by April Zyon
Going to the fridge, he grabbed some water. The bottle for himself he chugged down quickly. The other bottle was for their guest. He had a feeling she would need it after viewing the video Rainer was compiling. Even Tobias, who had witnessed some foul assed shit during his military years and done a few things he’d never admit to when he got out couldn’t stomach to watch any of it. There were limits to what brutality he could heap on another individual but in the case of Moreno, he was willing to go all the way. The monster deserved to pay for every single victim, man, woman, and child, who he’d killed in one way or another. Not all the deaths were by his hands but they definitely were on his head.
Rainer popped up from his seat and came over with the laptop. “It’s loaded and ready to play. Lift the lid and hit the spacebar. I have the volume set on high so you don’t have to do any fiddling around. Be ready to get it out of her line of fire if you would.”
He nodded in understanding. The girl, Gabriella, was soft and didn’t fully understand the monster that was her father. It was a sound bet she would lose whatever she had in her stomach within minutes of the video beginning to play.
Tugging on his hood again, he slipped on the gloves and pushed his sleeves back down to hide the tattoos. With the laptop under his arm, water in one hand, and a folding table in the other he headed back upstairs. A minute later he entered the room and threw her a look. She still had a mutinous expression on her face, full of defiance. He liked that about her. She believed in something and was sticking to her guns, even if she was one hundred percent wrong.
Quickly, he set up the table, laying the laptop on it. Uncapping the water, he held the bottle out to her and waited to see if she’d accept any. He’d undone it in the room specifically so she could hear it was a new bottle, the cap giving the distinctive snap when the seal had broken. Now to see how far her stubbornness would carry her.
Chapter Five
When the man walked back in she looked at him with hate in her heart. “Are you ready to be reasonable yet and let me go?” She demanded of him. God, he was huge. His body was scrumptious, and god bless all that was holy, she felt her pussy getting wet and her nipples getting hard. “Because that’s the only way that you are going to live right now, is by letting me go.”
He capped the water again and set it on the floor. Flipping open the laptop he gave her a sidelong look, shrugged, and then tapped the spacebar. Instantly it came to life with a shot in the forest. From what she could see it appeared to be a farm but until the camera zoomed in and steadied she had no idea what kind. Then she saw her father, several years younger, talking with a man who was gesturing wildly. Gabbie barely noticed her captor stepping back and away from her as the video progressed to showing her father pulling a gun and blowing a hole in the man’s head. Instantly it changed to a room cloaked in shadows where a man was begging for his life from where he dangled by his wrists from the rafters.
Gabbie turned her head and closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch this. “That can’t be my father.” She sobbed. “My father wouldn’t do that. Yes, I know that he does drug trafficking but there is no way in hell that he would kill people, not like that.” She felt her stomach churning and knew that she had very little time left before she puked. She heard a child then and her eyes opened automatically. What she saw immediately laid to waste any plans she had not to vomit. She couldn’t stop it. Not with what she saw. “God no.” She cried, tears rolling down her face as she cried. It couldn’t be. Her father wouldn’t do that. Her father would never kill a child. That wasn’t the father that had taught her to ride a pony, that wasn’t the man who helped her with her homework, who nursed her when she was ill. It couldn’t be.
The next scene had her gorge rising again. It was another child, this one a girl around ten or eleven, stripped naked and held down. Her father, no! Squeezing her eyes closed she fought to cover her ears from the sounds coming from the laptop. The sounds stopped suddenly. Opening her eyes, she saw the image was frozen showing the horrific act her father was in the midst of. “Do you believe us now?” the man asked. Again, he was holding out the water bottle to her, offering up a drink.
She took a drink of the water that was offered to her. She swished her mouth out and spat the water on the wooden flooring. She was crying but didn’t care. “There is no way that he would do that. Seriously. That’s not my father.” She only prayed she was right. She prayed this was some sort of nightmare. “My daddy taught me to ride a bike, protected me, kept me safe. He wouldn’t do that to a child, right?” She begged the man to tell her that it was all false.
He moved the table and set the bottle down on it. Gently he undid her bindings before tugging off the hood he wore. “They are the same man,” he said. His real voice was deep but smooth sounding, not guttural like he’d been making it sound before. “He’s a sociopath, Gabriella. A power hungry one at that. He enjoys hurting people, and loves to have it taped so he can watch it at his leisure over, and over again. The face he presents to you is not the one that he presents to the world. To the world, he is a monster that needs to die. It’s why we’re here, to end his reign of terror and save other little girls from that same treatment.”
“I just thought he was a drug dealer. I could live with that.” She looked at the man now, really looked at him. His hair was white blond, cut short and, if she wasn’t mistaken, in a military cut. So, he was possibly military, American from the way he spoke. His eyes though, they drew her to him. They were dark brown and she had thought she had seen green in them but she wasn’t certain. God damn her for getting horny when she had just seen what she had. She had to be sick. There was no other way to see it. She must be as depraved as her father if she was getting horny just looking at this man who was standing so close to her. “How long?” She asked, “Has he been doing this? Did my mother know?” Oh god, she could only pray that her mother didn’t know.
“From what we could uncover he’s been doing this since before you were born. We don’t believe that your mother ever knew. He seemed to keep her in the dark like he has with you.” He brushed a finger to her cheek, drying away the tears there. “Come on, you can clean up in the bathroom and brush your teeth. The folks with guns downstairs I wasn’t kidding about. If you were still thinking about running, that is.”
“He will come for me and when he does he will kill you.” She whispered and god damn her hide but she leaned into his hand when he touched her cheek. “I really should go and clean up, shouldn’t I?” What in the hell was wrong with her? She was leaning into this man instead of moving away from him. She had to be crazy. That was it. This draw to him was her insanity. It just was easier to think of this attraction she felt, then what she had just learned about her loving father. “Plus, I assume we are on a second floor and since I don’t like heights I don’t plan on going out the window.” Thus, why her father’s home was a single floor. She was terrified of heights and always had been.
He stood up and pulled her up from the chair. Leading her to the bathroom, she’d been right about it being on the second floor, and turned on the lights. “I’ll be downstairs when you are done. Come down and I’ll get you something to help settle your stomach. There won’t be anyone else down there so you needn’t worry.”
“Thank you.” Why was she thanking a contract killer? A man who was going to kill her father What was going on with her that she was acting like this? “I can’t let you kill him.” She told him. “He’s my father. Yes, for what he did on those video’s he deserves justice but it’s justice that he should get. I can’t watch you kill him.” Why that was important to her she didn’t know and she didn’t want to delve into it either. “I also can’t be the reason my dad dies.”
“Meet me downstairs and we’ll discuss it, Gabriella. But don’t think you’ll be able to change my mind or the mind of my clients easily. I’ll let you plead your case but you will need to read all the charges lined up against him. They’re compiled so it’s a relatively short list. The coun
ts are huge.” Tugging the door shut behind him she heard him head down the stairs a minute later.
She walked into the bathroom and cleaned her face up. She looked at herself and pulled the rubber band from her wrist and pulled her hair back. It was time for her to put seriousness back on the plate and she couldn’t do that with her hair around her face the way she liked it. No, it was time for her to instead be serious for a moment. After she was cleaned off she walked down the stairs and took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m ready for you to show me this list that you have together for the charges against my father. I knew about the drugs, I knew about all that part but I didn’t know about this part of it all. Please, please god tell me that what you showed me was all that he did over the years?”
He shook his head slowly and handed her a file. “No pictures are included. Given your reaction upstairs I pulled them all out. These are just the charges against him along with the various bounties on his head, and the various government approved authorizations for his termination. Including but not limited to three from the US, six from Columbia, and two from Mexico. I have some broth warming up, it should help to ease your stomach and not be too heavy for it. Tea is on the table and you should be able to pour some any time now.”
“Thank you.” She was over her head with this man and knew it. “Why are you being so nice to me? With what my father has done, why? With knowing that I knew about his drug running why are you still being so kind to me? I’m a bit confused by your behavior.” She poured herself a cup of tea and held the mug in her hands. “He’s coming for me. I activated a transponder in my shoes when I was tied up upstairs. Either he or his men will come for me.”
“They aren’t coming. At least not until we turn off the signal jammer we have in place. We figured he’d be the sort that was super paranoid given that fortress he built. We planned for something you’d be wearing or be able to activate.” He set a bowl of clear beef broth before her and then settled into the chair opposite her. “You are neither responsible for your father’s transgressions nor anything he has ever perpetrated against another individual. While you know about his drug business you haven’t participated, and I’m sure if it had ever come up where he was arrested you would have ensured he’d done the time. Only now it’s gone beyond that into territory you’re only just now discovering. You have a choice to make, Gabriella. Help us, willingly bring him to us, or we’ll do it our way and he’ll still die.”
“I don’t know what to do.” She was confused and the way that he was treating her made her even more confused. She expected anger, outrage, or something but not this. Not this, well, kindness. She also never in a million years expected to be attracted to a man that had kidnapped her. “I also don’t know what I would have done had he been caught. I don’t think that I’m as good as you seem to think that I am.” She hesitated. “What do I call you?”
For a split second he seemed to hesitate, like he was deciding what to tell her. “Tobias, my name’s Tobias Casey. Don’t call me Toby,” he added with a look that had her striking the name from all memory banks. “No one is one hundred percent good, it’s impossible. Everyone has a balance between good and evil. The majority happen to be one way or the other, even perfect balance between the two is nearly impossible. There are also those, like myself and my team, who have certain limits we’ll go to but no further. For his crimes, we’re willing to go a long damn way, but we won’t hurt an innocent if it’s at all possible to avoid. Which is why we haven’t nuked his compound. Yet.”
“From what I saw I don’t think even a nuclear bomb would harm him. The entire house has been changed inside. He’s literally living inside of a multiple feet thick bulletproof glass home. It’s as if he destroyed half of the inside of the home to build that monstrosity of a fortress that he’s living in. I knew that things had been changed the second I entered the door and the foyer that was at one time massive, is now a small enclosure that, if I were to guess, has scanners built into the walls.”
Tobias refilled her cup from the teapot on the table. Then he reached out for the laptop he had to one side, flipped up the lid, tapped on a few keys and then turned it her way. “These are the schematics best we can figure out. Took several people to get pieces of the information for a contact to construct this. While he’s definitely built it to withstand a lot, there’s always a way to knock someone from their pedestal if you look long and hard enough.”
She looked at the diagrams and shook her head. “Whoever did this is wrong.” She told him and looked at him. “Daddy’s had the basement built into the rooms he’s living in. It’s lead lined, the flooring is. It also looks completely seamless but it’s larger than you have here. He’s knocked out the kitchen, dining room, and the den that was my mother’s music room. He’s taken over all but my rooms, my study, the living room, and bathrooms. The scanner that he used to open the door is only on his side. I don’t know how someone would get inside of it if they weren’t inside of the room. Does that make sense?”
“Makes complete sense. These were cobbled together with whatever people could get to us, before he had them killed. We couldn’t find out anything beyond what you see here. We think he threatened their families, maybe even held them during the renovation completion.” He picked up a stylus and passed it to her. Tugging on the laptop he flipped the screen around to make it into a tablet and handed it over. “Will you make the alterations so it’s accurate? If we fail, whoever comes next needs every leg up they can get.” Gabbie had the distinct impression Tobias wasn’t a man who failed at much, if anything.
She looked at Tobias and then the laptop there in front of her for a moment. She was so confused. She realized that if she did what was right, she would be breaking her own heart. She didn’t know what to say, what to do. Finally, however, she nodded. “You know if I help you I’m dead, right? There will be others that will come up and they will take over his operations and either I would become a prize or they would just simply outright kill me.” She was trembling as she spoke, part of her didn’t want to give in but part did.
“From what we’ve heard you’re about to be sold off to the highest bidder whether you like it or not. Besides which, by this point he knows you’re gone and knows you left of your own volition. There’s no way for anyone to break into the place, but they didn’t really design it well enough to keep someone that knows how from breaking out. Either way, I doubt you have more than a few months to live whether under your father’s thumb or whatever husband he marries you off to with or without your permission. And yes, in this country, he has the power to get a disagreeable marriage enforced. You’re property to him and nothing more. A tool to be used until you’re no longer useful. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”
“Oh, well, isn’t that fun.” She tapped the pen a couple of more times while she tried to work out in her own mind what she should do. She had always hated being corralled and told what to do, it chafed at her to be penned in, so to speak, but it seemed that was just what she was. She was effectively trapped. “Well then, I have no choice, do I?” She still didn’t want to give up on her father. She didn’t believe that he would just marry her off without her consent, her father loved her more than that. “You might as well shoot me after I do this, it would be far kinder.” She whispered and began to draw on the face of the laptop the proper schematics of the house. “The side that wasn’t touched had the windows upgraded but my window should still be bypassed.” She wanted to puke, she was telling them how to get to her father. She was a monster and knew it.
His hand covered hers and he squeezed. “I’m an asshole, I’m a dick, and a few other extremely colorful adjectives but I never meant to make you feel you had no choice in this.” Tobias tipped his head to the tablet. “We’ll use your shoe to draw him out and you won’t even have to be in the vicinity. It’ll be better that way, honestly, since we know for a fact he’ll send his kill squad to wipe us out and rescue you if it’s viable. Drink your tea,” he said. Tugging the
stylus from her fingers he took the tablet and tossed everything to the side. Then he moved to get up.
Gabbie nodded and sipped at the tea. “This is my favorite tea, I know it’s a fairly common one but Earl Grey has always been my favorite tea when I’m not feeling well.” And right now, she wasn’t feeling well. Right now, she felt like she was going to puke her guts out and simply die. She still couldn’t believe she had given them the way to get to her father, the way to kill him and she hadn’t even battled against them. She was as much of a monster as her father was it seemed.
Tobias paused by the door to give her a look. “I’ll be a minute. Try to eat the broth too, you need something in your stomach.” Pulling the door open he slipped through to what appeared to be a hallway. She couldn’t hear him moving away or anything at all. The place was eerily silent.
She took the bowl with the broth in it and began to sip at it, she didn’t use a spoon because broth like this was meant to be drank like tea not eaten like soup. She was leaning against the counter instead of sitting in a chair. She honestly should sit down because of how woozy she was still feeling but she was afraid if she moved she would fall apart at the seams. She was barely holding her shit together as it was, one wrong move and she would be lost and knew it.
Tobias came back into the space looking to where he’d left her before his gaze found her in her new spot. Coming toward her he stopped. “I’ll need your shoe. We’re arranging to have you shipped out of the country to a location that’s low key with new papers. From there you can go anywhere you’d like so long as it’s nowhere you’ve ever been, or anywhere your father might think to look for you.”
She snorted in derision and wiped the tears that were falling from her eyes. “You really, really don’t get it, do you?” She shook her head and watched him. “I’ve been all around the world, I’ve had watchers in practically every single city on the map. I’m known to the types of people he would hire to come after me. I’m known to all of them and even ones I don’t know because they all wanted to be inside of his inner circle and used me to do it. That’s what really sucks. No matter what or where I go there is no hope.” She shrugged and tugged off her shoes to give to him. “Thank you for showing me the truth. I should hate you, I really should, but I’m not so sure that I can and that makes me hate myself even more.”