Delusive

by Courtney Lane

  “Gone where?”

  She shrugged. “Just gone, Hanley. Probably back to wherever he got them from.” She looked down at her spreadsheets. “I’ve never seen him use Jaco as a personal bodyguard for any of them.”

  I leaned across the counter, giving her no other choice but to look at me. “Jaco is special how?”

  “Everyone knows.” She gazed at me sheepishly from underneath her doubled-up false eyelashes. “Jaco is Elias’s best friend, and he only has one now.”

  “Best friend? Is that what they call it? Jaco is a goon. Can you tell me why a supposed CEO of an architectural design firm has goons?”

  “You can’t be that oblivious to the truth,” she muttered.

  “Exactly. I’m not. I’m just waiting on someone to admit it out loud.”

  “They probably never will. Go to a library once in a while. Look under the name of the people who incorporated this town. No one wants to rock the boat of the people who own the island we’ve all escaped to.”

  “You.” Jaco charged at me, startling Penelope and me. “Since you won’t answer your phone, use mine.”

  I picked up his phone, touching it as though it teemed with a communicable disease. “Hello?”

  A long audible sigh was heard from the other line. “I’m not a fan of babysitting you, Hanley, but you perplex me to an extreme extent.” Elias sounded a mix of upset and exhausted, beneath his words I could hear a few men arguing in the background. “Is what I ask of you really that fucking hard to follow?”

  I blinked, a little taken aback by his acridity. “Why am I being blamed because a man wasn’t able to keep his hands to himself? That man had no right to put his hands on me.”

  “Your last sentence is correct, and I’m sure the man who touched you has seen the error of his ways now that he’s missing a few teeth. He will be missing quite a few more things when I’m done with him. When I give you an order, it’s not up for debate or negotiations. If you are continuously unable to handle following directions, I will stop allowing you to indulge in your need to work while you’re living with me.”

  “Ugh!” I screamed into the phone. My anger got the best of me and I threw it. It hit the wall and ricocheted, falling into an ornate mauve, galvanized tin basket full of neatly folded lace panties. Holding my head, I persistently shook it. “I can’t do this anymore. I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.”

  Jaco and Penelope looked at me as though I’d cracked, and maybe, I had. Whatever internal feelings I had for him, I wished they would stop. I wished I had never been given the burden of having to endure Elias and his madness. Roth was much easier. I tuned out his insults, made him pay for them later, and things were fine—I could handle him.

  This man’s need to control every single aspect of my life, when I’d already lived as a prisoner, thanks to the crimes committed by his father against mine, had brought me close to losing my hold on my sanity.

  And that wasn’t the largest issue; he’d gotten inside my head and my heart. Both were saturated with Elias. I craved his cock, his tongue, his touch, his lips…his body. I needed the way he looked at me in those small moments I witnessed his vulnerability and crushing sadness. I needed him to inundate my ears with his beautiful way of making me feel on top of the world.

  The least desired seemed to be the things he wouldn’t stop exhibiting around me. The control. The extreme possessiveness. The violence and the volatile nature. Scenes of him “firing” an employee still haunted my dreams.

  When he used to touch me, he left me stupefied. Now when he touched me, I remembered his brutal hits between my thighs. I had to fight the urge to recoil, and sometimes, failed. I thought I could pretend the awful things he did and said never happened by wishing the worst things out of existence. It all fell apart when he showed me the parts I hated, because it was a reminder of every one of his bad deeds.

  A gnawing notion directed me to borrow Penelope’s jacket and continue to work. Another wanted to curse Elias and Jaco at the same time, calling them both every name that rang true to their natures. Promptly after, I’d find Skylar and fuck her without a care as to whether or not the word got around to Elias about it. His fingertips were grasping a part of me I tried to protect. My well-played and groomed façade had cracked and there was barely any shred of it left.

  Jaco continued to stare down at me skeptically. “You seriously just fucked up. You know that, right? He’s on his way here.”

  Slowly closing and opening my eyes, I rubbed my temples. “I won’t be here when he arrives.”

  Jaco’s eyes widened. “Don’t make me do what I need to do to keep you here, Hanley.”

  With both hands, I pulled up my skirt and swiftly kicked him in the groin, making him double over and dry-heave.

  Through watering eyes, his face fixated in grimace, he looked up at me in awe.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly and left the store.

  I needed to get to Skylar. She had a way of making me remember who I was and forgetting about the woman I had to be to lure her prey.

  I USED THE phone at a restaurant many blocks away from where I had left the Camaro to contact Skylar and ask her to pick me up. It took three hours before her car skidded into the parking lot.

  I got into her car and slid into the passenger seat. I looked her over—she looked beautiful, as usual, and was dressed as though she was ready to work at La Dentelle. “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “I got called in to work the rest of your shift. Thanks for that, because I thought Claudia was going to fire me before then.” She chuckled hard enough to hinder her ability to drive. “What the fuck did you do? Penelope was gulping back more Vicodin than usual during our shift. I know that bitch wants to fire you, but she’s waiting for permission from you know who.” She glanced over at me. “Where am I taking you?”

  “I’m escaping. Take me wherever you want to go.”

  Sinking deeper into her seat, she hesitated. “I’m…staying with my mom right now. I really don’t want to take you there.”

  “What happened to your place?”

  “It was my aunt’s place,” she said, failing to be convincing. “Her landlord kicked us out for too many lease violations. Milton is at my mom’s right now, and he works under Elias. Way, way, way under Elias. Like the janitor of the mailroom under. If you’re trying to run away from him, that isn’t the best place to go.”

  “Where else can I go?” I questioned, bubbling with raw anger. “I had to kick Jaco in his balls to lose him. Everywhere else I can go, Elias will find me. I want to go home and see my father, but he’s probably moved already.”

  She shook her head no. “Claudia’s sister doesn’t live too far from you. She drives by your house every morning when she goes to work. She never mentioned anything about moving vans. There are still two cars parked in the driveway, last she said.”

  I reached inside my clutch, but remembered I’d left my phone in the car, because I knew it was being tracked. “Take me to your place and hide me from Milton.”

  SKYLAR PULLED UP to a double wide mobile home situated in a park with similar looking homes.

  When we entered, the stale scent almost knocked me over. The appearance of Skylar’s mother was unexpected, from what I saw of her. Her head was planted in the lap of a man half her age and he was as physically torn down as she was. I surmised whatever they were hooked on ruined the looks they might’ve once had.

  Skylar hurried me along, taking my hand down the hall to an even narrower room. The sound of our feet hitting the floor echoed throughout the space, sounding hollow. The walls seemed to shudder with our every movement.

  She shoved me fully into a room. With the advent of boy band posters and lavender decor, I questioned if it was her childhood bedroom. I laid down on her bed with my arm behind my head, staring at the picture of a half-naked guy on the ceiling.

  Closing the door, she sighed and sank back against the door. “My mother keeps it lik
e I left it…a hellish mess.” She flopped down on the bed to lay next to me. “I warned you about that asshole. He acts like he’s so much better than everyone—‘cause he wants to make everyone feel small around him. Wants everyone to see him as some fucking king. He doesn’t deserve you. He doesn’t deserve any woman with half a lick of sense.”

  I gave her a grin and reached out to hold her hand. “You’re sweet to think that.” I fingered my temples with my other hand, working out the tension that formed there every time I spoke about Elias. “There is more to why I’m with him. It’s not as simple as me ‘playing the player.’”

  She propped up on her elbows, grinning at me as though she knew a secret when she couldn’t have. “Oh, I figured that out in the car. Sharing is caring.”

  “He’s exhausting,” I admitted through a sigh. “More exhausting than my father. Things are so easy with you. I don’t have to pretend or constantly be on my toes. I feel like I’m entering the ring when I’m with Elias. I have to say the right things at the right time. Not the things he wants me to say, or what I want to say, but things to purposely throw him off his perch.

  “You were right; he has this intimidating way about him from the way he speaks to the way he acts and moves. His actions… I can’t figure out what to do when he acts…crazy.” It was the only time my calculated dance made major missteps. I abhorred when he acted that way, it reminded me of Luther. My body had a visceral reaction, which in turn, opened me up when I wanted to remain cold. In an odd way, I surmised that’s how he was able to break through to me.

  “We probably shouldn’t stay here for long.” She leaned back on one elbow and ran her fingertips through my hair, pushing it away from my face. “That was Milton my mother was sucking off. He’d do anything for a hit, including sell you out.”

  “I can’t go home, either.” I closed my eyes as the pound inside my head began to worsen. “He will find me there, and besides that, I can’t deal with my father right now.”

  “There are a lot of things you can’t deal with.” She giggled.

  “You don’t understand, Sky.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Opening my eyes, I stared at the unicorn lithograph on the far wall. “His father is responsible for what happened to my mother.”

  “Hanley,” she gasped. “Do you think Natanael Cari killed your mother?”

  “It’s not as simple as that. At first, I thought it was over my mother’s profession. She drag raced, illegally and sometimes legally. In the illegal races, sometimes pink slips are the currency, and in the small-time legal races, you earn a trophy and money. The thing about the legal races is that if the opposing driver believes you are cheating, you are forced to break down your motor, so they can find out if you are in fact cheating. If you are, you lose almost everything. My mother refused and lost the money, but earned the trophy.

  “I don’t think that sat right with Natanael. I don’t know. I could be wrong about that. I’ve been churning through ideas since the day we lost her. Maybe she was supposed to throw the race. Maybe she hurt Natanael’s business by winning somehow. All I know is the next time my mother had a very important professional race, it was her last. The accident caused my mother to become stuck in a persistent vegetative state.”

  “Oh my God, Hanley.” Skylar’s lip quivered as she squeezed my hand.

  “That isn’t the end of it. My father told me Natanael protested to clear himself and his driver from taking the blame, and made sure my mother’s accident was declared negligent on my mother’s part. When that happened, we weren’t able to sue, and we weren’t able to get my mother’s benefit money. It left my father nearly penniless.”

  Her eyes glazed over as she stared at me with her mouth agape.

  “There has to be more to it. Natanael has more money than most, why would he care about something that would be a drop in the bucket to him? I can’t shake the feeling my father knows more than he’s told me.”

  “So what’s your plan? Destroy his son?”

  “It’s not that simple,” I dismissed her, ending the conversation and desiring to move on. “I feel like going out. I’ve never gone to a club. Is there one the Caris don’t seem to own?”

  “I know of a place, but it’s out of town, and close to where I used to live.”

  I ejected from her bed. “Where's your bathroom? I want to freshen up.”

  "First door on your right," she answered reluctantly. “And don’t blame me if you find some sick shit in there.”

  I navigated the narrow hall and found the bathroom next to the master bedroom. The handle of the bathroom door was in my hand when I saw movement in the bedroom. I released my grip on the door and took one small step inside the bedroom.

  In the midst of scourging around the floor, in search of something unknown, I spied Milton. Entering the cluttered bedroom, I called his name. Upon hearing my voice, he jerked, bumping his head on the edge of the bed.

  "Are you lost, little girl?" he asked with as scowl.

  I looked down the hall behind me, listening to Skylar's mother as she snored on the couch. I couldn’t run from the reason I was there, I had to make a proactive move. I’d delayed long enough by succumbing to feelings that got me nowhere but deeper into the throes of Elias’s dark abyss. Now that he’d said—or his actions might’ve suggested he loved me—phase two needed to be enacted to push things forward.

  Setting my eyes on Milton, I closed the door behind me. "How well does Elias treat you?”

  His posture went rigid, his eyes questioned me with skepticism. “Why’d ya wanna know?”

  “Because I want to help you.”

  “What I gotta do for it?”

  “You just have to help me when the time is right.”

  He flopped on the bed, staring up at me in wonder. “What do I get?”

  “A piece of the Caris’ fortune.”

  A slow grin spread across his face, revealing his badly decayed teeth. “I’m all ears, little girl.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE CLUB WAS A sea of well-dressed people dancing, socializing, and drinking under blue and red strobe-lights. The music was a hodgepodge of popular songs and dance music classics set against dubstep beats. Skylar and I hung back by the far wall closest to the bar. She surveyed the crowd, looking for something or someone.

  “Do you know how to dance?” she shouted over the din.

  Giving her a smile, I took her hand out to the floor and let the movement of my body serve as her answer. We were in sync as we moved to the rhythm. The crowd became denser, forcing us to dance closer to each other. I placed my hands on her hips, swaying my body against hers. Something flashed in her eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was desire or curiosity—it was gone too quickly.

  She grabbed my hands and slipped them from her. “I have to use the potty,” she stage-whispered in my ear and left me alone on the floor.

  I waded through the crowd and found my way to the bar. After waiting for five minutes, the bartender came around to me and looked at me expectantly, waiting for my drink order.

  “A madras, please,” I requested. I turned my back on the bar, looking for Skylar to reappear so I could flag her over. A tap on my shoulder made me turn around. My drink was ready and the bartender expected his pay.

  I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change. As I moved to the music, I began to sip my drink.

  Halfway done with my drink, I began to suspect something was wrong. The club’s crowd began to press on me, making it hard to move around. The closer I got to the bathroom, the farther away it seemed. White noise filled my ears and my balance faltered.

  The breeze of the fresh outside air whirled around my face, but I could barely gather if I was outside. I must’ve taken a very wrong turn if I was. The sidewalk became my ceiling and the sky my floor when something constricting was wrapped around my waist. My eyelids became heavily weighted, making it difficult to keep them open.

  I STARTLED, JOLTING off the couch
in fear. My head pounded, the room swirled around, slowing in speed as I regained my focus. The black walls and the patterned marble floor indicated where I’d wound up. I held my head and exhaled sharply in frustration.

  “Elias,” I called into the quiet living room. My taxed voice echoed throughout the room, returning to me without a response from the intended recipient.

  The faint sound of the water rushing through the pipes in the ceiling told me I wasn’t alone.

  I walked through the house and made my way up the wide staircase, following the sound of the water running in the shower.

  With trepidation, I crossed the threshold and entered Elias’s bedroom. I searched around the dim space, able to smell his cologne, but was unable to see him. A slight movement out of the shadow of the corner of my eye drew my attention.

  Elias leaned forward, revealing himself from his position on the love seat, opposite the bed. He looked relaxed and in too good of a mood to make me feel comfortable about the situation.

  “Did you sleep well?” As he stood, the air in the room began to thin. The dim lighting bounced off his face, highlighting the more prominent areas: his emerald eyes, the high cheekbones, the prominent jawline, and the very visible Adam’s apple cradled between the high collar of his black button up. “Hanley?” He flashed me his signature smile. “Answer my question.” His voice deepened a tad. It was enough to indicate I shouldn’t trust the beguiling front he showcased.

  “Yes, I did. But, I guess…” My voice trailed off when I realized Elias wasn’t running a shower for me, because the water abruptly shut off. The slam of the stall door made me tense up a little more. “What happened?”

  He looked back at the cracked open bathroom door. “Would you mind coming out here?” he requested more than asked of the person in the bathroom.

  The door creaked open and out stepped Skylar. Her skin was damp with moisture, and her hair was piled high on top of her head in a messy topknot.