Darkness Bound (A Night Prowler Novel)

by J. T. Geissinger

  Even if he was your paid whore.

  Perhaps especially if he was your paid whore.

  Holding his gaze, Jack nodded an emphatic yes.

  He nodded back, gently stroked her hair off her face, and smiled at her with an oddly contented look in his eyes, as if she’d just made him very proud.

  She didn’t pause long enough to examine why his approval should send such a wash of warmth through her veins. She just leaned forward, grasped the hard length of him in her hand, and slid the engorged head of his erection into her mouth.

  When he moaned and his entire body was wracked by a violent shudder, Jack also didn’t bother to examine more closely the high, sweet thrill that sang through her, pure as sunshine. She just applied herself vigorously to making it up to him, and let the questions of ethics and manners and her own uncharacteristic, wanton reaction to this beautiful stranger fade from her mind.

  She knew tomorrow she’d suffer for this. Tomorrow the self-loathing would begin.

  Tonight she was just a woman who needed a man, and a soft place to fall, if only for a little while. So she allowed herself to fall, and pushed that old, familiar burn of shame down into darkness.

  Jacqueline Dolan wasn’t at all what he’d expected.

  Snoring aside—soft and girly snoring, but still snoring nonetheless—she might be the most feminine woman he’d ever met, in spite of the tough-chick bravado she wore like a suit of armor. She was tender and passionate and surprisingly intuitive, guessing correctly that the feeling he got when kissing her was a little too . . . much. Though she was operating under a false idea of who and what he was, she still managed to recognize emotion in a stranger, and feel compassion for him.

  Compassion. Wasn’t that a laugh, coming from her?

  Lying beside her on the bed, with the sheets tangled between their legs and the first, faint pink rays of dawn creeping beneath the drawn curtains of her hotel windows, Hawk stared down at her, lost in thought. He’d seen pictures of her before, of course, staring vehemently into the camera as if she wanted to strangle the photographer, or on assignment in some hellhole with her hair in a messy ponytail, mirrored aviators on her stern, unsmiling face, wearing khakis and combat boots, gazing off into the distance. In those photos, the unmistakable impression was one of a woman who was hard. Hard, cold, and an utter bitch.

  The woman snoring gently beside him now was anything but that. She was actually quite sweet.

  He wondered why she tried so hard to hide it.

  In sleep, her features lost all their rigid tension, the sharp, wary edges that lent her that standoffish vibe that telegraphed she’d rather kill you than say hello. She had a dusting of freckles across her nose, fine as a sifting of cinnamon, and her lower lip was slightly more full than the top one, giving her mouth an alluring kiss me pout. She was bright and sexy and shockingly vulnerable beneath that icy façade, and she was also quite possibly the best lay of his life.

  God, was she.

  He’d never known a woman with such hunger. Most women were shy or hesitant, especially the first time with someone new, but Jacqueline Dolan had been ravenous, nearly insatiable, despite hours of his best efforts. It was as if she’d been storing up every one of her sexual needs for years, and unleashed them all last night. And, if he was being entirely honest with himself . . . he liked it.

  He liked it a lot.

  Jacqueline shifted beside him, exhaled a small, restless sigh. Her lids drifted open. She blinked up at him in hazy recognition, her blue eyes soft and warm.

  “Lucas Eduardo Tavares Castelo Luna,” she whispered, smiling drowsily up at him, “you are a beautiful man. I hope you have a beautiful life. Will you please put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door when you leave?”

  Just as quickly as she’d awoken, she closed her eyes and fell back asleep, leaving Hawk staring down at her in shock.

  She remembered his name. No one ever called him by his real name.

  And no one—ever—had called him beautiful.

  An unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling crept over him, starting in the deepest pit of his stomach and going everywhere at once.

  Weak, whispered his father’s voice into his mind. Weak and worthless, like I always said.

  Yes, he had always said that. And despite being dead for over fifteen years, his father still lurked in the darkest corners of his psyche, waiting to pounce on the slightest show of softness or emotion.

  Hawk sat up and shook his head to clear it.

  “Job to do. Playtime’s over,” he muttered, gazing at her camera on the night table beside the bed.

  He rose silently from the bed and just as silently dressed, all the while willing himself not to take one last look at the sleeping form of Jacqueline. Then he removed the memory card from the camera, and swiftly crossed to the door.

  He hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle as he left.

  Jack awoke tired, hungry, and deliciously sore.

  She stretched, reveling in the way her muscles protested, unused to the kind of vigorous workout they’d had last night. She lay there smiling up at the white popcorn ceiling, thinking one word over and over:

  Wow.

  Last night had been, hands down, the single most sexy/dirty/amazing night of her life. They’d tried every position, on every piece of furniture. If there had been a chandelier on the ceiling, they’d have hung from it.

  And pictures. Christ, she’d let him take pictures of her.

  She glanced at the camera still beside the bed, and decided she’d look at them only once before deleting them all and destroying the memory card. He’d been playful when he’d suggested it, coyly asking if she wanted to have a little something to remember her birthday present by, and she’d been so caught up in the moment she’d agreed. Then he’d given her pleasure again and again, the camera shutter clicking furiously, until finally they were both so exhausted they fell into sleep near dawn.

  She closed her eyes and remembered the details, savoring them, because she knew it would most likely be another few years before she’d be making new ones with anyone else.

  His mouth. His hands. The glowing dark burn of his eyes—

  You little whore.

  With that, the fun was abruptly over.

  She sat up and passed a trembling hand over her face. The accusations didn’t stop coming, rushing up from that dark part of herself she kept locked so tightly away, always managing to escape, especially at moments like this.

  The most powerful emotion Jack had experienced in her thirty years was shame. She carried it around with her like a demon on her back, a spiteful fiend that hissed into her ear, twisting even the most benign things into elaborate sculptures of ugliness. If a man passing by on the street smiled at her, it was because he could tell she was easy. If she got a promotion at work, it was because her boss expected a little something in return. If anything remotely good happened in her life at all, it was because the universe had a sick sense of humor. She went around all day every day with a thundercloud overhead, waiting for the other shoe to drop, until finally through chance or her own gift for self-destruction, it did.

  Other people had emotional baggage. Jack had cargo.

  Her stomach lurched. She ran to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet just in time for the first violent heaves to begin.

  When it was over, she sat there on the cold tile with her legs curled up beneath her, naked and shaking, bowed over the toilet bowl with her eyes streaming and her heart pounding frantically in her chest.

  “I hate you,” Jack whispered hoarsely to the empty bathroom. “I hate you and I wish you were dead.”

  Mercifully, the buzz of the overhead light didn’t require her to clarify whom she had meant.

  The flight back to New York was long, with a layover in Miami, so by the time Jack arrived at LaG
uardia Airport she was physically and mentally exhausted. She hadn’t been able to work on the plane; she’d instead alternated between downing tiny bottles of vodka and staring out the window. She knew from hard experience it could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for the malaise and self-recriminations to wear themselves out. In the meantime she’d be relatively useless, and no fun to be around.

  Which meant that stopping off at her father’s house in Queens on the way back to Manhattan was a bad idea.

  She almost didn’t go. But when she checked her voice mail as she waited in the stuffy cabin to disembark, she found her father had left her a message.

  “It’s your father. Hope your trip was good. I’ve got cake here; don’t forget.”

  Just as he always ended every call without saying goodbye, he always prefaced every message with a polite, “It’s your father,” as if she wouldn’t recognize his voice, or might have blocked the memory of him altogether. That was depressing, but visiting the house she grew up in was depressing to a multiple of one thousand.

  But she didn’t want to disappoint him, and knew there would be too many questions if she cancelled. Questions she just wasn’t up for answering, and for which he wouldn’t relent until he had answers. A trait she’d inherited from him.

  In the cab on the way from the airport, Jack chewed every one of her fingernails down to a nub.

  “Jackie,” her father said gruffly when he opened the door. He looked older than when she’d last seen him—on her last birthday—more grizzled somehow, his formerly gunmetal-gray crew cut now almost completely white. They shared the same clear blue eyes, and his stared out of a weathered face, which was angular and imposing. Though he’d retired from the military years ago, he was a Marine down to the marrow of his bones, with that ruler-straight posture, legs braced apart as if prepared for a hit. He wore his usual: a spotless white dress shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, a pair of navy-blue Dockers, black leather shoes polished to a mirror gleam.

  Her mother had always tried to get him into something else, add a little variety to his wardrobe, but her father steadfastly refused. Some things never change, her mother had said in that particular way she had, laughing and light but angry at the same time, vibrating with a dark undertone that Jack’s childhood self never understood, but was afraid of nonetheless.

  She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Dad. Hi. You’re looking good.”

  He cracked a lopsided smile and pushed open the screen door. “Not bad for an old-timer,” he agreed, and pulled her into a hard, one-armed hug.

  He released her almost immediately. They stood there in awkward silence for a moment, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  “Well, don’t just stand there on the porch gathering dust,” he said, sounding even more gruff. “Come on in.”

  He picked up her duffel bag, then went inside. Jack followed him, letting the screen door bang shut behind her, feeling as if gravity had exponentially intensified and every step she took inside pressed her down harder and harder against the Earth.

  Along with her father’s wardrobe, the house hadn’t changed. The downstairs rooms were bisected at waist level by dark wood wainscoting; flowery wallpaper climbed to the ceiling in a haphazard sprawl; and somber wood and tasteful, understated floral-print furniture had been selected to match. The house had two stories, narrow and dimly lit, with a ragged garden out back and a white picket fence that enclosed the yard in an ironic sham of hominess.

  Jack followed her father into the kitchen with the odd sensation she was traveling back in time to one of those fifties black-and-white TV shows. Father Knows Best transplanted to modern day Queens. She’d never realized how self-consciously retro the place was, how hard it tried to be individual and colorful, with its checkerboard tiles and sparkly Formica countertops, the cupboards painted turquoise and the appliances that matched.

  This room had been her mother’s domain, and the eclectic décor reflected it. Gazing around it now, it occurred to Jack for the first time that this room was a big middle finger to the rest of the house . . . the house her pushy, iron-willed grandmother had decorated when the family had first moved in and her new daughter-in-law was away spending some quality time in a room with padded walls.

  Jack’s father set her bag down near the back kitchen door, almost as if to reassure her she could make a quick getaway if needed.

  How well he knew her.

  Like a pair of cats warily circling, they cautiously took seats opposite each other at the small table. Each waited for the other to speak first.

  Finally, after playing with the salt shaker for a few excruciatingly silent moments, her father said, “You look thin. You eating?”

  “I’m fine, Dad. Just . . .” She shrugged. “You know. Working hard.”

  Because work was the altar at which he’d worshipped his entire life, he nodded in approval. The second-most worthless type of human being on the planet to Thomas “Tank” Dolan was one who was lazy. First place went to—

  “Garrett called yesterday. For your birthday.”

  Everything liquid inside Jack’s body froze to arctic ice. She whispered, “Don’t.”

  He sighed and ran a hand over his crew cut. “Jackie—”

  “I just walked in the fucking door!”

  She jumped to her feet. The chair skittered back over the checkerboard tiles with a nerve-jarring screech. She stood there staring down at him with her hands balled, breathing hard, heat spreading up her neck and ears. Her heart reared up in her throat, threatening to choke her.

  He sat back in his chair and spread his hands open in a wordless gesture of surrender.

  “I mean it,” she warned.

  He said softly, “Roger that,” and gave her a look of such sad understanding she had to close her eyes for a moment to contain the moisture in them.

  She walked to the kitchen sink and leaned against it with her arms folded tightly over her chest, staring out the window to the yard beyond, knowing there were trees and clouds and sunshine, seeing nothing at all.

  Her father cleared his throat. “Those wetbacks treat you okay down in Brazil?”

  “Jesus, Dad, really?” she said in disgust, not turning.

  Her father was many wonderful things, but tolerant wasn’t one of them. All “brown” people were wetbacks, Asians were zipper-heads, homosexuals were fags, Middle Easterners were a two-word combination so vile it went beyond the pale. His bigotry was an ugly flaw in a character she otherwise admired, and it pained her deeply to know that someone she loved, who had raised her and protected her and unfailingly cared for her, who had literally once saved her life, was so profoundly deficient.

  It was a lesson Jack had learned young, the way good people could also be bad. Things were never black or white, right or wrong, true or false, up or down. There were a million shades of gray in between, a million ways your heart could be broken by not understanding that one essential fact. When you loved someone, you risked overlooking his myriad darker colors to only focus on the bright and shiny whites, until one day the basic black of his nature made a stunning, horrible appearance, and you were knocked on your ass, wondering how you could’ve been so blind.

  Her father’s basic black took the form of intolerance for all things “other.”

  Just another reason to stay away. She knew she couldn’t change him. So she simply avoided the toxicity as much as she could, and got on with her life.

  After another long, uncomfortable silence, he asked, “You up for some cake?” Without waiting for a response, he rose and opened the refrigerator.

  She listened to him move around the kitchen, getting plates and silverware, pouring liquid into glasses, then turned to find him standing at the table over two mugs of milk and a sheet cake large enough to feed a party of two dozen.

  White frosting and sugar flowers and candles, and right smack
in the middle a huge “Congrats!” scrawled in pink script. She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. For just a moment, his rugged face looked sheepish.

  “It’s a combination birthday and congratulations cake.”

  “Congratulations? For what?”

  “The Pulitzer, Jackie. I haven’t seen you since before you were nominated, remember?”

  The faintest hint of recrimination colored his voice. For a moment, she felt guilty that she could only bear being in this house, with all its lurking goblin memories, once a year. Flaws and all, he was still her father, but every time she saw his face all she saw was . . . him.

  She couldn’t even think her brother’s name. Her mind flinched away from it like a battered dog expecting a kick.

  “Right. Well, that’s really nice of you, Dad. Thanks.”

  “Anything for my little girl.”

  The layer of rage simmering beneath his light, conversational tone reminded her exactly of how her mother sometimes used to sound: brittle and bottled up, ready to blow.

  Jack’s father lit the candles. She blew them out. Then they ate their pink and white squares of cake at the table in the cool, weighted silence of her dead mother’s kitchen, the air all around them thick with the presence of ghosts.

  Sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest exists within the country of Brazil.

  Vast, lush, and ancient, it’s a place where beauty and savagery exist in equal supply. Scarlet macaws perch preening on the boughs of moss-draped emerald branches while electric eels and green-and-black-banded anaconda slither silently through languid, piranha-rich waters below. There are vampire bats and squirrel monkeys and poison frogs that excrete toxins through their flesh; there are 150-pound rodents called capybara that are hunted by caiman, a reptile that can reach twelve feet in length. High up in the dense, leafy canopy, where the tropical sun filters through in brilliant shafts of emerald green, toucans call with a sound like the croak of a frog, while down on the perfumed beds of fallen leaves and bracken that cover the muffled twilight of the forest floor, leaf-cutter ants and rhinoceros beetles that can carry 850 times their own body weight scuttle about in endless pursuit of mates and food.