by Ada Stone
The thought of being with him like that always made me shudder, and I let him assume it was in pleasure, but it wasn’t.
It was in dread.
Knowing what I was in for that night, I drove to his house anyway. The drive wasn’t too bad, the traffic only marginally bad given the time of night. Sal lived downtown in the most expensive house in a sort of bad neighborhood. It was so much nicer than everything else that it looked out of place, but that was Sal for you. He liked to be the most ostentatious thing around and while he probably had the money to live in a much nicer neighborhood, he didn’t have enough money to be the richest person in that nice neighborhood, and it was important to him to be the best.
I pulled up into the driveway, staring up at his two-story house. It was huge. Four bedrooms, three baths, a kitchen that was larger than my kitchen and living room combined, and both a living room and a family room. There was also a utility room and a “mud” room which I never asked what was for. I saw them cleaning up something in there once, dark and thick, and afterwards just made a point of staying as far away from that room as possible.
Attached to the side of the house was a two-car garage which extended to the point where it could have had three cars in it, but Sal used that additional space for his tools. It was a workroom, though I wasn’t sure exactly what sort of work he did there.
Beneath the house was a basement, too, but I never went down there. I had a feeling that was where he did some of his more illegal activities when they somehow made it to his home, and I was perfectly happy with plausible deniability. The less I knew, the safer I was.
Popping open the door to my car, I slid out of the vehicle just as I spotted Sal coming towards me. I forced a smile onto my face, though it felt almost painful, and opened my mouth to greet him. “Hi, Sal, I—”
Before I could get anything more than that out, his large hand was wrapped tightly, painfully, around my upper arm.
“Hey!” I cried, but he ignored me.
He jerked me harshly forward so that I stumbled and nearly fell to the concrete as I struggled to get my feet steady beneath me. I could see now that he was furious, anger flashing across his features like black electricity. His face was red and splotchy, mostly with fury, but a little with alcohol, too.
He dragged me inside; I struggled halfheartedly, but didn’t know if it would be better to escape or to just deal with whatever had set him off in the first place. “Sal, please let me go!”
Instead of listening, he just continued to drag me forward. He pulled me up the stairs, my balance still not quite right, my legs tripping over the steps. He didn’t slow down, instead just dragging me up the stairs. I struggled until I managed to get my feet properly beneath me so that at the very least my knees stopped banging against the edges of the steps.
He hauled me down the hall and threw me into one of the bedrooms. His bedroom. I felt a shiver of fear snake its way down my spine as I eyed the huge four-poster bed. He released me only when he filled up the doorway, tossing me like a ragdoll into the room with enough force that I stumbled and fell heavily to the floor.
“Sal, what—?”
But he wasn’t interested in my questions. He was so angry that I could see a vein popping in his forehead, trailing down right between his brows which were tugged down into a thin, low line. “You fucking whore,” he spat, his tone laced with anger and malice.
I flinched. He took a step into the room.
“What?”
He made a sound that was almost like a growling in his chest, then said, “You heard me. You’re a cheating whore, Zoe Rivers.”
I shook my head as sudden dread filled me. Nick, was all I thought, but I wouldn’t let myself linger on him. If I did, I knew it would be bad. It would be written across my features who I was talking about and it would be awful.
“No, Sal, I didn’t—” I tried, but he wasn’t interested in my excuses. I had scrambled to my feet so that I could back away from him and put some much needed distance between us, but that only seemed to make him madder.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said, striding farther into the room, angrier now that I’d backed away from him. “Whores don’t get to speak to me.”
I shook my head, trying to think of what I could say that might save me from this moment, but of course nothing would. I still tried. “Please, Sal, listen to me.”
Smack.
It was almost as if the sound hit my ears first. Sal’s hand, wide open, soared through the air like a whip. The back of his hand impacted with my cheek, the knuckles grinding against flesh and bone, scrapping across my skin. A second later, a burning pain raced along my face and jaw. I felt tears prick at my eyes, and I worked hard to hold them back.
Shock must have registered on my face as I turned back to look at him, but he didn’t care. He was still livid, and dangerous, I realized far too late.
I stumbled away from him, but he wasn’t going to let me go so easily. He grabbed my arm again and with his free hand slapped me again, this time across the other cheek. He must have caught my lip, because I tasted coppery blood on my tongue.
“You bitch.” The words were emphasized with another slap. “You fucking whore!”
He hit me again and by now my face was burning, tears streaming down my sore cheeks. I wanted to slump down to the floor, to crawl under the bed just to get away from him, but he held tightly, not done with me yet.
Jerking me to him so that our bodies pressed together sickly, he said in a dangerously low tone, “You’ll spread your legs for some asshole, but not for me? You’ll let any dick into your pussy, you filthy bitch, but you won’t let me fuck you? I ought to do it anyway.”
The threat was clear and I felt myself pale. I felt my whole body begin to tremble at the thought of him forcing himself on me. It was terrifying in ways that nothing else had ever been. Panic began to well inside me, my whole being suddenly searching for a way out, away from Sal, but I couldn’t get free.
“You’d probably fucking like that, wouldn’t you, you slut?”
Before anything else could happen, he hit me a final time, releasing my arm simultaneously so that I fell back and spiraled down onto the floor. I banged my head against the floor—thank god it was carpet—and caught my shoulder against the bedpost as I went.
Certain that Sal was going to follow through on his threat and come after me, I tried to scramble back on the floor, but I needn’t have bothered. Disgusted and still full of rage, Sal turned from me and left the room. He slammed the door after him. I heard his stomping footsteps trail down the stairs and held my breath as he continued on his way.
When the sound finally disappeared, I slumped against the side of the bed and breathed again. My sobs wracked my body, but I reminded myself that it could be worse. So much worse.
Shaking, terrified and sore, I tried to come up with an escape plan, but Sal was downstairs and I knew without him telling me that he wasn’t going to let me leave. Pulling my legs up against my chest, I clutched them and rocked myself to the sounds of the TV playing downstairs. All the while, I tried to muster up the courage to try and get away.
It was an hour later, maybe two, when I finally got up the nerve to open the door and creep down the hallway. The TV was still playing downstairs, and I hoped that it would muffle the sounds of my footsteps. My face ached and my eyes were swollen from crying, but I was determined to try and get away.
It would probably be my only chance.
Slowly, I moved down the stairs, wincing when a step creaked or groaned beneath my weight. Each time, I was sure that Sal would hear me and roar with rage. That he would make good on his promise and force himself on me.
But I made it to the bottom of the stairs with no one coming for me. I creeped forward, finally spotting Sal. He was slouched on a chair in the living room with the TV on in front of him. But he wasn’t watching. His eyes were closed and empty beer bottles were littering the ground all around him. He was passed out drunk, I realized with
a trickle of relief. To emphasize the truth of this, he let out a gross, belching snore.
Not waiting to see if he was going to wake up any time soon, I raced to the door. I paused there only long enough to open it carefully and quietly, then raced outside. I got to my car and stuck the keys into the ignition with shaking, sweaty hands. There were tears on my face again, I knew, from the fear of getting caught by an even angrier Sal. But I got the car started and I tore out of there, not willing to give Sal the chance to realize that I was gone.
I drove quickly, speeding down the highway. I didn’t know where I was going at first, but then I realized that there was only one place I could go, one person I could ask for help.
Nick.
Chapter Nine
Nick
After busting with my short list of names, I decided I needed to try another route. If those affected by the accident wouldn’t talk, then I would have to try getting to the people who were directly involved with the construction. Whether that be suppliers, designers, or the actual workers, it didn’t matter. I’d try them all if I had to. Now that I knew something wasn’t quite right with Sal’s low key construction company, I wasn’t going to just let it go.
I would talk to Jordan about it and see what he was coming up with as far as how involved Sal was, but really I just needed someone to bounce my own thoughts off of. Unfortunately, I’d have to wait until he got back.
The whole thing with his little girl was getting out of hand. The kid’s mother had dragged her across three state lines and was trying to get sole custody of her. Jordan, unwilling to lose his parental rights, was making the trip to meet her and try to work things out outside of the courtroom. But if he couldn’t convince her, he was prepared to throw down. He had some nasty dirt on her and if she didn’t cooperate, he wouldn’t be above using it.
Anything to get Angel back.
He’d told me what was going on and was even apologetic about having to take off, but I made a point of waving him off. No big deal, I’d told him, though for me it kind of was. With the Heaven’s Wrath numbers so low already, I couldn’t really afford to be down a man—my most loyal man, too—but I also wasn’t willing to let him lose his kid over the whole thing, too.
I probably wasn’t going to find what I needed against Sal anytime soon anyway. And if I did, there was nothing going on that was too pressing that would mean I couldn’t sit on it for a few days or more even.
So instead of worrying about Jordan’s personal stuff, I focused on research.
Getting the names of the people who had worked on the jobsite was difficult. I actually had to go and request the information from the lawyer who had initially been involved with the lawsuits against VCI. I was turned away at the door. But I managed to get a pretty little secretary to help me out a little bit—it only took a few minutes of flirting, promises of an amazing time in the sack, and taking her number to do it, too—and convinced her to give me a few names that showed up in the court files. I told her that it would be fine, after all, since the cases had been dropped anyway.
I walked out of there with a list of companies that supplied the resources for the building, and a dozen or so names of workers who were hired to do the job.
That day, I went to the local metal workers’ union.
In the shop where the men worked it was hot and filled with the smell of burning, of heated metal, and maybe of chemicals, too. From the window, I could see men the size of mountain boulders sweating beneath their hardhats, working like slaves amidst a spring of firework-like sparks spraying throughout the room. It was almost enough to make me glad that I was in this small air conditioned room with Mr. Caraway, sitting at his big uncluttered desk. Almost. The room was fine, a little bare, but clean and cool. The chair wasn’t strictly speaking uncomfortable, though I didn’t want to spend the day in it. And Mr. Caraway himself, though pudgy and red faced, wasn’t an unpleasant man.
He just also wasn’t a particularly helpful one.
“Well, I really can’t discuss things like that with an outsider,” he told me with a bland smile on his face. “I mean, what sort of company would we be if we just rattled off personal information to every Dick and Joe who walked in here?”
I wanted to tell him that it would be the kind of company that had a lot fewer employees who had black eyes and bloody noses, but in the end I refrained. I wanted him to help me, not call security.
Taking a steadying breath, I tried to be polite. “I understand that there might be some legal things going on, but I’m really not trying to cause any problems. I just wanted to talk to some of the guys who do construction around here.”
Mr. Caraway narrowed his already beady little eyes, but he never dropped the smile. That was probably one of the prerequisites of getting the job—always smile. It made me think he was a smarmy little bastard and it didn’t really make me like him more.
“I’m sorry, Mr.—?”
It was my turn to smile at him. “Smith.”
The smile on his face twitched, but he maintained it just the same. “Mr. Smith. I’m sorry, but I really can’t give out any names specifically. If you’re interested in a job, I can certainly take an application and would be happy to set up an interview. But beyond that, I can’t risk you being someone other than who you say you are and giving you access to these good, hardworking men.”
This, I felt, was a little ridiculous. What did it matter if I was who I said I was or not? Realistically, if they had nothing to hide, then there was no reason to prevent me from speaking to the guys who were working on the VCI building before it collapsed. In fact, I was doing my best not to even mention VCI because I was fairly certain that no one would give me the time of day if I did, but even without doing so I was left hanging out to dry.
“That would be great,” I finally told him, forcing a smile. “Can I get an application?”
Mr. Caraway looked at me skeptically, but after a moment he nodded his assent and asked me to wait just a moment while he rummaged around for an application. It took him several minutes to search through his filing cabinets and his drawers before he finally stopped and sighed. “I can’t seem to find one here. Would I be able to e-mail it to you?”
Sensing my opportunity, I shook my head. “Sorry to say that my computer is down right now and I don’t know that it’ll be fixed sometime soon. I’d much prefer to have a paper copy that way I can get it back to you as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Caraway let out another long winded sigh, as though finding a paper copy of the application was just the hardest damn job in the world. It made me grin just a little bit, pleased with myself over the whole thing.
“Fine, fine,” he told me after a moment. Heaving his jiggly, round body up from the desk, he waggled a mini sausage-like finger in my direction. “I’ll go look in the main office for one. Maybe I can get one to print off for you. You wait here until I get back.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Caraway. I really appreciate it.”
He waved off my thanks with an engorged hand, then waddled off to the main office. When he was out the door, I tracked him with my eyes. It wasn’t until he reached the elevator and stepped in, the metal doors closing behind him, that I got up out of my chair.
I gave it half a second, then darted out the door and into the overheated working area. I started snooping around, seeing if I couldn’t catch someone off their guard long enough to get some answers, and some proof.
As I walked along, I tried to get the attention of several of the men, but they all waved me off or worse, when I asked them about the collapse and VCI, they told me to fuck off. I was about to give up hope, when a big burly man with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed beard laced with ginger strands of red came over to me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He didn’t quite seem enraged, but he wasn’t pleased either. In fact, he mostly looked annoyed, like I was one in a long string of idiots who had been causing him problems lately.
I shook my
head. “I don’t mean any harm. I’m just trying to—”
“Get your head smashed in? Yeah, I can see that,” he said smartly, interrupting me without so much as a care.
I frowned at him. “What?”
He gestured towards my head. “Where the hell’s your hat, you moron?”
Surprise probably showed on my face because he actually rolled his eyes at me and let out an impatient sigh. His muscles glistened with sweat and I saw that they were huge as he moved to put his hands on his hips. There was no question that the man was big and I wasn’t one hundred percent positive that, if push came to shove, I would be able to take him in a fight. Deciding quickly that it was for the best to just not test that, I put up my hands in what I hoped was universal for placating apology.