Chapter 53 Zeth
Zeth
I haven’t found anywhere else to sleep. I really, really should, but I haven’t. I’m waiting for her when she comes back from her pajama party with Jacob’s girls. Her eyes grow round when she sees me sitting at the small table by the window, cleaning the Desert Eagle.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. She’s wearing some of the heaviest makeup I’ve ever seen. She’s got that smoky look thing going on with her eyes, which makes them pop like crazy.
“Same thing you’ve been doing, I presume? Preparing for tomorrow night.”
“You’re bringing the gun?”
“Fuck yeah. And whatever else I can use to kill a man.”
“Ahh, well, Jacob better watch his silverware, then.”
“The silverware’s safe. I’ll use my bare hands if things get that bad.”
A flash of concern transforms Sloane’s face. “Are you expecting it to get that bad?”
“No. Maybe.” I snap the action of the gun home.
“Better to be safe than sorry. Did you see your sister?” This is a dangerous question.
I can’t tell by looking at her what’s gone down at the other house.
I’m assuming if it had gone badly, she’d be bawling her eyes out, but with Sloane you never know.
She’s far more complex than other women.
Far more intelligent. And far more fucking confusing.
Sloane comes and sits at the table opposite me. The cloud of perfume that follows her is enough to make my eyes water. No surprises there, though. Jacob’s girls are heavy handed with everything. Makeup, tans, tits, the whole nine yards.
“She wasn’t there,” Sloane informs me. “She’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, in time for the party.”
“Oh.” That’s not great, but not terrible either. Our plan will still work. Sloane looks troubled, though. “What’s up?”
She runs her thumb across her lower lip, staring at me. I’m about to tell her she’s making me really fucking uncomfortable, when I realize no girl has ever made me feel fucking uncomfortable. I’m damned if I’m gonna admit something like that to her.
“I’ve been thinking about something. And I don’t want you to get mad.”
Well, that is a fucking promising opening to a conversation. I sit back in the chair, putting the gun down on the table. She glances at it, and then takes a deep breath. “I want to know if you’re clean.”
“Wha—if I’m clean?”
“Yeah.” She shifts uncomfortably. “Y’know. We’ve had unprotected sex, and I want to know that you’ve not given me some disgusting, life-threatening disease. You’ve slept with all these women, and—”
“Whoa, what the fuck?” I’m replaying the last words to come out of her mouth, trying to process them. “I’ve slept with all what women?”
Small knots of muscle jump in her jaw as she clenches down. I’ve made her angry, but then so fucking what? She’s made me angry, too. Her eyes are blazing when she says, “I thought you were always honest with me. You can’t tell me you haven’t slept with sex workers before.”
“I have slept with a lot of women, Sloane. But I’ve never paid for sex.
” She lets out a snort that says she doesn’t believe me.
“I have nothing against it, Sloane. It’s an honest fucking trade.
Paying for sex is not something that attracts me, though.
At all. Everyone I’ve ever slept with has done so because they wanted to. Yourself included.”
My temperature’s on the rise, but so is Sloane’s. Her cheeks have turned a bright red. “Oh, really? So I lost my virginity in a hotel room in the dark to a complete fucking stranger because I wanted to?”
“You—” I bite back what I really want to say.
Fuck! That night. It’s gonna haunt us for the rest of fucking time.
“I bid on you to save you from someone who would have really fucked you up. And Eli told me you were experienced. He told me you were into kink. I thought I was doing you a favor, Sloane. I hate that I took your fucking virginity, I really fucking do. I’m sorry for that at least. But I did not force you, and I did not pay you. ”
“No. But Eli was supposed to pay me, wasn’t he? He was supposed to tell me where my sister was. That was the payment, but then you killed him before he could do it. So you’re right. I guess I wasn’t compensated for bleeding for you.”
She jumps up from the table, shaking with rage, and I follow suit, taking hold of her arm.
She spins and slaps me. I let her have this one.
I deserve it. I probably deserve a whole lot more from her.
I embrace the sting, waiting. Has she got more in her?
Doesn’t look like it. She just stands there, shaking.
“I’d have found Alexis a lot sooner if you hadn’t interfered, Zeth,” she hisses.
“Wh—wait. You’re blaming me for the fact that she’s been stuck here all this time? You wouldn’t have found her. Eli didn’t have any information to give you, Sloane.”
“Bullshit! I went into that office. I found him sitting there with a goddamn letter opener sticking out of his chest. I found the file he had on Alexis! It was right there, in his filing cabinet. Except you’d taken all of the information out of it, hadn’t you!! Why? Why did you do that?”
I’m trying my best here, but she is not making this easy. They taught anger management techniques in Chino, but I was too pissed off to pay attention. Fuck it. She wants to rehash this? Let’s go.
“That file didn’t contain a single thing about Alexis, Sloane. It was all you. Eli had all your personal details in there. He had photos of you at work, in your car. At home.” I wait, letting that hang in the air a second, so she can fully comprehend the implications of the information.
“Me? What do you mean, photos of me at home?”
“I mean photos of you in the shower, in bed, walking around naked. He had video files of you fucking touching yourself, Sloane.”
“What?”
“I went there to get everything he had on Alexis, but he just laughed. Said he’d tricked you.
That he’d heard on the grapevine a dark-haired girl had been taken by bikers, and she was working for them now, but that was it.
And he wasn’t even gonna tell you that much.
He was gonna feed you some shitty line that would end up being a dead-end lead, and you would have had to go back to him again for more information.
And guess fucking what? You would have had to fuck three guys to get that fake piece of info.
And on and on it would have gone. Around and around we go.
And then I saw the other files on the other girls he had in his office. Did you bother looking at those?”
“Yes! I—” She stops, though. All her fury is gone. She stares at the floor, tears trembling on the tips of her eyelashes, while her brain works overtime. “I saw them. I looked through a few. They were all…” She swallows hard. “They were all normal. Regular cases. Adulterers and broken bail bonds.”
It’s my turn to shake my head now. “No, you didn’t see the files.
because I took them, too. I took all of them.
He was doing the same thing to at least twelve other women, pulling their strings, puppeting every one of them.
I destroyed the photos, the thumb drives, the discs, everything.
And you’re right, I did kill Eli. I killed him because he stabbed me first. Here.
You want fucking proof ?” I tear my shirt over my head, twisting so she can see the two inches of scar tissue where Eli Horowitz stuck me in the side with his stupid fucking letter opener.
I mean, what kind of PI doesn’t have a proper fucking knife? Or a gun, come to think of it?
“Zeth…” She shakes as her fingers hover over the scar, but she doesn’t touch me. Ohhh, no, no, no, this isn’t what she wants to hear. She pulls her hand back, shaking her head. “You had those scars before. In the hotel. I felt them.”
“I had these scars.” I point to the three jagged marks across my torso—some of my many souvenirs from Chino. “But this was after I saw you at the hotel.”
“Oh my God.” She backs away, as if the truth won’t find her on the other side of the fucking room. When she backs into the bed, she sits down heavily on the mattress, shaking her head. “I had no idea.” She covers her mouth, breathing noisily through her fingers.
“And in response to your earlier question, Sloane, I am clean. I’ve only ever slept with you without using protection. I figured it was safe, since I’m the only guy you’ve been with. But still. I needed a good STD accusation to really round off this super shitty day. So fuck you very much.”
If I could, I’d storm out and tear the goddamn door off its hinges as I went.
I’ve been bailing a lot recently, though, and we can’t afford to keep yelling at each other here.
Jacob’s patience is paper-thin already. He’ll gladly kill me if we keep disturbing the peace.
Instead, I turn my back on her, pressing the heels of my palms into my eye sockets, and take a breath.
It would be so unwise to go to war with her, but fuck, am I armed and ready. She—
Her hand rests lightly on my back. I didn’t hear her coming. “Why did you do all of that?”
“Which part?” I snap.
“All of it. Why intervene in the first place? How did you know Eli was… was selling me?”
It’s easier to answer these questions with my back to her.
Easier but not easy. “My uncle, Carl.” That’s how a lot of stories in my life have begun.
With him. “When my parents died, Carl took me in. He was a piece of shit. Used to beat me. He wasn’t all bad, though.
He’d wait long enough for me to heal from the last one before laying into me again.
And he hardly ever broke bones. That was a small mercy, I guess.
Things got real bad when I was about eight.
He started drinking more. Whatever. So I learned how to distance myself from it all.
Carl was an open wound that wouldn’t fucking heal.
I didn’t want whatever he had infecting me, so I shut it down.
All of it. Until nothing he did affected me anymore.
“Anyway. The fucker was murdered three years ago. Someone cut him up real fucking good. I had to go to the hospital to ID him, and that’s when I saw you.
You were waiting for an elevator. I was just sitting there, soaking it all in.
That he was dead. That I wouldn’t ever have to think about him anymore.
And you… I took one look at you, and I saw that we were the same.
Shut down. Closed off. You were walking around, acting and sounding just like everyone else, but you weren’t.
You’d retreated inside. And I…” God damn it, this fucking sucks.
Every word is a razor blade flaying my throat as I speak it into existence.
Now’s about the time I’d normally try to put my fist through a wall.
The pain won’t temper the chaos this time, though.
Again, something warm touches my back. and I exhale shakily, looking up at the ceiling. It’s her lips. She’s kissing me, and it feels so fucking good. She freezes, as though waiting for me to walk away. When I don’t, she steps into me, her chest flush with my back, and hugs me from behind.
Shit, fuck, motherfucking bastard. Can this get any more difficult?
I grind my teeth, taking a beat until I’m ready to continue.
“And… I needed to know what had hurt you so bad, Sloane. So I made up my mind to find out. Didn’t take long.
And then Michael followed you when you went to see Eli that first time. And now here we are.”
This is going to scare the shit out of her. And it should. I fucking watched her like a psychopath and had Michael follow her. I brace for the fireworks, but Sloane just leans her forehead against my back, her shallow, warm breath fanning across my skin.
Nothing?
Seriously?
The only person who knows anything about this is Michael, and he got only the raw instructions: Follow the girl. Find out what she’s doing. Don’t let her see you. That kind of thing. I never told him why, and he never asked.
Eventually, Sloane stops breathing, like she’s concentrating very hard. And then…
“How? How can you be so good and so dangerous at the same time, Zeth? You’re a contradiction.”
Laughter boils up and out of my throat before I can stop it. “There’s nothing good about me. I watched you. I followed you. I worked out what made you tick. I made plans to infiltrate your life and manipulate you just like Eli did. I’m no better than he was.”
Her forehead rolls left to right as she shakes her head. “You are. You’re better than you think. You outbid someone because you were worried he’d hurt me. You emptied all of those files. Protected all those women—”
“You’re projecting what you want—”
“Why don’t you want to admit it? You can’t, can you? Not even to yourself.”
There are a lot of things I can’t admit to myself.
A lot. But being good isn’t one of them.
I know what kind of man I am. I see the monster staring back at me when I look in the mirror.
“Just don’t get your hopes up, Sloane. I’m not waiting to be redeemed.
There’s nothing here for you to try and fix. ”
Women never want to hear the truth. They always think they can change you. Iron out the creases in your screwed-up life. Waltz in and light you up so brilliantly that they chase away the shadows.
But ever so quietly, Sloane whispers, “I don’t want to fix you. But… I would like to try and understand you.”
Fuck, she’s going to need a crystal ball if she wants to accomplish that. I don’t even understand me. This is awkward as hell. I try not to feel her heat behind me. I close my eyes and try not to feel healed because it.
“Zeth?”
“Mm?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
Oh, here we go. The needing part. I need a stiff drink. “What?”
“Turn around and put your arms around me.”
The thing about Sloane is, she never says what I think she’s going to say.
She wants me to hold her, but holding someone in your arms, the way she’s holding me?
That isn’t about sex. That’s about something else, and I’m not sure I have it to give.
I implied the exact opposite this morning.
I know how it sounded. You’re the girl who’s too blind to see what’s standing right in front of her.
Well, she’s throwing it right back at me now, isn’t she?
She’s telling me she does see, and she wants it.
I should have listened to the voice in my head hissing at me to shut up and done precisely that.
I reel off every curse word I can think of, and Sloane patiently waits.
She doesn’t panic.
Doesn’t run.
She’s braver than I give her credit for. Far braver than me. So I turn, and I put my arms around her, and I hold her.