Chapter 11
Ellie
The foyer of Ringo’s suite had marble floors, fresh flowers, and expensive artwork. To the right, I glimpsed a formal dining room with an overlarge abstract sculpture taking center stage on top of an ebony-stained table.
Heck, maybe it was real ebony?
Ahead was a family room with fireplace, coordinated leather seating, and an entertainment shelf that doubled as a “small” library.
That’s if you compared it to the public one downtown on State Street.
The room wrapped around a full-sized kitchen that took up the interior corner, and turned into a small dining area flanked on the exterior wall by floor to ceiling windows that framed Lake Michigan in glittery segments.
Then the layout dumped into a fancier living space that had almost a two hundred and twenty degree vista of the lakefront starting from the due-north-facing view down to Navy Pier from its windows.
The view was spectacular from this rarified strata.
It was like the morning I woke up at his home in Sestri Levante. I walked out of the bedroom onto the terrace and stared at the Mediterranean in awe. In this place, I’d be front row to the sunrise over the lake.
I’d kill for a place like this. Apparently, Ringo already did. That thought got shoved aside for more mundane needs. “Do you have a shower? I smell like beer.” And sweat, but I’d never admit that.
He set my suitcase inside a bathroom more spacious than my condo’s living room.
With the attached walk-in closet, it might be bigger than my entire home.
The shower was definitely larger than my bathroom.
I fiddled with the nobs and such between sorting through Ringo’s rushed attempt to grab my essentials.
He packed worse than I did. My loofa wasn’t in the suitcase, my shampoo leaked onto my jeans, and there wasn’t a piece of underwear in the damn bag anywhere. I could have sworn he picked up at least one from the mess of my room.
Maybe none survived Johnny’s wrath?
I shuddered from the chill that swept over me. He seemed so harmless with that baby face of his. “Ringo?” I called out.
He peeked his head in the door without knocking.
“Yes?”
Mental note: lock the damn doors around him. On the heels of that thought was another, he’d just pick the lock. This time my shudder wasn’t as chilly.
“Did you find any underwear that wasn’t ruined?”
His eyes swept down me and back. It wasn’t sexual, more like clinical. “I’ll see if I can find something for you to sleep in.”
He slipped away before I could ask him what he meant. Did this place come stocked with clothing?
Or… did he have a girlfriend, wait, no… a mistress?
My stomach churned. I asked him once if he was dating anyone, and he denied it.
But that conversation was before I found out he’d just been using me to get close to Mario during their falling out.
“I need my head examined.” I stripped out of my clothes, hung an oversized hotel-style bathrobe on the hook nearest the shower, and scrubbed the smells of the bar from my skin and hair.
I didn’t hear him, but when I was done drying my skin and wrapping my hair with a towel, there was a pair of boxer shorts and a soft T-shirt on the marble counter.
They must be his. I picked up the shirt and inhaled. To my disappointment, it smelled like fresh laundry.
I wasn’t perverted enough to smell his boxers and embraced the assumption they were clean, too. The folds were a little too crisp and the fabric just a little too stiff to indicate otherwise.
Then I wrapped in the monster-sized bathrobe and sighed a little.
Its heavy weight felt like a hug. And the dense terrycloth absorbed any lingering dampness from my skin.
My muscles were sore, and the day’s rollercoaster that started with being startled out of bed caught up with me.
I may have stumbled a little when I finally exited.
Luckily, there was a bedroom directly across the hall.
It had a king-sized bed and another impressive view of the lake.
Dawn would come too soon. I tugged at the curtains, but they wouldn’t budge. I was just about to give up and find another room to crash in when Ringo entered.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to close the curtains,” I said.
He touched the panel beside the door, and the curtains slid into place, blocking out the lights of the city, the lake, and the peninsula that peeked up from the very bottom of the view. Now I felt like an idiot. Should I thank him?
“Sleep, Ellie.”
I stared at the bed but didn’t move.
“El?”
“I’m scared.” Where did that come from? Frustrated with myself, I plopped onto the bed face-first. “And now I’m mortified. Leave.” My words were muffled by the soft comforter.
I heard more than felt Ringo sit on the mattress opposite me. When I lifted my head, he didn’t pretend he wasn’t watching me.
“What?” My voice was slightly hoarse. I propped up on my elbows to study him.
He hesitated. “Remember Venice?”
“What part? The abduction, the trauma, or the murder?” I hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d slit my attacker’s throat. I fainted at the first splash of blood.
His jaw shifted. “After.”
The hotel. A dozen memories, not all of them bad, but almost all of them highly uncomfortable, flashed through my mind. I’d exposed my Achilles Heel to him, then begged him not to leave me alone for fear I’d have nightmares. And he hadn’t.
“I’m a big girl.”
This time when his eyes dipped to the gap of the bathrobe, it was sexual. “No nightmares?”
There would be at least a dozen unless I was so exhausted I didn’t dream. Defeated, I patted the bed. “When I wake you up, don’t pull your gun, or your knife.”
He stared through me. “I can’t promise that. But you do know they won’t be aimed at you, right?”
Yup. That was one line he hadn’t crossed. Yet.
Casey was right, Ringo was a wolf. All teeth and cunning, but also the epitome of what my body craved to cuddle. Like that human touch could ever tame him enough to drive the killer instinct away? I knew better than that.
Then again, if Johnny came after me, I wanted a man like Ringo at my side to scare the piss out of him. Maybe even eat him like those creatures in old fairy tales did. One big bite and voila! Problem not only solved, but eliminated from existence.
As if it were that easy?
I stared at the sculptural vase that perched on my side’s nightstand.
The flowers in it were just as fresh as the ones in the lobby.
That meant someone was employed to come in and change them.
Perhaps they cleaned the place as well? This maintenance would happen every day for the length of Ringo’s stay. What kind of money afforded that?
Even winning the lottery didn’t give me that kind of perk.
Ringo was a wolf. One that solved problems. Rich, connected people hired him to eliminate their complications. Permanently.
That’s what hit me hardest. The permanence of it all.
His whole adopted family had done this same trade for well over a thousand generations.
The family business was not going to go away no matter how much I wished for it to disappear.
As long as there were people with problems there would be people like Ringo who’d solve them.
Could I accept that? I thought I couldn’t. And before that, I naively thought I could.
Now, I didn’t know.
I must have stared at the flowers for longer than I should have.
Ringo walked around the bed to my side. Gently, he offered an arm for me to lean on as he pulled me up and tore the covers down so I wasn’t on top of them.
I let the robe fall to the floor and climbed in, handing him the duty of tucking me in.
He did without complaint.
Then he circled the bed, removed his clothes and crawled in next to me.
I’d barely registered his body wrapping around mine before nodding out.
Hours later, I woke with a start. My breathing was too fast and my skin clammy with sweat that had broken out.
In my dreams I’d been running. The backyard of the house I grew up in was too long.
It became a dark forest. The men pursuing me called out all sorts of promissory comforts.
“Come home, Ellie. It’s too cold out here.
You’re not safe. Come on, little girl, you can’t stay in the woods all night.
There are wild animals out here, Ellie Jacobs. Come back.”
I feared them more than the dark, more than the cold, and certainly more than the animals.
I couldn’t breathe.
Ringo’s arms wrapped around me. “I got you. You’re safe.”
I couldn’t breathe. They were everywhere. At the windows, lurking in the shadows, and even inside my home.
“Ellie!” Ringo shook me.
I stared at his face. It was familiar, but also not. The concern was new. If I could, I’d lie to him and tell him it would be all right. I gasped for air, panting in the darkness.
“It’s okay.”
Was it?
My mind cataloged the surroundings. The bed, Ringo, the fancy vases on the nightstands, the gun hanging off the headboard within easy reach. The hilt of a dagger that had slid out from under Ringo’s pillow.
I was in the woods. Deep in his realm where it was anything but safe.
My breathing calmed. I drifted a bit, leaning on him as the rush from hyperventilating sent tingles through my body that bordered on pain. “Thank you.”
He exhaled and the warmth of his breath caressed my scalp as his lips brushed against my hairline.
“You’re not kidding about those nightmares. Venice wasn’t like this.”
No, it hadn’t been. I’d only had the beginning of one that night.
It startled me awake like a bullet. And in the aftermath, the adrenaline rush made me cling to his body for more than just comfort.
I needed an outlet or validation that I was alive.
Flight or fuck, Kat called it. She had her own trauma growing up.
We clung together and learned unorthodox coping mechanisms to deny admitting our childhoods had broken us.
One was spitting in the world's face. When life hands you lemons, put ’em in a bazooka to blast them back at their owners.
“I’m okay now.” While I spoke the right words, I didn’t push him away like I should have.
Part of me wondered why I didn’t.
Ringo rubbed my back in little soothing circles. “That’s good. Can I ask what was chasing you?”
“The FBI.”
His reaction was about as I expected. He shifted to hold me at arm’s length to check whether I was joking or not.
The trouble was I wasn’t joking.
“From your childhood?”
He knew about that because Allie talked.
I never did. Or tried not to. My make-believe had gone on so long that I’d almost managed to block it all out.
Along with big gaps of memory that may or may not have occurred like Allie claimed it did.
Those experiences and stories were hers.
Mine were a black void. It wasn’t until I met Kat and started getting in trouble that my actual memories started.
It was like I hadn’t existed before that point.
Except for the dreams. Ones Allie swore didn’t happen. I was never lost in the woods. I never was chased by agents in the middle of the night. And I certainly wasn’t abducted from the house in a black panel van one winter night. But those things played on repeat in my nightmares.
Sometimes I even wondered if the nightmare in Venice was real.
“Tell me I’m not crazy. Please?”
His hand cupped my face and then burrowed into my hair in such a tantalizing caress I leaned into it. Ringo shook his head and uttered one word. “Babe.”
“I remember things that aren’t real. And I don’t know if some things are real. Like Venice. There were pictures, so it had to be real, right?”
His fingers tightened. “Tell me what you think you remember.”
“We spent that first day doing touristy stuff like the gondola ride, where you knocked my phone into the water.” I was never going to let that one go.
He grimaced. “And?”
“And then you had to leave. So, I went to the hotel and had room service. The next morning, I had coffee and those funky fried donuts that tasted like oranges with raisins in the dough. I like the chocolate-filled ones better.”
“They’re called frittelle. They’re special.”
“One word, raisins. The tiramisu was far superior.”
“Heathen,” he muttered.
I shot him a glare. “Anyway, I went to the museum Allie had on the schedule, boring. Then the costume shop. That was fun.”
“That dress was scandalous.”
“You loved it.” I smiled, remembering how it came off.
He didn’t argue.
“Then drinking in the square and dinner… but I don’t remember you finding me.
Just—” I drew my finger across my neck. A carnival scammer tried to take my picture as I drank the lemony aperitif.
I told him to fuck off, creatively, of course.
Then, one of the costumed harlequins shoved between us, sending the guy packing.
He seemed charming. I thought it would be fun to stroll through the square because our costumes matched in color.
It was a bit of a blur, the music, the laughter, the tourists snapping photos of everyone partying like it was the day before we’d all drop dead.
He grabbed my arm to steer me. I’d gotten used to this and let him lead.
Until the music dimmed and the lights were far away in the streets, not this dark place.
And just a few seconds later, a shadow moved across his throat, and a line of red blood spilled.
Then things went black.
Ringo’s jaw was tense. “You didn’t feel the knife he held to your ribs?”
I shook my head. “Maybe the corset was too thick.”
He nodded, hesitantly. “That’s probably right.”
“How’d you know?”
He shifted, straightening the sheets I’d tangled in my attempt to escape my nightmares.
“Tell me, please?”
“I knew because it would be what I’d do on a job.” His face was grim.
A noise escaped me. Whether it was acknowledgement or grief, I couldn’t tell.
I felt the urge to be completely, utterly honest with him. After all, he’d been honest with me. “I liked you better when you lied to me.”