by M. S. Parker
“No,” I said, removing my hand from his. “You’re staying on the couch.” I pointed at him. “And no arguing.”
He held up his hands in surrender, and I went to find bedding for the couch. Saying that I didn’t want him driving back tonight was true, but it also gave him an excuse to stay and keep an eye on me.
As much as it pained me to admit it, it also meant I didn’t have to be alone tonight, and we could keep pretending that things between us were the same as they were before we’d started sleeping together.
I needed that right now because things were going to get worse before they got better.
Sixteen
I couldn’t breathe. Every breath I tried to take was agony, jarring out what little air I managed to take in. My lungs burned, fire spreading across seared nerves down to my fingers and my toes so that every inch of me was in anguish.
My teeth clacked together as I shivered, each tremor sending another convulsion of pain through me. I was cold, and I was burning. Every gasp was a cry, a whimper. My cheeks were wet, but I couldn’t tell if the liquid was tears or blood.
I could smell blood. That sharp, metallic scent that always made me nauseous surrounded me. I didn’t want to open my eyes, because then I’d see it all around me. I’d see where I was bleeding. See that I was dying.
Because I had to be dying. It was the only possible explanation. The only explanation I would accept. Because if I wasn’t dying, that meant I’d have to endure this and I couldn’t. I needed it to be over. I couldn’t take it. I wasn’t strong enough.
I wasn’t.
I wasn’t.
But I had to be.
Because I heard screaming. Screaming and blood and death and pain and all of it forever and–
I slapped my hand over my mouth as I jerked awake, barely managing to hold in a scream. I pressed my lips tightly together as I tried to talk myself down.
It wasn’t real. Not anymore. It hadn’t happened again. I was in pain from some asshole beating me up. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t anything to be scared of. Not like what had happened before. I was safe here. I was home. This was a safe neighborhood. A safe building.
And I wasn’t alone. Clay was here with me. He was just a few feet away, out in the living room. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. No one would get to me here. I was safe.
That was what I needed to remember. That I was safe.
I managed a couple short naps before I finally gave up trying to actually sleep. Not wanting to bother Clay, I didn’t turn on any lights as I made my way to the bathroom. I had to admit, I’d had my doubts about this place when Adare had first suggested that I rent it. I’d been a little spoiled by the loft Anton had left me in Hell’s Kitchen, but once I’d settled in here, I’d realized how good I’d gotten it. No obnoxious neighbors. And no one complaining that I’d used up all the hot water.
When I finally came out of the bathroom, I felt a lot more human and a little bit less sore. The hot water had eased the aches in my muscles, and while moving around wasn’t going to be the most fun thing in the world, I knew if I rested too much, I’d get stiff, and it’d be worse in the long run.
I’d put a new band-aid on my forehead, which looked better, but the bruises on the side of my face looked worse. I’d try later to cover them with makeup, but for right now, it was just me and Clay, and he’d already seen them.
“Your couch sucks,” Clay grumbled as he staggered past me. His hair stuck up at all angles and the pattern of fabric on the couch had imprinted itself on his face.
“Towels are in the cabinet next to the sink,” I called after him. “I’ll make us some breakfast before you hit the road.”
“That would be great.” His voice was muffled by the door. “When do you have to be at work?”
“Adare lets me come and go at my own time,” I said. “It all depends on the case.”
I frowned. My case. With Clay’s sudden appearance and the announcement about my father’s new trial, I’d almost forgotten about Meka. Even after the assault, I’d planned on looking over my notes and figuring out my next move.
Then Jalen happened.
Then Clay.
The shower was on again, which meant my conversation with Clay was on hold until he was done. It said something about how messed up my mind was that I didn’t even consider going into the bathroom to appreciate the view. I may not have been sleeping with him anymore, but I wasn’t blind. The man was hot.
My brain chose that moment to flash a snapshot of last night in front of my eyes. A snapshot of the look in Jalen’s eyes just before he’d kissed me. A shiver ran through me, and it wasn’t because my hair was still wet.
I tightened the belt on my robe and pushed memories of sex aside. It was time for breakfast. I hadn’t eaten much last night, especially after Clay’s little announcement, and now I was hungry for something substantial.
Pancakes.
Pancakes with strawberries.
Yes.
I rummaged through my cabinets, pulling out various ingredients and setting them on the counter. Pancakes were one of the few things I knew how to make from scratch and focusing on small tasks helped me not think about anything else. I’d just finished filling two plates when I heard the shower turn off.
The best thing about not sleeping with Clay anymore was that I didn’t feel the least bit guilty for leaving his pancakes on the counter and starting on mine. I’d only taken a few bites when someone knocked on the door.
Shit. I’d forgotten to call Adare and let her know how things were going. She had a spare key, but I knew she’d never use it unless it was an emergency. I left my plate and headed for the door. I didn’t bother seeing who it was, and the moment I opened the door, I told myself that I really needed to start checking before I opened it.
“Rona.” Jalen’s face was flushed, the skin under his eyes smudged dark. “May I come in?”
I stared at him as I stepped to the side. What was he doing here? Yesterday, he hadn’t been able to get away from me fast enough. I hadn’t asked him to stay, and we weren’t in a relationship. Sure, it’d been a shitty thing to do, but it hadn’t really been much more than an anonymous hook-up. I barely knew him.
“It’s early, Jalen,” I said finally, crossing my arms. It hadn’t felt weird, walking around in my robe with Clay here, but with Jalen, I felt…naked. “Couldn’t this have waited until I was at the office?”
He shook his head. “This isn’t about this case. I came to apologize. For leaving the way I did after…you know.”
“I-It’s–”
“Wow, something smells amazing.”
I looked over to see Clay coming out of the bathroom with just a towel around his waist and a grin on his face. A couple months ago, seeing those broad shoulders and flat stomach would’ve turned me on, but now, I had a basic appreciation for his form, and that was all.
He nodded at Jalen. “Hey.”
Jalen’s features turned to ice. “Hey.” He turned to me, his voice as cold as his expression. “I hadn’t realized I was just the first in line last night.”
“Excuse me?” I stared at him, hoping I’d misunderstood. “That’s a hell of an apology.”
He laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “I wanted to apologize because I thought leaving without saying anything was rude. I should have known when you didn’t call me, pissed off about my behavior, that you’d had other plans.”
“What’s going on, Rona?” Clay asked, looking back and forth between the two of us.
Jalen glanced at him, then turned back to me. “Did you shower before you fucked him, or does it turn him on, getting sloppy seconds?”
Mother. Fucker.
I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him toward the door. “I don’t know if you think having money means you can talk to people like that, or that fucking me one time means you own me, but I don’t care about whatever the hell your damage is. Stay the fuck away from me.”
I shoved him o
ut onto the landing, a part of me was hoping he hit a patch of ice and fell down the stairs. I slammed the door shut and stayed there for a moment, resting my forehead on the door as I worked to control my temper.
“Who the hell was that?” Clay’s voice held a familiar, protective note. “And what was he talking about, being the ‘first in line?’”
I straightened and took a slow breath. I needed to be careful how I handled this. The last thing I needed was for Clay to go after Jalen for being an ass. Clay was an FBI agent, and assaulting a civilian for insulting a friend wasn’t something the agency would look on too highly.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I turned around. The smile on my face felt as plastic as it was, but it was better than any real expression would be. “It’s done, and we have pancakes that are getting cold.”
Clay looked like he wanted to press for more information, but he knew me well enough that it wouldn’t do any good. “Let me get some clothes on.”
As he picked up his shirt from the floor and headed back into the bathroom, I wondered if I should call Adare and tell her what happened. Then I imagined the look on her face if I told her how badly I’d fucked things up.
Better to leave well enough alone.
Seventeen
Working on Meka’s case kept my mind from wandering too much. This wasn’t some simple case of investigating a possibly – usually – cheating spouse. This was a missing teenager. Too important for me to be distracted by some spoiled rich asshole who thought he could do and say whatever he wanted.
Fortunately, I’d always been good at compartmentalizing.
I put the last note into place on the whiteboard and then took a couple steps back, so I could see the big picture. I’d put all the information about Sylph Industries on the left and everything from the school on the right, then a picture of Meka right in the center. Theo’s name was right above it. Now I just needed to connect the dots, see the patterns.
One of the first things was to look at discrepancies. There weren’t any on Theo’s side. Everyone essentially said the same things about him. Good guy and all that. Nothing strange I could see in his finances, unless he had a hidden account in the Cayman Islands. He didn’t spend more than he made, not more than the average person did anyway.
It was Meka who seemed to have two different sides to her. Parents didn’t always know their kids as well as they thought they did. While I was sure there were some who were the same at home as they were with their friends, it wasn’t unusual for an investigation to turn up secrets that made parents cringe and cry.
On the other hand, teenagers weren’t always the most reliable witnesses when it came to their peers. Biases, jealousies, the simple fact of immaturity, all of those things came into play when they talked about other teens. But, sometimes, they saw more than the adults in their lives.
Which meant I had to figure out the actual truth. Was Meka the girl that her father thought she was? Or was she a secret rebel? Sleeping around with different guys?
I looked at her picture, as if that would tell me what type of young woman she was. It wasn’t a candid shot, but I’d seen plenty of those on her social media accounts. Those had shown her to be a fun-loving girl, but nothing that suggested the sort of behavior some of the boys in her class had attributed to her.
She didn’t have a best friend. There wasn’t one girl who claimed to be closer to her than anyone else. No one person in whom she’d confide.
Which meant, I suddenly realized, that she had to have put her feelings somewhere. If she didn’t have a person to tell everything to, and she didn’t put all sorts of personal shit on her social media sites, she had to have something else.
A diary. Journal. Whatever she wanted to call it. Maybe she used pictures instead of words, but she had to have an outlet somewhere. I just needed to find it.
“I don’t understand why Shawn keeps pushing for sex. I told him when he first asked me out that I wasn’t ready. He said it was okay. That he’d wait because I was special. I told him that if he couldn’t handle it, he should break up with me. I even tried breaking up with him, but he didn’t want to hear it. He just kept saying that he was fine going at my pace, but then when we were alone, it was all ‘come on, baby, I love you, don’t you want to make me feel good.’”
I read the journal entry out loud to make sure I wasn’t reading things into it.
Theo had let me into Meka’s room but warned me that he’d looked for clues already. I’d thanked him and then found the diary ten minutes later. Not really a surprise since I’d found it under her bras and panties. Very few dads would be willing to go digging through his daughter’s underwear drawer.
A cop probably would’ve found it, if any of them had bothered to take this case seriously, and maybe they’d even connect things the same way I had, but none of them could do what I was about to do. Shawn was a minor. They’d need to follow all sorts of legal procedures before they could even talk to him, and there was still a chance that he wouldn’t know where Meka was.
I planned to cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. If he thought that I had to follow all those same rules, he was going to say things he never would have said otherwise. If those things led me to Meka, then it wouldn’t matter how I’d gotten the information. She could tell the cops exactly what happened to her, and if it implicated Shawn, then he’d be toast.
And my gut told me that little slime-bag was at the center of the whole damn thing.
Which was why I was waiting outside the school on Friday afternoon, watching for that scruffy blond hair. I heard the bell ring, and I pushed myself off my car to stand straighter. A gust of wind made me pull my jacket closer, but I didn’t even think about getting back into the car, not before I had a little chat with Shawn.
A couple students gave me funny looks but considering the condition of the side of my face, I didn’t blame them. At some schools, seeing a woman with a bruised face wouldn’t be cause for a second thought, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case here. This place was too nice to let all that out into the open. This was the sort of place where dirty secrets were kept in closets or under rugs where they belonged, never to be aired in public.
I didn’t think too much more on that because I’d spotted him. That cocky little swagger and smirk didn’t look any different from what I’d seen yesterday. Hopefully, that’d change in a moment.
I didn’t call out to him or go running toward him. I didn’t want to make a scene, not like that. I walked toward him, my pace nice and even, like I knew exactly where I was going but wasn’t in too much of a rush to get there. I didn’t stare at him but rather kept him in my line of sight as I pretended to casually look around. When I was a few feet away, I picked up speed, closing the distance rapidly as Shawn stopped to talk to a pretty blonde. She saw me first.
“Is she one of those bitches you said dug you?” Shawn turned when I spoke, and I grabbed his arm. “You can get back to riding her when I’m done with you. If she still wants you after I rip your balls off and cram them down your throat.”
“Hey, hey, woman, what’s your deal?!” He stumbled as I yanked him away from the blonde. “You can’t manhandle me like this!”
I shoved him back against a tree and ignored the muttering behind me. People were watching, but I didn’t care, not if it helped me get Meka back.
“I’m gonna have your badge, bitch!”
“Listen up, bitch,” I snapped, “because I’m only saying this once. I’m not a cop. I’m not required to read you your rights or treat you like anything other than the piece of shit you are.”
Fear flickered behind his eyes. “I can still call the cops on you.”
“Yes, you can,” I agreed. “And we’ll have a nice little chat about the drugs in your backpack.”
The color drained from his face. “The what?”
It’d been a guess based on his bloodshot eyes and general demeanor, but apparently a good one.
“I d
on’t care about the shit you poison yourself with,” I said. “I care about Meka and where she is. You tell me what you know, and maybe I won’t make an anonymous call to your principal…and the local police department.”
He glanced around, squirming nervously. “Not here, all right? I got a reputation.”
“I’d think getting your ass handed to you by a woman would improve the way people think of you.” I wanted to stay here and make him look like an even bigger asshole, but I didn’t know what he was going to tell me. If it was something that would embarrass Meka, I didn’t want the whole school finding out. I sighed. “My car’s over here.”
I didn’t let go of his arm, practically dragging him to my car. I had a feeling he was going to spread around some seedy lie about how I blew him or some shit like that, but I didn’t care. If a couple rumors floating around a high school were the price I had to pay for finding Meka, it’d be worth it.
I shoved the kid into the back seat and climbed in after him. “Talk.”
He crossed his arms, looking even more like a sulking child than he already had. “Look, I got a rep to keep up, and she was hurting it. Being a damn prick tease. I took her out three times.” He held up three fingers. “Everyone knows that a girl got to give it up on the third date, but she just kept saying she wasn’t ready, or some shit like that. I told her fine, I’d be good if she went down. She was lucky. No dude’s gonna shell out cash for three dates if he ain’t getting some that third time.”
I couldn’t resist. I smacked the back of his head. “Real classy.”
He shrugged even as he glared at me. “Anyway, she wouldn’t do nothing. Not even a handy.”
“Shawn,” I warned.
His cool-guy demeanor shifted, and he looked uneasy for the first time since I’d met him. “Look, these dudes are serious. I was getting my…medicine when I made a joke and then they held me to it. These ain’t the sort of dudes you wanna mess with. Believe me.”