Stockholm Syndromance: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 4)

by Ada Scott

  “That first night in the club, I saw some… things. I noticed you come in, but it seemed like a lot of people did. There were some men that came up to you, gave you some money, and then you gave them something. They didn’t look like the kind of guys who used moisturizing cream or lipstick. Then there was the fight with the gang. They didn’t look like the kind of people concerned with the cosmetics industry either. What aren’t you telling me, Ryan?”

  Oh fuck. Looked like Sarina was already crashing like a meteorite into the world I was trying to take over. Fuck.

  My heart sank. If I told her the truth, it would drive her away, I’d be “with” her even less than now, not more. How the fuck could I explain this?

  Sarina

  Ryan probably wouldn’t have had any different expression on his face if he’d been tied to a post in front of a firing squad. The way that hopeful smile dropped from his face broke my heart. I felt like an ogre, taking this perfect, sweet, sincere moment and using it for my own purposes.

  I had to remember I was a cop, I was working here, even though a huge part of me wanted to scream “Yes!” and dive on top of him. A boyfriend? For me? How fucking amazing would that be? Instead, I risked losing that beautiful thing.

  Then there was the fact that I’d also just put out an ultimatum for Ryan. If he didn’t think I was worth it, then he’d just tell me to get my things and go. Then where would the investigation be?

  My heart stopped what it was doing and focused on Ryan, to see if he’d been feeling these utterly forbidden things as strongly as I had. What was taking him so long? If only my life was as simple as his I’d have admitted everything by now.

  Just tell me, Ryan… the things I’ve already done have probably put you out of the reach of the law anyway. You won’t get prosecuted in the end, you’ll be safe. I won’t let them get to you. Just tell me you sell F, that’s all I need for now… say it and we can be together. We can work everything else out later…

  “I wasn’t lying about the cosmetics business,” said Ryan.

  My heart considered not resuming its work, but then reluctantly started beating, as I dealt with a shrinking feeling that made me try to retract my hands from Ryan’s grasp. He didn’t let go.

  “I wasn’t, the company exists and turns a good profit. But,” he took a deep breath and paused for an eternity, licking his lips and eyes looking upwards as if searching his head for the right words. “I don’t even know how to explain this.”

  “Just tell me, Ryan… It’s OK…”

  “I never tell anybody…”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “I’m an only child,” he began.

  What that had to do with selling drugs, I had no idea, but I didn’t press him any further. I just listened carefully, hoping that was all the encouragement he needed to keep talking.

  “Never knew my dad. Apparently he needed a girl who could take a beating a lot better than my mom. It took her finding out about being pregnant with me to work up the courage to get herself out of there and leave the cheating and the hitting behind.”

  Ryan shut his eyes, raised his eyebrows and sighed as if he couldn’t believe these words were coming out of his mouth.

  “For my whole life, it’s been just her and me. She had to work like a fucking slave to make ends meet. She had a part-time job during the day, looked after me between school and bedtime, and then a part-time job in the evenings, and odd-jobs all over the place. I can only imagine how exhausted she must have been.”

  I gripped his hands tighter and shuffled closer so my knee touched his. Ryan had noticeably paled as he talked, and the heat seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

  “I remember this one time, I must have been nine years old. I came home from school and she wasn’t there. We didn’t have a TV and there was nothing in the cupboards like the kind of packaged snacks my friends at school had. It’d been kind of a shitty day, kids being assholes like only kids can, and I was sitting there for a while feeling sorry for myself, angry at her for not having money like them. What a piece of shit…”

  I shook my head. “You were only a-”

  “Kid. Yeah. So I was sitting there on the couch and I heard her car kinda cough and splutter its way into the driveway and a minute later she came inside. She had this look on her face I was too young to understand, but I remember it and I know what it means now. She was nervous. What was she nervous about? Well, I was sitting there pouting like a spoiled brat and she knelt in front of me and she had this soccer ball in her hand. I looked at it, and then I looked at her.”

  Ryan stopped for a second and then almost gave me a heart attack when he sobbed. A tear dropped from his eye, and I reached up to cradle his face and wipe it away with my thumb without thinking.

  There was an impending sense of doom growing inside of me that was terrifying, as Ryan waved his hand in the general area in front of him, as if the memory of his mother was right there for us both to see.

  “She had these bags under her eyes, wearing one of the two dresses I’d seen her wear in… ever. She had nothing for herself and she bought me a soccer ball. She must have been tired right down to her bones, but you know what she said?”

  I shook my head, feeling cool air on tear-streaks on my own face.

  “She said, “Sorry I’m late, sweetie, you wanna come play kicks with me in the park?””

  Ryan didn’t talk for a while and I dropped my hand back down.

  “I couldn’t have put it into words then, but that was the first time I had an inkling that she was giving me everything, and I promised to myself that, no matter what it took, I’d give her everything too. Only, when I gave it, it really would be everything. The world on a silver platter. Before I could do that, though, she got cancer.”

  “Oh, Ryan…”

  “Probably from one of the shitty jobs she forced herself to have so that I could have anything at all,” he muttered. “But the medical bills kept on getting bigger until I wasn’t breaking even anymore. So, I knew this guy who could get some F, and I managed to make some arrangements so that I could buy from him and sell it on. Pretty much straight away, that started making even more than the cosmetics business. It covers the medical bills and then some.”

  “Is she getting… what do they call it… is she in remission?”

  Ryan’s face contorted for a second before he squeezed out the answer he didn’t want to give. “No. But she will. She’s going to have it all.”

  I reached out and pulled him towards me, holding his head against my chest as we fell backwards along the couch. “Shhh, it’s OK.”

  Holy shit. What an emotional can of worms I’d forced him to open. This poor guy was just doing the wrong thing to try to do the right thing. He was a good man.

  I will keep you safe. I’ll say it’s entrapment, we can still use the information to work up your supply chain… just not against you. And it could take years. That’s a long time for us. Whatever “us” is.

  I stroked his hair for a while until he was breathing normally again. “Sounds like we’ve got some things in common then,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m an only child too, and I never knew my dad. Of course, I never knew my mom either. I was adopted, but then the adopted family were deemed unfit to parent and somehow I ended up in the foster care system. A broken system if ever there was one. I bounced around for a while, each family worse than the last until I ended up in a home with a guy that sounds a lot like your dad. Um… I never tell anybody this either.”

  “Well, it seems fair…” said Ryan.

  I gulped. “I guess so. This guy… one night he was so drunk… beating the shit out of his wife right in front of me. “Teaching respect” he called it. Well, something… snapped inside me, you know?”

  Ryan nodded, without looking up at me.

  “I was like… “You want to hurt her? You’ll have to go through me.” So I got right in there, in the middle of it, and, boy, he went straight
through me. Feel this.”

  I reached down and picked up Ryan’s hand, aiming the fingertips at just the right place on my scalp.

  “That’s from when he gave me a black eye and I flew backwards and hit my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I was just waking up when he was done with my foster mother and I saw him coming towards me. That’s when the cops arrived, kicked the door down and dragged his ass off to the holding cells.”

  That’s when I first decided to become a cop, I thought.

  “Sounds like he needs to get in touch with his feminine side,” Ryan mused.

  “Yeah. Well, instead he got in touch with a lawyer, and he was back in the house by the weekend. But no lawyer in the world could keep me there, so I bounced around a bit more until I ended up with a family that wasn’t awful for a couple years, until I turned eighteen. I don’t keep in contact with them, though. Living there was like living in a hotel, you know? Clean, reasonably safe, but impersonal. So, that’s why I took those self-defense classes, why I saw that guy in the club coming at you with a knife and I thought “You’ll have to go through me.” I’m not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore and I can fight for what I care about. For who I care about. For some reason, I cared about you from the moment I saw you, Ryan.”

  Ryan looked up into my eyes for a while, as if he was lost and finding himself in there. “Does that mean you wanna…”

  I nodded and smiled. “Ryan and Sarina. Has a nice ring to it, huh?”

  Ryan turned towards me and moved between my legs before kissing me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, holding him tight as I kissed him back.

  There was no rational and objective argument for what I was doing… but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

  Ryan

  With Sarina’s coursework piling up, we didn’t get to spend as much time together as I would have liked over the next few weeks after making it official. It seemed like the “high school” relationship did some pretty quick growing up during that talk.

  Every touch was still the embodiment of excitement when I was with Sarina, but I’d never touched anybody that I’d shared that deeply with. In my world, I couldn’t let anybody know my vulnerabilities or they’d just use them against me. It was both liberating and terrifying that Sarina had that window into my inner workings.

  Tonight, we’d had a chance to celebrate that quick maturing of our relationship, and I’d given her a day to remember. Starting with flowers delivered in the morning, a sexy little cocktail dress delivered and waiting for her when she came back to the dorm for lunch, and then an expensive bottle of perfume, with a note to avoid the cafeteria dinner like the plague because we had plans for tonight.

  She looked like a movie star coming out of the dorm, when I picked her up in the town-car, rented complete with driver, and she smelled like an angel while we rode to the restaurant. All eyes were on her as we ate, as was only fitting for the sexiest woman in the room.

  However, the whole time it seemed like there was something on her mind, and it took me until the ride home to drag it out of her. Safely behind the privacy panel so the driver couldn’t hear us, I leaned in and kissed her.

  “Spit it out, I can tell you’ve got something you want to say.”

  “It’s… it’s just embarrassing…”

  “More embarrassing than leaving your panties on my bookshelf like they were a best seller?”

  Sarina blushed and slapped my arm with the back of her hand. “Shut up, you. And yes, in a way, it is.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s just… I haven’t managed to get a job to pay for my tuition and accommodation yet. The club got back to me and said they had a huge list of applicants with a lot more relevant experience than me. I should have spent more time looking, applying everywhere, but somebody has been keeping me busy. Not that it’s your fault,” she added hastily, “but everything I paid in advance is going to be running out soonish, so I need to get on top of this or you’ll be dating a homeless dropout.”

  I shrugged. “This is no problem, just tell me what you need and I can cover it-”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No… I can’t do that. I wouldn’t feel right. I know we’ve been moving pretty quickly, but that would just feel like charity and I’d hate that feeling. And don’t you dare say it would be for services already rendered.”

  She waggled a warning-finger at me and I shelved the obvious joke, holding my hands up in surrender. Dropping my arms after a second, I rested one hand on her inner thigh and she clamped them together as if giving my hand a kind of hug.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well… I did have this one idea…”

  “And this is what’s been on your mind all night?”

  “Yeah… um… I was thinking, you know how you said you could get some F?”

  I narrowed my eyes, glanced at the privacy screen and then back to Sarina. “Yeeeaaaaahhh…”

  “Well, would it be possible for me to get some to sell? I could pay you back once I sell it, and then it wouldn’t be just you paying for my whole life. You already give me too much.” She gestured at her dress.

  I pressed my lips together into a thin line and turned my head to look out the window on the opposite side of the car. There wasn’t much to see there, on account of the tinting, but a blank canvas to stare at while dealing with this potential drama-bomb was probably for the best anyway.

  Giovanni had been pretty specific about clamping down on the distribution of F at our last meeting, a point he would no doubt reiterate next week. As a result of that, and of meeting Sarina, I hadn’t taken any F from the lab or even visited any of my regular on-selling haunts since then. But I did still have a modest amount tucked away in my apartment.

  I had no other use for it, having no particular need to take it myself. It was essentially a really inconvenient and inefficient paperweight, if it wasn’t bringing in any money or the kind of respect and lifestyle I’d grown accustomed to.

  The Acardis would frown upon it, to put it mildly, if they found out, but it wouldn’t take that much F to cover her expenses for the rest of the academic year. After that, well, life was going to be pretty fucking different anyway. For “us” and the Acardis both. If there was a version of “us” that could even survive the entire truth about what I was.

  The way she accepted the first part of my story, my initial reasons for going down this path before I got my taste of the kind of power I could take from the Acardis, gave me a lot of hope. The idea of having Sarina at my side when I took control instead of a string of meaningless, and ultimately inferior, lays was all kinds of seductive.

  I turned back to Sarina. “OK. I can get you some. Not much, but you won’t need much. Just make sure you don’t go out on the streets selling to dangerous people. Sell on campus, small amounts to people looking to have a one-off party. Understand?”

  “Yes! Thank you! This solves everything!”

  Sarina wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a hug and kiss. We lost our balance a little as the driver turned into the driveway for Cumberland, but managed to avoid any clashes of teeth.

  The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the car was that short chick from Sarina’s floor, Millie, standing outside the dorm with her hands on her hips. She threw up her hands in mock disgust when I helped Sarina out of the car.

  “Are you fucking serious right now?” she asked, coming over to us.

  “What?” asked Sarina.

  “I just walked home from a date at the messiest house I’ve ever seen, by myself because “the game” was on, and you turn up like this? It’s not fair.” Millie turned to me. “You got any friends?”

  I laughed. “Um… they’re all taken, I’m afraid.”

  “You coming up?” asked Millie. “I’d like to grill you in the common room about why men are such a-holes.”

  “Sounds like fun, but I’ve got somewhere else I need to be tonight.”

 
; “Such a shame.” Sarina slipped her arms inside my jacket and cuddled up to me.

  I would have loved to come up and christen Sarina’s bed with her, but my interrogation serum from hell was at a stage where I had a relatively small window to put the final touches on, or the whole batch was fucked. Either way I was glad to go without playing the agony aunt for Millie.

  “Hey! You should come to the Halloween party! Dress up! Guests are allowed!” She poked Sarina in the arm.

  “Oh… I’m not really sure Ryan’s interested in that…” said Sarina.

  I remembered the Halloween parties from my college years, they were invariably incredible boozefests and the source of many a story for everybody who attended. Lots of fun. Plus, it would do my heart good to see the sexy thing snuggled up to me dressed as Sarina the Slutty Teenage Witch or something.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  “Really?” Sarina looked up at me.

  “Oh yeah, those parties are always memorable, if you can remember them at all. But, listen, I’ve gotta go. Talk soon, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Sarina rose up on the tips of her toes and kissed me before letting go and heading towards the entrance with Millie. It was almost enough to make me forget about the potent chemicals bubbling away in my lab, but not quite.

  “Bye. Talk soon?”

  Sarina nodded and the girls both waved me off. I re-entered the car, and the last thing I saw as I was driven away was Sarina and Millie heading towards the entrance of Cumberland, with a couple other girls rushing out to get a debriefing on their dates.

  Ryan

  There were always a few Acardi soldiers around the lab, and even in the lab if it was just before a top to bottom clean anyway. They were there for security, to deter any stupid motherfuckers from trying to rob the place, or at least hold the fort while reinforcements came if a serious threat was posed to the operation.

  Now that the latest batch of my interrogation serum was ready, all I had to do was wait for one that I hadn’t questioned before. There was a constant rotation of new people, so all I had to do was sit here at my computer with the bait out and see what I caught.