SIXTEEN
Luce
"What can I say, Larry?" I said, flipping the cutting board around in my hands. The thing truly was a work of art, a mix of different grains all expertly put together into a lovely pattern.
See, the only problem with it was it was so full of arsenic that the tests turned a brighter shade of orange than the chart of levels even showed.
"I don't like men who try to poison women." He was tied up in his barn. Normally, I didn't like to do off-site work. It was messy. It was harder to clean up evidence. But I wasn't too fond of carting people across state lines and breaking federal laws either. "I mean, I think that is just a general rule. No one likes men who hurt women. It's cheap. It's cowardly. It suggests your cock is about as impressive as a pencil. But anyway, I digress. I really, really don't fucking like men who try to poison my woman," I said, spinning around, swinging the giant piece of cutting board, slamming it into the side of the man's head.
I wasn't one for torture.
But what could I say?
The man wouldn't fess up.
I needed him to tell me he did it.
And I needed to know why.
Because no matter how much research I did the night before after Evan passed out and I got an hour or two, I could not figure out why. So he was friends with Alejandro. So she was his adoptive daughter. So... what?
Evan wasn't Larry's type.
He only liked short, plump, blonde-haired women.
He never deviated.
So he couldn't have been pissed that Alejandro never let him get on his daughter.
What the hell was the motive then?
"Men turning on other men because of some fucking split-tail," he cursed, spitting blood onto the hay on the ground.
Split-tail.
What the fuck?
Who still used phrases like that?
What a backward fuck.
"Christ," I growled, shaking my head. "Why poison the fucking cutting board? What did Evan ever do to you?"
"Made a bitch out of that man," he said, shaking his head.
"Out of Alejandro?" I asked, squinting at him. "He raped women in every country he visited even after raping Evan's mother and kidnapping her daughter."
"The things that man did before her..."
Ugh.
Shit.
I wanted to rip his heart out of his chest and squeeze the life out of it.
He wasn't exactly wrong.
While I couldn't find any actual evidence online, as it predated most of the dark web, there were stories attributed to a man who fit Alejandro's descriptions. Ritualistic, sadistic rapes. Long, drawn-out torture that left women half-dead and usually fully signed-out mentally.
"You know, he forced me to agree to take care of her if anything happened to him."
"Take care of her didn't mean fucking kill her, dipshit."
"Lots of interpretations of that phrase, asshole."
"Why arsenic? Why not just kill her when she came to pick up her shit? Oh," I said, curling my lip.
Yeah.
For most shitheads like Larry, the act of murder was sexual. The rape itself was power. The kill was what got their cocks hard. The one woman he was sent away for, he apparently sodomized with an unknown object. I bet my life on him jerking off on the corpses before he buried them. He didn't want to kill Evan with his hands because she wasn't his type.
Fucking blessing, I guess.
"The fuck could it matter? He's dead. She's moved on. Why kill her now? Why not ten years ago?" He looked away, refusing to answer.
I hated the fucks like him, the ones that made me play guessing games, read their body language, figure it all out myself.
"What? Because Alejandro would see the signs in her? Eventually trace it back to you?" I sighed out a breath. "Kinda a shame that he didn't get to do the honors. I hated that twisted fuck, but he would have made this truly excruciating for you."
"What? And you're not?"
"Normally, I am pretty cut and dry with the killing. A bag over the head. A knife across the throat. Simple, really. See, I'm not a sick fuck who gets off on hurting someone like some people. I just want to rid the world of sick fucks such as yourself. Usually, I even give you a choice. You can go to the cops or die."
"But I'm not getting that choice."
"Nah. I mean, what, so you can sit in protective custody until you die? Can't be that far off. You're what? A good one-fifty overweight. You gotta have high blood pressure, cholesterol, and I hate to think what your arteries look like. Your ankles and calves are the size of fucking watermelons with water retention. Renal failure. You don't have that long left anyway. And while it might be kinda poetic for you to be stuck in a cell breathing in air that smells like shit all the time and eating the government food you hate so much, I'm afraid you aren't going to get to choose that."
"Because that bitch belongs to you."
I sighed out a breath. "Hate to break it to you, but this is America. In the twenty-first century. No one belongs to anyone anymore. But as long as she doesn't get sick of me, yeah, I'm with her. And even if she does get sick of me, I still give a shit about her. See, that's how normal, healthy relationships work. I know the concept is foreign to you."
"Right, I'm supposed to take advice from some skinny little computer hacker."
Christ.
He was a dick.
His past of abuse, and wanting to kill Evan aside, I wanted to take him out. Just for being a miserable human being. Thank God he lived on his giant farm and didn't often bother people with his terrible personality.
"So now what, little shit?" he asked, completely unperturbed by the fact that he was tied up and I obviously had all the power.
I had a feeling it was a front, though.
He was a man used to having the power.
Having it taken away must have been eating him up inside.
"I should take this shit," I said, reaching for the bottle of herbicide so rank with arsenic that I was worried about even touching the container. He used that along with a discontinued (because of the arsenic level) wood preservative on Evan's cutting board. "And force it down your throat. Every last drop. Then you could slowly, and painfully, see what you would have eventually done to Evan. But, I don't want your ass taking up any more of this air. So... we'll do this the quick way."
Well, not totally quick.
Slitting his throat would have been the fastest route.
But it was also the messiest.
I was fully aware we were in a barn full of hay and equipment. The clean up would be labor intensive and frustrating, to say the least, if I got blood everywhere.
So the bag it was.
And it wasn't quick.
And it was pretty terrifying not to be able to breathe.
But I had a feeling this fuck suffocated the women he victimized, so hey, it was a fitting end. It was good for him to see the torment of not being able to breathe that they went through in their final moments before death.
Three of them.
That was how long it took someone to die.
Granted, they would pass out within twenty seconds. But twenty seconds of not being able to catch your breath was pretty fucking terrifying.
A fitting end, I felt.
I didn't like burying bodies.
I did it out of necessity back in Brazil, but it created a much higher likelihood of getting caught than, say, melting the body completely and leaving no trace it ever existed behind.
That being said, the man owned like thirty acres.
Ten of them were plots for gardening.
Mr. Manson would become, in the truest form of the word, fertilizer.
Several hours later, after washing the body thoroughly, I dragged him out to his garden bed, digging a hole deep enough to bury three bodies, dropping him in, covering him back up, then fucking planting some green beans on top of him. They would be flourishing in a few weeks. The ground wouldn't look overturned.
I took myself back to the barn, scooping up all the hay in the general area where I had been with Larry, and bringing it back into his house with me, washing both our sets of clothes with bleach, drying them, then burning them slowly, along with the hay, in his fireplace until there was nothing but ash left.
I redressed.
I made my way back to the old dirt road on the side of his property where I had some clunker of a car I bought on a song back in Jersey. I traded the real ones with fake plates to keep it from tracing back to me in any way shape or form.
I climbed in, and drove that fucker all the way back to Navesink Bank, stopping only twice for gas, one of those times calling Larry's local police department to anonymously say I was worried because I hadn't seen him in a while. Normally, I'd keep the cops as far away from a crime scene as possible, but he had animals. The ones grazing in the field with their own stream would be fine. The chickens and horses... not so much.
I might have done a lot of dark things in my life, but it took a real monster to kill animals for reasons other than food or mercy.
I stopped at a wash-your-own car place, spending over an hour making sure I got every speck of Mississippi off of it, then returned it to its hiding spot, and made my way back to Evan's on foot.
It was only four days.
But it felt like a lifetime.
And every single time I thought of her in the interim, there it was again - that warm, swelling sensation in the chest.
It only seemed to intensify as I walked up the path to her front door, raising my hand to knock, wondering if she would be pissed, or would understand.
What the hell was I even supposed to say when she...
"Barrett?" I asked, jolting straighter at seeing him inside her house. "The fuck are you doing here?"
"Diego," he said in a very 'duh, you idiot' kind of way as he moved to the side to let me pass.
"You don't call, you don't write, you could have been dead in a ditch somewhere..." Evan said casually as she noticed me step in, giving me a smile as she walked plates toward the dining table. "Did I miss any?"
"Maybe something about candy from strangers, kidnapping, and, oh, the state of my underwear."
"The... what?" she choked out on a laugh.
"Guess that's an American thing, huh?" I asked, looking over at Barrett.
When Evan's gaze went there, Barrett shrugged. "We were all raised to make sure we had on clean underwear in case we got into a car accident."
"Ah... why would that matter?" she asked, squinting.
"Because the doctor and nurses might see it," Barrett supplied as Diego let out an epic squawk that made me and even Evan wince, but Barrett was unmoved as he raised a hand for the bird to fly onto.
"That's idiotic," Ev concluded, shaking her head. "Alright, well, are you going to say hi or what?"
A smile tugged at my lips as I crossed the room to her, the warm and swelling thing so intense that it almost made it hard to breathe.
Her face looked better. The cut on the side of her head was mostly sealed, red and angry, surrounded by a smattering of blue and purple bruises still, but healing. The split on her lip was gone, probably already scabbed and impatiently pulled off by a self-conscious Evan. She didn't look quite so broken anymore.
"Hi," I said, hands sliding around her lower back, pulling her hips flush with mine, even with an audience, feeling my own desire start to course through me. "How was your hunting trip?"
"Successful."
"You don't have to talk in code," Barrett told us casually, walking Diego over to a tree stand and putting him down. "I swept the place."
"Ah, you did what now?" Ev asked, pulling back so she could look around me.
"I swept the place."
"For what?" Ev asked, clearly out of the loop.
"Bugs. What else?"
"Like termites or... oh," she mumbled a little self-consciously as I chuckled, pulling her in, and kissing her temple. "Like recording devices. Why would you sweep my house?"
"Because he's here," I supplied with a shrug. "Barrett likes to make sure nothing gets overheard."
It's one of the most appealing traits of his, his carefulness. Because, let's face it, private investigators didn't always work perfectly inside the law. Barrett especially, thanks to some pretty impressive hacking skills that aired on the side of very illegal, and setting up his operation literally across the street from the Navesink Bank Police Department, wanted to make sure none of his skills ever came back to bite him in the ass.
"Just make yourself at home, man," I said, lips tipped up, but brows furrowed as Barrett moved around the kitchen getting utensils and napkins and then going into the fridge for drinks.
Evan was trying to keep her lips from smiling, but losing the battle. "Excuse us for a minute, Barrett," she said, reaching down to grab my hand, and pull me down the hall into the bedroom.
"One hacker slides out, another slides right in," I teased, watching as she ran her hand through her hair, making the strands settle in a new configuration. It was a weird, small thing, but I had somehow missed it while I was gone.
"You were right," she declared, looking a mix of amused and dumbfounded.
"Well, I always like hearing that," I said with a chuckle as I reached down to pull off my hoodie. "But what was I right about this time?"
"He and Diego have like... bonded. And he drops by twice a day to see him."
I laughed at that, remembering saying they would likely have to share custody. Barrett never struck me as much of an animal person, but exceptions could apparently be made for one as smart as a parrot.
"Diego calls me właściciel now."
Polish.
I fucking knew it.
"The fuck does właściciel mean?"
"Owner," she supplied, shaking her head.
"What does he call Barrett then?" I asked, curious.
"Przyjaciel. Friend," she explained, still standing half a room away from me as I sat down on the edge of the bed.
"You mad at me?"
"What? No," she said, shaking her head. "I mean, a little heads-up would have been nice, but no."
"Then I can't figure out why you're still half a room away from me," I said carefully, not wanting to sound like I was demanding her to come over, wanting to know her genuine reaction.
"I just... I didn't know if maybe you needed a little... space. You know, like, after..."
"Doll, do you need space, you know, like, after?" I asked, trying to keep the mood light even though it was a somewhat heavy topic.
Because, while we hadn't done a whole helluva lot of talking about it, my so-called career was absolutely a factor. Her reaction to what I did was the biggest factor.
"Um... no. I don't think so."
"Alright. Well, I sure as fuck don't need space. In fact, I need as little space between us as is possible."
She ducked her head to the side, smiling coyly. "And by that you mean..."
"Take them off, or I rip them off," I agreed, already yanking my tee off my body.
She smiled then, seeming relieved, like she had maybe been as stressed as I was about how we would handle me coming in from a job, both of us knowing the shit I had just done.
But the fact of the matter was, Evan wasn't your typical woman. While she didn't know about the nasty shit Alejandro did to women, she was fully aware that he used his knowledge of poisons to main, torture, and kill men. She had always known that about him. But she had been able to compartmentalize that.
So maybe I had that sick fuck to thank for the fact that she could do the same with my work.
She reached for her shirt, dragging it up her body.
My cock was already hard and throbbing in my pants as I moved to stand and remove them, watching as her hands slid down to remove hers as well, leaving her in a simple black bra and pantie set, nothing overly sexy about it, but it was the hottest fucking thing I think I had ever seen.
"All of 'em, Ev," I demanded, reaching to drag my boxer briefs down, grabbing a condom out of my wallet in the process, then standing to watch as her hands slid behind her back to unclasp her bra, as the material loosened, then fell from her body, exposing the perfect swells of her breasts, her nipples already hardened points.
My hand moved down to close around my cock, stroking it a bit absentmindedly as she discarded the bra and moved her hands down her belly in a path to the waistband of her panties.
"Fucking killing me here," I growled as she teasingly ran her fingertips across the soft fabric, letting a finger peek inside, then back out. "Oh fuck it," I said, charging away from the bed, pressing her back against the wall, reaching between us to snag the material, then yanking hard.
Her eyes went wide, and her lips parted on a hiss as the tearing noise let her know I was making good on my promise.
I was too far gone too fast. My balls felt tight, and my cock was almost painful I was so turned on.
I didn't have time to waste.
My hand slid between her thighs, stroking up her slick pussy, and locating her clit, finding it swollen. "Fucking soaked."
She let out a shuddering breath, leaning forward into me, resting her forehead into my shoulder. "I missed you," she admitted, making more pre-cum bead on my cock.
I moved my hand, shifted my hips, and let my cock slide against her wet lips, feeling the tremble course through her, feeling a similar one seem to move through my insides. "Fucking missed you too, Ev."
I meant it in more ways than one.
I missed fucking her, being inside her, hearing her moans and whimpers, feeling her nails in my back, her breath on my skin. I fucking missed that, sure.
But I just plain missed her too.
It had almost felt wrong to be away after spending so much time with her.
Maybe that was irrational. I mean, I had only known her a couple of weeks. But that being said, we had spent days and nights together. We had stood in long lines at airports, watched movies on planes, rode in rickety buses, sweated like fucking animals on hikes, had meals, slept near each other, slept with each other. We shared every small detail about our lives with each other.
I had never been anywhere near as close to another person as I was to her.
So I missed that.
And I missed the way she slept like the dead, the way she smelled, the teasing or the genuine smiles, the sound of her laugh, the way she clung to me before sleep. I missed the stories she would tell about the places she had seen, so rich with intricate detail even after time would normally wash that away. I swear you could see the reds and purples and golds of the saris in India, smell the henna as they intricately temporarily tattooed her hands and feet. You could feel the unyielding sun on your back in the deserts of Africa. You could taste the ultra spicy foods she sampled in Mexico. You could hear the calls of the wild macaws in South America.
I fucking missed her.
And while I had no fucking idea how to feel about that fact, there was no changing it. It was just something to factor into daily life.
I wondered absently if maybe it would change my life, if maybe I wouldn't want to be away from her on the long stretches I sometimes needed for jobs.
But then she whimpered into my neck, and I snapped back to the present, feeling another rush of her wetness coating my cock.
I couldn't take anymore.
I needed to be inside her like I needed my next breath.
"Wait..." she said as I walked backward, pulling her with me toward the bed.
"What?" I asked, turning so she was the one with her back to the bed.
"Barrett is..."
"A grown ass man who knows that after I'm away for half a week, I am going to be fucking my woman as soon as I get back. But if you're worried, I guess you're gonna have to try to be quiet," I said with a wicked grin. "Key word there being try," I added as I grabbed her, turned her, and pushed her forward toward the bed, pressing her legs wide so I could move behind her, grabbing one side of her ass with my hand, and slapping the other hard. She let out a loud, throaty moan. "Yeah, guess that's gonna be a challenge for you, huh?" I asked as I slipped the condom on.
Before she could say anything else, I slammed my cock deep inside her, fighting the urge to come as she cried out loudly, trying to muffle the sound with her face in the sheets, but mostly failing.
There was no taking it slow, no making it last, no soft and sweet.
It had been too long for both of us.
We both needed release like we needed our next breath.
So we fucked.
Hard.
Fast.
Loud.
I think she completely forgot the existence of a man named Barrett Anderson, let alone that he was in the house.
Because by the time her pussy became a vice grip on my cock, telling me one more thrust would send her quivering around me, she was borderline screaming.
I reached between her thighs, pressing into her clit as I slammed home, knowing it was the thrust that would send us both spiraling into oblivion.
Even as I thought it, her voice caught, and her pussy started pulsating hard.
I pressed deeper still, coming with her name on my lips.
And as soon as she got her voice back, she called out mine too.
We both collapsed back onto the bed, struggling for breath. My arm reached out to drag her to me as her body shook gently with aftershocks.
"Yeah, definitely don't need any space," she said, snuggling in closer, sounding somehow both giddy and dreamy at the same time.
Thank fuck for that.
I didn't realize how much I needed to hear that until she said it. With certainty. And maybe with a little sex still in her voice.
"Glad to hear it," I said, giving her a squeeze, then rolling her off me, so I could stand.
"How are you walking right now?" she asked, making me turn back with a huge grin, my pride enjoying that little ego boost.
"Doll, I've been on the road all fucking day. I think you were putting food out when I got here."
"I see," she said, folding upward, and reaching for her clothes, smile wicked. "Fuck you and feed you. That's all you want from me, huh?"
"Not even fucking close," I said, giving her a hard look that made her eyes go a little dreamy before I grabbed my clothes and headed out to the bathroom.
"Where's Barrett?" Ev asked a minute later, meeting me in the hall, fully dressed except I could tell she forewent the bra. And, hey, anything that gave me easier access to her body was something I was all for. "And Diego?"
We moved out toward the dining room, finding Barrett's plate empty, but with a note sitting beside it.
For once, it was neither in Polish nor code.
Diego is positively traumatized by your 'reunion.'
We're at the office.
- B & D
"He keeps kidnapping my bird," she said, shaking her head as she went about loading up plates for the both of us.
"I think it's time to accept that Diego isn't yours anymore. You now share custody with Barrett."
"I would be annoyed, but he somehow taught him to only do his business on the tree stand. And that is a damn miracle. So he can steal him all he wants."
She moved to sit down next to me, reaching for her fork.
My hand caught hers, noticing she had finally taken off the chipped polish. My thumb ran over the bed of her nail, the lines still there from the mid-point and down, but the fresh growth was clear. "The rash was gone too," I added, meaning on her chest.
"I feel better too," she admitted, giving my hand a squeeze. "I don't think I even realized how poorly I was feeling until it stopped. I have you to thank for that," she said, eyes going soft. Then she did the damnedest fucking thing. She leaned over and rested against my arm, her head on my shoulder. "I have you to thank for a lot of things," she added.
"Ev..." I said, trying to shrug it off, trying to shake the weird discomfort I felt inside at receiving her gratitude.
"If it weren't for you, I'd still be following a serial rapist across the world. I wouldn't know he wasn't my father. I wouldn't have found my mother. I wouldn't know I was being poisoned."
"You would have figured that out eventually, Evan."
"What? When I had kidney failure or cancer? Geez, take a compliment."
I smiled at that, leaning the side of my head down on the top of hers.
"Alright, I'll take it," I agreed, feeling awkward.
"You know what?" she asked after a long silence.
"No, what?"
"I think I'll take you."