31. Trinity
Chapter 31
Trinity
“…take it to…drinks it all.”
I open my eyes to orange-tinted darkness. It feels like someone’s standing on my head. They may, possibly, be the same culprit who rubbed grit in my eyes. I push onto my hands and glance around.
I’m in their bedroom. This should alarm me. Terrify me, in fact, but I can barely think straight through the sullen thud-thud-thud of my head.
Orange light slices a line across the myriad blankets and pillows scattered about. I blink at the silhouette a few times before I recognize it.
Apollo comes over to me, stepping in and around the mattresses like he’s walking a minefield. He crouches beside me and holds out a steaming cup. “Coffee,” he explains. “Cream, two sugars. That right, pretty thing?”
I can’t even.
I nod at him and accept the cup. Thankfully, my ass barely hurts anymore, so I can sit up in a cross-legged seat as soon as he disappears out of the room.
After a quick check to make sure there are in fact no snakes around, I drag a blanket over my shoulders. It’s absolutely freezing in this place, and no surprise—it’s not as if the library has heat.
The guys talk in hushed voices for a few seconds, and then there’s utter quiet.
I spill coffee into my lap when Zachary calls out my name.
“Trinity? Join us.”
I consider ignoring him.
Then I remember his warning. I don’t need another hiding, thank you very fucking much. Juggling the coffee cup, I somehow manage to drag a blanket over my shoulders without spilling a drop. Then I make my way to the other side of the man cave.
They’re all seated, Reuben and Cassius on the same couch I was on, Zachary still in his chair—although it’s been pushed back closer to the bookshelf now—and Apollo on a badly worn armchair on the other side.
They all look up when I enter, making me freeze.
“Are you hungry?” Reuben asks.
Am I ? —?
I glare at him.
Do these freaks think they hit some kind of reset button when I went to sleep? What the hell is wrong with them? They’ve assaulted me, kidnapped me, and interrogated me, all in a matter of hours.
What. The. Actual. Fuck?
I still don’t even know why. It has something to do with Gabriel, but Lord knows what.
Something inside me snaps. I storm forward, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim of my cup. “No, you sick fuck, I’m not hungry!”
I expect one of them to say something, maybe to calm me, but they keep staring like they paid good money for this show.
Setting down my coffee on the closest bookshelf, I keep the blanket closed with one hand and use the other to point at Zachary.
“You think you can just go around doing whatever the fuck you want? Well you’re wrong! You can’t.”
Zachary settles back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest. Is that a smile ghosting his lips?
“Someone’s going to notice I’m gone. You realize that, right?” I scan the other faces one at a time. Apollo with his mop of unruly hair. Reuben with his ten-yard stare. Cassius who?—
He’s fucking leering at me. “Who’s gonna notice you’re gone, my little slut?”
“Stop calling me that!” I charge forward, emboldened by their apparent lack of giving a shit. I make to punch him on the shoulder, but nothing close to that happens.
Instead, he’s on his feet pulling some kind of ninja move that has me draped over the back of the couch and him bending over me.
No one stops him.
Cass’s hand slides under the blanket, grabbing at my breast. Reuben’s rosary falls out and dangles from my neck.
“How did you sleep?” Reuben asks, as serene as fuck. Contorted like this, I can barely breathe. The fact that Cass keeps groping me isn’t helping.
“Okay!” I shriek. “Please.”
“Let her go,” Zachary, by contrast, sounds exhausted.
“God damn it, Zach!” Cass pushes away from me, but not before he squeezes my ass with both hands. “Stop giving me fucking blue balls.”
“You’re doing it to yourself,” Zachary replies. “Now sit. Both of you.”
“Yeah, right over here,” Cass says, showing me his teeth as he drags me around the couch.
I end up on his lap, despite my protests. He seems to remember Zachary could get me to stop fighting with a slap on my butt, so it takes three of them before I sink onto his lap and don’t bolt straight up again.
It’s not exactly the most comfortable seat. Does he always have a hard-on?
“Where are your things?” Zachary asks.
I glower at him for a second, and then remember how futile it is to resist, protest, or fight back. “What things?”
“Trinkets and keepsakes and shit like that,” Apollo fills in. I glance up at him, but his eyes are on the camera in his lap. He seems intent on either fixing it, or taking it apart piece by piece.
“I don’t have things like that.”
“You didn’t bring any with you?” Zachary asks.
“No. I don’t have things like that.” I cross my arms, mimicking him, and shrug. “What, is everyone supposed to have a whole bunch of junk for no reason?”
“Things of sentimental value?” Zachary says. “Most, yes.”
“All I found was this,” Apollo says, leaning over and picking up something off the floor beside his armchair.
I would have stood if Cass hadn’t slipped an arm around my waist and clucked at me like I was seconds away from receiving another smack. So I toss my hair and try to make it seem like I don’t give a fuck that they’ve taken the only thing I brought with me that wasn’t clothing or shoes or underwear.
“It’s a bible,” I say stiffly. “In case you were wondering.”
“An old translation,” Zachary says, stretching to take it from Apollo. He flips it open, and I tense…waiting for the photo to fall out.
After how they’d grilled me about Gabriel, what would they say if they saw the photo of him and my father? It might spark the kind of reaction that ends in violence.
But nothing falls out. Either they’ve already found it, or I jammed it so hard between the pages that they’d have to open it to the exact place to take it out.
I can only hope they’ve been too busy to check.
Zachary hefts the thick volume in his hand. “I prefer these. The newer translations are too… polished.”
“They’ve taken out all the good shit,” Cass agrees. “All that fire and brimstone.”
“Strange how many things are open to interpretation,” Zachary muses, as if to himself.
“Mis-interpretation,” Apollo says. The camera comes apart in his hands, and he stares at the assortment of pieces now littering his lap.
“Not everything.”
I turn to Reuben, and swallow when I see him staring at me. When he reaches for me, I instinctively close my eyes. They pop open when his fingertips brush my breastbone. He lifts the crucifix dangling around my neck and rubs his thumb along the wood. It releases a sweet, heady scent that makes me squirm on Cass’s lap.
Which, in turn, makes his erection even harder.
“Enough!” I snap. I yank the crucifix from Reuben’s finger and turn to glare at Zachary. “Tell me what the hell I’m doing here.”
Now my head’s thumping like a bass drum. I press the heel of my hand against my temple, wincing, but I don’t break eye contact with Zachary.
He sits forward, resting his elbows on his knees and lacing his fingers together. “You, Trinity Malone, are going to help us take down a sex trafficker.”
I laugh, because what the hell else am I supposed to do? “Me? How?”
Zachary goes on as if I hadn’t spoken. “They called him ‘Guardian’.” His jaw ticks. “You know him as Gabriel.”
There’s a beat of silence where even my heart stops beating.
Zachary gives me a grim smile. “Sorry. Father Gabriel.”
My coffee’s gone cold in my hands. They gave it back to me a few minutes after they’d started telling me their story.
Apollo begins.
“My parents got shot when I was six. Mugging gone wrong kind of thing. I’d been an altar boy for like a month before that happened. Somehow, I ended up at an orphanage in Redmond instead of foster care.
“Not that I minded. I thought it was kinda cool. Had a lot of friends to play with. I was there for like a year before it happened.”
He pauses, and starts collecting all the bits and pieces in his lap and putting them on the floor, arranging them around his bare feet.
“One of my teachers told me I’d done so well in class that he was taking me out for pizza.” Apollo lets out a sardonic laugh. “Fucking idiot I was, I believed him. That’s how easy it is to get a kid into your car. Fucking pizza, man.”
He sniffs, and drags his hair out of his face. It flops back again, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Zachary lights something. I first think it’s weed, but then cigarette smoke billows into the air between us. They start passing it between them, each taking a drag or two before passing it on.
“We drove for hours. What it felt like, anyway. I started getting cranky. He slammed my head into the dashboard so hard I passed out.” Apollo scratches at the scar on his forehead like he can still feel that pain through the years.
And here I’d thought it was an old sports injury or something.
“When I came to, I was tied up in a basement.” He starts arranging the various mechanics of his broken camera around his feet in a halo.
It feels like someone’s pouring cold water down my spine. He takes a deep breath, and glances up at Zachary.
Zachary nods at him.
Apollo looks at me.
That icy water freezes, and my entire body goes stiff.
“I had two Ghosts. They’d come every Saturday and Sunday, alternating like.” He sticks out his fingers and twists them back and forth. “Never saw each other, but they timed their shit so well, they had to have wiped each other’s cum off their dicks more than once.”
My mouth fills with saliva. For a moment, I’m convinced I’m going to puke. Cass takes my wrist and urges my cup to my mouth.
I take a sip. “Ghosts?” The word slips out before I can stop it.
Apollo’s eyes dart up. His foot starts tapping. “Yeah, Ghosts.” He points at Reuben. “He came up with it.”
“It’s what we called the men who visited us,” Reuben says. I glance at him, but he’s still staring at Apollo. “We never knew who they were, or how long they’d stay. They weren’t supposed to speak to us.”
“But some of them couldn’t shut up,” Cass says.
I look at him over my shoulder. His blue eyes could have bored a hole through my head. “I got there a few months before Apollo arrived,” he says.
“Where? In the basement?” I glance over at Apollo. “The same one?” Apollo seems to have forgotten I exist. He’s busy with his camera again.
“Yup,” Cass says. “Now snuggle up, honey tits. It’s my turn.”