Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  “What?” Kalina asks, clearly confused.

  “She didn’t make the connection,” Silas comments at this point, and I realise the brothers have already talked about this.

  Of course they have.

  “I think you’ve been working the same case too long,” Rowan says, and holds his hands up when Kalina takes a breath. “No offense. I’m sure you’re shit hot at what you do. If you weren’t, nobody would have pay-rolled your expenses for this long to find their son. And I’ve never done what you do, so I’m an amateur. But, when you’re missing the bleeding obvious, then you’ve got to a point when you can’t see the woods for the trees any longer. I bet what’s been bothering you, without you realising, is the time stamp. I googled your missing boys. Zoltan disappeared in July, Piotr in October, Daniel got hit in the September between. Same year. But you’ve been looking at that year so much, you’re not seeing it any longer. What I’m saying is, I think it’s all connected.”

  I watch Kalina go pale, and I start to stand up. I want to sit with her, but she makes an unmistakable gesture in my direction, without breaking eye contact with Rowan, telling me to stay where I am.

  Her show.

  I understand.

  And sit back down.

  Kalina

  The minute Rowan says it, I feel the rush of recognition.

  He is still wrong, the time stamp wasn’t what was bothering me subconsciously. He’s also right, I didn’t see the woods for the trees. But now I know what else I wasn’t seeing, what was not right with the way Daniel was running.

  He wasn’t running like he was exercising. He wasn’t even on a route to run for exercise around here. Why go up the streets if you can run along the seafront?

  Daniel looked like he was running scared. Literally.

  As I hold Rowan’s dark brown gaze, everything else falls away and I can see a scenario unfold in front of my mind’s eye.

  Daniel running along the seafront, down by Madeira Drive, which would make sense, given where he lived. Callum cruising along, spotting him, getting ahead of him, getting out of the car, intercepting him, trying to grab him. Daniel ripping himself loose, charging away. Callum sprinting back to his waiting car, following Daniel, losing him as he runs up the steps to the upper level. Callum panicking, turning around, going back to reach the upper level, searching for Daniel on the empty streets, finally seeing him again, and hitting him on purpose.

  To kill him.

  To kill the witness to a botched kidnapping.

  Rowan surreptitiously shakes his head at me. Somehow, he knows what I’m seeing.

  “No, it would need two,” he says into my thoughts. “There were two people in that car that day. One to grab and one to drive. Cormac would have done the grabbing. Callum the driving. Which is why Daniel got away. Cormac is big, but slow. Really fucking slow. In the head and in his movements. I bet Callum didn’t even wait for Cormac to get back in the car. Just left him standing there, which is why you can only make out one shape in the car on the footage.”

  “I’m so lost,” Grace exclaims at this point, but I can barely hear her because I’m still fully hypnotized by this weird mind-melt Rowan and I are currently in.

  “It gets worse, though,” Rowan carries on. “I Googled your two boys because I wanted to see pictures of them.” He takes a big breath. “And I know them.”

  Diego

  “What?” Silas asks, and I realise that Rowan only let him into the know this far until now.

  I’m not surprised. If what he’s told me by the lift is true, this falls firmly into the realm of entertainment for the people, and I know that a large chunk of Rowan doesn’t want his brother to find out how low he really sank while he was away.

  I get it.

  After what Rowan told me when they arrived, I’m still reeling from the realisation of how few degrees of separation really stand between me and them. Only about two at latest count.

  Rowan sighs deeply and looks around, leaving Kalina shell shocked as she processes the information.

  “I don’t know, guys,” he says. “I’m not sure you want to know about this. It’s horrific and once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.” He turns to Grace. “You specifically, Grace. The rest of us, we can deal, but you are...”

  “...an innocent,” Kalina finishes his sentence.

  I look at Grace and I see her lips quiver. Silas takes her hand, turns it palm up and presses a kiss into it. They look into each other’s eyes for a long moment and he pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s like something from a movie, but the tenderness is broken unceremoniously by Raven, who jumps up to brush crumbs off her dress. And to give Rowan a dressing down.

  “Don’t be a chauvinist, Rowan O’Brien. She’s American. We grow up watching people get killed and maimed live on TV every friggin’ day of our lives. Real people. Real time. You ever watch somebody be shot in the head or clubbed to death in the streets? I bet she has. Now that is horrific. I’m sure she can deal with whatever you got.”

  Rowan looks at her with sad, tired eyes.

  “Not quite sure why I’m the chauvinist if Kalina calls her an innocent but I think this is Grace’s call, really. Honestly, if I could unsee what I’m about to show you, I would unsee it in a heartbeat. The other thing is, if we do this, if we do something about this, we’re gonna piss off some seriously influential people. It’s dangerous. On a whole new level.”

  That gives all of us pause. In the end, it’s Silas who breaks the silence.

  “Well, at the moment you seem to be the only one who knows what you’re talking about,” he starts and then focuses in on me. “Other than George, maybe.”

  I hold up my hands.

  “Hey, I haven’t seen it. I don’t subscribe to those channels. I wouldn’t even know who to pay for access to those channels. Neither would I want to. Look at Rowan.”

  Rowan frowns at me.

  “Well, somebody put cameras up in your family’s pool when they thought there was gonna be a snuff movie to be had there,” Rowan retorts sharply. “So don’t pretend you’re that far removed.”

  “Cecil,” I say. “I already told you, that sideshow was set up by Cecil. The camera, the lights, the pumping out of the pool. I was gonna have you two fight old style, in the garden, for fun. I thought having you two fight would be cool for the two old geezers to watch, and I thought maybe it’d finally settle shit between you. And then it all blew up when Cecil took over. Man, there was a point when I thought you were in on it, Rowan. You were the one who’d come fresh from the gladiators.”

  The colour drains from Rowan’s face and I realise I’ve fucked up as soon as Silas’ voice echoes through the room. Not the subdued everyday version of it but the powerful, highly alarmed one.

  “You fought for the people?” Silas exclaims, and pins his brother in a death stare.

  Silence stretches out between them until suddenly Silas jumps up and clears the space between them in two steps. He clasps his hands behind Rowan’s head, sinks onto his knees in front of him, and pulls Rowan down with him, until they are forehead to forehead.

  “How many, Rowan?” he asks, a tear running down his face.

  “I don’t know,” Rowan whispers, his eyes, too, glistening with tears. “Two, maybe three. They don’t tell you. But the others were still breathing when I left the ring, I swear.”

  Silas pulls him into a hug, cradling his head before he claps him around the ear, still in the embrace.

  “You could’ve got killed, you stupid twat.”

  I watch them hug hard for a minute, Rowan’s shoulders shaking as he cries into Silas’ shoulder. It’s unbearably intense.

  My eye wanders to Raven, wondering if she knew that the man she sleeps with every night has killed people. People who were prepared to kill him in return, but still.

  There is an expression on her face that tells me she knows everything there is to know about her husband.

  And doesn’t care.

  K
alina

  I don’t even know what’s going on anymore. I meet Grace’s eyes across from me and she shrugs, equally lost.

  So we just watch as the brothers hang in each other’s arms, rubbing their faces into each other’s shoulders until they’re done crying.

  It doesn’t take them long.

  Eventually they detach, Silas gets up and looks around.

  “Right. Recess,” he says and grabs some of the dirty dishes off the table.

  He looks at Grace and jerks his head in the direction of the hallway. She jumps up and grabs some more stuff off the table then follows him. We’re left behind in tense silence until they come back. They sit back down on their sofa and Grace looks around.

  “I’m in,” she says.

  Rowan nods sadly, gets up and retrieves the messenger bag from the back of his chair.

  “Okay,” he starts while he begins taking hardware out of the bag and laying it out on the table. “I want to make this clear before anyone gets the wrong idea about me. I had nothing to do with this side of their entertainment industry. I’ve seen this before only because I was owned by a lord for a while who was a huge fan of these two. He made us watch it sometimes, I think to see who was turned on. Or maybe it turned him on to watch us watch it. I don’t fucking know. Those people, they really are different from us. Centuries of holding the power and inbreeding really do stuff to the genetic code, I guess. They’re like a fucking subspecies of degenerates.” He pauses while he hooks up an ancient-looking laptop to something that looks more like an ancient walkie talkie than a phone and then carries on. “There was a lot of talk about if this was real or just set up to look real. I always hoped for the latter. ‘Cause those boys, they look like they actually, I don’t know, love each other, I guess. But then somebody told me there’d been one before the little guy, the one I think is your Piotr, though the big guy, your Zoltan, only calls him Guppi. Guppi in return calls him Zet. So, yeah, somebody said there was a boy cast, they called it cast, before Guppi. Little Asian looking kid. Zet called him Bonsai. But then, apparently, the whole thing was a lot rougher. Rapey, s&m-y. I never saw any of those episodes. But the woman I went to get this stuff off this morning, she says they were properly cruel. Thinks the Bonsai kid probably snuffed it. Says the program disappeared for a while and then they rebranded it. New boy for Zet and rather than go for the brutality angle, they went for a kind of paedo-romance-in-captivity feel.”

  “What the fuck?” Silas asks what we’re all thinking, and Rowan sighs.

  “You’ll see,” he says as he fires up the computer, and looks up to home in on Diego. “This isn’t running over your wi-fi, don’t worry,” he says, and I realise the walkie talkie thing must be a first-generation satellite phone. “They make sure nobody can be traced viewing this.”

  “You trust the guy you got this stuff from?” Diego asks, indicating the items on the table, and for the first time ever, I hear fear in my lover’s voice.

  “Woman,” Rowan corrects him. “And yeah,” he adds. “If I can’t trust her, I can’t trust anyone outside this room.”

  Raven flinches at that and looks back and forth between her man and the hardware.

  “Who is she?” she asks sharply.

  “The woman who bought me out of my bind.”

  “Why?”

  “She loves me.”

  Raven inhales audibly and he looks up at her, frowning.

  “Not in that way. I saved her daughter. I helped her escape an abusive relationship. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you another day. The lady I saw this morning is...just imagine Sheena if she had daughters not sons, was part of the upper ten thousand and had access to things us mere mortals will never have access to.”

  Raven relaxes at that.

  “I thought they could long decode satellite phones,” I throw in.

  “Yeah, I’m sure they, whoever they are, can,” Rowan answers. “But they would need to know that the satellite in question exists first.”

  It’s around about then that I realise just how big an operation we are talking about here.

  “We’re all gonna die,” I mumble.

  Rowan shrugs as he fires up the laptop and keys in some numbers that he’s written in biro on the inside of his arm into the phone he’s got hooked up to it.

  “This isn’t recorded,” he says with a warning undertone. “It’s been running since Zoltan disappeared, so I’m sure somebody out there has recordings, but I can only link us into the live feed. We have access for today, that’s it. That’s all the money I had.”

  “How much?” Diego asks.

  “Ten grand a day,” Rowan says.

  “I’m in the wrong business,” Diego quips.

  Rowan shoots him a death glare but is distracted by Silas.

  “You still got ten grand lying around like that?” Silas asks suspiciously.

  “I was saving up,” Rowan mutters, not making eye contact, before he turns the screen, so all of us can see.

  “What for?”

  Silas’ voice is sharp.

  “To buy you a bike,” Raven hisses at him, while Rowan gets up to move around to the sofa, making Raven and me bunch up, so he can sit next to her.

  “That true?” Silas asks softly, and Rowan shrugs.

  “You sold yours to pay my debts. I owe you,” Rowan answers, matter of fact, then points at the screen. “Watch.”

  We all lean in closer as the laptop goes straight from a black screen into a live camera feed, by-passing any of the normal operating system interfaces.

  And then the room around me falls away as through the skyline of our brunch, I suddenly see the boys whose bones I’ve been hunting for the best part of a year.

  The faces I’ve looked at a million times.

  Older, paler, but alive.

  They are lying, naked but for a shackle around Zoltan’s ankle and a thick metal collar necklace, wound around Piotr’s neck like a snake, on a bed in what looks like a brick-built basement without windows.

  And they are facing each other, kissing.

  Z

  Guppi is the best kisser I ever experienced. He gives it his heart and soul, despite the fact he’s not even into me. But I wouldn’t know from the way his tongue happily plays with mine, how he goes from gentle to sloppy to heated and all the way back again. I know it’s so very wrong, but just the tip of his tongue touching mine gets me instantly hard, always, even after two years with nobody but him for company.

  One day, when he gets out of here and he’s put all of this far, far behind him, he’ll make some girl very happy with that mouth of his.

  There aren’t many like him, and I kissed a fair few guys before we ended up here.

  Most of them in the two weeks before the ròka approached me outside the gay club I kept hanging around, but that wouldn’t let me in because I wasn’t old enough.

  Brighton was like a dream come true for me.

  In my little town in Hungary, being gay is still a big problem. Or rather, a problem once more. Some of the older guys say there was a period when things were more liberal, but since Orbán’s been in charge, it’s been totally okay to openly hate homosexuals again. Especially in small Catholic towns like the one I’m from. So at home, any fooling around was always charged with worry that my mum might find out. She wouldn’t have survived the shame.

  When I first got to Brighton, I was blown away by how many men there were openly out in public, holding hands, being affectionate, making out on the beach. Normal couples living a normal life. And I wanted a piece of that.

  So I hung around outside the club, like a dog waiting for scraps. And I got plenty. I’d find guys to go off with as they spilled back out pretty much every night. I’m not wired to be a manwhore, one day I want to settle down with the right guy, but two years ago I was just rampant with lust and opportunity.

  A kid outside a candy store.

  And then the candy man came and said, “Hey, I know a private candy store where they don’t ask
for ID if you’re with me, you fancy coming along?” and like a total idiot, I got into his car.

  Classic story.

  I didn’t fancy him, but I thought, hey, why not. And he seemed so harmless with his slight built and his ferrety face.

  The devil comes in a small package.

  Diego

  We draw the line when the little one starts kissing his way down the big guy’s torso and his mouth starts closing in on the big guy’s hard-on. “That’s enough of that for now,” Rowan says as he turns the screen away, as if to give them privacy, absurd though that is, but doesn’t cut the connection. “You get the gist.”

  He looks around at us, while I look at Kalina. She is white with shock and trembling. I exchange a look with Raven who is sitting next to her and we silently get up to swap seats. As soon as I lower myself down, I put my arm around Kalina and absorb some of the tremors running through her. She can’t bury her face in my chest because I’m sitting on her bad side, but when she looks up to me, eyes filled with unshed tears, I know she wants to.

  “They’re alive,” she whispers, and I nod.

  “You know, they didn’t look too bad,” Grace says thoughtfully.

  Raven laughs sarcastically.

  “What, for a couple of kidnap victims held as sex slaves you mean?”

  Grace shrugs.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she defends herself. “After the deal Rowan made out of how horrific this was gonna be, I expected worse. They look well looked after.”

  “If you ignore the shackles and the scars on the big one, yeah,” Raven says.

  Grace scowls at her.

  “I’m not saying I wanna subscribe for more instalments, Raven. I’m just saying they don’t look completely broken,” she hisses.

  “Do I look completely broken?” Raven asks sharply, and I decide it’s time to intervene.

  “Pack it in, people, not the issue right now,” I shut them up forcefully, and look to Rowan. “This is not a Cecil set up,” I inform him. “No way is Cecil involved with gay porn, not even for the people. Not a chance. He and Dad narrowly avoided jail for beating a gay couple half to death when they were still actively pursuing their Britain First crap. Cecil’s greedy, but he’s got his principles. They are despicable, racist, homophobic, sexist principles, but they are principles. And there is no way Callum set this up without his dad’s connections. You’re jumping to conclusions all over the show. I’m not sure you’re not barking up the completely wrong tree here.”