Chapter Sixteen
Liam
I dodge Zed’s fist as it comes at me, using it as an opening to catch my friend in the ribs.
Zed winces and shakes it off as we circle each other.
“Okay, let’s have it. Bev said your head’s too far up your ass to see straight. Something to do with Ravi.”
Closing my eyes with a grunt, I slide my wrist across my face to clear the sweat.
And like every time I close my eyes lately, I’m assaulted by images of my hand on his flesh. I hear the crack of my palm across his ass. The sounds of him shouting his orgasm to everyone in the zip code.
The harder I try not to want him, the more I do. I think that’s the worst part.
And then go fuck yourself, Daddy.
“I’m fine,” I insist.
Zed launches a kick my way. I’m a beat too late blocking it, taking the edge of his foot on my chin before I reach up and grab it with both hands.
“Are you sure about that, buddy?” He gasps for breath and tries to pull his foot away, but I hold tight. This is what he gets for suggesting I’m not on top of my game.
Even though I’m not. Not even a little bit.
“Look, we can all tell you’re twitchy as fuck. You have to know a meltdown can’t fly around here. Bev said you’d been fighting with ‘that kid who lives with you,’ but I thought Ravi had moved.”
Ravi climbing through his window half-dressed. Ravi draped over my lap while my hand reddens his light brown skin. Ravi’s teeth sinking into his lip.
Go fuck yourself, Daddy.
Argh. With a shout, I flip my oldest friend onto his back. He hits the ancient mat with a satisfying thud.
“It’s complicated,” I say as he tries to push himself off the floor.
“Do us all a favor and uncomplicate it, will you? This business is plenty stressful without the team getting nervous because their leader is losing his grip. You need to take a few days off or something?”
More like a year. On the other hand, having to come into work is probably the only thing keeping me sane. Adhering to my schedule is the only reason I didn’t challenge the meathead bodyguard Daniel Corvus put on Ravi and then drag the kid home by his hair like the caveman I am.
“I’m fine. Talk to me about the search and rescue in Mexico.”
Zed staggers to his feet, breath heavy. Maybe I’m not the only one struggling today. We’ve been going for about half an hour, which is typically nothing for us.
“Yeah, about that. Sal called in while you were running some errand the other day.”
The errand was ambushing Ravi outside of his morning class.
“And?”
He takes a swig from his water bottle. “It’s not good news.”
“Shit.” I slam my fists together. Which is as unsatisfying as it is painful. “Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”
My friend puts his hands to his hips. “Because you’re a loose fucking cannon lately and nobody wants to come anywhere near you.”
A harsh breath punches its way out of my lungs. “What happened?”
“The guys were a little too late. They found where the prisoners had been kept, but the kidnappers were long gone. Tourists. Some local teenagers. Bodies in a shallow grave.”
I drop my head back onto my shoulders. A strangled “Fuuuuuck!” works its way out of my throat. “Fucking pieces of shit.”
Across the room from where we’re sparring is an old heavy bag hanging from the ceiling. I storm over to it, beating the thing and shouting until my body burns and my voice is hoarse. “Fucking piece of shit motherfuckers.”
One of the uglier things we deal with in this business is kidnapping for profit.
These gangs pull people off the street, often young people, demand a ransom, and then when the family pays they kill them anyway.
It’s not uncommon for our company to get hired to go in and find the person taken, especially if it’s a tourist whose family has the cash.
Sometimes we find them in time. Sometimes we don’t.
When the kidnappers know to keep moving and they’ve got the home turf advantage, the odds are against us.
We all know this shit happens. Knowing it doesn’t help. Especially now.
Teenagers in a shallow grave. Fuck. I swallow bile, unable to keep Ravi’s face out of my mind. The wrong buyer gets him from this auction, and something like that could happen to him. Or something worse.
The water in my water bottle is warm and barely eases my burning throat. “How’s Sal holding up?”
Sal came to work for us because his sister was one of the many people lost to this kind of racket.
When the police weren’t able to do anything, his mother took up the mantle of vigilante, hunting the men responsible and having them killed or arrested.
The gang, in return, murdered his parents. An entire family lost due to greed.
“He’s seeing the company therapist as required in these situations. Tell you one thing, he’s handling it better than whatever the hell this is.” Zed motions up and down in my general direction. “Sal’s not the only one who would benefit from a few visits with Doc Lambert.”
Fuck him. I don’t have time for that shit. “You ready to go again, or are you done for the day?”
Zed laughs. “You implying I’m weak, motherfucker?”
No, I’m trying to distract you from the fact that I am.
“You know better than to ask me something like that,” my friend growls.
We return to the mat. Zed takes up a stance and charges me again. When we fight there aren’t too many rules. We try not to do permanent damage, but since an escaping drug dealer won’t adhere to rules, neither do we.
Which is why, when he manages to get me on my back, I sink my teeth into his arm.
“You actual piece of shit.” He growls.
My laugh is a little maniacal as I flip him again. And clock him in the jaw. That’s going to swell later.
“Who’s the piece of shit?”
His answer is a battle cry as he bucks his hips hard enough to throw me off.
I’d be impressed if I had time to be, but he doesn’t waste a second before barreling toward me again.
Before he can make contact, I slip to the side.
And when he’s recovering from the first punch, I throw another punch, and then another.
He doubles over with a grunt. Blindly, he gropes around for the water bottle he left on the edge of the mat, using it to swish around his mouth.
When he spits it out, there’s blood.
And two teeth.
“Hell, man. Didn’t mean to do that.”
Still hunched over, he responds by putting up his middle finger. “Sure. Whatever, fucker. My fault for leaving my mouth guard in my locker. Now before I call the dentist to see if I can have these put back in, do you wanna tell me again how you’re perfectly chill and nothing at all is wrong?”
Willing my heart rate to settle down, I bring my hands up, interlacing them behind my head. This man is my best friend. We’ve been through the worst kind of shit together. I’d tell him anything, but I don’t know how to tell him this.
I’m still barely willing to admit it to myself.
“Look, we all know you want to fuck the kid. I think I speak for everyone when I say just get it the hell over with so you can go back to being a regular asshole we barely tolerate and not the extra-extra asshole you’ve been lately, okay?”
Everything inside me goes cold. “What did you fucking say?”
My offense is a smokescreen, desperately covering the guilt that curdles my blood. The shame. The utter panic.
Everyone knows. Everyone has known. Do they all think I’m a fucking predator? Is that what I am? In the end maybe I’m no better than the sick old fuckers paying to watch Ravi dance while they smoke cigars.
“Jesus, Liam. You can’t think it’s not obvious. Well. Maybe it wasn’t at first to the rest of the crew, but you forget how well I know you.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” When I say Zed and I have been through everything together, I mean everything.
In spite of that, I’ve never wanted to strangle him more for calling me on my shit. But Zed and I don’t pull punches with each other. We never have.
“Then maybe you thought that knock I took to the head off the Gulf of Aden caused permanent brain damage. You must have, since you seemed to think I wouldn’t notice how a little more than a year and a half ago you switched from mostly women to mostly men at our group sessions.
Then you slowly stopped having them at all.
And how you’ve been pent up as fuck ever since this auction shit hit the wire. ”
“Did Bev tell you? That Ravi’s the one…” Getting auctioned off like a used car. Like cattle. Like foreclosed real estate. I can’t even say it out loud.
“She did, but she didn’t have to. You think I can’t read? I have access to the same reports you do. And she was right to tell me.”
“I’d hoped for some discretion considering—”
“Considering he has you twisted up like Mama Elisabetta’s garlic knots? She was right to come to me. You should have done it first.”
My throat’s dry and tight, like I swallowed sandpaper. Another guzzle from my own water bottle helps me stall on my answer but does nothing to ease the pain.
“You’re right. I think…I might be losing it a little,” I admit on a shaky exhale.
“Because you want to fuck the kid.”
“He’s not a kid!” My water bottle sails across the room before I even process what I’ve done.
Zed grimaces with his two front teeth missing, undeterred. “The hero doth protest way too fucking much. You’re the one who calls him that. Man, then.”
“He isn’t—” When I realize I’m about to contradict myself, I stop. “He’s nineteen, man. I’m almost forty. Comparatively, he’s a kid.”
“A kid you’d like to fuck.”
“Don’t make me clean out the rest of your goddamn mouth. I’m not supposed to want to fuck a kid I helped raise. We hunt down pieces of shit like me.”
“We hunt down child molesters and traffickers. People who groom someone below the age of consent into doing things they shouldn’t do or otherwise wouldn’t agree to. This is not that.”
Exhaustion pulls me to the floor, knees bent up as my ass hits the mat. “He says he knows about the get-togethers.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Get-togethers?”
“You know, the group sessions. The ones where we—”