by Skye Warren
“I hope you don’t mind me coming here,” Mia said. “I can go if you’re too tired…or if seeing me will upset you.”
“No, I’d like to talk to you. Actually,” I said, feeling unaccountably shy, “I’d like it if you could talk to me. Tell me about your time with him. We didn’t get to talk very long the day I came to see you. And now I—” I spread my palms, as if in supplication. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know or why. Only that she was part of the answer.
She drew up the plastic chair and sat down. “I can tell you about him. Maybe it will help you reconcile what happened. Or…I don’t know, help with closure.”
“Or help us catch him,” I whispered.
“Right. Of course.” She said it so quickly that she clearly didn’t think it would happen. To her, he was invincible. And I wasn’t sure she was wrong.
I sighed, letting my eyes fall closed. In the darkened hospital room, it was almost the same. My eyes felt tired, and I let her words wash over me like a lullaby. Like a story before bedtime, and that was what it was. Her voice was a sweet melody, soothing to my roughened nerves.
“Carlos’s father ran a fairly large drug trafficking operation out of Colombia. His mother was an American woman. I saw a picture of her once. She was really beautiful. Exquisite. And you couldn’t tell her origins from the picture. Her dress was shimmery, and she had diamond earrings and a necklace. It was kind of a fairy tale, back then, and they were royalty.”
I could picture them, the stern-faced drug lord in a sharp suit. The glittering bride at his side, elegant and severe. My mind painted them in black and white, with vintage glamour. But this story had a dark side. Even light casts a shadow.
“Families were important back then. All the important men had wives and kids and they’d meet up for big dinners. La familia.” Mia’s laugh sounded soft and musical, like a wind chime in the night air. “When Carlos was eight years old, there was a dinner. His parents’ anniversary and it was a big affair. But the two of them had been fighting that day, in private. The way things worked, the women didn’t talk back to the men. Not ever.”
Mia paused, and I felt her sadness drench the air. For who, though? For Carlos? Or for the woman from a previous generation, who was so much like her. Used for her body and elevated through her status with a man who did her harm.
“That night, she turned on him. In front of everyone, she shouted at him and told him she’d been sneaking behind his back. He pulled out his gun and shot her. In front of Carlos.”
I shivered in horror and sympathy, imagining that moment. Remembering how it felt to see violence too young and unprepared. None of this excused what Carlos had done, but I could tell from Mia’s voice that she knew that too. More than that, I got the sense she hadn’t even thought he’d done wrong. We were all animals, acting on instinct. He was just a particularly intelligent and powerful animal. A lion with rippling muscles and a beautiful mane and a pair of jaws that could rip you to shreds if he wanted.
“He kept the party going. That was the breaking point for Carlos, I think. They removed the body, and his father kept the party going because they already had everyone there, and food, and music.”
“That’s awful,” I whispered, feeling the horror of it wash over me. Imagining a little boy, who had probably already seen too much, being told to pretend that nothing had happened. That his mother hadn’t just died.
Mia nodded. “He went to live with relatives after that, and he barely ever saw his father. They were involved in the organization as well, so he still saw what was happening, but he had no plans to follow in his footsteps. In fact, he…”
She trailed off, and I looked at her. Her smile was wistful. “He had other life plans.”
“What were they?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but that was a lie. She knew. It was just weird that after telling me all this personal stuff about Carlos, she’d omit something like this. Surely it wouldn’t matter if he’d wanted to be a doctor or even a racecar driver or whatever little boys wanted to be.
“Go on,” I murmured, determined to get as much information—honest information—from her as I could.
She lifted one slender shoulder. “He told me when he picked me up off the street, when he decided to keep me…he said he was going to shoot me one day. So don’t get too comfortable. At the time I believed him.”
I remembered her using the same phrase at our last meeting. “At the time. And what do you think now?”
“I learned to trust him by his actions, not what he said.”
“So he didn’t put you in chains? He didn’t whip you?” I demanded, already knowing the answer.
“He did.” She nodded. “But he always took care of me after. That’s not what you do if you don’t care. Believe me. I met plenty of men who wouldn’t have. But Carlos didn’t let them touch me…until the end. When things started breaking down.”
“Why did he let you go?”
Her eyes were open, guileless. A deep, bottomless brown. “I think he started to care about me, honestly. More than he was comfortable with. He started to worry that he would shoot me. That he’d marry me and care about me, and that he’d act on instinct. On blood. It’s not entirely logical, but when horrible things happen to young children, they change the way they think.”
A shiver ran through me. A premonition? I knew exactly how much the horrific events of a young child could shape a life. My brain had been wired different from everyone else’s at that young, impressionable age. I hadn’t realized how lonely it made me. But Carlos knew what it felt like. And so did Mia, both because she had experienced it herself and because she had an innate compassion that bled through her every word. I began to understand why Carlos had kept her for so long, and it wasn’t only for her lithe body or delicate features.
“He told you all this?”
She must have heard the disbelief in my voice. Her smile was wry. “Not at first. He tried to keep things really strict. Completely separate. But he must have realized he could trust me. He started opening up to me. About his hopes. His fears.”
I could have laughed. I didn’t. “His fears? What would that be, not making enough of a profit on the illegal drugs he’s importing?”
“Something like that. You see, when his father died, the empire he had built would have passed down to Carlos. Except Carlos didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He was done.”
This caught my attention. “What happened?’
“There was a second in command. An older man, closer to Carlos’s father’s age. He assumed control, and that would have been the end of it. But he didn’t trust Carlos. I don’t know whether he thought Carlos would rat them out, since he knew so much, or if he thought Carlos would come back looking for a piece of the pie. So he decided to have Carlos killed. Sent a couple guys on a hit.”
My palms were sweating. My heart pounded, as if I cared. Silly, because obviously Carlos had made it through alive, but something in me still yearned to hear the completion. To know that he’d made it out okay. It was as if he’d tied us together somehow, merged a part of our bodies so that now his safety was mine. His happiness too. Disturbing, considering he was a sadist and a psychopath.
“Carlos killed them. I believe they were the first lives he ever took. Self-defense.”
Yes, it would have been self-defense. If he’d gone directly to the police and explained the situation. But if he’d done that, he would have been a sitting duck for the next pair of hit men who came along. Without even hearing the words, I knew Carlos had done the only thing he could do. He survived. And as fucked up as it was, I respected that. There was no good or bad, sometimes. There was just living and not living. A person had a right to do whatever it took to survive.
I had to believe that, otherwise my actions at the warehouse were untenable.
Self-defense.
“He knew more men would be after him, so he went after the guy in charge directly. Killed him and replaced him as the hea
d of the organization. But there was chaos by then. Losing their leader twice. Having a young man in charge of everything, one who didn’t even want to be there. People started flipping out. There were so many deaths. It was chaos, and Carlos was sucked into it, righting the organization and bringing everything back to order.”
“Why didn’t he just turn them in?” The question was out before I could call it back. I’d just meant that he could be free of the situation, wash his hands of the heritage he’d never wanted.
“They were family,” she said simply.
And yes, of course. Because normal people didn’t sell out their family. That was only for the disloyal, like me. How dare I call Carlos cruel when he hadn’t been able to do what I did, turn my back on blood.
* * *
“What do you remember?”
The psychologist sat with her legs crossed in a short pencil skirt. Did she know how much attention she drew to them? Did she want her male patients to look at her legs? Fucking psychologists. Voyeurs and exhibitionists.
Her question hung in the air. What did I remember about my captivity, she meant. But the question was open ended, and I wasn’t thinking about captivity. New memories had started to float to the surface, ones long repressed.
A better question would have been: How did you escape your father’s attention?
No one has ever hurt me. It had been my mantra for so long, a lament and longing rolled into one. But was it true? I could no longer be sure. Of that, of anything.
“Samantha?” she prodded.
“I don’t remember. It’s all a blank.” It wasn’t completely a lie. It wasn’t blank, but it was a blur.
Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t remember anything?”
“I remember Lance. He’s one of the agents I work with. I remember we were stepping out of the van, trying to figure out what had happened. Everyone inside the warehouse had gone quiet.”
“Were you worried?” she asked.
She was trying to profile me. And doing a piss poor job of it, too. But I was a good little agent, so I answered. “Yes. The plan was very specific. And we’d heard them over the comm. Something was wrong.”
“What did you do then?”
“We headed toward the location to see if we could help. Only, we got separated. And…someone attacked me. They disarmed me before I could stop them. I remember being punctured with a needle. Some kind of drug.”
I looked at her, the nameless, faceless woman who was supposed to analyze me. She’d be the one signing off on my return to duty. Her expression was politely blank. Her eyes were placid—borderline vacant. The only reason I knew she was listening was her pencil moving, marking down notes, judging me.
“And that’s it,” I finished.
“You never got a good look at him?”
“No,” I said, and at least that much was honest. “I never got a good look at him.”
The master of disguise and evasion. He could have been anyone. He could have been any man I passed on the street, and I wouldn’t even know it. And wasn’t that the fucking tragedy.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hell no,” Lance said over the phone.
“Please.”
He swore. “I can’t believe you’re still hung up on Hennessey after…”
“After getting raped?”
“I just would have thought you didn’t want company. Not that way.”
Yeah, I would have thought that too. Instead, I felt the opposite. Whereas before I had been satisfied with steamy moments and hot kisses, they were no longer enough. They were too weak to counter the memory of handcuffs and whips, of hard phallic objects inside me. The memory of pain. I wanted something more, needed the closure pleasure could give me. That Hennessey could give me.
“Never mind,” I told Lance. “I’ll find it another way.”
He swore again, low and vicious. “Fine. I’ll get it for you. But you know he’s just going to drop you as soon as he gets a new assignment. Don’t come crying to me when he does.”
“Okay. And Lance?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
It took him an hour to find out where Hennessey was staying by pulling his credit card receipts, and then I was on the road. He didn’t live too far from me, but this being Houston, that meant a thirty-minute drive time. The streets were mostly empty this late at night, with only the streetlights to guide me, like candles left in the window. For all I knew he wouldn’t even be home. And even if he were, he might not want me. Like Lance said, I was a passing interest for him. The rookie he could kiss in the supply closet for a little mutual stress relief. That was okay. I thought of the future differently now. It wasn’t about reaching toward some picturesque future with dinner dates and presents at Christmas. I couldn’t ever be that normal, and I had more pressing goals at the moment. It was about survival, body and soul. My soul needed this.
The hotel was in Montrose, quaint and built for extended stays, like an apartment with housekeeping service. The office was dark, appearing closed. I circled around back counting the numbers on the doors until I found the one Lance had told me. This was it. The phrase do or die had never felt more real to me than now.
I knocked on the door.
A minute later, Hennessey opened it. He covered his surprise quickly, leaning on the door and blocking the entrance. His bare chest gleamed, the sprinkling of hairs silvery in the moonlight. Drawstring pants hung low on his waist, revealing angled hipbones and a V-shape that drew my eyes down. My gaze skated over the bulge visible through the thin fabric and down to his bare feet. He was casual. Sensual. Perfect.
“How did you find me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
I flashed back to when he’d shown up at my apartment. “FBI Agent.”
“Stalker.”
My voice came out husky. “I come bearing gifts.”
His gaze dropped to the jacket I wore. A plain trench coat that ended at my knees. Not dirty in the slightest, except for the red heels I’d paired with it. They sent a different message. They hinted there was nothing underneath the coat, except maybe a few scraps of lace. They hinted at a present waiting to be unwrapped.
A muscle in his jaw ticked. His eyes stared at some point beyond my shoulder. I expected him to protest. You’re only doing this because you were damaged. Even a token protest seemed likely. I only hoped he wouldn’t turn me away completely. He had to know I was only here because I needed to be.
“Forgiven,” he finally said, stepping back to let me in.
I sighed in relief that he wasn’t going to fight this, fight me. Maybe getting beaten and violated should have already broken me, but they hadn’t. I’d wanted to know how it felt for so long; the anticipation had been a form of preparation.
The reality had been more and less than I had expected. More, because everything hurt worse and cut deeper than I could have imagined. I’d received bland disinterest from my foster parents and rote chivalry from the men I had dated. It had been like living in a world of black and white, like having that world slashed with red. Beautiful and alarming.
The experience had also meant less, because I never understood why Laguardia had taken me. I only skated the surface with him, so distanced by metal and leather and glass and every other type of material he’d used between our bodies. Whips and restraints and dildos had formed a barrier between us. That was why he’d used them. But that hadn’t been fair to me. I was left with half an obsession, one side of the deviant coin. Now I needed to reach out and touch someone. I needed to be touched.
Hennessey remained by the door while I strolled around the room. He might have been a guard, a lock and key, if it weren’t for the troubled light in his eyes. I saw everything in terms of captivity now, in the cold continuum between freedom and pain. Neither had ever fulfilled me.
“Samantha.” The word was laden with questions, bending under their weight. Why I was here and what I wanted. Whether or not I was okay.
Who knew, rea
lly? Getting abducted might have broken my sanity. Or finding out my father was a serial killer. Or falling in love with my partner, a man who would never really respect me and never stick around. Any one of those was enough to drive me crazy, so what did it matter which one had pulled the trigger? If there was one certain victim in all this, it was my sanity.
My hands went to my belt. I untied the knot and held the sides of my coat together. I had to give him fair warning, so he could blot out the shock and pity from his eyes.
“There’s still some bruising.”
Something flickered in his eyes, but his expression remained stoic. “I see,” he said quietly.
He didn’t see. He couldn’t. I opened the coat and let it fall, closing my eyes at the sound of his stuttered breath. My front had mostly healed. Carlos had gone easier here, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. There were only a few lingering marks and some yellowish bruising. I looked like I’d been spray painted gold, uneven and whimsical. In the dim light of the lamp, the effect probably faded to a mere glimmer.
I turned, and felt the impact of my back hit him with resounding, utter silence. There was no pretty frame of mind I could put around red slashes and blue-black bruises. Perversely, it looked worse now than it had felt at the time. I’d gone into a kind of cloud-like space, floated away on endorphins and fear until the pain looked blurry and dark, like the earth beneath an airplane.
However it had felt then, it looked awful now. I’d stared at the marks in the mirror, looking over my shoulder. He’d turned me into some sort of abstract painting, something that could hang on a metropolitan museum with the title “A Dark Love” written on a little white placard. It was the most angry, meaningful, caring thing any person had ever done to me, but I could never tell Hennessey that. He wouldn’t understand. It was just another secret to take to my grave.
“Do you still want me?” I wouldn’t blame him for turning me away.