CHAPTER TWENTY
HUNTER
Grace washes my chest, the suds running through her fingers and streaming down my body. As far as showers go, it’s more of a broom closet than a master bedroom, but I don’t think either of us minds the proximity at the moment.
I keep my hand on the swell of her hip, the other drawing a wet curtain of her hair from her face. “You okay?”
Her hands move lower. “I know we’re on the run, but bunny-hopping from motel to motel isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
She cups my balls, weighing them gently. “You’re not a runner, are you?”
She shakes her head slowly, those polished-amber eyes full of steely determination. “No.”
“You want to go after the Johnson brothers, don’t you?”
Two hands take hold of my growing length, wringing it out in alternate strokes. “We go after them. We fuck them right up the ass.”
*
I can’t believe we’re back in New York, but this was the plan—go where they least expect. It was brilliant in a way, Grace’s idea, but it’s laced with danger all the same. We’re either going to come out kicking or wind up very dead. I sure as hell hope it’s door number one.
Grace yawns in the passenger seat, her feet pulled under her. “Right here.”
I yawn myself. We’ve been driving all night.
I pull down an alley and park. Grace looks sideways at the non-descript service door.
“This precinct has been shut down for almost a year now,” she says. “The Captain and the boys used to bring perps here for stuff off the books, so to speak. They called it ‘conditioning’?”
“’Conditioning’?”
“AKA beating them senseless for their own amusement.”
“And this stuff flies?”
“No one cares what happens to these shitheads. Their managers aren’t calling in on Monday to see why they haven’t shown up for the morning roundtable.”
I can’t hide my confusion. “So, we’re going to hide out at a police station and the one place we know the Captain and Bobby could show up at? That doesn’t strike as me as common sense.”
Grace swivels in the driver’s seat and smiles. “He’s not going to come here.”
“And why would that be?”
Her smile grows as she reaches into her pants pocket and withdraws a key. “Because I’ve got his key.”
“You don’t think he’ll notice it’s gone?”
She pops open her door. “He’s too busy chasing his dick around to even consider it. Besides, he hasn’t been here in months, and we made sure we left a nice trail for them to follow back in The Middle of Nowhere. The last place they’ll expect us to be is here.”
I breathe out. “I really hope you’re right.”
She reaches over and squeezes my thigh. “Trust is an important part of any relationship.”
“Thanks, Dr. Phil.”
Relationship—that’s a first.
Grace lets us in. There’s no doubting the place is abandoned. Random furniture and rubbish clutter the halls, but the windows have been covered up and there’s no way to see in from the outside, which is good.
Grace leads us down into the subterranean levels. She flicks a switch and the lights flicker on reluctantly. “We’ll stay down here. It’s safer that way. There’s a kitchen, bathrooms down the back there, cells if I need to lock your ass up for the night.”
I grab her around the waist. “Lock me up?”
She pushes me away with her butt and hands me the car keys. “The second door on your right goes down to the basement parking lot. Be a dear and park TNT down there, will you?”
I join her in the kitchen afterwards, her feet up on the table. She’s watching a large monitor in the corner showing a split screen of the cells and adjoining rooms, flicking from one security feed to the next. One part shows the service door, the alleyway in gritty black-and-white.
“Thought I’d switch it on, keep an eye on the perimeter.”
I take a seat. “Smart.”
She slides a fifty across the table. “There’s a Chinese restaurant next door that does a decent sesame chicken. Better you go given they know me there.”
“You used to work here?” I ask.
She looks around. “As a probie, before they decided to sell up and turn the entire place into arty apartments. I think they’re even calling the development ‘Blue,’ like it’s a kind of abstractionist press piece.”
I don my jacket hood outside and return with the Chinese, dumping it on the table. “Dig in.”
It’s a strange atmosphere down here. The water from the faucet is dripping, the florescent light overhead buzzing intermittently. Hitchcock would be proud of the dread it’s creating, but I think we both know it’s internal—that clock tick-tocking towards the inevitable.
I rest my chopsticks down and dab my mouth with a napkin. “Have you always lived in New York?”
“Born and bred.”
“Brothers, sisters?”
She shakes her head. “No, and before you say it, I wasn’t spoilt. Dad took that army training and served it right up to me. My days were filled with routine and order and old-fashioned discipline.”
“So he spanked you?”
That draws a small smile. “No, actually, though I admit I have developed something of a taste for it in adulthood.”
My cock twitches at the thought. “But you wish you had siblings?”
She stops, lost for a moment in reflection and looking so perfectly, singularly beautiful it breaks my heart. “Sometimes, but I was a tomboy.”
I pick at the chicken not feeling particularly hungry. “You don’t say.”
“I was more interested in Soldier of Fortune mags and hunting knives than My Little Pony and princess parties. What about you? You ever wish you were a single child?”
I can’t help the flood of nostalgia that follows. Seeing Cayden was great, but I haven’t seen Colt in years, Mason in forever. “Sometimes. My brothers were… are painful at times, but we got along most of the time, lived together in the same house on campus.”
“Fancy.”
“I come from money, that silver-spoon poster child everyone loves to hate.”
“And it helped?” she asks.
“Being hated?”
“Money, getting you laid?”
I draw a ring around my face. “Does it look like I need help getting laid?”
She smiles, scissoring her chopsticks in the air. “I can picture you and your brothers, naïve college girls, beer pong, Solo cups… You basically lived in Animal House, didn’t you?”
“Well, it certainly felt like a comedy sometimes, but sure, we made the most of it.”
“And the girls? You actually remember any of them?”
“Not a single one,” I reply, and it’s the god honest truth. I remember bits and pieces, a birthmark here or a screamer there, but they all blend together when I try and break it down, because the truth is I’ve never been in a meaningful relationship, at least not one where there are actual stakes at play, where there’s something to lose.
“And me?” I see her swallow immediately after asking the question and for the first time realize there’s fragility to Grace Siddell after all, the tiniest of cracks showing in that bulletproof exterior she puts up.
I lean across the table. “How could I forget?”
She fixes her eyes on me. “I don’t do long term. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“We take it slow then.”
She laughs. “You’ve seen me drive. I don’t know the word.”
“Day by day.”
“Sexual encounter by sexual encounter.”
“Definitely.”
*
We hole up for another day doing our best to unravel things, but the longer we sit around, the more any kind of concrete answers seem to elude us. We make use of the showers, the former storeroom, fuck our way around most of the lower floors, but even this can’t stamp down the impending sense of doom we’re both feeling. We’re in deep, too deep, and I can’t see a way we’re going to be able to tread water for much longer without taking action.
But more than anything, what this down time has allowed for is Grace to open up. She talks about her father, her childhood and neighborhood, her first crush (Daniel Templeton, a Jewish kid with a penchant for Baby Ruths), losing her virginity (at prom, funnily enough) and her first girl fight (also at prom following said loss of innocence). I smile through it all.
Deep down, I wonder what we are. This firecracker connection hasn’t come from nowhere, but I still don’t know how she sees me in her eyes. Am I a partner with benefits, a simple fuck-buddy, or does she want more? As crazy as it would have sounded to twenty-year-old Hunter, I want more from this. The days of my revolving bedroom door are drawing to a close, because while sex with Grace is incredible, it would be nothing without the person she is—fierce and loyal and oh so fucking stubborn.
She senses me mulling something over. “You going to share those sexual fantasies with me or keep to yourself and Mrs. Palmer?”
We’re eating Chinese again, slowly making our way through the mammoth menu. “I’ve got a few. You?”
She runs through like she’s marking off a grocery list. “Spanking, hair-pulling, anal, shibari…”
“Shibari?”
“Japanese rope bondage.”
Jesus. “And you’ve explored this in the past?”
She shakes her head. “Never really met someone I trusted enough to share with, you know?”
Hope rises, the rest of my thoughts pooling around my groin somewhere. “And you trust me?”
“We’ll see, though the real question you should be asking is if you can trust me,” she says, pointing the chopsticks into her chest.
“We’re not talking about sex any more, are we?”
She looks down to the table. “People who hang around me have a habit of getting hurt.”
“I can look after myself.”
She shakes her head, once. “That’s exactly what my last partner said, you know.”
This is crucial, the wall coming down. “What happened to him?”
She leans right back, chest open. “’Her’, actually.”
I let the silence build around us, let Grace relay the details in her own time.
“It was supposed to be a simple follow-up,” she continues. “We were going door-to-door and turning up shit—the usual. We get to this one house and I can see through the window’s something going down. There are two guys inside, guns on the table. We’d inadvertently stumbled onto some sort of weapons deal.
“I signaled to my partner to draw her piece. She did, but one of these gangbangers spotted me through the window, drew a semi from behind his back. I got down behind the wall, hard against the brick, shouted for her to do the same, but no. She stood there, paralyzed, gun up, while the bullets ripped her apart, kicked her left and right like a rag doll.
“That was it. I saw red, stood and dropped those two motherfuckers right where they stood, called it in and performed CPR, but it was a fucking mess. I’d press down and all it would do is pump out more blood around my hands until it came up to my wrists, like I was wearing gloves. She was choking on it, unable to get out what she wanted to say. Her mouth was open, face bedsheet white… gone. But you want to know the worst part?”
I don’t reply.
“She was a mother of two. She had a husband, a life… the whole domestic works. And now those kids will grow up without a mother because I couldn’t protect her.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known how she’d react.”
She puts her chopsticks down. “Save it. I’m not going to break down and ask for forgiveness, but I know the score and I have to live with it.”
It’s starting to come together, the mother angle, the whole save-the-world thing. It’s insight I’m pretty sure she hasn’t shared frequently, if at all. “Thank you.”
“For what?” she laughs. “Giving you a good reason to stay the fuck away from me?”
“It only makes me want to pull closer, actually.”
“You know what they said about Icarus…”
“And you’re the sun?” I laugh. “That’s a bit pretentious, isn’t it? You’re pretty hot, but—”
She throws her chopsticks at me. “Oh, shut up, you.”
After dinner we run over where we are in terms of the Captain, but we’re still low on options and information. I have to admit this was a smart play holing up here, but I wonder how long we can keep it up without drawing attention.
“It’s not too late to go to Internal,” I offer.
Grace shakes her head, adamant. “No, like I said, they’re all buddies. It’s too risky.”
“What about Tim, back at the precinct?” I ask, trying to think through every possibility. “You’re sure we can trust him?”
“Tim’s a fucking rock, and like I said, he fucking loathes the Captain. He’ll keep his mouth shut.” She pats her hip pocket. “I’ve still got the thumb drive in any case.”
“The Captain’s name on Rachel’s list isn’t enough.”
“I know, which is why we need to catch these fuckers with their pants down.”
*
Grace orients me around the deep lower floors we haven’t really explored yet, both of us keen to take our minds off the case. “Apparently, this used to be a distillery in the early days.” She gestures left. “Part of the old packing room is through there, where the ovens used to be on the right.” She breathes in. “Can’t you smell it?”
I can smell her, but as for everything else… “Reminds me of one of those S&M clubs, Batman’s secret bondage lair.”
Her laughter echoes down the corridor. “Hey, if Christian Bale’s down here somewhere, I’m sorry but it’s all over, Red Rover.”
I lean against the wall, cold against my shoulder. “Just as well you have the next best thing.”
She stops, facing me. “You should know I can handle whatever you can throw at me—the full bad boy experience.”
I point at myself. “You’re referring to me?”
She looks left, right. “I don’t see any other hulking towers of testosterone around here.”
I take a step closer fighting the urge to take her immediately, pinned against the wall. “What makes you think I’ve got it in me?”
“You work these streets long enough you get real good at reading people, but I guess you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”
Another step closer. “And what read are you getting on me now?”
Her hands press against my chest, her breathing stunted. “That you’ve been repressing your inner animal for too long, keeping it caged up while you were treated, too scared to unleash it for fear of what might happen.”
“Is that so? What about the motel?”
Her hands drop, sliding down to the waistband of my pants. “Child’s play. I want you to really take it out on me—all that aggression and wasted sexual energy. Use me, Hunter.”
Those last two words light a blaze in my pants that’s about a second away from a forest fire.
Her lips are at my ear, breath hot on the delicate cornucopia of it. “Fuck me however you want, wherever you want. I’m yours.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Trust me,” she purrs, stalking towards the nearest cell.