Chapter 3 Rhys
Rhys
Rhys closed his eyes, taking a long draw of his joint.
It had been a long day followed by a perfectly pleasant evening, enjoying the company of a very talented yoga instructor and her husband.
He shouldn’t have been surprised to discover how flexible she was, really.
She was a professional. He leant back against the headrest in his car, steadily exhaling.
There was a shout from behind him. One that sounded oddly like his name. Rhys glanced back just in time to see Penny—Penny Isaac—gripping the rollover bar and hopping into the passenger seat.
Even with her face hidden in darkness, she looked…terrified.
When he last saw her, she’d been her usual uptight, strait-laced self. A woman he loved to taunt, for the precise reason that she so clearly couldn’t stand him. He’d never seen her with so much as a hair out of place.
Now?
The black hair that was usually twisted into a professional up-do tumbled around her terrified face. “Drive,” she pleaded, sounding like she’d smoked half a million cigarettes since they’d last spoken. “Please. Drive, drive, drive.”
What. The. Fuck.
Jesus, she’s not even wearing shoes. What had happened to her? If she’d asked him for a lift as her normal self, Rhys would have driven off alone with a smile on his face, but this?
He stepped on the accelerator, more than a little concerned. Was she having a mental breakdown? He wouldn’t have been surprised by how tight she seemed to be wound. Or had she been assaulted? “Where am I taking you? A police station?”
There was a pause before she answered. “No,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I can’t go there.”
“A hospital?”
She shook her head.
“Penny,” he said quietly. “Do you need to be taken to a clinic?”
“A clinic?”
“For women who’ve been…sexually assaulted.”
“I haven’t been sexually assaulted,” she croaked, her hand resting at the base of her neck, and Rhys breathed a sigh of relief. “I just…” She swallowed. “Can you take me home?”
He nodded, sucking in another draw of his joint as he brought up the navigation on his car. “Put your address in here.”
Penny’s nose turned up as she did so, directing them towards Camden. It wasn’t too far from his home, as it turned out. “What kind of cigarette is that?”
Surely she wasn’t serious. He knew she was prim and proper to a fault, but come on. How could someone who lived in London not know what weed smelt like? “It’s weed, Penny.”
Her eyes widened with equal parts shock and fury—the first sign he’d seen of her usual self. “It’s illegal.”
The only answer he gave was another deep inhale. He needed it. She wouldn’t understand. It was the final couple of days before his next infusion, when his pain was at its highest. Without cannabis, he’d be a useless, bedbound pile of agony rather than a functional human being.
Before he’d gone to prison, Rhys hadn’t needed it.
He’d taken his health for granted, like most people in their early twenties.
All it had taken was a single fight to change that.
His cellmate at the time and now closest friend and business partner, Warren, told him that the fight had broken out because another prisoner had kicked out Warren’s prosthetic leg from under him.
Rhys didn’t remember a thing; he’d simply woken up in the hospital wing with a head-splitting migraine and fourteen stitches across his palm.
The stitches healed, but the damage to his brain never did, even over a decade later.
“So,” he finally broke the silence as they entered Camden, “are you going to tell me what happened back there?”
Penny’s breathing had calmed, but her leg was constantly moving as she tapped her foot on the dark green leather carpet. “How well do you know George Chomsky?” she whispered. “And Bielak, one of the security guards?”
Rhys shrugged. “Not as well as you. The only time we’ve spent together has been in a professional capacity. Why?”
“Go down this little road here,” she pointed, contrary to the navigation’s instructions. “My front door is around the back of the house.”
He obeyed, but quickly regretted it. The so-called road was little more than a dark, potholed track, and he winced as the underside of his low-slung supercar grated against the surface. Fuck sake, this is my new one. “Why?” he asked again.
“It’s just here, behind this car.”
Rhys came to a stop with a sigh of relief, saying a silent apology to his poor car.
He’d have to send it over to his mechanic after his infusion; he was due to visit his little brother in California for a couple of weeks, so hopefully it’d be fixed by the time he returned—although it wasn’t like he didn’t have a garage full of other cars to drive if it wasn’t.
“This is where your family lives?” The only illumination came from his headlights, but even in the darkness, it didn’t look like much.
A narrow terraced house with a pitifully small paved garden ending in a chain-link fence.
“Not my family—just me. The upstairs is mine.” Penny gestured to the metal staircase bolted to the brickwork.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He could hear Penny’s foot tapping against the floor. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
Rhys held up his hand. “Scout’s honour.” He’d never been a scout.
“Bielak killed someone.” The whisper burst from her like she couldn’t keep it in any longer. “And I think it was on Chomsky’s orders. Bielak dumped the man’s body in the Thames afterwards. I saw a video of it. They know I saw it, and they tried to kill me.”
The pronouncement sat between them, suspended in the air, before he eventually broke it. “A video?” George Chomsky was as clean as a whistle, Bielak even more so; the man was ex-police. As was most of the security team for Chomsky, now that he thought of it.
“Yes. From a security camera.”
He tried not to let his doubts show. “Then maybe you should go to the police.”
She shook her head vehemently. “I don’t trust them.”
She was definitely having a breakdown. “Are you sure you weren’t mistaken in what you sa—?”
“Yes, I’m fucking sure!” she spat, the hoarse words reminding him of fire erupting from a dragon. “Unlike some people, murder isn’t an everyday part of my fucking life, Rhys.”
Rhys looked away, his jaw clenching in irritation. Fine. Enough of his sympathetic bullshit. He promptly filed her mental breakdown in his not my problem cabinet. She could go and deal with it on her own. And they could return to their usual states of mutual dislike.
No part of him regretted what he and his cousin, Jensen, had done that night.
It had been violent. Savage. Downright sadistic.
But so too had it been justice. Penny couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand.
She hadn’t lived through the devastation of discovering someone she loved had been abused by a man in a position of power.
The raging, unquenchable anger it caused—and the endless sea of guilt that he hadn’t noticed it happening.
“Thank you for the lift,” she whispered hoarsely, breaking the strained quiet that stretched between them and getting out of the car.
Rhys didn’t respond, watching her outline move towards the gate in the chain-link fence—until a dark figure passing by the window of her upstairs flat sent a chill of unease crawling up his spine.
Didn’t she say she lived alone? “Penny,” he said sharply, watching the distinct glare of a torch prowling through the darkness of her home. “Get back in the fucking car.”
Maybe she wasn’t having a mental breakdown after all.