Eight
At four-forty-five a.m. on Christmas Eve, Ian knocked on the back door of the Teague residence, Alec at his side.
They were expected. The moment he pulled his hand back, the door swung inward, revealing Maggie Teague, her hair and makeup done, but wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas. Fuzzy white slippers embroidered with holly berries and leaves adorned her feet. She looked admirably alert, given the hour.
“Come in, come in,” she said, waving them into her kitchen. “Coffee?” The smell of it was rich in the air.
“Please.”
“Go ahead and sit down. His royal grumpypants is gonna be a minute.”
They did so, Alec stifling what sounded like a laugh in his hand.
Maggie smirked as she set steaming mugs in front of them. “Just to warn y’all, he is not a morning person.”
“We’ve already had the pleasure of finding that out, I’m afraid,” Ian said.
“Hmm.” Her gaze moved over both of them, taking in their dark, conservative clothing…and coming to rest on Ian’s loose hair. “You got a hair tie or something?”
“Oh, yes. Well.” He hiked up his sleeve to show her the elastic on his wrist.
She pursed her lips. “That’ll never do. You’re gonna go kill somebody, you can’t have your hair in the way. Hold on.” She left the room with brisk strides.
Alec’s eyes bugged. “She knows what we’re doing?”
Ian sighed. “I suspect that woman knows everything about everything.”
She returned a moment later with a bottle of styling cream, a comb, and an assortment of small elastics. “Here, turn around and straddle the chair.”
Ian complied, amused, taking his coffee with him. “I appreciate it, ma’am, but it’s hardly necessary.”
“Oh, hush.” There was the squelch of cream coming out of the bottle, and then her hands were in his hair, smoothing the product through it, efficient, but gentle.
Ian froze.
Alec made a face at him that devolved into a smile.
“I miss this,” Maggie said as she ran the comb through his locks. “Ava doesn’t need me to play with her hair anymore.” She sighed dreamily. “And yours is beautiful.”
“Um…thank you?”
She chuckled.
Slowly, he relaxed into her ministrations. She was careful, slow, but clearly knew what she was doing, his hair pulling just the right amount of tight.
By the time Ghost came into the room, glaring and foul-tempered from lack of sleep, Ian had two tidy French braids holding his hair back.
The MC president came to a halt, squinting between his wife and Ian. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it, baby,” Maggie said, patting him on the shoulder. “Y’all are all ready to go. Coffee?”
“Yeah.”
~*~
The silence of this plane ride was the quiet of anticipation, punctuated by the warm looks Ian traded with Alec, and Ghost’s quiet snores, where he slept with a section of newspaper tented over his face.
Just before they landed, Alec reached across the space between them, and Ian met him there, took his hand into his own. Laced their fingers and held tight as the plane made its descent.
When they walked down the stairs a few minutes later – Ghost shading his eyes with his hand and cursing the New York cold – they found a car waiting for them. A black Suburban with tinted windows. Its driver, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, stood leaning against the driver door. He had aviator shades. Wasn’t very tall.
Charlie Fox.
He pushed his shades up into his tousled dark hair as they approached. “Let’s go deck the halls, shall we,” he said with a straight face.
Ian sighed.
Ghost said, “Hey. He’s the best. Just…try not to punch him in the face. No matter how tempting it is.”
~*~
“Alright.”
They were at the Ritz again, the park stretching beyond the window, dusted with snow, a gorgeous view ignored by the inhabitants of the suite.
Fox paced back and forth in front of the laptop he’d set up beneath the flat-screen TV. A news story was playing on the screen…an interesting one.
Daniel and Rebecca Breckinridge were on every local channel, their pictures paired up with headlines that called them “predators,” “monsters,” and “crooks.” The videos were too graphic to show, according to the pressed and glossed anchors, but the gist was that the couple had molested and coerced their models, both male and female, into sexual relations, and the models had caught them on video. All they’d needed was a means to share the videos.
“I trust you made that happen?” Ian asked, brows lifted, as Fox came to a halt and faced them.
“I have resources,” he said with an evasive shrug. “Yeah. I did. The models were very interested in exposing them, especially if I could guarantee they’d be blameless.”
“How could you guarantee that?” Ghost asked.
The English biker smiled, then. “My sister might know someone interested in buying out an American modeling agency.”
Ghost whistled.
“Your sister…” Ian began, then shook his head. “Nevermind. I don’t want to know. What’s the plan?”
Fox turned around and dug into the duffel he’d carried up to the room, coming back out with a stack of tan uniforms. He tossed one into each of their laps. “Congrats, boys, you all just became maintenance men for their building.”
“This is insane,” Alec murmured, but when Ian glanced toward him, worried, he found his boyfriend smiling with quiet disbelief. “Does this sort of thing ever actually work?”
“Actually, yeah,” Ghost said, sounding like he didn’t believe it much himself.
Fox looked affronted. “Hey. I’m the best.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Ian deadpanned. “Now kindly assure me we aren’t all about to be arrested.”
~*~
It was alarmingly simple, as far as plans went. Maybe that was why Ian felt so nervous he thought he’d faint or vomit. Or maybe that light-headed, shaking, swaying feeling had more to do with what he was about to do than the likelihood that he’d actually get to do it.
Maggie’s braid job held, and he snugged his tan cap down over his head, hiding his face – and, even more distinctive, his hair – from the cameras as they trooped into the building and then the service elevator. Ghost carried a stepladder in one arm, a hard plastic Kobalt case in the other. The rest of them toted buckets which, upon initial inspection, appeared to hold rags, screws, hammers, nails, and an assortment of tools Ian had never before touched in his life.
He sweated inside his coveralls; his fingers tapped at the handle of the bucket as the service elevator chugged slowly up, and up, and up, the floor markers lighting up one-by-one above the door.
This was it. It was happening.
He’d lost all sensation in his fingertips; the bucket handle slipped and he closed his hand into a fist around it.
He could do this. He could.
They deserved it.
Didn’t they? Didn’t everyone who’d ever touched him back then?
Or did he deserve revenge? Maybe he wasn’t worth it.
Maybe–
The elevator came to a shuddering halt, and Ghost leaned in close, voice low. “Just remember what we talked about, okay? And if you can’t–”
“I can,” Ian said through his teeth.
“…either way. It’s alright.”
The doors slid open and they stepped out into the hall, Fox in the lead.
Ian’s knees didn’t want to straighten. Each step felt like he folded up just a little more, like a paper doll.
Fox raised his hand, the signal that meant they were almost there – and yes, there was the door. Smooth black paint and gold numbers. A white pedestal with a decorative fern atop it off to one side. A Christmas wreath circling the knocker, an understated ring of magnolia leaves.
Ian’s heart battered his ribs, a winged and frightened thing trying to get out.
Ghost squeezed his shoulder once, tight, and stepped in front of him so he stood beside Fox.
The Englishman knocked and dragged a convincing New York accent out of his repertoire. “Got a call about a busted chandelier,” he called through the door, and a moment later it cracked open, still hooked by the chain. Half of Daniel’s face peered out, and Ian looked hastily at his feet, his pulse running up his throat and out through his limbs. His entire body felt like a throbbing bruise.
“What?” Daniel said, a frown in his voice. “We don’t have a–”
There was a quiet sound, quick, which Ian knew meant Fox had pulled the pepper spray cannister from his pocket; a hiss as he fired it.
The rest of Daniel’s sentence turned into a surprised, pained shout.
Ian lifted his head, then, just in time to see Ghost snip the chain with a set of clippers. The plan, then, was to rush the door, force their way inside, and so they did, Ghost using the stepladder as a battering ram.
Fox leaned down as they swooped in, catching a shouting, disoriented Daniel under the arms with both hands. “You,” he barked at Alec, and as agreed, Alec caught the man’s flailing hands and secured them with a zip-tie. Then he and Fox dragged him deeper into the apartment.
Ian shut and locked the door behind them.
Ghost flipped the latches on his Kobalt case to reveal a matte black Smith & Wesson, and the suppressor he’d already screwed onto the end of it. Weapon raised, he led their party down the hall and into the gorgeous cream-on-cream living room of the apartment, where Rebecca stood caught, phone in her hand, silent scream distorting her face.
“Drop the phone,” Ghost told her, gun pointed at her head.
Her hand went limp and the iPhone hit the carpet. She looked terrified, eyes wide with panic, pulse fluttering in her throat. She was petrified.
Ian had been petrified, once. When he was twelve, and traveling to America in a shipping container, suffocating and swamped with the stink of the other unwashed boys around him, choking on the smell of shit, and piss, and fear sweat.
He’d been petrified the first time he realized that people like Rebecca and Daniel Breckinridge would pay to fuck him.
Petrified when he’d watched a tiny, bone-thin boy named Kev get dragged down a hallway in a club, used by a fat, sick man who didn’t care that he cried, and bled, and was only a baby.
And just like that, he wasn’t petrified now. No. His hands stilled, and his nerves settled.
He reached up and whisked his hat off, let her see his face, rewarded by the little gasp that escaped her lips when she saw that it was him.
“Tie them up,” he said, crisply, and he wasn’t Ian Byron anymore: artist, dancer, scared, stolen boy. He was Shaman. And he’d come to collect on the debts owed him.
~*~
A calmness had settled over him, and now he had total control over his emotions. Aloof, composed, haughty. All the things that made his clients squirm.
The Breckinridges might have squirmed if they’d been able. They were tied hand and foot to a pair of kitchen chairs that Ghost had dragged into the living room. They weren’t gagged; Fox and Ghost both held guns on them, and shouting would have been a waste. The TV played news footage of their exposed scandal: blurry cellphone videos, anonymous statements, financial records, interviews with old friends and neighbors who claimed they’d always known something wasn’t quite right with the couple. Their families were hiding from the press, and the whole thing was spinning wilder and wilder out of control, the way these sorts of things always did.
“Now,” Ian said, clenching his gloved hands together loosely behind his back as he paced back and forth in front of the two of them. “It would appear I have you at a disadvantage.” He gestured to the TV. “I think I’ve beaten you at your own game, yes?” He turned to face them.
They didn’t respond – of course they didn’t. Daniel’s eyes leaked constantly, raw and red from the pepper spray; his lips trembled as he breathed through his mouth, sniffing occasionally because the spray had burned his sinuses, too.
Rebecca’s tears were the type born of fear; they’d carved stark tracks down her face, through her makeup, long streaks of mascara dripping off the edge of her chin and jaw.
Ian sat down on the sofa across from them, appreciating the firmness of the cushions, the softness of the fabric. It didn’t look or feel as if anyone sat on it regularly. Behind the couple, the sky loomed slate gray, pregnant with snow, a few fat flakes drifting past in fits and starts.
“Do you know what a shaman is?” Ian asked them, tone one of conversational boredom. “Did you know that was my stage name at the Nest? Yes, of course you did. You paid to have me.” He smiled with all his teeth.
Rebecca snuffled and hiccupped.
Daniel twitched, hands testing his bonds, but slumped back into submission when Fox gestured at him with his gun.
“A shaman,” Ian continued, “is an intermediary between the world of the living, and the spiritual realm. A go-between. Someone who can communicate with spirits – the good, and the evil. I guess you could say that a shaman is a magician, of sorts.” He smiled again, and knew it looked terrible. “Certainly lots of men found another plane, or saw the face of God, when they were coming down my throat.”
Someone – Alec, he thought – hissed a tiny, distressed sound.
Daniel grunted a protest.
“Oh, does that offend your sensibilities? I suppose the people who buy a few hours of a boy’s time for their own pleasure don’t like to be so uncouth as to actually discuss it.”
“Ian,” Ghost said, quietly, voice careful.
“It’s fine. I just want them to know, first. When people do the things they do, they need to understand why it’s wrong.”
A feather-light touch landed on his shoulder. Alec. A slow press, like he knew that anything sudden would set Ian off. “Babe.” Not a plea, but an encouragement. You can do this.
Ian took a deep breath he hadn’t known he needed. “A shaman,” he continued, “is a powerful person. It wasn’t fitting back then, when you knew me. Not then. But now. Now. I’m the powerful one here.” He gestured between them, their dynamic, this current situation. “Powerful people can hurt you. So it pays not to fuck them over. Literally. Or figuratively.”
The two of them looked at the floor, at the table, at Ian’s knees, even his face in darted snatches, but never at each other. There was no love there, no seeking of comfort.
Ian didn’t understand. This was supposed to go differently. They were supposed to scream, and fume, spit at his face, call him names, accuse him of the being the monster that he must be to have come here to do this.
But they sat silent, chewing on their lips, weeping and waiting for the inevitable.
Ian felt a wave of sickness surge inside him, a sharp pain up under his ribs, and he thought he might vomit. Some hardened killer he was. So much for revenge.
He dragged his gaze from Rebecca’s face full of ruined makeup and it collided with Ghost’s.
The biker president stood backlit by the silver glow from the floor-to-ceiling windows, grayer than he was in real life, but still lean and hard, like always. A man who’d had all his soft spots chiseled away, so that all that was left was muscle, and bone, scar tissue, a criminal and a leader. Someone who allowed his wife to be the counterbalance to all the dark decisions he so readily made.
Ian swallowed and some of the nausea eased, looking at the man. Alec’s hand was still on his shoulder. The one light thing in his life. The goodness. That’s why he was he: to protect that. To preserve it. If he untied these two, and walked away, they’d ruin him…and ruin Alec. Ruin models, girls and boys both, just as they’d ruined him, and Kevin…and who knew how many others.
Like he knew what Ian needed to hear, Ghost said, “I can do it, kid. Just say the word.”
Ian reached up and patted the back of Alec’s hand where it rested on his shoulder, then stood. “No,” he said, stomach settling. “It’s fine.”
He reached into the bucket he’d set by the end of the couch and pulled out the straight razor he’d brought. “Anything to say for yourselves?” he asked.
Predictably, they kept silent.
“A little over a year ago,” Ian said, flicking the razor open and turning to them, “Kevin tried to kill himself in a bathtub. He failed. He didn’t know how deep to cut.
“I won’t make the same mistake.”
And he didn’t.
~*~
At ten-fifteen a.m. on Christmas Eve, the building’s security feeds experienced a glitch that erased ten minutes of footage.
No irregular activity was logged into the guest book at the front desk…a station, that morning, manned by one Milo Bauer, formerly of the New York chapter of the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club.
The next morning, all the news stories would be about how ruined modeling execs Rebecca and Daniel Breckinridge had committed suicide together on their living room floor, in front of the Christmas tree.