

  Mason inhaled. “I’ve thought about that more than I want. First, I fucking hate that Nancy or anyone else has gotten Lorna’s hopes up that Missy is alive.”

  “Second?” I asked.

  “The same principles apply. It was awful that we lost Missy when we did. Nancy is a cunt if she sold her own kid. That’s neither here nor there. She’s always been a cunt. At least Zella isn’t making that decision; she’ll have no choice. One point for her. Then again, if this Garcia had the money and the financial wherewithal to continue making payments, maybe Missy lucked out. I always thought she ended up like” —he took a breath— “the others. Fuck no, I don’t approve of Nancy selling her own daughter, but maybe, just maybe, it was the best option and Missy made it out.”

  “Lorna wants me to search.”

  Mason turned toward the window. “Of course she does.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I’ve got everything I want, all of it.”

  His answer surprised me, most significantly because it didn’t address the subject of my question. “You’re saying you don’t care if we find your sister if she’s out there to be found?”

  “No, I’m saying it won’t affect now. I have everything I want even though I don’t deserve any of it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Mason’s stare narrowed. “Over the last twenty-four hours, I’ve fucking been considering heinous acts, things no decent man would even think of, and yet they’ve been playing on a fucking loop in my head. I could say I read about them or I saw them in some sick movie, but that’s not true and hell, Reid, I’m not lying to you. I’m a sick fuck. I’m not sure if life made me this way or if I always have been. Maybe Nancy’s selfish money-grabbing act to satisfy her addictions gave Missy an out Lorna and I never had. If that’s the case, she probably has a decent life. Why would she want to find Lorna and me and remember the shit beginning she had?”

  My gaze narrowed as I stared at my brother-in-law. “Do you think Laurel or Lorna look at you and think you’re—to use your own words—a sick fuck?”

  “They don’t really know me.”

  I scoffed. “Bullshit. You’re wrong, Mason. They know you. I know you. Sparrow and Patrick, we all know you.”

  “Yeah, well the three of you aren’t exactly upstanding citizens. The women wear blinders. They see what they want to see.” He shook his head. “It was the way Laurel saw me, seeing something other than pure evil, that had me so fucking off-kilter when we met again.”

  “Maybe they see what we don’t show the rest of the world.”

  Mason took a deep breath. “I have a torture session in my near future. This isn’t the best time to convince me of my internal goodness.”

  “I’m not talking about today,” I said. “I’m talking about Missy. You’re right, Lorna has her hopes up. If we can’t find your other sister, then Lorna will have me, you, and everyone else to convince her that she has enough in her life. But if you’re suggesting that if Missy is out there, she’d be better off not knowing her brother and sister, the people who looked after her for the first nine years of her life, who still love her, and who want to see her, my response is you’re wrong.”

  “Lorna’s rose-colored glasses have worn off on you.”

  Romero weaved us through narrow streets. When I looked out the window, a light mist had begun to fall. The buildings were no longer residential but more industrial. “Halfway house?” I asked, emphasizing the last word.

  “Not exactly,” Mason answered. “I didn’t trust Zella to stay quiet, or the kid. Most of these warehouses around here have been sitting empty for the last few years. We have access to one that is conveniently near a few that are still functioning. These particular ones are currently rented by a private company that collects and refurbishes used corrugated boxes.”

  “Why?”

  “The process is inexpensive and they can resell cheaper than new.” That wasn’t my question, yet he continued speaking. “With online sales increasing, they’re fucking making a mint with shipping companies. And on the plus side, their machinery is loud. Their cleaning process uses chemicals that stink. The company isn’t huge, but they have just enough employees that an extra car or two doesn’t warrant investigation.”

  “You’ve used this place before.”

  Mason nodded. “I know from experience that Zella—or anyone who is being questioned—can scream their head off and no one will hear.”

  My nostrils flared as I exhaled, willing myself not to give too much thought to Mason’s questioning process and screaming subjects. “Impressive thought process regarding location.”

  “Logical,” he corrected.

  It was logical.

  “Have you spoken to the capos who are watching Zella?” I asked.

  “I just received another text. It seems Mommie Dearest is now demanding smack.”

  Another name for heroin.

  “Fuck,” I said, staring out to empty parking lots, boarded-up windows, and giant empty buildings. “Her argument for mother of the year is eroding by the minute.”

  The SUV entered a chain-link-fenced area, the tires bouncing on the dilapidated parking lot pitted with potholes and cracks. We passed five or six cars lined up near a loading dock. Romero continued driving around until we reached the other side of the building. This side appeared more abandoned. As he slowed, he hit a button. A large garage door opened before us. He drove us inside.

  The only light inside was the white illumination from our headlights, glowing into a dark cavern. The only exception was the presence of other vehicles.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” I confessed.

  Mason smiled. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Reid

  Romero held a light and his handgun, ready to react as he led Mason and me through the darkness. Particles of dust stirred and floated in the stale air within the tunnel of light. Over Mason’s shoulder was the strap of a duffel bag he’d removed from the back of the SUV. His gun wasn’t in his hand, but I knew from experience that it could be in a millisecond. My hand itched to once again free my gun from its holster as every little noise had me on full-alert.

  The cold, damp chill penetrated my clothes, making me wish I’d worn a coat. With each step, my nose scrunched as I took in a multitude of offensive odors. Every now and then a stronger odor, one I couldn’t place, would tease my gag reflex.

  When Romero lifted his sleeve to his nose, I asked, “The corrugated-box company?”

  Mason nodded. “Keeps transient people away.” He kicked a plastic bag lying in our path. “Most of them.”

  Slowly, my vision adjusted to the shadows beyond the flashlight’s beam. Debris littered the concrete floor, including leaves that had made their way inside along with rodent droppings, trash, and the occasional carcasses that crunched under our boots.

  When we finally reached the far end of the cavernous empty shell, Romero opened a large metal door. The hinges creaked, echoing in the emptiness, as he pushed it open.

  At one time, the area we were e
ntering appeared to have been the office area for the warehouse. The center of the large room was empty, yet when the light hit the floor, tracks for the type of dividers used to separate desks and work spaces were visible. Around the perimeter were multiple doors. Without hesitation, Romero took us to a door that led to a stairway. My ribs hurt and the metal steps creaked under our weight as we climbed two stories. The higher we went, the more intense the odor from below became. Mason reached for Romero’s arm and turned to me.

  “Reid, after you’ve heard enough, come back out here. You can either wait here or Romero will take you back to the car.”

  I wanted to remind my brother-in-law that I’d been the one to gut Maples. I’d served beside him for two tours in the desert and made my occasional appearance when needed on the streets of Chicago. I wasn’t exactly a newbie to this world. While I considered reminding him of those things, as my arm throbbed and my chest ached with each step, I simply nodded.

  When Romero reached for the next door handle, a loud, squealing noise reverberated through the stairwell. The high-pitched sound reminded me of the noise of a power saw cutting through a hard surface.

  We all stilled as Mason lifted one finger.

  Nearly a minute later, the awful noise ended, reverberations echoing off the cold cement-block walls.

  “That was from the machines next door. They come in thirty-minute intervals,” Mason said. “A series of five—”

  The squealing began again.

  When it ended, he added, “There will be three more and then a nearly twenty-five-minute pause.”

  After the fifth loud squeal, Romero opened the door to a hallway.

  The three of us stood taller as Romero placed his gun back in his holster and the Sparrow standing guard outside a door stood up from the chair where he’d been seated.

  “Ryan,” Romero said, addressing the Sparrow.

  I wouldn’t have been able to place him on the street, but I knew of him. At nearly six feet two, James Ryan was nondescript—weathered skin, dirty-blond hair, and brown eyes. Those characteristics made him a perfect infiltrator into any situation. He neither stood out nor was memorable. Yet he had a reputation for getting information. It seemed that now he was a babysitter. Thankfully, our Sparrows were versatile.