Roderick
She wanted to keep things professional.
I got that.
It was hard enough to be a woman in a male-dominated profession. She didn't want to be known as someone who would fall into bed with her contacts.
First, because she didn't want to be known for that.
Second, because it made things more dangerous for her in the long run.
She'd had too many run-ins already, too many marks on her body from deals that didn't go the way they should have gone.
I didn't want to be the cause of any more of those. Even if I wasn't someone who bragged about the women I slept with. Rumors had a way of spreading regardless.
So we could keep it professional.
Until the guns were found.
Then, well, then all bets were off.
I didn't know what the plan was after we met with the contact, if we were hanging back for the night, or heading back to the city.
What I did know was that if I spent another night in bed with her, and she ended up all over me again, yeah, I didn't know if I would be able to keep the promise I'd made to myself.
She'd wanted it as much as I had too, that was maybe the worst part. Knowing we wouldn't have stopped if my damn arm didn't get in the way.
Speaking of that, getting her to nurse me, yeah, that had been a moment.
A moment.
The kind that made a man think.
About things he didn't normally think about.
Like futures, like how nice it would be to always have someone to rely on to patch you up whenever you got hurt. How nice it would be to have that soft body draped over you every night. And how unpredictably comfortable all of it had been.
Maybe my mother wasn't so far off.
With all the pestering, all the assertions that I was the right age finally, that I would appreciate a good woman after so many one-night-stands.
Was it possible I had gotten my fill? Of all the meaningless sport sex? All the changing faces? All the bullshit small talk?
Maybe I wanted big talk.
Talk like Liv and I had in the car on the way down, talk about pasts, scars, fears, all the shit that made you who you were.
"I was bringing you something up," I told her when she appeared in the doorway of the dining room a few minutes later, her hair pulled back, dressed in jeans and a shapeless sweater. I wondered if it was an attempt to make herself less sexy for work. If that was the case, in my humble opinion at least, she failed royally.
"I'm not hungry," she declared, taking the coffee from me. "I'd rather get moving. I'll drive so you can eat."
She was in a mood.
Whether it was because she was in work-mode or because she was mad at me, I wasn't sure.
But I kept my thoughts to myself and attempted to eat while she drove, thankful that I had chosen egg and cheese on a hard roll instead of something that required a fork or knife.
"All this money," she mused as we pulled into the neighborhood half an hour later, the first words she had spoken since we'd left the hotel. "And all they have to do with it is buy stupid guns."
"Those stupid guns keep us in business," I reminded her.
"It's wasteful to own guns to keep them in a safe. It is even more wasteful to pay tens of thousands for anything when you could use that same money to give to a women's shelter or a soup kitchen or a group that helps runaways. It's ridiculous to me that anyone would spend so much money on something so useless."
"So, I am guessing your feelings on designer clothes..." I started, watching as she shot me an eye roll. "Gotcha."
"It was impossible for me to get off the streets if not for Eman. And I had to put up with a lot I never should have had to just to have a roof and food. Astrid, too, was on the streets. Might never have gotten off them if I hadn't happened upon her. It's the ultimate of frivolity to throw huge chunks of money that could help people at something just so you can brag about your red bottoms or the art on your wall."
"Or the guns in your safe."
"Exactly. Besides, this guy is single," she added, rolling her eyes as she parked the SUV out front of one of the many sprawling mini-mansions on the street. "This place has eight bedrooms. Eight. For one person. I will never understand why most of the wealth in the world is in the hands of the selfish few."
"Maybe that is how they got so much of it. By not giving a fuck about anyone else," I suggested, shrugging it off.
"I know it's nothing new. The upper crust has always just ignored the hands of begging, starving children. But I think this kinda shit is proof that we haven't made the great strides as a society that we think we have."
"At least he might have the gun we need," I suggested, wanting to help shake the bad mood she was wearing before we went in there to talk to the owner of the oversized house. We didn't need her snarling at gold-plated light switches and crystal chandeliers.
"Right," she agreed, wiggling her shoulders, trying to shake it off. "Let's get this over with."
With that, she cut the engine, went around to the backseat, stuffing the cash from the duffel bag and into her purse.
"Ready?" she asked as we stood at the bottom of the driveway that was lined with lit lights even though it was bright as could be out.
"Yep. Let's try to schmooze this guy, though, Liv. Rich guys probably don't take well to being snapped at like your street contacts."
"Fine. Then you do the talking. I will be your little obedient arm-candy," she said, nose scrunching up a bit.
"I don't think of you that way," I told her in a low voice as we walked up. "Try to remember that, no matter what I say in there."
The door was opened by a butler.
A butler.
Like the guy living here was of English royalty instead of a successful, retired corporate attorney.
"Mr. Hill will meet you in the library," he told us, leading us past the grand entrance where - as I had predicted - there had been a crystal chandelier and gold-fucking-plated light switches.
"Can we really call it a library when there are no books here?" Liv asked in a hushed tone when we were left alone in a room that smelled faintly of cigar smoke and leather.
The walls were lined in various hunting pictures, all old, likely worth thousands, and all hideous if you asked me.
But taste, it seemed, was relative.
It was a long couple of minutes of us standing there on his red, tan, and black oriental rug in front of his mahogany executive desk.
"This is that 'I am a rich guy who can keep everyone waiting' move," Liv suggested. And since he knew we were there, he had picked this time himself, I had to agree with her. It was a power play. A show of dominance.
I have what you want.
It was so long a wait that Liv jolted slightly when the door clicked open to reveal the butler for a short second before Mr. Hill himself came walking in.
I had to work to keep my lips from twitching, giving me away. Because something about overcompensating came to mind when we found that Mr. Hill was somewhere in his sixties. And shorter than half the Henchmen kids. Short and slight, appearing fragile almost in his expensive blue suit with his graying hair perfectly coiffed.
"You must be Liv," he said, greeting her first, closing both of his hands over hers and I could see her eyes dancing a bit over the fact that her hands were bigger. I could practically hear a quip from her head into my own about how she wondered if his fingers were long enough to even reach a trigger of the guns he collected. "And you, sir, must be..."
"Roderick," I supplied, shaking his hand, trying to not do so as forcefully as I might normally, not wanting to take away his dominance since his pride seemed to depend on it.
"Right. Well, Liv, Roderick, I hear you are in the market for a Gold Eagle."
"We are."
"Can I ask if it is for another collector, or some street thug to create chaos with?" he asked, walking away from us to move behind his desk, chin lifting to keep eye-contact.
"It's for a collector," I supplied.
"Good. Good. I hate the idea of one of these beauties being used to start some lowlife gang war."
My hip bumped slightly into Liv's, knowing she was struggling not to say something she knew she wasn't supposed to. Something about how the very purpose of guns were to gouge holes in people, not be eye-fucked.
"Of course," I agreed as the man went into his desk with a key, pulling out the gun that had been hard - though not nearly as hard as the other - to track down in the first place.
"Did you bring the money? Cash," he clarified ridiculously. As if any arms dealer in the world would show up with a goddamn personal check.
I motioned to Liv who shot me a hard look, but handed me her purse, holding it open for me so I could fish out the bank-wrapped stacks for him. Liv was paying twice what we would get from our collector for this. Sometimes doing shit in a backhanded way like stealing meant you paid a lot more steeply. Either literally or figuratively.
It was the first time I felt bad about it. Because while this amount of cash wouldn't even put a dent in Reign's spending money, it was likely something Liv was feeling. It likely meant there would be one extra job put onto her schedule in the coming months to make up for the loss.
"Seems to all be there," Mr. Hill - who hadn't given us his first name - said, nodding a bit as he stroked the muzzle of the gun before passing it across the desk toward me, seeming to expect me to do the same with the cash. As though not actually handing anything to each other somehow made this interaction any less illegal. "And you've never been here," he reminded us, making it take real self-control not to roll my eyes.
"Never been where?" I asked, shaking my head.
"Exactly. You will be seen out," he added, hitting a button on his desk that literally chimed into the rest of the house.
I had never been someone who begrudged someone their wealth, but I was starting to see Liv's point.
"That was rather... boring," Liv said, snorting as we walked down the driveway.
"Do all your drops end in violence of some sort?"
"No, but that was just so easy considering how hard it had been to find these guns the first time."
"We got lucky. Hopefully, we get lucky again with the last one."
"Yeah," she agreed, hopping back into the driver's seat. "I figured you got enough driving yesterday. I checked us out of the hotel with the TV before we left. Your shit is in the trunk."
Well, then.
No more having to worry about her crawling all over me in bed then, I guess.
The disappointment was something visceral as I sat there watching out the window for the first hour of the drive before Liv seemed to have enough of the silence.
"You know my whole story," she said, making my head swivel to look at her profile.
"Just about," I agreed, nodding.
"I know next to nothing about yours. And don't try to tell me I know a lot because I only know about The Henchmen. And we both know that isn't where it all started for you. If I were to place a bet, I would put my money on it all starting back in Puerto Rico."
"You wouldn't be wrong," I agreed, nodding.
"We have a long drive, Roderick. Indulge me."
Not many people had my story. And those who did - the guys in the club who needed to know like the prez and the guys who asked like Sugar and Cy and Virgin - only knew the outline of it all, not the shit that filled it in, all the guts of the story.
"It did all start in Puerto Rico. Before I was even in existence really."
My mother had been young and pretty. Gorgeous, actually. And really pretty girls in really poor neighborhoods didn't have a lot of choices. They could sell themselves out. They could try to catch the eye of someone from a better area. Or, well, they could belong to one of the few guys in the area who had money, who had a way to get them out of the slums and into a better situation.
Of course, it came with some stipulations. Like looking the other way to the guns and drugs and cash. Like treating battlefield wounds on their nice dining room tables. Like learning what furniture to hide behind if rivals came through with automatic weapons out the windows of their cars.
But my mother had no mother of her own and a father who spent more time in the local pubs than at home.
And she was starting to get too much attention from men she didn't want attention from.
She slept with a knife under her pillow.
And she needed an out.
So when a man named Benigno - Benny - started paying her attention, she let him. She let him wine and dine her, offer her safety, get her out of her childhood home.
She had been young, but not naive.
She knew who Benigno was, had seen him on the streets with his crew.
The Ñetas.
The biggest gang in Puerto Rico.
But Benigno said the right things, gave her the right things, and my ma, yeah, she needed a break in life, knowing nothing could break her spirit like a life of unending poverty.
So she did what any girl from the slums did when their only out was to attach themselves to dangerous men. She steeled her spine, her stomach, her heart.
She tried not to jump when she heard gunshots, go pale at the sight of blood, question why my father's eyes were so goddamn bloodshot all the time.
I came a couple years later, a mistake by all accounts though my mother would never admit that.
Pleasant surprise, that was what she'd told me.
But there couldn't have been many pleasant memories of that time because the minute he found out she was pregnant, that was when the beatings began.
Benny didn't want to be a father.
He just didn't want to wrap it up.
And he wanted the young, pretty, flat-bellied girl he had picked up out of the slums.
But he didn't kick her out.
Just fucked around on her, beat her when she was - in his mind - being a nag, demanding too much, when she couldn't keep me quiet when I was crying and he was sleeping off a hangover.
But my mother was stuck.
It was either stay in the creature comforts, giving me the things she had been denied all her life, or try to leave and raise me back in the slums.
Try being the operative word there though.
Because there was a good chance that a man like Benny wouldn't let his woman leave with his son. Even if he had no interest in them. It was a reputation thing. And Benny was working his way up in the ranks.
So my mom played her part.
She kept the house.
She turned a blind eye.
She let him get her with four more babies by the time I was ten.
By then, yeah, I was old enough to know. To understand. To feel completely helpless about it.
The screaming. The slamming. The begging. The crying. the mornings after when my mother's face was mottled with bruises and stained with blood, when she couldn't pick one of my sister's up because of a busted rib or wrist.
I knew what he was doing.
And I knew I had no way of stopping it.
Because, by then, I was in school.
And everyone knew who Benigno Flores was - the second-in-command of the Ñetas. That I was his kid. That being his kid meant no one could mess with me.
And if my father had the power to make other clueless ten-year-old boys keep a wide berth around me, I figured there was no way anyone could help us.
And they didn't.
And I had to watch my mom break a little day by day, week by week, year by year.
While my father lived the good life - making and blowing money, drinking, drugging, fucking, fighting.
She was home raising babies, keeping the house spotless, keeping his clothes cleaned, keeping meals on the stove for him three times a day even though he was rarely home to eat them because if she didn't do all those things, she would pay for it in blood and bruises.
I mean, he would always find other reasons to beat her, but she tiptoed around him, scrambled to remove any possible external reason for him to go at her.
"I'm sorry," Liv interrupted, reaching over to give my knee a reassuring squeeze. "You must have felt so powerless."
Powerless.
That was the right word.
Fucking powerless.
It didn't matter that when I turned thirteen, I sprouted up to his height, that I widened out to be bigger than he was.
He was still the second most powerful man in our area.
I had no chance of standing up to him.
But then a year passed us by.
Mom had a face without bruises for a whole three weeks in a row.
She felt it.
I felt it.
It was coming.
It had been too long.
She cooked and cleaned. I helped with the laundry, with the shopping, with the lawn maintenance.
But in being so busy, we had forgotten one thing.
Keeping the girls quiet.
At nine, Mia and Zoe knew how things in the house worked. Ana, at seven and Elisa at six, were smart, picking up on all the stress in the house, naturally marking their tones, playing quietly.
But Leala was only just halfway to four, was full of energy, crazy, buzzing around the house like a whirlwind.
And her idea of playing was something akin to screaming.
My mother and I had been used to it.
It was our normal day to day noise.
But my father had been sleeping one off.
I'd never forget the cry that morning. It was something I would hear in quiet moments on occasion still, all these years later.
It had been ear-piercing even to us, used to the screams of little girls.
The dish my mother had been washing slipped and shattered to the ground in slow motion as I turned fast enough to overturn the chair at my side, both of us rushing out to the living room, sure she had impaled herself on something, had severed a goddamn limb.
"My father had thrown her into a glass coffee table."
"Jesus," Liv hissed, jaw getting tight. "Was she alright?"
She'd been lucky.
The shards hadn't stuck her in every inch of exposed skin like they could have.
She'd taken a slice to her forehead, deep enough to require stitches which she wasn't allowed to get because there was no way to coach a three-year-old to tell the hospital workers that she had been running around and fell into the table, not that her daddy had shoved her into it.
It had healed jagged, leaving her with a scar there, even as an adult.
Leala had never been wild and carefree again, she silenced herself, withdrew, became a quiet, sullen girl who jumped away from men, not just her own father.
And that was when I had started planning it, plotting it.
I never told my mother, knowing she would try to talk me out of it, that she had, in many ways, become comfortable with the discomfort of her life. It was all she had known for over a decade.
But there was no way we could stay.
I didn't mind the occasional ass-kicking I was subjected to. And as much as it killed me to see my mom bruised and bloodied, something about my little sister, yeah, that motivated me.
I couldn't let it happen again.
Not on my watch.
I didn't care that I was young, too young, surely, to be planning what I was planning.
I never got a chance to be a kid, not really, not in the carefree sense of the word. I had to grow up quickly.
So I was fourteen going on thirty.
And I had a mom and little sisters to get out of a bad situation. I wanted for them to get the chance to be kids, to be free to be loud without worrying about being struck for it.
I wanted my mom to never know the feel of angry hands on her skin again.
I would get that for them, come hell or high water.
"At fourteen," Liv said when I fell silent for a long moment.
"At fourteen," I agreed.
It was young, surely, for any son to kill his father.
But normal or not, that was what I set out to do. Once I discreetly packed bags- for me, for my mother, for each of my sisters. I stole little sums of money from my father, bits here and there, money to start a new life with, sure, but also to ensure our transport off Puerto Rico and to the States.
It was a terrifying prospect, leaving the only place we had known as home. But the fact of the matter was, once the Ñetas found out what I had done, there would be no way to outrun them there. They had too many connections, too many eyes and ears everywhere.
We needed to get to the States, then move around a bit, only settling when we were sure there was no one after us.
So we needed someone in imports to be able to sneak us in.
And that cost money.
A fair chunk of money.
It took me six months to get it all set up. Six months of watching my sisters shrink away from my father, watching my mother walk around with bruises, watching my father get more and more paranoid, more and more fucked up with drugs.
I had a plan.
A date.
I thought that if I knew the exact moment, I would be able to psych myself up for it, do it in a calculated, careful way.
But then one night, I woke up to my mother screaming, crying. And then as I tried to wake up, shaking off sleep, I heard it.
Her body slamming into the wall.
I didn't think, didn't pause, didn't consider the repercussions of being impulsive.
I reached under my mattress for one of my father's many guns, one he never even noticed was missing months before.
I walked out of my room, heart hammering so hard in my ears that I didn't even hear the screams anymore.
I shouldered their bedroom door open, cocking the gun, moving inside, finding him standing over my mother's prone, unconscious body, looking as though he planned to kick her again.
But he wouldn't.
I wouldn't allow it.
I never would allow it again.
The gun rose, aimed.
My finger slipped, pulled.
The bang was loud in the small room, almost as loud as the choking sound my father made as he gargled his own blood for a long moment before he died.
I needed to shake my mom awake, giving her a moment to absorb the scene around her. Her husband in a pool of his own blood, her son with the still warm gun in his hand.
"We need to get the girls and run," I told her, voice as firm as I could make it when it was still cracking. "I have a guy who will get us out of Puerto Rico," I added, watching as she looked at me with drawn low brows, a mouth parted. "On a boat," I clarified. "But we have to go before the cops come. Before the gang comes looking for me. They won't let me live after this. We need to go before they get here."
Somehow, the threat on my life was what had her jumping up to her feet, wiping the blood off her face with the edge of the comforter of their bed.
"I'll get the girls. You pack food, mijo," she demanded, standing up straighter than I had perhaps ever seen her. Like the weight of her marriage to this man was lifted, allowing her to shrug off the hundred-and-eighty pounds of dead weight she'd been dragging along with her for almost twenty years.
I tucked the gun into my waistband, taking what money was in my father's wallet, and packed my school backpack with as much food as I could fit.
The girls were sleepy, scared, still dressed in their pajamas as we pulled them out of the house, using my father's car to get us a few towns over before leaving it and going on foot.
"You've been planning this," she'd accused when we got to the building where I had stashed all of our things.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Since Leala was pushed through the table," I admitted.
"I thought about it," she said in a whisper, rocking Leala while I carried Elisa who had fallen back to sleep sometime before.
"About what?" I asked, sitting watching the water, wondering how long it would be before my contact would come back.
"About killing him," she admitted. "I would lay there in bed when he was passed out with drink. I would think how easy it would be. To bash him over the head with the lamp. To hold a pillow over his face. I had hundreds of chances I never took. Not even after he started whipping you when you were a boy. Not after he pushed my girl through a table. I couldn't do it for me. And I couldn't do it for you either."
"I never blamed you," I assured her, wrapping my free arm around her slight shoulders.
"You should have. It was my job. To protect you. To keep you safe. I failed."
"You never failed," I told her, shaking my head. "You tried to give us a better life than you had. We were never cold or hungry or had to wear rags to school."
"I think I'd have rather seen you in rags than watch you all shrink away from the man who was supposed to love you."
"He wasn't capable of love. All he knew was power and pain. That was all he could give us. You couldn't have known that when you met him. And by the time you realized, it was too late for you."
A low, quiet sob escaped her at that, her chin falling to meet her chest, her hair falling to hide her cut and bruised cheek.
"It's over now," I reminded her. "No one will ever make the girls feel that way again. Or you. We can start over."
I'd been perhaps a bit too optimistic. I had been young; it came with the territory.
And comfort was all I had ever really known.
So when we had finally stepped onto American soil, I had expected things to be much the same. A comfortable home. Food. Good clothing.
The reality had been watching my mother work her fingers to blisters and bleeding, cleaning houses or hotels, working in laundromats, just to keep shitty, leaking roofs over our heads, Good Will clothes on our backs, rice and beans and ketchup in our bellies most nights.
Hard work and sacrifice became our lives.
But little by little over time, all the girls stopped ducking their heads and pressing their lips together around men. The programming that had been so much of their young lives unraveled, leaving them just typical little girls with only vague memories of the times before.
That was my mother's - and my - burden to carry.
"That is why you wanted to provide for her. You feel responsible."
"In a way," I agreed, shrugging. "I had been the reason she had to come here and start over. Work so hard. I wanted to give her a break from that when I was able to."
"I'm sure she would make this choice - even with all the hard work - a thousand times over. To be able to watch her girls not learn that all men are scary. To see her son not become a carbon copy of his father. To never feel angry hands on her skin again. She wanted this for herself and for all of you."
"She did," I agreed, nodding. "But I wanted her to be able to enjoy life a bit too. I work hard now so she doesn't have to."
"You're a good man, Roderick," she said after a long moment, tone dripping with sincerity.
"You know what, Livvy?"
"What?"
"You're a damn good woman too."
Her cheeks went the slightest bit pink at that, her gaze staying stubbornly forward despite being in bumper-to-bumper traffic. "It's true," I insisted. "I know a lot of damn fine women. So I know what I am talking about."
"Thank you," she said, voice small.
And as I watched her profile, a proud little smile teasing the edge of her lips, I had a thought I had never had in my life before.
My mother would love her.