by R. J. Lewis
That vulgar mouth went straight to his dick. “You’re really asking for it, aren’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” was her cheeky replied. “And anyways, when are we going to take our affair outside the office? Imagine spreading me out on a giant bed. So many things one can do in that environment.”
“Tempting.”
“Do it then.”
“I’ll consider it.”
Maybe.
There was too much to consider being open with her outside the office. He’d already made a mistake fucking her at her place. Call that a moment of weakness, although he had to admit, images of her naked across his king-sized bed was beyond appealing.
“That’s it?” she said, eyebrows up. “You’ll consider it? I’m not sure how long I can take being bent over your desk. Not that I don’t enjoy it, but fuck, Borden, I’m not an acrobat.”
He chuckled at her little spat.
“Come here,” he told her, gesturing to his lap.
Emma didn’t budge for a moment, eyeing him wearily.
“Come here,” he repeated. “I won’t bite.”
She stood up and moved to him. He took her by the hips and settled her over his lap, hiking up her dress.
“No,” she snapped, hands over his. “I’m broken.”
“I’m just touching you, doll. Innocent little touches, I promise.”
She hesitated, and then let him, albeit with a look of suspicion.
He suppressed a smile. “See? I’m not doing anything. Why are you always so hard?”
“Same reason as you.”
“Power?”
“Shit childhood.”
He went still. “What makes you think I had a shit childhood?”
“You grew up on my side of the tracks. There’s no need to elaborate more.”
He frowned because she was right. “I thought your grandmother gave you a good life.”
“She did what she could, but I was always led astray.”
“Because of your mother?”
Emma exhaled slowly, scowling at him. “You went through every part of my life, didn’t you?”
He nodded, slowly. “I already told you I did.”
“Then you know what she did.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it messed me up good, and I wasn’t a very nice kid.”
He chuckled lightly. “Neither was I.”
“No? What made you a little shit?”
“My parents threw me out at fifteen. Can’t say they ever gave a shit about me, so after that abuse, it was sort of a relief to be out of there.”
Instead of looking at him with sympathy, her eyes grew hard with anger. “What a bunch of assholes.”
“Yeah.”
She waited for him to say more, but Borden hadn’t talked about that part of his life since… Well, ever. Not even to Kate.
“You know what desperation is like, right?” he asked her quietly, searching for her understanding.
She nodded solemnly. “Yes.”
“That’s why I sold drugs at sixteen. I couldn’t make it in the streets otherwise. I was wayward. Very fucked up. I latched on to some hard stuff, too. Figured taking the drugs would help me cope. I think I was searching for something to fix how broken my life was.”
“And drugs did that?”
“Yeah, they did. When you grow up so poor, so alone and isolated, so degraded by the people who are meant to love you, when you’re set free into the world, you find ways to forget all of it. Getting high worked.”
He hadn’t realized how hard he was gripping her thighs until he looked down at them. He eased his hands immediately and took a deep breath. What the fuck was he doing talking about this shit? It wasn’t important. That was all water under the bridge.
“I know what you mean,” she simply said, and that was it. No words of sympathy, no consoling him, just understanding. Pure and real understanding that he instantly felt, and it was a nice feeling, like being weightless without that extra pressure sitting in your chest.
Fucking hell, this girl… She was something else. He couldn’t shake the feeling away in that moment. Just perfection. Real perfection, not the fantasized kind.
Emma leaned forward and gently kissed him. All that tension in his stomach withered away at her soothing touch, and he wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her back. Languidly, he roamed her mouth, stroking her tongue, taking in her unique taste that excited him like nothing else.
She lightly rolled her hips against him, and her breaths grew heavy. She wanted more of him. Un-fucking-believable.
He squeezed her ass, ready for another hip-roll when the office door suddenly jerked open. Borden tore away from her mouth and looked over her shoulder. Hawke stepped in, staring urgently at him with a screwed up face.
“Borden,” he said sharply, “we’ve got a problem.”
Borden’s hand was still on her ass when he gritted out impatiently, “What’s the problem?”
Hawke glanced between him and Emma, displeasure clear on his face. “It’s a private matter.”
“Talk.”
Emma tried to pull back, but Borden’s grip tightened. She wasn’t going anywhere. Hawke would be gone soon and then he’d be inside that wet warmth all over again. Admittedly, he wasn’t thinking straight.
“We found a man sneaking into the club,” Hawke explained. “Said he was unarmed when we caught him, and we searched him thoroughly to make sure. He had a gun in his fucking underwear. Real nasty thing.”
Startled, Emma stared at Borden with a gaping mouth. Borden was no longer paying attention to her. He was staring hard at Hawke, a thousand questions flooding through him. A simmer of anger he surprisingly hadn’t felt in a while began to surface.
“Some dickhead thought they could mill past my men with a gun on him,” he muttered, his eyes hardening. “How delusional is he?”
“He’s not talking,” Hawke replied evenly, fighting his own anger.
“He’ll talk to me,” Borden calmly said. It was forceful, but he wasn’t about to rage with Emma in their midst. She was starting to really matter to him, and the last thing he needed was her to get upset by him.
“You’ll take care of it then.” Hawke wasn’t asking. He knew already Borden would.
“Yeah, I’ll be right there.”
Hawke walked out, and silence swept the room. Emma was staring questionably at Borden.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
Borden didn’t look at her as he sat up in his chair and gently moved her off. He grabbed his keys off the desk, exhaling. “I’m going to take care of it, Emma.”
She swallowed hard, standing before him. “Don’t…don’t hurt him, Borden.”
“Don’t hurt him? That man was coming to hurt me. If he’d found me vulnerable, I’d be eating a bullet.”
“But he’s been caught. I’m sure he’ll be scared off now.”
“Don’t be naïve. I make a dozen enemies a day. I can’t afford to let one of them go.”
“So what are you going to do then?”
Borden just looked at her.
Her lips trembled. “Borden, don’t kill him.”
“I won’t,” Borden lied.
She roamed over his features, trying to see through his façade. “That’s not true, is it?”
He stood up, not responding. He shoved his keys and lighter into his pocket and began moving to the door.
“Borden?” Emma pressed from behind him.
“The ones at the top are always the worst, Emma,” he simply told her as he opened the door. “But you already knew that.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder right before he stepped out.
The image of her burying her face in her hands haunted him.
*
The man was in bad shape before they’d even knocked him around.
Hawke had handed the gun over to Borden. It was a nice gun, a Heckler and Koch USP, certainly not cheap.
He told Borden he was likely in his fifties, in good health, and dressed in a nice looking suit.
“Definitely not a druggie,” he explained, baffled. “But you could tell he’s had a lot to drink.”
They’d transported him into one of Borden’s abandoned warehouses miles out of the city on an isolated bit of land. He hadn’t been in this location for a very long time. He should have known it was only a matter of time before one of these assholes tried getting at him.
From a distance, Borden gazed at the man. At his unkempt bearded face and matted blonde/grey hair. He was on his knees, hands tied behind his back, staring off into space like he’d already made his peace. Hawke handed Borden his gun, and he walked to where the man was.
“A gun in your underwear,” Borden boringly remarked, approaching him. “I wish I could say that was a new one, but I’d be lying.”
Borden stopped in front of him, and the man’s eyes flickered up at him. The second Borden met those green eyes, his blood ran cold instantly. His whole body seized up, and his breath felt like it’d been knocked out of him.
No. This wasn’t possible. Surely he was hallucinating.
He blinked hard, trying to grasp reality. Borden could see so much of her in this man, which meant…
The man chuckled sardonically. “What’s the matter, Marcus? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Borden took an unbalanced step back, blinking rapidly at Kate’s father. “I don’t understand.”
“You understand perfectly,” he retorted.
Borden took a few breaths. “You shouldn’t have done this, Doug.”
“I should just let you live then? You killed my daughter. Don’t think I’ve let that go. Nothing will bury the past. It will always find you, Marcus, and it will make you pay.”
“I’m still paying.”
“No, you need to pay with your blood. You don’t deserve to live. You’re a monster! My baby girl would have still been alive had you never returned! Our lives are broken. Forever and always!”
“And what was a bullet to my head going to do, Doug? Make it better?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t fucking care either. I can’t be in this world knowing you’re still breathing the same air as me when it should be her! They should have come after you! Why didn’t they come after you?!”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I was taking over their turf, and they wanted to scare me off.”
“And they killed my daughter!” Doug shrieked in his rage, his pale face turning red. “Monsters like you, they strangled her and dumped her like trash!”
Borden numbly said, “I found the two men that took your daughter’s life, and I made them suffer.”
“What about my suffering? Or my wife’s? You will never ease our pain –”
“You think I’m not suffering too?” Borden cut in, raising his voice. “You think I don’t mourn your daughter every single day? That I don’t blame myself? I loved her, Mr Davenoth, and I wish it was me instead. I know I don’t deserve to be here, and if I could choose, she’d be here instead of me. I’d take the worst kind of death just to make that happen. Sell my soul to the fucking Devil if he could make it happen, but it’s never going to fucking happen, and I can’t change the past no matter how many times I blame myself for it.”
Doug didn’t expect Borden’s response. He went still, and his eyes rimmed red. He was vulnerable and broken, Borden realized, and in his rage for justice, he did something he would never have done. Now he was staring emptily at the gun in Borden’s hand, suddenly sober.
Borden’s grip on the gun tightened and he shook. He was usually calm in these situations. There was usually no feeling involved. But that was back when his world was black and grey.
It wasn’t black and grey any more.
It was filled with fucking colours again.
And who had to stand in front of him now to shake him up even more? None other than the father of the woman he’d loved before her untimely death.
“I’m sorry,” Borden whispered to him, the ache in his voice present.
Doug tried his best to glare at him, but even under the raw hatred, Borden could only see pain. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t the only person putting up a front, pretending to the world that he was impenetrable.
Doug was suffering more than he was. He’d only tasted a short year in Kate’s life, and even in that short time frame she’d left a permanent footprint on his soul. But her father…he’d had her all his life. He’d seen her from baby to woman. His suffering was unimaginable in comparison to Borden’s.
They weren’t just two angry souls clashing. They were two souls hurting, and they recognized that in that moment. Doug looked away from him and stared down at the dirty floor, his shoulders heaving up and down as he sobbed.
“I miss her,” he cried breathlessly. “I miss her, that’s all. I just miss her.”
Borden’s eyes pained. He let out a shuddering breath. “Yeah.”
He missed her too. Always.
“I keep thinking of what I could have done differently. I was too hard on her. I stifled her.”
“You loved her,” Borden said. “She knew that.”
Doug continued shaking, a man reduced to this was hard for Borden to watch.
“You can’t let this happen again,” Doug then said, looking at him. “You can’t.”
Borden went still. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone talks, Marcus. They all know about the girl.”
He looked away and down at the ground. “Is that why you did this, Doug? Tried silencing me because you think it’ll happen again?”
“It will,” Doug returned. “It will, Marcus. You have too many people who want you dead. Every day people. It’s going to happen.”
He didn’t reply.
Suddenly overwhelmed and emotionally raw, he clenched his teeth and walked off. Hawke’s brow furrowed when Borden approached.
“Let him go,” Borden instructed simply, trying to keep his voice level. “He isn’t himself. He’s had too much to drink.”
“Kate’s father or not, drunk or not, his intentions were to kill you,” Hawke snapped back angrily. “You can’t let him breathe another minute.”
Borden breathed heavily, trying to get his thoughts in order, but he felt like a noose had wrapped itself around his neck. He looked back at Doug, and then at Hawke’s stone-cold face. The walls around him started to close in, and he took off out of the warehouse, pacing back and forth.
A sharp twist in the centre of his being, and he dropped to his knees. He grabbed at his hair and pulled at it in frustration before dragging his nails down his face. But even the pain didn’t remove the ache inside of him. All he saw was Kate’s dead face. He couldn’t even look back at a time when she was smiling, not after witnessing that smiling face look at him lifelessly. His fingers dug into the ground, and his eyes continued to sting with unshed tears. FUCKING FUCK, why couldn’t he ever just cry for her? Why wouldn’t the tears fall?
He would never have seen that face had he never returned. She would have been alive. Doug was right. He was fucking right about everything.
Borden was a monster, and he deserved to die.
“He can’t live,” Hawke said from behind him. “You know it too, Borden. All the men know about him coming here. How will they respect you if you don’t put this man into the ground for trying to kill the most powerful man in New Raven?”
Borden stared up at the sky, as if waiting for it to offer him answers to this fucked up situation.
“It’s not personal,” Hawke continued. “Just get it done and we’ll take care of the rest.”
Borden exhaled slowly and rose to his feet. He felt like a man stripped of his armour. If he did this then he was lower than the fucking scum that killed Kate.
And was he?
He turned around, and nodding to Hawke, he strode back into the warehouse.
Twenty-Th
ree
Emma
The ones at the top are always the worst, Emma. But you already knew that.
I was rattled by his words. I’d spent the rest of the day trying to understand the man I worked months for. I tried to imagine him as the villain he portrayed himself to be, and it alarmed me when I broke down into tears. Because he really was, and no amount of humanizing him would change that.
So why didn’t I stop feeling less for him then?
*
Borden wasn’t in the office the next day.
In fact, he didn’t show up the rest of the week. And the week after.
That was nine Borden-less days.
It was absolute agony. I suffered. Seriously suffered. The office felt so empty. My heart felt cold. I was pining for him. What would have caused him to just disappear like that? I tried asking Hawke where he was during lunch one day, but the asshole deliberately ignored me, telling me it wasn’t my business. Not even Moustache Man budged when I begged for some information.
It was just shit. I felt every minute of every hour pass, and then I went home, unhappy and confused with my emotions.
It was just… I’d been around that man non-stop for weeks on end. He’d filled up so much of my day. It wasn’t fair that he probably didn’t give a shit about me, and I was hanging by a thread, caring for his whereabouts like I cared for my next breath.
Shame that didn’t go both ways.
It was Friday night and I’d just returned from grocery shopping. Moustache Man had generously helped me bring up the bags to my apartment and left. I was in the process of putting things away when I heard a knock on the door.
I glanced at the time. 6:40pm. It was late-ish, but I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I certainly knew nobody in this building. I grabbed my switchblade from my purse and let the blade flip open. I cautiously walked to the door, straining to hear any sounds.
“Emma, it’s me.”
Borden.
My shoulders sagged in relief and my heart skipped a beat at his voice. I quickly unlocked the door. Opening it, I saw him standing there, jeans and a plain black tee on, with his arms against the doorway. For a brief second, I felt like I’d been injected with life again. Warmth flooded into my system, and then it crashed into the other side of me, the side that questioned why I would be happy with a man that didn’t tell me he was going to be absent for so long.