by J. D. Sloane
“My Dad used to point them out sometimes when we were camping. The story of Orion was one of my favorites.”
“Mine too,” he said, his expression becoming guarded again as he hit a button on the ceiling above him. Jessica reached her seatbelt as the far door scrolled open and rubbed her right wrist without thinking as a gust of snowflakes blew inside the warehouse in a sudden gust.
“We really shouldn’t be driving in this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Michael said hitting another button on his console. Jessica glanced out the window as she heard a low whirring sound and then looked at Michael quickly as the entire car seemed to gain two inches, the body coming to rest with a sudden loud clank.
“Snow tires?”
Michael bit back a smirk and revved the engine with a tap of his foot.
“Something like that.”
Jessica looked down as the GPS flashed red and did a quick double take as her apartment address scrolled across the bottom, the quick maze work of streets winding back to their destination fast enough to make her dizzy.
“I take it you don’t need my address,” Jessica said, raising her brows.
Michael threw the car into reverse and looked up as the Pleiades arced across the sky, their old suitor Orion locked in a chase of destiny that would outlast the universe itself.
“Not unless you’ve moved in the last 24 hours, I don’t,” Michael said, pumping the gas pedal softly before he threw the car into first.
He hit the pavement outside the warehouse at a solid thirty miles an hour and then spun around to the back exit, the blanket of a thousand snowflakes reflecting back at them as he clicked on his high beams. He dropped the gas pedal again as they came to the long industrial drive leading back to the main road and then slowed down slightly as he noticed the way Jessica was holding onto her seatbelt, her eyes locked on the windshield as if forcing herself to concentrate on something that could kill them both at any second.
“Don’t worry, I’ve driven in a lot worse,” he said, adjusting his lights down towards the road as Jessica turned to look out at the street. Through the blanket of snow around them the city was beginning to transform, long strings of colorful Christmas lights lighting up every tree along the boulevard. She wiped her wrist across the glass as they came to Campus Park and gave him a flash of that heartbreaking smile again as they drove past the huge, thirty-foot Christmas tree in the center of downtown, currently standing sentinel above a glowing white ice-skating rink.
“I forgot that they put it up already,” she said, letting out a low sigh as Michael glanced down at the GPS and made a quick right. “With everything that’s happened it’s easy to forget that Christmas is right around the corner.”
“It will feel like the holidays again soon,” he said, his voice low and clipped as he clicked his wipers and they sped across the windshield at double-speed. “Trust me.”
Jessica flicked her eyes towards him and then turned her body in his direction, dragging her knees up onto the seat as he glanced down at her.
“If you’re going to just hunt White down and kill him anyway, why not help me?”
“You already tried it your way,” Michael said, tapping the gas pedal harder as they cruised beneath the aqueduct. “Did he stay in prison? Learn his lesson? Decide to become a model inmate?”
“You’re not being fair.”
“You’re right, I’m not. What I’m being is just. That’s the problem with our entire legal system. Citizens are more concerned with it being fair than it being just. Our society as it stands simply isn’t equipped to deal with a man like White. It has a fatal blind spot that any clever criminal can exploit over and over again. And that’s where I come in. That’s what men like Byron and I do.”
“Kill for money?”
Michael glanced at her, his square jaw tightening as he looked away.
“Narrow the blind spot.”
Jessica looked down at her hands, her entire body shivering and Byron glanced at her and then turned up the heat, scratching the back of his neck in light irritation. He wasn’t used to talking so much to an outsider and he was beginning to feel exposed. The worst part about it was that he found himself wanting talk to her, to tell her things she couldn’t possibly understand because she had been conditioned to judge by proxy. She was a police officer, for God’s sake, and there was always the possibility that this was all some elaborate scheme to force him to trust her. To make him help her bring in White alive when he knew in a way he could never explain to her how unbelievably futile a move like that would be.
“Is that why you kidnapped her? Brooke? Is that what you were doing? Narrowing the blind spot?”
Michael looked at her quickly, feeling her words like quick stab to the heart and turned down the road to her apartment building as he clenched the steering wheel harder.
So pretty. Beautiful even. What is about beautiful women that makes them know instinctively where to strike when they’re fighting dirty? Do they learn it in high school? Before then? Are they born knowing it out of the womb?
“Byron told me,” she said, her voice soft and rushed as if salving an open cut. “He also told me it was the last contract you took. That you just- walked away after that.”
Jessica looked up as Michael pulled up in front of her building, the bright green wreath above her door a cheerful note of holiday in a block of otherwise identical first floor apartments. She glanced at him as he pulled the car into the narrow driveway in front of her house, letting the car idle for a moment before killing the lights and then took a deep breath and let it out slowly, a steamy white circle appearing on the windshield in front of her.
“He said that he thought you may have been trying to save her,” she said, biting her lower lip as she cut her eyes in his direction. “But that you wouldn’t admit it even to yourself.”
“Well, as I’ve said before, Byron doesn’t know half as much as he pretends to. Now, I don’t mean to hit the meter on the unexpected pleasure of your company Miss Nolan, but it is after three. Even heroes have to sleep sometimes.”
“Tell me you’ll help me bring him in alive.”
“No.”
“Don’t you understand how important this is? If White goes free or gets murdered by some other criminal…”
“I’m not going to change my mind, Jessica. I know your police force has a very charitable catch and release program for criminals like White. But I don’t need the job security. And I have no intention whatsoever of making this a full-time profession.”
He turned the wipers off with a flick of his wrist and then turned his body towards her in the seat as he made a careless gesture towards her front door.
“I would walk you in but…”
Jessica looked at him as he let the sentence drop off into nothing and raised her brows, her eyes moving over his features.
“But what?”
“It’s late,” he said, his eyes running to her bandaged wrists without thinking as she blushed. “You should get some rest.”
Jessica cleared her throat and then looked up at her door without moving, her fingers running across her wrist in a quick, unconscious flinch of motion.
“Don’t you think I want him dead?” She said, her voice low and flat over the quiet hum of the heater. Michael felt his brow furrow as she stared out of the window, the snow collecting on the windshield giving her face an eerie white glow.
“Don’t you think I’ve been fantasizing about it every second since I woke up in that hospital bed? My dad he…”
Jessica cleared her throat and Michael felt a quick moment of panic when he realized that she was trying not to cry, her face flushed and bitter as she rubbed her lips.
“If anyone has any reason in the world to want him dead I do. I’ll never get back what he took from me. Never. It’s just lost.”
Michael felt a deep pang of regret run through him as she watched the snow collect on the windshie
ld, her face so resigned and inward that he found himself replaying the moment he had wrapped his arms around her on the balcony, the way she had looked at him when he whispered that he had her.
But you never get to go back to being who you were, do you? He thought, his face softening with empathy as she tried to regain control of her emotions. No, not even for a moment. And after a while you’ll convince yourself that what happened to you was a good thing because it forced you to evolve. That’s what we all tell ourselves when something truly unthinkable happens. It’s the sad little fable at the end of story. The one we use to bridge the gap between everything we believed we could be and the monsters this world forces us to become.
“You know I almost had him,” Jessica said, her voice soft and detached as she stared out the window, brushing her hair out of her eyes as she flicked them in his direction. “Back at the first crime scene. There was a van parked in the alleyway. I went to investigate. I still don’t know why. It just looked…”
“Wrong?”
“Yes,” she said nodding. “Exactly. It just seemed wrong. There was a man standing near it and he was filming the scene. He winked at me. Winked. And I just had this feeling…”
“What happened?”
“It was so surreal. I walked up to the van, knocked at the door. The windows were pitch black. I could hear him moving around inside but he wouldn’t answer. And then I noticed that the plates were bad, so I knocked again and told him to get out of the vehicle.”
Jessica shook her head as if she still couldn’t believe it and shrugged her jacket off of her shoulders, pulling her arms out one at a time as she pushed it to one side.
“And then he threw the van in reverse. I was standing behind it. If the dumpster hadn’t been there I would be dead. They took off for the end of the alley and I fired at their tires. They returned fire. Everything seemed like it was happening at once. That’s how fast it was. You don’t think about anything in that moment, you know? It’s like instinct just takes over. I started running after them…”
Michael raised his brows, resting his elbow across the back of her seat.
“You chased them? With them firing on you?”
“Like I said, I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get the plate number. Something for the detectives to go on. But then I heard something. Someone calling for help behind me. Someone I hadn’t noticed when I opened fire.”
Jessica dropped her eyes and Michael found himself wanting to brush his fingers across her skin, the desire so pure and singular that he had to curl his fingers into his palm to quell it.
“It was a boy, a teenager, just going to join the crowd at the end of the block. One of my bullets ricocheted off the building and struck him in the back. He’ll never walk again. The doctors are acting hopeful but they’re not really saying anything. And I know from experience what that means.”
“You know that wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. It was ruled a good shooting. But what I didn’t tell them is that when he called for me, I almost didn’t go. I almost left him there to die. And he would’ve died, he would’ve, if I hadn’t gone back.”
Michael looked at her carefully as she turned her eyes towards him, a strange feeling of foreboding running through him as her lips parted slightly, as if remembering some dark mirror image of herself that she hadn’t known existed.
“That’s when I knew,” she said, her voice low and rushed. “That’s when I understood. How important this is. Because he’s right. White is. There isn’t any line. Anyone in the right set of the wrong circumstances can allow themselves to become a killer.”
Michael froze as Jessica shifted towards him on in her seat, looking over his mouth before her gaze drifted back up to his eyes. He watched the eerie glow of frost outlining her features like a halo jump from her hair to her lips as she cocked her knees apart, brushing her fingers across them as his gaze dropped to her thighs without thinking.
“If you murder him, if anything happens to White besides him being dragged off in chains and locked up in solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life, he will win. And he can’t win. There won’t be any justice at all because we’ll have proved everything that he said was true. And everything he did to me and my family and that girl, it will all just be part of it. It will become the first awful footnote in this city’s march towards total chaos…”
Michael ran his hand behind her head without thinking and Jessica looked up at him quickly, breaking off mid-sentence as her eyes opened wide. He saw her face fall slightly as his fingertips brushed her temple and dropped his hand as she looked away, her brow furrowing as her hair dropped into her eyes. He started to speak and then stopped himself, suddenly feeling the chasm between them so distinctly he flinched and froze as Jessica placed her hand on his shoulder, her pale face filling with some emotion so lost and hungry that he dragged her towards him with both hands.
“Don’t,” she said as she scrambled over the seat and kissed him hard on the mouth, her hazel eyes flitting over him as she crawled into his lap. “Don’t say anything. Just kiss me.”
Michael wrapped his arms around the back of her head as Jessica curled into him and kissed her deeply as he felt her jolt against the hard line of his cock, wrapping his arms around her waist as her eyes fluttered wide.
God, she is so tiny, he thought. This could be dangerous. I should think about this first. How did we get here again?
“Look at me,” Jessica said, wetting her lips as Michael shifted her over his cock, following her hand carefully as she curled it around the front of her skirt. “You’re going to help me. Say it.”
Michael watched her hike her skirt up slightly, the edge skittering over the black lace front of her underwear and caught her hand as she reached between her thighs to grab his cock, tilting his head at her as he held her eyes.
“You know it’s never a good idea when two killers try to play relationship,” he said, his low voice smooth and clipped.
Jessica looked down at him, pressing her free hand against his cheek and spread her knees wider as she pulled her other hand away from him with a smooth slide of her wrist, twitching her fingers over the front of his pants before reaching for his zipper.
“Yeah?” Jessica said, leaning backwards slightly as he slid his hands up her skirt. “Well I’m out of good ideas.”
Michael bit back a moan as Jessica unzipped his pants and pressed her hand inside his boxers, dragging his cock out with her fingertips as he felt for the seat release with the flat of his palm. He inhaled quickly as he felt her fingers close around his cock and ran his hands under her ass as she stroked him gently, something hot and frantic in the smooth, urgent slide of her fist. Michael dragged her closer as he slid his hands up her back as she pulled her hand away from his cock as she curled her fingers around the back of his neck, leaning forward to kiss him.
“Touch me,” she said, her throaty voice low and urgent.
Michael buried his hand into her hair, kissing her deeply as she arched over him and dragged his hand over her cheek as she unbuttoned her blouse, her breasts brushing against his lips as she tossed it behind them. He shifted his foot on the floor, trying to find some leverage as he slid his hands up the sides of her blue lace bra and paused as she reached behind her to unclasp it and winched, her arm faltering to his shoulder as her eyes dropped down to meet him.
“You do it,” she said, speaking against his neck. Michael searched her face quickly, the sudden embarrassment in her expression filling him with a rare rush of compassion and held her eyes as he brushed his hands up her back, sliding his fingers beneath the thin lace band as he unclasped it with a quick shift of his fingers. He gritted his teeth he felt her lace underwear slide against his cock, trying to be gentle, trying not to rush and then pulled her bra off impatiently as she rolled her shoulders forward, the lace ripping between his fingers as her entire body froze. Michael paused as he saw her flinch, her face tightening wi
th a quick flash of fear and slid his hand against her cheek as she shook her head, pressing her hand between his legs as she closed her eyes.
“No, don’t,” she whispered, rubbing his cock with quiet urgency. “Don’t stop. Don’t.”
Michael leaned forward, his entire body igniting beneath the slow steady grind of her hips and pulled her nipple into his mouth as she gasped, her fingers dropping away from him. He sucked harder as she arched backwards, running his hand up the front of her neck and then dug his fingers into the sharp jut of her hip as he dragged her over his cock, letting out a quick sigh as it bucked against her open thighs.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, dragging her closer as she started to close her eyes again, and fisted the back of her hair gently, the ice-covered windows giving her skin a strange incandescent glow. Jessica moaned as he dragged her over his cock again and slid his other hand beneath the front of her skirt, holding her in place as he pressed his hand between her legs.
“Tell me,” he said, his eyes darting over her face as she flinched again. Jessica looked down, her eyes going wide as if forcing herself to see him and Michael watched her lips sigh open as he ran his fingers beneath her thin lace panties, shifting his legs slightly until his fingers were shoved up against her clit. He watched her shoulders quake as he began to rub slowly, rolling his fingers against her clit in smooth, gentle strokes, and closed his eyes as she pressed her forehead against him, his cock giving off a painful throb as her face flushed with urgency.
“I want you inside me,” She sighed, wrapping her hands around his face and he slid his fingers inside her as he held her eyes, pumping them gently for a moment as he held her body in place. She let out a low moan as she rolled her hips against him and he spread her lips wider, gritting his teeth as she rocked against his hand.
“Say it again,” he said, his voice low and strained, his entire body igniting beneath the soft quake of her fingers as they curled around his neck.
“I want you to fuck me,” she said, crying out lightly as Michael pressed his thumb against her clit and he pushed her underwear aside as pressed his cock lower, dragging her down by the back of the neck as he slid himself inside her. He let out a quick breath as he felt her cunt close around him and gritted his teeth as she began to rock against him instantly, his brow furrowing as he tried to the slow the quick, urgent pump of her hips.