Chapter Ten – Abbey
”You sure you can make it back okay?” Chuck asked me, frowning down at me as I looped my arms around his shoulders.
”I’m going to be fine,” I assured him, laughing. ”I have a cab waiting outside. You stay here, I don’t want to drag you away from the guys.”
He grinned and leaned down to plant a kiss on my lips.
”If you insist,” he murmured. As soon as his mouth found mine, I re-thought whether or not I wanted to make a case for him to come home with me. But I knew it had been way too long since he had spent time with the rest of the Dogs, and the last thing I wanted was to keep their leader away. I knew he had a job to do, and no matter how selfish I was tempted to be with all of this, I was going to let him do it. Even if I really wanted to just have him stick around. I kissed him again on the corner of his mouth, and he smoothed his strong hands down my back, pulling me a little closer.
”You sure about that?” he asked, voice low. His must be in the same place that mine happened to be. I giggled.
”I mean, no,” I admitted. ”But I don’t want to take up all your time. I know you have your duties...”
”Fuck the duties,” he murmured, and I felt my knees getting a little weak. Oh, this guy was so willing to throw everything away just so he could spend a little more time with me – how could I not be falling for that as helplessly as I was? It would have been impossible. But I knew if we spent too much time together, the excitement of everything we had was going to fall away way too quickly, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to let that happen.
”Go back in,” I laughed, as my cab pulled up behind us. ”I’ll text you when I get back, alright?”
”Fine,” he muttered, kissing me again, and sliding a hand playfully down to give my ass a squeeze before he let me go. I giggled.
”Get out of here,” he told me, flashing me a grin as I climbed into the cab. I loved how into me he was – how open he was about how much he was attracted to me. It had been a long time since I had been with a guy who swaggered with as much confidence as he did, and there was something supremely sexy about knowing that he commanded as much power and influence as he did – nothing got in his way, nothing even came close, and everyone gave him just what he wanted.
Including me.
I climbed into the cab, gave the driver my address, and we headed off towards my place. I glanced in the mirror to see Chuck staring after me. I took him in -- his leather jacket, his shaven head, that dark stubble that grazed against my cheeks whenever he kissed me. The flutter in my chest turned into a pounding.
He had invited me out to the Kennels tonight, the bar owned by the Dogs, to meet with some of the rest of his crew. I”d had no idea what to expect, but he’d spent the evening with his hand wrapped around my waist protectively, as though making sure everyone in this place knew just how much he wanted me. As though it couldn’t have been more obvious.
It was strange, spending time with him outside of my apartment, but strange in a good way. Strange that he seemed so willing to introduce me to these men he commanded – and fuck, seeing him take charge and command their respect the way he did was seriously hot to me. He knew exactly how much power he had in this city, and the way those guys rushed to take care of his every command was a sure sign of it. He didn’t need to throw his weight around to make himself known, and I could hardly tear my eyes from him all night as he talked, laughed, joked with the guys who clearly worshipped the ground he walked on. He’d mentioned that he’d had a strong relationship with the man who had run the club before him, seeing him as something of a father figure, and it was clear that so many of these men saw him the same way.
I rested my head against the window, smiling tipsily. Being in his presence had been more intoxicating than any of the booze I’d had this evening. The thought of him, even though he wasn’t by my side right now, it was the most impossibly exciting thing in the world to me...
And I knew I was falling for him. Falling for him hard. Hard in a way that might have been dangerous, given how we had met. I had arrived in this city because I was trying to get away from my ex, after all – could any good relationship start on those terms? I had no idea. I wasn’t sure it would do me any good to overthink it.
Sometimes, you just had to take what was right in front of you and accept that it was working, right? You didn’t need to spend all your time tossing and turning it back and forth in your head, making it into a problem when it wasn’t. So there was an age gap between us. So he was the leader of a biker gang. So what? I had never lived my life by any conventional standards, running from freelance job to freelance job and chasing stories others wouldn’t touch.
I paid the driver, leaving her a generous tip thanks to my good mood, and climbed out of the car, rummaging in my purse for my keys – but, before I could reach them, a scent accosted my senses. A scent that made me stop dead in my tracks.
My head flashed around just as the car pulled away down the street. It was...it was paint. The same smell from when I arrived back and found that typewriter sprayed on the side of my building. Those kids must have been hard at work again, causing trouble, causing problems...
Or, at least, I hoped it was those kids.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled as I made my way around the building, my hands shaking, following the acrid smell of the spray paint.
And, sure enough, there it was – another image, painted on to the side of the building, the blood-red paint still dripping down to the ground below, the sidewalk stained.
Only this time, it was a cat. A ginger cat. I stared at it for a long moment, my eyes wide, trying to wrap my head around what I was seeing. But the truth was, I didn’t need an explanation. I knew what this was.
Or, rather, who this was.
I took a step towards it, heart pounding in my chest. The stripes on the cat’s fur meant there was no doubt – it was Cinnamon. And, over his throat, in the picture, a long slash of red had been painted, like his throat had been cut.
I clasped a hand over my mouth, wanting to cry out in horror. The mere thought of something happening to that innocent little creature was more than I could take. And this was a threat, there were no two ways about it.
I rushed towards my apartment building, throwing open the door and practically sprinting to my place – I needed to know that my little guy was okay. Nothing had happened to him, had it? It didn’t look as though the door had been pushed open, but what if someone had...
I unlocked the door with shaking hands and let out a gasp of relief when I saw Cinnamon rushing over to greet me. He had no idea what was going on out there or why I leaned down to scoop him up and press my face into his fur so intensely.
”You’re okay, sweetie,” I murmured to him, though I was talking to myself more than him.
Outside, for a split-second, I thought I heard footsteps. I rushed to the window to check, but if someone had been there, they were gone already. I pulled the curtains shut and locked the door, reaching for my phone to call Chuck and tell him to get down here and do something.
But something stilled me before I could make the call. I knew I should just call him, it’s what he would want me to do, but there was a part of me that was fearful about what it might mean for us if I begged him to come down here in the face of trouble. I didn’t want him to see me as some perpetual victim, always in need of his help. I was stronger than that. I knew I was.
I didn’t want to wreck the beginnings of what we had by letting him see me as the kind of woman who would only ever need his help, who would be ever reliant on him for what he could give me and not what I could share with him. Besides, all it was was some graffiti – was there really anything to it? What if I was just reading too far into this, letting myself get caught up in a panic?
I took a deep breath and sat down on the edge of the couch, staring at my phone. Okay, I could call someone, right? I didn’t have to just sit here being scared. I dialed up Rina and listened to the ring a couple of times, not actually expecting her to pick up, but to my surprise, she did.
”Hey, Abbey, you okay?”
She answered with a tense tone in her voice that told me she was worried I might not be.
”I’m...I’m okay, yeah,” I replied, trying to keep my voice as light as possible. ”I just wanted to check in with you...”
”At this time of night?”
”I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
”No, I was out,” she admitted. ”I just got back. But something must be on your mind to be calling me this late, right?”
She always perceptive enough to know when there was something going on with me, and I guessed getting a call at one in the morning from an old friend with a stalker ex was never a good sign.
”Yeah, I guess so,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. I hated that he was still getting to me as much as he was, and I hated that it was still so easy for this fucker to get under my skin, to have me jumping at shadows when I should have known better. I was smarter than that, but he had me feeling like I didn’t stand a chance against him.
”So, what’s happening?”
”I...I don’t know if anything’s happening,” I admitted. ”I just...I just wanted to see if you knew anything else about what happened with Franco. Where he went, stuff like that?”
”Nothing. I’m sorry,” she replied, and I could hear the grimace in her voice. ”But... I know he left Atwood.”
”Right,” I muttered. It wasn’t enough. If I was going to kick into straight-up panic mode, then I was going to need to have more information to go on than that.
”Who did you hear it from? His old roommate, right?”
”Yeah, and this other friend of mine, Iris,” she explained. ”She was...she was involved with him a while ago. Had some of the same issues you did.”
”Really?” I replied, my ears perking up. If there was one way to get to the bottom of someone, it was to sift through their history.
”Yeah, she’s been keeping tabs on him after all the trouble he caused her,” she explained. ”I don’t know if she has any more information about him, but I could talk to her, if you like.”
”Could you put me in touch with her?” I suggested, voice tight. ”Do you think she’d be open to that?”
”Uh, I could try,” she replied. ”I think she lives near Atwood now. She moved out of Lilyvale after...after everything that happened with Franco.”
I frowned. I hated that he had done this to other women, that he had been allowed to get away with it for this long with nobody stepping up to tell him that he needed to leave us alone. But maybe if I could get a little more information out of this girl, I would be able to start piecing together a case against him.
”Can you pass on my number to her?” I asked. ”See if she’s willing to talk to me? I don’t want to put pressure on her, but if she’s open to it, I’d love to see if she knows anything.”
”I will,” she replied, her voice catching at the back of her throat as she spoke. ”Are you sure there’s not something you want to talk about? All of this, it sounds...serious.”
”I’m fine,” I assured her, even though I wasn’t even sure I believed that myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about the graffiti outside, the slash along the cat’s throat. It couldn’t be Franco, could it? Because I hadn’t let Cinnamon out of the house since I had gotten him, not wanting to be caught by a landlord or neighbor, so if he knew I had a cat, it was because...
It was because he was watching me inside my house.
A cold shock of dread rushed through my system at the thought, nausea twisting in my guts. I felt as though I was going to throw up all the booze I’d put into my system tonight. I hated this. Hated the feeling of being under surveillance. I thought coming to this city would have been enough to shake that sensation, but, if anything, it just seemed to have left me with more to worry about.
”I’ll speak to you soon, huh?” I told her quickly. ”You should get some sleep.”
”You sure everything’s--?”
”It’s fine,” I replied quickly, cutting her off. I didn’t want to stay on the phone with her too long, or I knew she would sense there was something up – and the last thing I needed was her worrying about me. No, I was doing quite enough of that for myself tight now, and she didn’t need to stress about everything that was going on with me.
”Alright, well, talk to you soon,” she replied, and I hung up before I could blurt out anything else that might give away my true state of mind.
I stood there in the silence for a long moment, trying to pull myself together again. Fuck, this felt impossible – impossible for me to make sense of everything that was going on inside my head, impossible for me to clear the panic that was settling around me. I should have asked Chuck to come back with me, I knew he would have made me feel better...
But I couldn’t rely on him to fix things up for me. No, I had to make the effort to do that myself – and, hopefully, getting in touch with this Iris girl would go some way to making that happen.
”Come on, Cinny,” I murmured to my cat, crouching down to pet him. ”Let’s get some sleep, huh?”