Chapter 22
Jed
Irun through the prison, looking for something important, but I can’t remember what. All the doors and gates gape open, and signs of struggle are everywhere. Blood smears and splatters on the walls, bullet holes. Something terrible happened here.
I hear water running in the bathroom as I get closer. It roars in my ears like an oncoming train. The floor is flooded. Tinted with pink. I wade through it, ankle deep, running, splashing. The bathroom seems endless. I finally find him curled up on the ground, covered in blood.
Mickey’s eyes open as I approach. He lifts his head, trying to speak, but just a garbled cawing sound comes out.
I fall to my knees as he gestures toward his face, the finger spiraling. Then he makes a frustrated gesture with his hand, one that says, “don’t you understand me yet? What are you, thick?” He points at his face again. And again.
Now he was holding a blank plastic mask like the one Boer had used.
The roar of the falling water gets louder, like a massive waterfall.
It’s getting deeper, and not pink anymore.
Red. A lake of blood, heaving waves, lifting Mickey’s body, sweeping him away.
Surging around my knees, my thighs. Sucking and pulling at me.
The mask floats on the surface, bobbing and swaying.
I turn, and see a masked Boer blocking the bathroom door.
He holds Freya in front of himself like a shield, one hand between her legs, a knife to her throat, the one I threw at him.
Freya is dressed like Sandee, her tight sweater stained with blood, her skirt rucked up over Boer’s hand.
Her eyes are full of terror. Boer is laughing.
Boer pulls off his mask. Underneath, he has no face. Just a bloody skull, exposed muscles and tendons. Round, lidless eyes, a grinning, lipless mouth, wide open and still laughing, as the knife slashes Freya’s throat. Blood spurts—
I jolted bolt upright with a sharp gasp, heart galloping. Fuck.
Freya sat up next to me. “What?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Bad dream,” I said. “Routine for me. All those combat tours. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”
She didn’t move, just put her hand on my arm. She could feel me vibrating from the adrenaline. “Jed,” she said softly. “Please.”
“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said. “Just let me be. Go to sleep.”
“Tell me the dream,” she insisted.
“Why? So both of us can be creeped out?”
She made an impatient sound. “I’m creeped out already, so I really don’t think your bad dream is going to move the dial. A burden shared is a burden halved, right?”
“No. It’s a burden doubled, and I don’t see the point.”
She sighed in frustration. “Jed, just let me in.”
“It’s violent,” I said. “Blood and gore. You don’t need to hear it.”
“Yeah? Let’s have it. I’m down for some gore.
” She repositioned herself so she was sitting crosslegged, facing me, tugging the blankets around her.
I got a swift glimpse of her nipples peeking over the quilt.
Just enough light filtered in from the kitchen to show the contours of her breasts, and the flinty resolve in her eyes.
It was a piss poor idea to let my bleak, blood-soaked dreams out of the the box where I hid them. Plus, she got her throat slit at the end of it. Real buzzkill, that detail.
“You won’t like it,” I told her. “It doesn’t end well for you.”
“Duly noted,” she said. “I’m not afraid of a silly old dream. Tell me.”
Aw, what the fuck. Be it on her head. “It started out in prison,” I said. “With Mickey, dying in the bathroom.”
Freya put her hand on my hand, and I almost jumped, pulling away. The toxic violence I’d seen could transmit to her, like electricity. “He wasn’t supposed to talk to me, so they cut out his tongue. To make a point. Among other parts.”
I felt her flinch, just barely. “God,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” She grabbed my hand again and squeezed it, not letting me pull away. “Tell me the rest of it.”
So I did. The whole disjointed mess came out.
Mickey, on the floor, dying. Making that gesture with his fingers, pulling on Boer’s mask, but I’m just too fucking thick to get the message.
The tidal wave of blood. Boer blocking the door with a knife to her throat.
The mask coming off of Boer’s naked skull before he slits her throat.
All of it. It was a relief to let it out.
It immediately lost some of its power and dread.
Afterward, Freya just sat for a long time. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking in the dim light. She looked like a statue. Calm, remote, thoughtful. She wasn’t letting go of her grip on my hand, and I didn’t want her to.
Then she spoke up. “The part with Mickey was just like you remembered it in real life?”
“Except for the waves of blood, and the mask,” I said. “But in real life, he wrote a name on the wall. In his own blood. Joe Grifo, and then the letters O and R.”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not a clue. Now let’s forget I said anything and go back to—”
“Shhh. I’m working it out. Don’t bug me.”
“It’s just a dream, Freya,” I said. “Dreams are irrational. It’s just the brain vomiting out the stuff it can’t process.”
“Dreams can be garbage, yes. But they can also be high-level problem solving on a subconscious level,” Freya said. “Some of mine have been. Don’t discount them right away. Let’s analyze this one. Think about the elements of the dream.”
Shit. So she was going to fuck around with my subconscious mind, too? She was unzipping stuff, poking around inside where she had no goddanm business. “Let’s not and say we did,” I said grimly.
But there was no stopping this woman. “There’s Mickey, making that gesture toward his face, for one—”
“He did that because they cut his tongue out. Nothing to analyze there.”
“Indulge me, Jed.” Her voice was gentle, but stern. “There’s the mask, with Boer and Mickey both. Boer’s face under the mask, with no skin. That strikes me as an important—”
“It strikes me as disgusting,” I said. “I think my mind added that in just for cheap shock value. Standard nightmare bullshit theatrics.”
“Don’t be bad-tempered. Did you see Boer’s eyes yesterday?”
I squinted at her. “Freya. He was wearing a mask. Remember?”
“I mean, through the eyeholes, Jed,” she said, impatiently.
“To be honest, I was more focused on his trigger finger. He was holding a fucking gun on you, so excuse me for being distracted.”
Freya snorted under her breath. “Fine. So yesterday, when he nabbed me, I happened to notice the skin around his eyes, through the eyeholes of the mask.”
“Well, I didn’t, so clue me in. What about it?”
“It looked swollen, kind of purple,” she said. “His eyes looked bloodshot.”
“Maybe he has insomnia. Or he drinks. Who the fuck knows.”
Freya shook her head. “It looked like he’d been punched in both eyes.”
Huh. Interesting. “Where are you going with this, Freya?”
“Nowhere yet. I’m just groping. Let me bat it around for a while. No bad ideas in brainstorming, remember?”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“It would be, if you would play along,” she said, her voice sharp. “What was Mickey supposed to give you when you got out? A flash drive, you said?”
“Yeah. Mickey was an accountant for this mob boss in Vegas, Adriani. Boer partnered with him, so Mickey gathered some dirt on him. Info about his new identity, his money, things that would be useful for finding Boer, and putting him in jail. There was someone on the outside who was holding it for him.”
“But Mickey didn’t tell you who,” she said.
I shook my head. “He didn’t have a chance,” I said bleakly.
“Maybe he did,” she said.
I stopped breathing for a moment. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Well, he kept gesturing toward his face, right? And there’s the mask. Boer had a mask. In the dream, Boer’s face had no skin. It’s all about the face.”
“I wouldn’t wonder about that. His tongue was cut out,” I said.
She made an impatient sound. “Think about it. I had a friend who had her eyes done, and she had swollen, bruised eyes for weeks afterward. Just like Boer’s eyes.
What’s the point of wearing a mask? You know who he is, what he looks like.
Unless he’s wearing his mask to hide his new face. And Mickey knew he would be.”
Sudden excitement buzzed inside me. “Holy shit,” I said.
“Maybe Mickey tried to tell you who has that flash drive, after all,” she said. “Maybe it’s Boer’s surgeon. And maybe that’s Joe Grifo. Where was Mickey based before prison?”
“Portland,” I said. “Oregon. He had a place there. Adriani, the mob boss, was based in Las Vegas, but Mickey went home to Portland whenever he could.”
“Oregon,” she said. “That explains the OR. Try cross-referencing exclusive, high end cosmetic surgeons named Joseph Grifo. Start in Oregon.”
I slid out of bed and went straight to the laptop in the living room, stark naked.
I ran a search, and found him on the first page.
Madden, Grifo, Clark, and Burns, a cosmetic surgery practice in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Grifo’s first name was Joseph. There were other Grifo doctors, a James, an Angelo, a Giovanni, a Micheal, all of them with different specialties.
But a Joe Grifo, in Oregon, in cosmetic surgery…
that search yielded just one, single guy.
Well, fuck me.
Freya leaned over my shoulder, gorgeously smooth and warm and fragrant. “Did you find him?”
“I found someone,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it’s him.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “It’s a place to start.
A door to knock on. Hey, look at that. Madden, Grifo, Clark and Burns are participating in the organization fundraising gala for the New Day, New Hope Foundation, a charitable foundation which seeks to improve the lives of individuals in need of reconstructive surgery, blah blah.
That’s happening in just a couple of days.
Interesting. I wonder if our guy will be there. ”
In retrospect, it looked so obvious, I wish I’d figured it out for myself. But no, it had to be handed to me on a platter by a hot naked girl. Shane and Ethan always dazzled me with their big brains, too, but the sexy naked girl element gave it a special twist.
But fuck it. We couldn’t all be rocket scientists. There was a place for everyone in the grand scheme of things. The world needed its grunting meatheads, too.
Like Freya had needed me today. I had made myself useful, beyond a doubt.
She gave me that incandescent Sandee smile, and tossed up her mop of wild, tousled hair, stretching for me, arching, putting on a show.
Then cupped her own breasts, sliding her fingertips down, down, down.
“I think, Jed, that our work here is done for now,” she said, her voice silky.
“And now you should come with me into the bedroom and make up for being a jerk in that special way only you can.”
She turned around and sashayed back toward the bedroom, hips swaying.
Wow. This woman was something else. Figuring out my next move by parsing my stress nightmares? She had superpowers. Like a sexy, dangerous sorceress.
And that didn’t dampen down my hard-on. Oh, no. On the contrary.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for me. I walked in and stood there, waiting for a cue. Something unmistakable, like grabbing my dick.
She did me one better, grabbing my ass with one hand, my cock with the other, sucking me tenderly into her mouth.
I gasped at the intense sensation. Slow, teasing little licks and trills and swirls, taking me deeper into that hot well, caressing me with her clever tongue.
She clamped her fingers around the base of my cock, squeezing tenderly while she took me in. A slow, pulsing rhythm.
I’ve never not liked a blowjob. What wasn’t to like? But this was next level. Another universe. Life-changing, mind blowing, brain melting. I wanted to fuse with her, kiss her, fuck her. Feel her come around my dick, bathing me with her balm.
But it was so hard to stop this perfection. Only the thundering imminent orgasm made me draw back. I wanted to be inside her when I came.
I reached down, beyond speech, nudging and maneuvering her until she scooted back onto the bed, and opened her legs, holding up her arms to me.
My chest expanded, like a supernova as I entered her. So sweet and yielding, bathing me with her hot lube at every stroke. Staring at each other. I’d never felt so completely seen, known. It felt incredible.
We clutched each other, heaving and crying out in that frantic crescendo, and then the energy blasted me open from the inside. Light was flooding into the ruins.
I was open to the brilliant, endless sky.
After my heart calmed down and I came to my senses, fear came flooding back.
This was stupid. The more attached to her I got, the more dangerous it was for both of us. I’m doubling my load and cutting my effectiveness in half. Or worse.
I couldn’t wallow in all the tender fucking feelings if I wanted Freya to survive.
I admired her courage and nerve, but my first priority was keeping her safe, not indulging her ego.
I had to pass her over to the Drakes and have them deliver her to Ethan.
Protecting and controlling her should be her brother’s problem. Not mine.
I was getting swept up into the stratosphere. Which was great while I was riding the giddy updraft, but I knew it couldn’t last. Gravity always had its way in the end.
And it was a long, long way back down.