by Tilly Delane
“That was swift justice,” Rowan says sarcastically to my statement that Callum’s back in society.
Rowan might be as criminally inclined as I am, but neither of us condones the shockingly short sentence Callum got for mowing a perfectly healthy teen down and leaving him with life-changing injuries. That’s legal speak for brain damaged.
“Hmm,” I answer. “Bit too swift for my liking.”
“Let me guess,” Rowan says. “He’s holing up with Cormac now.”
“Yup,” I nod.
“The dream team is back together.”
“Yup.”
“I know that tone, Diego. You want to take them out.”
“I’d love to,” I admit. “But I’ll settle for off the streets.”
“So you were wondering if I saw anything we can pin on them while I was there?”
I nod.
“Something like that,” I admit.
He shakes his head, sadly.
“Nope. Other than the dogs, I saw nothing the pigs might be interested in. Sorry,” he says, and then a smile spreads over his face. “But if you need help finding something, I can be on a plane in a matter of days.”
“Cool,” I say. “Get me some flight details and I’ll spring a business class for you and Raven. See ya.”
He nods curtly, and the screen goes blank.
Kalina starts laughing next to me.
“Well,” she says. “I didn’t understand a word of that, but it was hot,” she proclaims, and climbs onto my lap, immediately tugging at the elastic of my briefs that I only put on ten minutes ago.
“Right,” Silas clears his throat and gets up. “I’ll check on that tea.”
He shuts the door behind him, and then I’m alone once more with a girl who clearly thinks I’m the hottest guy ever to walk the earth.
Life could be worse.
Guppi
Z hisses when I put ointment on his ankle.
“Sei kein Waschlappen,” I mumble, and he clips me playfully around the head.
I’ve taught him quite a bit of German, and he’s taught me some Hungarian, but I know he didn’t understand that I told him not to be a wimp just now, other than by my tone.
We used to be more careful with the play fighting because we didn’t know if it would trigger my collar. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into almost two years, we stopped thinking about it too much.
Z says that’s human nature.
You become less scared the longer something doesn’t happen.
If he’s right, then maybe one day I’m un-scared enough to just trip the mechanism and end it all.
I kiss his leg just above where the flesh is swollen and red.
The big guy, the one Z calls Óriás, which means giant in Hungarian, came earlier and swapped the shackle from the left ankle to the right.
He swaps it over every other week, so the skin can heal, then swaps it back again.
Still, after two years, it has left scars all around Z’s lower leg.
Z says when we get out, he’ll get tattoos to cover them up.
He still says when, not if, and I love him all the harder for it.
Z says he’ll get tattoos to cover up all his scars.
He’ll be a walking canvass.
They never touch me, but the one Z calls Ròka, fox ─ for his red hair and his pointy face ─ loves whipping him until he draws blood. I think it’s because Ròka is scared of Z. Because Z is big and virile, even at only nineteen, and Ròka is... small.
That’s why Z is shackled to a chain, and I am not.
Or maybe they know the threat of my head being blown off will always be enough to keep me in line.
I fear for Z now that Ròka is back. It sounds insane, but the months when we were just being looked after by Óriás were almost nice. With Ròka out of the equation, there were no beatings, and we were allowed to just get on with selling what we apparently sell best.
Love.
Romance.
Gentleness.
Z’s big penis in my little mouth.
According to Z, it’s not what they first had in mind when they set this up. He knows because there was a boy before me. Z called him Bonsai. I’m sure that was as much his real name as Guppi is mine. Z gave me my name, too. He says he won’t call me by my real name because then, when we’re free, I’m still that person. I know his real name and he knows mine, but out aloud I call him only Z.
Z says Bonsai didn’t survive the kind of brutal stuff Ròka thought would sell.
So when they snatched me and brought me back here as his replacement, Z insisted on doing it differently. He basically told them they could blow my head off and shoot him dead, before he’d rape me, but he’d agree to break me in gently.
Ròka whipped him until Z’s entire back was dripping with blood, but he held fast.
And they went with it.
Apparently, it sold.
Big time.
Still does.
And our lives depend on it.
I kiss Z’s leg again and he catches my face in his palm, tilting it, so I’m looking up at him from my position of kneeling in front of our bed. He runs a hand over the sparse fluff on my upper lip and narrows his eyes.
“We need to wax that,” he says, in English, but so quietly the microphones won’t pick it up ─ we hope.
The Ròka gets really angry if we say anything that shatters the illusion. And we’re not exactly in a no camera zone right now. We’re right in the middle of the shot.
I hate it when he waxes my fledgling beard. Not because it hurts like a bitch, which it does, but because there is a part of me that wants to shave like any normal guy. I’ve always been small for my age, been told I look effeminate, and I should be allowed to like that I’m finally starting to turn into a man. But I know that waxing makes more sense. It’s more thorough, it leaves no room for telltale shadows.
And I need to carry on looking young.
Z can grow and be hairy all he likes. Actually, I’m starting to suspect the more manly he looks, the better. But if I start not looking underage any longer, they’ll get rid of me.
They’ll feed me to the dogs.
Literally.
Z says that’s what they did with Bonsai.
Kalina
Diego leaves Sheena’s at four o’clock on Sunday to go back to work, and I immediately feel a bit lost. Grace and Silas invite me to go to the beach with them, but I don’t want to be the third wheel. So I decline and go back to my laptop.
I have another stab at Piotr and Zoltan’s files, but I keep distracting myself with thoughts of the weekend.
I can’t concentrate.
Each time my mind wanders, I can feel Diego’s lips on mine, top and bottom set, can feel him moving inside me. Like he’s left an indelible imprint.
But it’s not just the physical memory that keeps replaying in my mind. I think about all I’ve learned about him in the last two days, about how complex he is. I think about the dynamics between him and Silas and Rowan, which are fucked up yet somehow beautiful.
I think about how much I want to keep him.
And I get curious.
I wasn’t lying to him when I said I only understood a fraction of what he was talking about to Rowan on the phone. I got as much as there is some guy named Cormac who organises dog fights and a guy called Callum who’s just been released from prison, and Diego wants to set them up somehow.
He clearly hates both of them, but he seems to be gunning mostly for Callum. Wonder why. Wonder what this Callum has done to incur his wrath. The other thing that clicked was the recurring theme of an O’Brien in the mix. Sometimes I wonder if they are just short of surnames in Brighton and surrounding areas. I hesitate for only about a second before I decide it’s not stalking my new temporary boyfriend if I have a little dig around the net and see what I can find on this Cormac O’Brien character.
So I do.
Nothing.
Well, noth
ing around here.
There is an American author by that name I’ve never heard of.
On a hunch ─ and because everyone in a twenty-mile radius who isn’t called Benson seems to be an O’Brien ─ I type in Callum O’Brien.
And get the whole story.
Callum O’Brien, also known as Callum Carter and Callum Bosworth, was arrested in September two years ago, after failing to stop at the scene of a road traffic accident. His silver BMW X5 was caught on CCTV when it mounted the pavement and mowed down 14-year-old pedestrian Daniel Mantas, a promising young footballer whose parents had recently moved to Brighton, so he could join the Albion football club’s youth program, and who was out for a run.
Daniel Mantas was taken to the Royal Sussex County hospital with life-threatening injuries. Callum was arrested at the Fight or Flight gym, after calling the police on himself, only hours after the accident. Callum claimed he lost control of the vehicle due to a sneezing attack and then panicked. He was taken into custody, charged and released on bail within a few days. The case went to trial almost a year later and Callum was sentenced to eighteen months behind bars for causing injury by dangerous driving.
Callum’s victim sustained life-changing injuries. At the time of the article going to press, it looked like he was going to be dependent on a carer and a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
I look at the pictures that accompany the story. One is Callum’s mug shot. The other is of Callum arriving in court, looking smart in a dark business suit and flanked by a woman I presume to be his mother on one side and a lawyer-type on the other.
Callum’s the weaselly type, slight in built, with ginger hair and brown eyes. He looks like any other guy, but on the mug shot there is a mean slant to his mouth. Or maybe I’m just imagining it because of what I’ve just read. How can anyone hit somebody and then just leave them to die?
There is no picture of the victim in the article, a comparatively short piece from the local newspaper website, published on the day of Callum’s sentencing.
But there is a link to the CCTV footage.
I let the mouse hover over the play button for a bit before I decide to go ahead. Despite of what I do for a living, I still feel squeamish when I see reels of people getting killed or injured. The bones I recover are already dead. They bring closure to the living. Watching a life being snuffed out is a whole different kettle of fish.
In the end, though, I click.
The footage is not too grainy but quite far off, so you can’t make out Daniel’s features. The time stamp tells me it was very early morning, which would explain why the light is grey and there is hardly any traffic on the road. With a jolt, I realise that I recognize the front of the cafe that’s partially in the shot, still shut at that time of day. I actually know that part of Brighton quite well. It’s in Kemp Town, not far from the language school headquarters. I’ve had paninis in that cafe once.
Whoever cut the clip did it so that you are staring at an empty section of street for a good fifteen seconds before anything happens. I guess to ram home how quiet and ordinary a morning it was. Or maybe just because otherwise it’s over in a blink of an eye. Because once it happens, it happens so fast you can hardly process what you see before it’s over.
The smallish figure of a blond teenage boy suddenly appears from the right, running along the pavement. He’s wearing a blue and white hoodie, blue jogging bottoms and white trainers, and appears to be steadily pounding the pavement at a fast run. But something about his movement doesn’t sit right with me. Before I can decide what it is, though, a fat silver BMW enters the picture from behind the kid, mounts the pavement, hits him side on and catapults him out of shot.
I watch the clip five times, trying to figure out what it is that bothers me, but in the end I give up. I’m wasting my time, and I have other stuff to do.
I briefly click through some of the other links that came up in the search but don’t find anything more than what the first article already told me.
There is no mention of Callum being released anywhere, but I wouldn’t expect that. Not big enough a case for the press to be interested. When I do the maths, though, I get why Diego and Rowan seemed so pissed off at the system. If Callum’s recently come out, he only served nine of the eighteen months.
I wonder if Daniel was somehow connected to Diego and if that is why he’s going after Callum. For a moment, I consider widening my search, but then I decide I’m going to ask him next time I see him, rather than snoop around. I don’t want to treat Diego like a case. It seems wrong.
So I shut the computer, grab a large bar of chocolate from my secret stash and go and run myself a bath instead.
Diego
I meet with Julian in the office at five and we discuss jobs for next week, as is our normal Sunday routine.
Our company provides some bodyguard services for celebs that live on the south coast, but mostly we hire out security staff for events, and sometimes even prisons. HRM prison service needs agency staff just as often as other industries do, which can be quite the advantage in terms of keeping tabs on the players currently inside.
Because event security is our main bread and butter, weekends are too busy for Julian to take off. So he, Isla and Lila clock off Sunday nights and come back Wednesday mornings, while I stay in The Brick’s penthouse rather than go home to my parents.
Lila keeps our calendar well organised, so we’re usually through with our Sunday meeting in a couple of hours.
Today is no different, despite the fact my thoughts keep wandering to a small bleach-blonde, previously brunette, pixie girl who sucks dick like no other.
“Boss?” Julian asks me, and by his tone I can tell he’s been trying to get my attention for a while.
I clear my throat.
“Yes? Sorry, what was that?”
“Our guy up in the hills,” he says, meaning the man he’s put on Callum and Cormac. “He’s wondering how long this assignment is for. He’s set up camp in an empty barn, and it sounds like he is all set for the long haul, but I think he might want to have a timescale as to when he’ll be relieved, or if there is a rota, or what.”
I nod, thinking about it.
“Has he had anything to report?” I ask, somewhat superfluously because if there had been anything Julian would have told me about it already.
Julian shakes his head.
“Nothing. They had a supermarket delivery yesterday and that’s it. No comings, no goings.”
“Ok.” I think about the info I got from Rowan for a moment. “Does he know if there are any dogs up there?”
Julian frowns. In his world, everybody and their dog’s got a dog, so it hardly seems worth mentioning.
“I don’t know.” He pulls out his phone. “But I can find out.”
He types a message out annoyingly fast and hits send. A couple of minutes later, his phone pings.
“Hmm, Arlo says it’s practically a secure compound, so you can’t see over the fence anywhere. And he hasn’t found a vantage point to look down into it from, but he’s working on it. He’s heard dogs barking. But he can’t tell for sure from which direction. It may have come from the farm next door.”
I roll my eyes.
“You had to put a half deaf man on the case, didn’t you?”
Julian shrugs.
“He’s a good kid and he’s fucking good at camo. He blends like no other. And since that fight, when Silas beat him to a pulp, he’s been little use for anything other than surveillance. I put him on the door, people see his hearing aid, and they take advantage. Shit, he nearly lost his other eardrum because people think it’s funny shouting directly in his good ear.”
“Maybe we need to get him a more invisible hearing aid. Something a little less nineteen seventies than what the health service issued him with,” I ponder, and Julian grins.
“What?” I ask him.
“You’re a good man, Diego.”
“Fuck off,” I say good-naturedly.
<
br /> Julian takes that as his cue to scrape back his chair and whistle for his wife and dog.
“Let’s go, girls!”
Isla stands up from her place by his feet and Lila appears in the door with a big grin, holding his jacket out for him.
“You called, master?” she says sarcastically.
“I did,” Julian says, and smacks her bottom on the way out.
Hard.
I hear her giggle all the way through reception, until they step out into the hallway and the office door shuts behind them.
Julian and Lila were already married when I met him and puppy Isla on the beach that day. They’ve been together nearly ten years, through thick and thin, through army years and civilian life. And I just know they still fuck like they’ve only just met.
I want that.
I want a forever girl.
I kind of want her right now.
So I ring the one who I’ve got in my scope for the position, as soon as I leave the office and step into the lift to go up to the penthouse.
She answers on the third ring.
“Hey,” she says, and the acoustics tell me she’s in the bath.
“I miss you,” I say. “You want to come over to my place tonight?”
She doesn’t answer straight away, but I can hear her breath hitching a few times, the telltale sound of suppressed tears.
She’s crying.
Not happy tears.
I’m instantly on full alert.
“Kalina? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I get like this sometimes,” she adds, sniffling. “After sex.”
I take a big breath but don’t get a chance to speak.
“After good sex,” she stresses, and it warms my heart that she’s thinking of my ego, even while she is clearly struggling with her mood. “Like a comedown. I’ll be fine. It usually happens a lot more often. I guess...I guess, we did it so often this weekend I didn’t get time to crash.”