Aris: A Sexy Romance Novel (Thief of Hearts Series Book 1) (13 page)

She marched through the house heading directly toward Aris’s office.  The picture of her on the desk was still there.  She moved around the office, opening every drawer and door she could find.  There were a couple of other photos of her, not in frames, in the credenza behind the desk but nothing else. 

She stomped back out of the office going up the stairs by two’s.  The door knob to Aris’s bedroom turned under her grasp as she threw it back against it’s hinges.   Her knees nearly went out from under her.  She grabbed the door jam with her right hand and her stomach with her left.  On the wall immediately in front of her was a design done in different frames.  There had to be at least a dozen pictures, all of her.  They were different time periods.  Most of them she didn’t recognize.  There was one of her in Judge Casler’s court room.   One that looked like maybe she was on her way to work.  Another of her at the green grocer’s.  There was one of her in one of her power suits.  That, at least explained part of where he got the idea that she liked green.  She was standing with her arms crossed.  She must have been listening to someone talk to her.  She had that
‘you’re so SOL’
look on her face that she normally gave opposing attorneys, who actually made her come to court to kick their ass, rather than taking the beating in their office without all the spectators. 

She crossed the threshold into Aris’s bedroom.  Stalking her explained how he knew so much.  Were their cameras in her apartment that she didn’t know about?  Or maybe he had access to her office?  Anger grabbed hold of her.  She pulled open the closet doors.  She went to his dresser pulling the drawers open.  There was a box on top of the dresser.  She opened it revealing watches, a couple of bracelets, tie tacks and a small glass globe.  She looked at it closely for a minute, not sure what she was looking at.  The red strands inside the globe were the same dark copper color as her hair but they had something greyish on some of them.  Duct tape.  He’d gotten a piece of the duct tape stuck to her hair in the helicopter that day.  She half expected to find her skirt and Choo’s here too.  There was an armoire on the far wall.  She threw the doors back on it to find that it was a book cabinet.  There were black spine folders inside it sitting in neatly marked racks.  Month and year were labelled on each spine.  There were also odd folders with information on the spine that was topic oriented.  She reached up pulling one down that said
‘Pierce’
on it.  There were copies of emails in it that Pierce had sent to her.  So they were in her office.  Most of them were indicative of how Pierce talked to her but there were a few that she wasn’t aware of.   Apparently, Pierce’s email wasn’t impervious to their snooping either.  There were a few there that went directly from his personal account to the partner personal accounts.  Pierce complained about what a bitch she had become.  There were also gross sexual insinuations on his part as well as Lou’s.  She thumbed through the rest of them picking up on the highlighted text in the various messages.  Saoirse began to shake, but she reached up pulling one of the dated folders down from the shelf.  Whoever put the reports together commented on everything.  Her attitude on that day, which cases it was known she was working on, copies of grocery receipts, notes of not enough hours of sleep, notations about a lack of healthy foods in her diet, whether she seemed distracted or happy, what she had purchased at the drug store, an entire laundry list of boring everyday items was in the folder.  The daily notes weren’t signed but she flipped through the entire month finding a name at last.  Ling.

Saoirse sat down on the bed ready to cry when she heard Ling and someone else come into the house.

“Seers?”  Ling was shouting her name as he moved through the house.  He finally came to the top of the stairs walking down the hall to the open door.

“Seer?”  Ling walked into the room.

“How long Ling?  How long have you been stalking me for him?  Is that how you came to live in the same apartment building with me?  Are there cameras in my apartment too?”  her lip quivered as she fought back the tears.

“Whoa!  And halt!  I am not a stalker.  Stalkers are nut cases that are obsessed with people, I...”

“And this isn’t crazy and obsessed?  There’s notes in here on my moods, what I ate, how many hours I slept, hell Ling, the only thing that’s not here is what size vibrator I use!” she threw the file at him as Khar came through the door.

“Seer, that’s gross!  I’ve been there to save your butt hundreds of times so don’t start throwing accusations around before you even know what the score is.  I’m not a stalker.  I was your Minder.”  Ling picked up the folder on the floor.

“What’s the difference?”

“A great deal.”  Khar finally spoke.  “No, there are no cameras in your apartment, we don’t need them.  Minders are trained to be your guardian angel on earth.  That’s the point of their job anyway.  You, however, were the pilot project of the program so we made some mistakes along the way.”

“Guardian angel?” she was nodding her head,  “Angels don’t run around doing illegal shit.”

“Angels don’t, but I’m fairly certain you wore yours to death years ago.”  Khar leaned on the low dresser across from the bed with his arms crossed.  Ling leaned up against the door jam.  “Seven years ago, we pulled a job on a bank where our strategy man ran into a woman that completely captivated him.  He kept his wits about him well enough at the time to realize he had to leave her in the helicopter, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about her constantly.  We grew up together, the four of us.  We trained together, but we were still fairly green when we pulled the bank job.  It became clear to us that you were taking up quite a bit of Aris’s attention.  We did a job in Mexico not too long after the bank one.  It took everything Noah and I had to convince him not to detour into the US to see you.  He was concerned that if you needed help he wouldn’t know it.  He was upset at the idea that you might need something, or be hurt, and there was no one there to let him know, nor help you.  It nagged at him.  We needed him to be able to focus on what we were doing.  Since I was the one with the most skill at information gathering, we decided that I would take one of the recruits, training them with what I knew, to keep tabs on you.  The original idea was that someone would be minding you so he wouldn’t have to worry about anything.  Ling was the first recruit I taught, so we sent him to watch over you.”

“You are not an easy assignment either, I hope you realize.”  Ling pointed at her from the door.

“What is so tough about me?”

“What’s not!  How about the Witrif case?  The guy off’d himself and you just went numb.  You didn’t even see your life flash before your eyes when that semi couldn’t stop for the light in the rain.  If I hadn’t dropped my Harley in front of him, you would have been street salsa.  You routinely do all sorts of stupid dangerous things, bad enough that I asked to be put back in the field.  You were one heart attack after another!  Like the night you couldn’t sleep so you walked six blocks to the main thoroughfare to hail a cab.  It was 3:00 bloody a.m!  If I hadn’t heard the noise in the hall of your door closing, and your keys, I would have missed it.  As it was, I ran out the door half dressed keeping a very scary eye on some dude that followed you from half a block back the whole way.  I was afraid I was going to have to slap him senseless in an alley.  Or what about the time you got dehydrated from the flu so bad you couldn’t stay conscious?  You passed out in the elevator.  Anything could have happened to you.  I carried you back up to your apartment with your cellphone line open on a call to Denise.  Lucky for all of us, she panicked and called 911.  I couldn’t have taken you to the hospital directly there would have been too many questions I couldn’t answer.”

“The whole idea at the outset of the project was to simply give Aris some peace, knowing that if anything happened, someone would be there to help you.  As we learned, and gained insight with your case, we expanded the program.” Khar continued in his matter of fact tone.

“There were some guys that we took on that claimed no family.  It was only after their death that the reality became clear.  They had a wife or children or parents, someone that they had commitments to.  Of course, this left us with a huge problem.  We had to find a way to cover that person’s responsibility but we couldn’t just walk up to the family and tell them who we were.  The insight that we gained keeping an eye on you for Aris gave us the tools to teach other Minders how to look after someone else’s parents, or help with kids, or bills, without being noticed or having to answer loads of questions.  It was keeping commitments while keeping our anonymity.”

“And who gets all the reports with all the dirty little details?”

“Minders and intel gathering are my responsibility.  We don’t do full blown reports on everyone that we mind.  More often than not, there are a few loose ends that we need to clean up, some provisions that have to be made, but after that most situations take care of themselves.  You, however, never left Aris’s mind.  As I said, we made some mistakes.  You were never supposed to know Ling’s name, nor learn to recognize his face.  Somehow it didn’t work that way.  We thought at first that if he were someone you knew visually, as being a tenant in your building, that you wouldn’t pay any attention to passing him on the street or noticing him at the grocer.  Had it worked the way we thought, it would have given Minders the ability to stay in plain sight of their charges without them realizing who, or what, the Minder was really there for.  In your case with Ling, it worked the opposite of what we expected.”

“The full reports were something that I started.”  Ling interjected.  “I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing.  I had no way to show that I was doing anything for the boss, so I started putting together the reports.  Since you recognized me as being a someone in your building, I had some limited opportunities to interact with you, so I put those in the report too.  It also gave us a chance to test out some ideas on how info gathering should actually work.”

“And that’s what you were doing in Hong Kong today?  You were minding me?”

“Oh no.  I haven’t been your minder for a while now.  You wore me out.  I was actually working on something else in Hong Kong today.  I didn’t handle the situation very well, but quite frankly, it freaked me out seeing you.  I had no idea you were with Aris.  It wasn’t until I got to Noah, and waited for Aris to show up with you, that I realized something was wrong.”

“Is Aris alright?”

“We haven’t heard anything from Noah at this point.”  Ling looked at the floor.

“Not our best work, but certainly not our worst.” Khar directed his comment toward Ling.

“So, I basically ran into a mugging, but Aris got the worst of it.”

“Mugging?” Ling’s eyes nearly burst their sockets.  “Remember that stupid dangerous I talked about?  Those men were professionals.  I just don’t know what groups yet.  That’s what I was busy working out when you ran into the middle of it.  That’s why the one guy got his throat cut.  One of the other dudes in the know recognized Aris after the first guy panicked.  Which is why he got his throat slashed, so we wouldn’t think it was sanctioned, or acceptable, to their leadership or that we’d understand that it wasn’t something they planned and they cleaned up their loose cannons.”

“Do I have a Minder now?”

“Yes, the Minder keeps an eye on you and Denise.”  Khar looked straight at her.

“Denise has one too?”

“No, but Aris decided that you were getting too reliant on Denise for everything that you would be devastated if anything happened to her.  Considering she lives in a war zone, we decided it would be better if we kept tabs on her at high risk intervals, such as commuting or errands.”

“Who took all the pictures and why?”

“That was me.”  Ling shoved his hands in his pockets.  “I started playing around with photography with different types of cameras for info reasons.  Since I was supposed to be watching you anyway, I started messing with what they could do.”

“How did you get the one in the court house?”

Ling looked at Khar who nodded.  “Lapel pin.  Great little camera, it was something I rigged just to see if I could.”

Saoirse looked around the room exhausted.  “Did Aris kill the old holy man after he came back from the bank job I was at?”

“No.  Noah killed the Holy One.  The man that died at the bank job was Leo.  He was a good kid but the Holy One decided he was expendable.  Aris got upset because he knew something was wrong that the Holy One had chosen Leo to do the job rather than someone more qualified.  He couldn’t figure out what was really going on fast enough to save Leo.  When Noah came to later on, Aris told him what had happened.  Noah put it altogether, lost his temper at the Holy One’s attitude that Leo was expendable, and hit him.  He fell hitting his head on a table and died.  We all carry around the guilt for Leo.”

“I’m confused.”

“You’re tired.  You have been through a lot today.  Rest.  I’ll have someone let you know about Aris as soon as we do.  I will make arrangements for you to return to your home if that’s what you’re asking for.”

“She’s not going anywhere for right now.”  Jerith came down the hallway with Denise.  “I want assurances from the other side that no one is looking for her or anything else crazy.”

“Seer!”  Denise slipped past Khar into the room.  She, too, had much the same reaction to all the pictures that Saoirse had.

“Noah called, Aris needed nine stitches, but he’s fine.”  Jerith remarked to Khar.  “Ah.  I see you know about the Minder now too.”  Jerith collected the various items around the room putting them back in their proper places.  Khar and Ling left the house.

“Minder?” Denise looked confused.

“Oh, you weren’t here for that convo.  You remember that stalker conversation we had?  Yeah.  I have a
‘guardian angel here on earth’
who apparently watches over me because Aris can’t be there to protect me himself while I do things that are
‘stupid dangerous’
.”  Saoirse’s sarcasm and anger were running loose.

“That’s sweet.  That’s not the same thing as stalking at all.  I told you so.”

“Glad you think it’s such a wonderful thing, because my Minder keeps tabs on you too.”

“Me?  Why?  I don’t do anything dangerous.  I live a pretty boring life.”

“He doesn’t like your neighborhood, he thinks its a war zone, and you’re at risk when you commute or run errands.”

“Oh.  He doesn’t have all these sorts of pictures of me too does he?”

“No, I’m the original Frankenstein’s monster experiment.”

“You can’t be the original.  The first experiment monster didn’t live.”

“I kind of feel that way right now.”  Saoirse walked down the hall to her room.