Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
The boards were off the windows, and when he led me in, I realized he wasn’t squatting anymore.
The electricity was on. He had an office in the front, all the shit looking like he picked it up curbside.
He led me into the back to his equally awful-looking apartment, pouring us each a Scotch and sitting across from me at a folding table he used as a dining table, something that gave me an almost blinding memory of sitting there and helping my sister do her homework after school.
I tried not to think of her as a rule.
It only brought with it darkness, a sadness so deep I could drown in it. And, once that passed, all that was left was the motherfucking rage.
“This all you want?” he asked, sitting back in his folding chair, making the front legs kick up. “This killing, this nothing life that is going to end up with your own ass in a grave or the pen like your pops. Is that all you want?”
There was a wisdom in Rhodes, even back in those days, even though we were just about the same age. I guess being completely on your own with literally nowhere to go did that to you. My family might have been shit for the most part, but they were family.
“The fuck else am I going to do? Who is gonna want me and my skill set? A killer? A drug dealer?”
“I’ll hire you here and there,” he said, shrugging.
“Rhodes, no offense, but you don’t exactly seem like you’re keeping your own stomach full, let alone mine.”
“Not going to lie. I’m not rich. I’ll never be. But this is a good gig I have going here. Getting busier every day. There are times when I need backup, and Gabe is going the legit route and can’t get involved with my shit anymore.”
“The fuck do you even do?”
His smile was slow, lazy, a little devilish.
“Call myself a PI though I don’t have the license.
I do whatever people pay me to—catch their partners cheating, find their missing drug-addicted kid, get some blackmail pics.
Whatever pays. And sometimes, I could use an extra hand,” he said, reaching up to yank the neck of his tee to the side, showing a red, long, angry cut halfway across his throat and sneaking down toward his back.
I knew enough to know that was a knife and it was close to taking his life.
Another half an inch and he would have been choking on his own blood.
“So you want muscle?”
“Pretty sure you got a brain in there under all that piss and vinegar too. Won’t be keeping you in fucking diamonds, but I can keep you from going hungry as you figure out what you want to do with your life.”
“Why?”
No one gave you shit for free.
No one.
To that, he shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I wouldn’t say I’m a good guy, Tig.
I just know desperation when I see it. Trust me, I see it a fuckuva lot in this line of work.
Normally, there’s not shit I can do. Or, maybe just as often, I create that when I take pics of private shit, and hand it over for money.
I do dirty shit. Maybe this is my way of paying some penance for that.
Something I think maybe you need to start doing too. ”
From that day forward, I did.
I contracted with Xander as I got out from underneath the gang I had been affiliated with since I was seventeen. This was not done blood-free, I might add. But it had to be done.
One day, several years later, we had followed a lead for a missing girl the cops couldn’t get a whiff of in their channels to some fucking place called Navesink Bank, which was a cesspool of criminal activity.
We found her holed up at Hailstorm on the hill, a paramilitary organization where they put her particular skills to work.
Those skills were coding. She was a living, breathing computer.
And she had run off when her parents cut her internet.
Xander and I shared a look, shrugging, both agreeing silently to leave her right the fuck where she was. Partly because we didn’t want to piss off the leader of that camp, but also because we understood.
We stopped in town for a beer.
And it was motherfucking fate, just like it was fate the day my hit was Xander’s client. There in the bar was Sawyer Anderson. He and Xander knew each other, so we got a table, drank, and talked.
By the time Xander was ready to head back to the city, I had a job offer that I couldn’t refuse.
“Think you finally found it,” Xander said, slapping a hand down on my shoulder and leaving without another word.
And I had.
There was a part of me that maybe always knew I had to leave the city. I had to leave all those old ghosts behind. I needed never to see a face that knew me again. I needed to start over.
Working for Sawyer, I slowly but surely managed that. And while he eventually got to know all the sordid details of my past, it was after he already knew, trusted, and had respect for the man I became.
The layers of filth, guilt, and anger I had still been carrying even years after I started working for Rhodes slowly slipped away.
I got a place, an old abandoned office building because I got it on the cheap and I fixed up the inside. Eventually, I let some construction worker take the basement and build a fucking fallout shelter in it. I made connections around the town, though I generally kept to myself.
There wasn’t a day, even more than a decade later, when I didn’t think about Rainy, didn’t wonder what she might have become, what we both might have become if circumstances were different.
I think it was why Cassie and Kenzi’s case was weighing on me more than they usually did.
We handled a lot of shit at the office. But we didn’t come across a many cases with women getting taken.
In fact, I think there had only ever been one other remotely similar case, and that was many years before.
It brought back all the bad memories. I was disgustingly versed in the evil of some men, knowing what they had done to my own sister, knowing what could be happening to Cass, knowing the sick fuck still wanted to do those things to Kenz too.
So even though all the leads went nowhere and there was no sign of her, I couldn’t give up.
I should have protected her.
It should never have happened on my watch.
Just like with my sister.
“What was she like?”
I felt my head jerk, not realizing how zoned out I was until I looked up at Kenz, fucking knockout she was, with sad eyes.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Your sister.”
“Oh,” I said, shrugging a little and giving her the truth. “Honestly, she was a lot like Reese. Sweet, too sweet really considering what she grew up around. Skittish and a little naive, maybe.”
Her hand released her fork, sliding across the table and closing over the top of my hand, turning slightly so she could squeeze.
She didn’t let go afterward. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and there was a depth there that you really only ever heard from women, because they were the only ones who could truly understand that horror.
“Long time ago,” I replied, feeling almost a little choked up, which was completely foreign to me. But it had been a long time since I really sat and thought about my past. Sometimes facing it did that to you.
“I bet it doesn’t feel that way, though.”
That was the damn truth.
Seeing her pulled out on that slab in the morgue, busted, blue and purple all over, cuts and gashes all over her face and throat, looking nothing like the girl I had seen leave for school that very morning—yeah… that would always feel fresh.
My hand turned under hers, fingers slipping between hers a little awkwardly I gave the angle, but giving her fingers a squeeze before releasing her, and reaching for my scotch, needing to get the taste of my past out of my mouth.
I didn’t give women that story.
Almost as a rule.
I knew it for what it was—dark, ugly, terrifying.
I also understood that not many women could even remotely understand that, reconcile the idea that the man who had done those things was the same one sitting across from them.
I got that. So, because things never got super serious with anyone to the point where we needed to share every awful detail of our lives, I just glossed it over.
I gave them the condensed version about being involved with a gang, losing my family, and moving on from there.
Why I had invited Kenzi to ask me about it when I barely knew her, when she was not someone I was in a serious relationship with, was beyond me.
Maybe a part of me thought, of all the women I had known, she would understand the best, judge the least. And not just because she had been a hellion, but because of the lives her brothers had led.
By all accounts from what I knew of him, Paine was a good man, greatly respected in our community.
And from what Rhodes said about Enzo since he took him in, still liking his desperate cases, the same could be said of him.
But those good men had dealt heroin.
They had pimped prostitutes.
They had beaten and likely killed people.
Yet those pasts didn’t define them entirely.
Kenzi understood that.
So that was likely a part of it.
There was another part, though.
It was irrational.
It was too soon.
But it was true nonetheless.
While shit was still new, and the situation was less than ideal pretty much all the way around, I knew.
I wouldn’t be cheesy and say it was love at first sight or some shit like that. But she walked into that office, threw that sass around, and I knew.
Then every other interaction with her since then, even just the emails she sent back to me where she somehow managed to be smart-ass and snarky via text, to the conversation we shared earlier that day, to the make-out session on the couch, it all just reinforced what I knew from pretty much the moment I met her.
Whatever was happening with us, it was heading somewhere serious.
And when you were heading somewhere serious with a woman, you gave her all your dark and ugly right up front so she could decide right off if she could handle it, no springing it up on her six months down the road because you knew she was already in deep, taking the pussy route.
No, you gave it to them straight and waited to see if they wanted to throw it back, if they could handle the burn.
If they could, well, then you knew you had the right woman.
It saved a lot of hell and headaches.
I had a distinct feeling that Kenzi was the kind of woman who could not only throw it back but then demand another round.
That was the kind of woman she was—strong, fearless, up for a challenge, and maybe most of all—mature enough to know that no matter how sordid your past was, it didn’t mean you couldn’t turn it around.
Like her.
While her history wasn’t exactly dark, it was impressive how quickly she had made the switch from her old lifestyle.
She went from a hellion to a dedicated workaholic in a blink.
She went from being wild and uncontrollable to a professional whose life wasn’t that much more interesting than her librarian sister’s anymore.
It said a lot about her as a person that she had managed that feat.
I would be a lucky man if she decided that she could handle my dark.
The next words out of her mouth, well, they gave me the answers I had been seeking.