Honor

by Jay Crownover

  “What else?”

  The puffy-faced young man slowly started to slide down the wall until he was resting at my feet with his head in his hands. He fisted a bunch of dreadlocks between his fingers and pulled.

  “He also asked me to hook him up with a gun. He’s got a couple sisters and Child Welfare just pulled them from his dad’s care. I think that was the final straw for him. Like he had nothing left to lose, ya know?”

  My back teeth clicked together in aggravation. “Did you come through for him?”

  The kid peeked at me over his bent knees. “Yeah. I had a buddy that wanted to buy a plane ticket back home to New York. He sold Tyler a piece for a few hundred bucks.”

  “When was this?” This was information that made the situation with the unpredictable Tyler even more dangerous. Messing with my club and my money was one thing. Having the means to permanently take away the one thing I had ever wanted for myself was another. I couldn’t risk Key like that. I wouldn’t risk her.

  “A few days ago.”

  “So where can I find Tyler French now?”

  The kid shook his head and he looked like maybe he was going to cry. “I don’t know, man. We run the streets. We hop trains. We sleep in squats and under bridges. It’s not like we have addresses.”

  I grunted. “Tyler didn’t look homeless when he worked for me.”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t know where he’s been staying. Maybe he got a girl or something.”

  I considered the cowering kid in front of me as I tried to decide if he was telling me the truth or if he was protecting his friend. Between the bruised and bloody nose, the watery eyes, and the generally defeated demeanor, I came to the conclusion that he knew I wasn’t messing around and could bring a world of hurt down on him if he wasn’t up front with me.

  “The worst house on the worst block, where can I find it?”

  The kid folded forward and let his forehead rest on his knees. “Dude, Tyler’s already got kicked around by life. Can’t you just cut him a break?”

  “No. Tell me where the house is.”

  The punk muttered the address and I slipped out of the alley and made my way to what really was the worst part of the Point. It was block after block of run-down single-family homes covered in graffiti and with bars on the windows. It was a neighborhood with asphalt instead of grass in the yards and a place where your neighbor was more than likely selling drugs rather than Girl Scout cookies. It was a neighborhood where, if you saw a woman on the street corner, she wasn’t waiting for her kid to get out of school, she was waiting for a john to pull up so she could offer him a twenty-dollar blow job.

  I found the worst house on the block with no trouble. There were rusted bikes in the front yard leaning up against the warped and cracked siding . . . like seven of them. There was a collection of broken coolers and a menagerie of car tires making an obstacle course to the front door. I debated knocking to see if the person in charge of this mess would come to the door, but decided against it. I didn’t have time to waste and getting a rusted door slammed in my face just to have to force my way inside anyway seemed pointless, so I just put my shoulder against the flimsy wooden door and shoved. I heard the lock creak and the handle break away from the frame, but the whole thing barely moved.

  I swore under my breath and put more of my weight into the motion. I heard something fall and a male voice bellow from somewhere inside. Once there was enough space to squeeze through, I entered the house and almost instantly regretted my decision. When the kid said the dad was the kind that never got rid of anything, maybe I had been so worried about finding the kid that I failed to read between the lines and realize that the dad was a hoarder. No wonder the kids had been pulled from the home. I hadn’t ever been anywhere as horribly putrid or vile as the inside of this home.

  It was alive with bugs and rodents. The smell was so pungent that I could practically see it hanging in the air in front of me. It smelled like trash, bodily fluids, and a general waste of life, with boxes, piles of trash, dirty clothing, and random junk that blocked me everywhere I turned.

  I heard the voice calling out the name “Tyler” and then a litany of swearwords as I carefully picked my way through the maze of refuse and rubbish. The voice was slurred and sounded mean, so I couldn’t blame the kid for wanting to get out of this hellhole. I just didn’t know how all this came to have anything to do with me.

  I knocked into a hidden shelf that was covered from top to bottom with empty beer cans and the ensuing noise made my skin crawl. I kept expecting the guy attached to the screaming voice to show up, but there was no sound of movement as I continued to navigate my way through the mess. It made me tense and had me on high alert, but once I picked my way through the junk and entered what I assumed was the main living area of the house, everything became clear.

  The guy was sitting on a sagging couch. I could barely pick him out among the empty food containers and empty bottles and cans. He was listing to one side and it was pretty clear that he only had full function and total mobility on one side of his body. One arm hung listlessly at his side and one side of his face didn’t react at all when he caught sight of me. The half of his face that did have mobility twitched and pulled tight in anger. It took a second but recognition slipped in, and all the bits and pieces that were missing from the puzzle started to click into place.

  I lifted an eyebrow at the man as he continued to glare at me from the couch.

  “You already destroyed my entire life, you foreign piece of shit. What are you doing here, Gates?”

  I looked around at the mounds of stuff piled on top of more stuff and then glanced down at the floor, which literally seemed to move under my feet.

  “If you had kept your hands to yourself, neither one of us would be here.” Sitting across from me, forever altered and forever trapped in a prison of his own making, was the man that I had pulled off of Key and beaten within an inch of his life all those years ago.

  “Fuck you. Get out of my house.”

  I could see how badly he wanted to get to his feet and confront me, but he lacked the strength to accomplish this.

  “Where is your son?”

  The man’s face pinched in a furious frown and his good hand curled into a fist.

  “I don’t know. The little bastard took off weeks ago and I haven’t seen him.”

  “You mean he didn’t want to stay here in these luxurious accommodations?” I let the sarcasm drip from my voice.

  The man growled and finally clawed and lumbered his way to his feet. One arm was useless by his side and one leg was slower and limped more than the other as he shuffled toward me.

  “My old lady bailed when I ended up in the hospital after you were done with me. Couldn’t really explain why I had my ass handed to me at a strip club, so the bitch got all uppity and took off, sticking me with the brats. I can’t hardly fucking move thanks to you and yet I’m supposed to raise kids and take care of this shithole?”

  “From what I hear, the state took your kids, and apparently the things you were doing to them mean this pigsty is exactly what you deserve.”

  One side of the man’s face twitched and his eyes narrowed. “We all get what we deserve in the end, so where does that leave you, Gates?”

  It was a good question. The answer was: probably where I started—in hell.

  “I need to find your boy. You messed him up good and he’s going to get himself in the same kind of trouble you found yourself in.”

  “I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. He’s the one that called the state and had the girls yanked outta here. Now I don’t got anyone to help me out around here. I might as well die.”

  The smell of the hovel was starting to get to me, and I could see the guy wouldn’t be of any help even if he did know where his kid was at. This was a broken, twisted human being, and I could understand why his son held me personally responsible for his awful home life. Before I had given the old man a beatdown, he had no do
ubt been a terrible man, but some of that evil had been taken out of the home and spread around the Point. When I crippled him, made him homebound, undoubtedly all that awfulness had been trapped in these walls and buried the poor kids here right along with the hoard. He couldn’t victimize the outside world so he kept all his deviant and violent tendencies right at home.

  I met the man glare for glare. This was a time when the consequences of my actions were staring me right in the face and I had to be accountable for the things I had done. I was the one who put all this squalor in motion all those years ago by letting the monster I was trained to be off the leash. Showing my true colors had pushed Key away and had sent this man’s son on a path of vengeance I couldn’t blame him for choosing.

  “Your family deserves better than you.”

  He grunted and took another tottering step toward me. “Get out of my house, Gates. I’ll see you in hell.”

  That made me grin at him as I kicked my foot back so that it connected with a cluttered entertainment center piled high with garbage and other junk. The TV was the old tube kind that weighed a good couple of hundred pounds. I stepped out of the way just as the unit fell forward and landed right on the other man.

  He screamed and went down to the grotesquely dirty floor with a thud, his entire lower half caught under the weight of the unit and the old television. He gazed up at me with unfiltered hatred as I bent over and put my hands on my knees to look at him with disgust.

  “I bring perdition with me wherever I go, so you won’t have to look far. Maybe while you lie there, hungry, scared, worried if someone will find you in your own filth before you die, you can think about the fact that maybe if you had taken care of your own instead of perverting it, corrupting it, you would have had someone here to save you. You would have had someone around who cares if you live or die. Our actions define us and every move you’ve made from the start has been the wrong one.”

  With his good arm he was shoving at the furniture trapping him to the floor. He was huffing and puffing in exertion but that didn’t stop him from telling me he wanted to kill me, and swearing vengeance and revenge with every other breath.

  “What about your actions, Gates? What do they make you?” He indicated where I was going, leaving him pinned to the floor. “A pimp? A murderer? A fucking psychopath?”

  Yeah, my actions definitely made me all of those things at one point or another, but they also made me a man that was taking care of his city, his business, and his woman. I wouldn’t apologize for that. My methods didn’t always lead to a perfect outcome but I had learned early on in life that the only way to get anywhere was to fight for what you wanted. So I would be accountable for the things I had screwed up and I would always fight and hopefully win. Even if that victory took years and years to earn.

  I left the man on the floor, stuck and screaming after me. I sincerely hoped none of his neighbors got curious and went in and freed him. He deserved to die in the piles of his own filth. It was a fitting way for the bastard to go out.

  It had been a waste of a night, considering that I now had a motive but still no location for Tyler, and I was annoyed that Key never texted me back. When I got back to my house in the woods, all I wanted to do was strip naked and scrub off everywhere I had been tonight. I felt like I was covered head to toe in the Point and the filthy atmosphere was suffocating me. I kicked off my boots before going inside and calling Keelyn’s name.

  I scowled when she didn’t answer and worked my shirt off over my head as I headed up the stairs toward my room. My bed was obviously empty even though the lights in the room were on, and there was still no sign of Key. The suit I had asked Bayla to grab and take to the cleaners was in a heap in front of the closet, which was unusual. I added my shirt and the rest of my clothes from tonight to the pile and padded naked to the bathroom. I pushed the door open and came up short because Key was standing in front of the massive vanity meticulously placing all her different tubes and jars of makeup on the countertop.

  She was humming under her breath and had earbuds dangling off either side of her face. She was dressed in nothing more than a tiny little tank top and a pair of stretchy yoga pants that were molded to her like a second skin while she wiggled and shook to the music only she could hear. I blinked at her like an idiot. Men used to pay hundreds of dollars a minute to get her to do that kind of show and here she was performing it in my bathroom for free.

  I reached out a finger, hooked one of the buds, and yanked. “What are you doing?”

  She whirled around and gaped at me. I wasn’t sure if it was because I surprised her or because I was totally naked, but either way her jaw dropped and her gaze skipped over my stomach and went right to my dick, which, as always, was really happy to see her.

  “I’m moving in. Where are your clothes? You’re very naked.”

  I grunted and moved around her so I could crank on the shower. “They need to be burned. Even in the Point there are some places that are worse than others. I swear I saw all of them tonight. What do you mean you’re moving in? Weren’t you already here?”

  I looked at her over my shoulder as steam started to billow out of the glass enclosure. Her eyes were locked on my backside, and if I wasn’t mistaken she was licking her lips. I cleared my throat and grinned at her as she jerked her head up to look at me with a faint blush on her cheeks.

  “I mean I moved in. My stuff is now with your stuff and you don’t get to kick me out when we fight . . . which we will.”

  I scoffed at her and reached up to pull my hair down. “It took me too long to get you here. I would never kick you out.” I let out an “oof” as she slammed into the front of me and I had to put my hands on her waist to keep us both from falling back into the open shower. “And you told me it isn’t fighting . . . it’s foreplay.”

  Her hands went up to my hair and started playing around with the tie that kept it trapped on the top of my head.

  “I was dying to take it down as soon as you put it up.” Her words were laced with humor and her breath was hot on my throat. My cock reacted predictably but so did my heart, which started to bang and slide all around the inside of my chest, trying to find enough room to fit now that she had meticulously put all the pieces of it back together.

  “I’m really dirty. You might want to wait until I clean up before you put your hands on me.”

  She was combing her fingers through my now freed hair and gently working them through the parts that were tangled up from being tied up all night. She gave a delicate little snort and lifted up on her toes so that her lips could press into mine.

  “A shower isn’t going to make you clean, Nassir. I’ll put my hands on you no matter what shape you come to me in, as long you get back to me in one piece. That’s all I care about anymore.”

  It was a sweet sentiment, one that made my heart thud even harder for her and her alone, but it didn’t change the fact that I was actually physically dirty and could feel the city sitting heavy in all my pores. Without warning, I took a big step backward and pulled her with me into the shower. She swore at me as the water drenched her and immediately plastered her clothes down her body. She used two hands to push her hair out of her face but begrudgingly took the body wash I handed her and started to work the liquid over my shoulders and chest while I scrubbed my hair within an inch of its life. She’d helped me pull those haphazard stitches out a few days ago, so it felt good to scrub my scalp.

  “I like coming back to you.” I meant coming back to her in my space, in my life, so deep there was no way she could ever leave.

  “Good. Wanna tell me how your night went?” Her hands skated over my abs and her index finger dipped in my belly button, which had me sucking in a breath. I frowned when I noticed a dark shadow around her eye and what looked like a raw scrape mark at her hairline.

  “After you tell me why you look like you ran face first into a wall.”

  She lifted a finger to her tender eye and winced. She raised a sleek eyebrow
at me and pinched one of my nipples, twisting hard enough to make me grunt in pain.

  “Let’s just say you leave a lasting impression on the women in your life. We can talk about it later. It makes me kind of mad at you even though it’s not really your fault. I want you to tell me about your night.”

  I scowled but could see by the stubborn tilt of her damp mouth that she wasn’t going to budge on the subject, so I told her, “I found the kid’s real name. Tried to track him down at his family’s house. Nothing panned out, but now I understand why the kid has it in for me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Her hands got a little lower and I saw her smirk as my breathing faltered when she wrapped a soapy fist around the erection bobbing up and down in front of her.

  “Yeah. Like you always tell me, my actions have consequences. The kid is one of them. I messed up and it in turn messed him up. I made him what he is, so I can’t really fault him for wanting a piece of me. I’ve been there myself.”

  I grunted a little bit as she pushed me back under the spray of water so that all the suds sluiced down over my skin and onto the tile under our feet. Her gray eyes were luminous as she gazed up at me and it was a fog I never wanted to escape from.

  “That makes me want to kiss you.”

  “What? Taking responsibility for the role I played in my own misery?”

  “No.” She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the center of my chest, where my heart did its very best to kiss her back. “You seeing someone as a person, as a human being that is a product of their environment. You being able to recognize his motives and their validity. That’s new.”

  I threaded my fingers in the back of her neon-colored hair and bent my head to kiss her on the crown of her head. “You’ve made me soft. You always did.”

  She squeezed the very not-soft part of me that she still held in her hand. “Soft things can be harder to break than rigid things. They have more give in them and more bounce-back.”

  I hummed in agreement. “Didn’t you say something about a kiss?” I wanted to change the subject to something a little lighter. I’d had enough of introspection and soul baring for the night. Plus, we were both wet and aroused. There were much more interesting things we could be doing with our mouths than talking.