Bounty (10 page)

Tingling blackness and heat overtakes me. Liam shakes and moans, losing himself in the same way.

For a while, all I can see is darkness, all I feel are the warm pulses between my legs. Then the pulse in my chest.

Then another one, against my ear.

And breath, on my skin. Liam’s weight, draped over me, the slickness of our sweat between us. His lips, soft against the space just behind my ear.

My eyes are watery and my entire being trembles. Best orgasm of my life, on his messy bed while he bleeds all over me, and my body aches, and I’m terrified and exhilarated.

What the fuck.

I
come back
to myself in the middle of the night. The morning. The clock next to my bed reads 5:32, the red numbers stark and harsh. There’s just a bit of dark blue lightness in the sky. A hint of dawn.

Jesus. What the hell happened? Blood loss, maybe, or adrenaline comedown. Or the most intense arousal of my life.

Some combination of those.

Whatever it was, I lost control in a way that has never happened to me before. Sure, I’ve had to do my fair share of violence – it’s pretty much a requirement in this line of work. But I’ve never lost it like I did on those men in the alleyway, never literally seen red. And never in my life have I felt so physically possessive of a person. I wanted to make April mine.

I remember the sex with crystal, pleasurable clarity, but also from a distance. Separate. Like looking at the horizon through a spyglass pointed the wrong way.

I look down at the crown of April’s head, cradled against my chest. We’re in my bed. She’s mostly naked, just her bra left. Her panties torn off. She fell asleep with her hands still bound together with my belt.

I fucked up. So badly.

My first instinct is to bolt. I feel my body tense in preparation.

But April let’s out a little hum of pleasure, and of course I can’t do that. Besides, we’re in my apartment.

I’m in so much deeper than I thought. I’m not just attracted to April, wanting to fuck her. I’m not just into her in a surprisingly genuine way.

I’m falling in love with her.

Fuck, even now, just watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the way her hair spills across my sheets, dark and liquid in the pre-dawn light. The way her lashes brush gently against her cheek.

I just want to touch her, to press my lips to her little rounded shoulder, her collar-bone, her wrist. Right where an ugly, purple bruise is blossoming against the softly freckled skin of her arm. I want to protect her.

And what did I do? I fucked her. Rough. Right after she’d been assaulted in the street. When she was at her most vulnerable, her most frightened…

Liam Copperhead, you are a terrible person.

The guilt makes me feel sick, and that makes me weak.

I manage to slip out from under her, replacing my chest with a pillow. She stirs only a moment, mumbling ever so softly.

I hurriedly clean up my apartment, stuffing away all the cameras, the recording equipment, hiding the briefcases, the guns…

God, I hope she didn’t get a good look last night. Hopefully she didn’t notice that my place doesn’t exactly look… properly lived in.

We were both pretty out of it, so she likely didn’t notice.

But now what?

I can’t go back to sleep. I feel electrified, struck. I should definitely text Vicente, tell him what happened. Why the fuck doesn’t April’s father, the ‘great’ Devlin Sullivan, get some goddamn protection for his daughter? How does he just let her traipse around the streets of Boston like there’s no other organized crime in the city? Like he himself hasn’t pissed off a bunch of gangsters who would love to get back at him through his daughter? How much stupider could he be? Does he think no one knows about her? Secrets can’t protect her forever. It didn’t protect her from me.

My gut drops out. I’m still disgusted with myself.

I would expect a man like him would already be aware of what happened. He should at least have someone watching April secretly, and his lackey’s should have already descended upon us. But nothing.

Maybe he really isn’t her father after all.

I text Vicente a brief report of what happened, ask for his opinion.

This is perfect
, is his response.
She’s indebted to you now. You protected her. You’re beyond reproach.

Fuck you
, is all I can think to reply. He can choose to interpret it as a joke if he wants. I’m sick of his shit.

I’m gripped by the sudden and absurd thought that we should call the cops, before I remember that we essentially are the cops.

And April didn’t seem too keen on it herself, last night. She didn’t want to go to a hospital, made no mention of calling the police after she was brutally assaulted — or an attempted kidnapping took place — whatever the point of the whole attack was. Any normal girl would have dialed 911 immediately.

That alone convinces me I’m right. She’s Sullivan’s daughter, and she’s not completely naive. She knows how to handle a gun. She wasn’t completely shocked by the attack – she wasn’t asking “why?” She knows the situation.

But will she be suspicious that I, too, had no inclination to call the police? I didn’t even consider it at the time. But it’s fucking weird. I’ll have to bring it up. In fact, if I play my cards right, if I act dumb, this might be a great time to get some more answers from her.

And fuck do I want them now, even though my reasons aren’t quite what they should be.

But she’s still asleep, and there’s nothing to do but wait. I’m not going to wake her in the middle of the night just to satisfy my curiosity. She needs to rest.

Fuck, I need to rest.

But as much as I want to, I can’t just crawl back into bed and curl up with her.

I can’t.

I stretch out in my lounge chair instead.

W
hen I wake
for the second time, it’s still early. The light streaming through the window has that bright, coppery morning hue, just a tinge of blush.

It looks gorgeous on the planes of April’s face, which is looming over me.

“Liam,” she says again, shaking my shoulder.

“Wha–?”

She holds out a cup of coffee and I take it without thinking.

“I couldn’t sleep in,” she says, perching on the edge of my chair, fully clothed. She’s looking bruised but otherwise intact. I’m holding the coffee, dumbfounded.

“Me neither,” I finally manage.

She should be furious with me. Or at least disgusted.

She won’t meet my eye, so maybe she is. But then, why the coffee?

She looks up at me, pained.

“Last night—”

“April, I—”

“I have to call my dad,” she says, instead.

“Of course,” I say, and my heart begins to pound. The guilt and excitement battle for control.

I want to listen in on this conversation. I could get everything I need right now, and get out. Stop fucking with her, stop fucking her over, stop taking advantage of her. Get out of her life.

If I can just get one piece of concrete detail…

She holds a coffee in one hand, and her phone in the other, tapping through it.

“Shouldn’t we call the police, though?” I ask innocently. “I mean, I was so fucking out of it last night, I didn’t even think of it. We should definitely call the police.”

She stares at me a second. “It might be too late now.”

“But they can get evidence off our fingernails and stuff, like in CSI,” I say. I have to actively resist cringing; I might be totally overdoing the naïve act.

She waves this away absentmindedly. “We showered. And besides, calling my dad will be more useful than calling the police,” she says cryptically.

“I beat the shit out of those men, too.”

“They fucking deserved it,” she nearly snarls.

“Yeah but what if they go to the police?”

“They won’t,” she says, certain. Grim. Then blinks rapidly at me and shrugs. “I mean, guys like that, they don’t want to talk to the police, right? I don’t know.” She pretends to look torn.

We’re both playing dumb, now.

I see how it is.

I imagine the conversation, for a moment, if we were being honest with one another. How we would plot retaliation against those men, who I think may have been Russian. How we could trace, through her father, the group responsible. How I could bring legal forces down on them, and she, illegal forces.

We’d be quite unstoppable.

The desire for revenge is… powerful. I wasn’t expecting it. But I hate those men and what they did to her. What they made me do to her.

And just as quickly as it possessed me, the desire for vengeance vanishes. Of course we can’t do that. She can’t know who I am. She doesn’t know I know who she is. I’m not even sure if she knows exactly who she is.

Though, I can tell, she’s not completely ignorant.

“You should call him right away,” I say. “Where is he? He’ll want to come see you.”

She pauses.

“He’ll freak right the fuck out alright,” she says. “This is like his worst nightmare.”

“He’ll obviously come,” I say, pretending to reassure her. “Even if he’s halfway across the world.”

She gives me an odd look.

“Yeah. I think… I think I want to go home and call him.”

Shit. Tilted my hand too much. Now I’m interested. I should have just shut my big mouth. But I ruined it. I pressed too hard. I always press too hard. Sometimes I think there’s something really wrong with me.

“Of course,” I say instead. “Do you want me to drive you?”

“I’ll call a cab,” she says, tapping at her phone again.

“Right.” Why would she want me to take her anywhere, after last night? I literally went berserk and more or less took advantage of her.

Wait.

Her phone.

I have a GPS tracker, but I need to get on her phone, pipe all the data to and from it to a third party. I can trace her calls remotely. Read her messages.

I have to get that phone. I have to take advantage of her, again, so I can get out of her life.

“Let me,” I say, closing my hand over hers on the phone. “You should drink some water and clean up.”

“Oh, right,” she says, dazed, looking down at her bare feet. “Yeah.”

While she hunts for her shoes, I have just enough time to download the app through the FBI backchannels. I hide it in a subfolder of a subfolder and pray that she doesn’t comb through the contents of her phone very often.

It should now log her every tap and sound. Her microphone and camera will always be on.

I’m a terrible fucking human being. I just want… I don’t know what I want. For us to get vengeance together. Yes. To find out where her father is. Of course. To apologize, apologize, apologize, for taking advantage of her at her lowest. For lying to her.

When she comes back to the bed, I hand her the phone back.

“Well, I’m sorry, April,” I apologize. Once will have to do for now. “You should go.” Protect herself from me.

She nods, flat, lips pressed tight. Then she leaves, still clutching her phone.

“
I
’m sorry
, April,” he says, and I nod. I understand. I’ve put him through so much. “You should go,” he finishes.

Right. Of course. Of course I should leave — I wouldn’t want to be around a woman who gets people beat up. Whose life is filled with this much drama.

I have to go call my father, the ‘businessman,’ who I’ve always known was into something shady.

But what I didn’t tell Liam was what those men said to me when they grabbed me.

Time to teach your daddy a lesson.

Then they argued, in Russian, with one guy holding a knife, another peeling back my fingers, and a third holding me down…

I can only imagine what they might do to send my father a lesson. And men like that? I’ve seen enough Dateline reports.

Those were gangsters.

I’m scared. Standing in the street, waiting for my cab, I’m terrified.

I’ve never been taken like that before, hit like that. Never. Even the one time another set of creepy men took me from school, it was all very… subtle. I was just sitting in a car. My dad’s secretary came to get me after a few hours.

My father said it was business rivals, crossing the line. And of course, he was right.

Rivals. Gang rivals. Because my father is a mobster. And his “secretary” is his second in command. And my “shop” launders money for him. And him always telling me not to talk about it is not just a businessman’s ego. He trained me to protect his secrets. Trained me to protect myself with a gun. It seemed like a silly dad thing, before.

Crap.

I’ve known this. I’ve known this my whole life, somewhere deep inside, but now I have to face it. It’s in my face. It hit me in my face, literally.

And I was utterly useless. Shocked, slow, my gun was knocked out of my hand almost immediately. Head-butts, it turns out, are extremely painful.

I guess when push came to shove, I needed someone to save me after all.

Liam.

God, Liam. After everything I put him through, and I’m still lying to him. Pretending I don’t know why I was attacked. Hiding what I know now is the truth. Playing dumb like a goddamn idiot, rebuffing his attempts to help me, snapping at him for wanting to call the police, wanting to tell my father what happened, like a normal person.

I have to just let him go. Let him stay out of this mess.

I spend the car ride back to my place working up the nerve to call dad, and sniveling like a goddamn idiot. Even the cabby asks me what’s wrong. Humiliating. And when I step out of the car and walk up to my apartment, I begin sharply regretting coming home alone.

I’m scared. Of both of those things. And I’m scared of how mad I am, too.

When I finally do call my dad, from my cell phone instead of the red phone, Bert answers quickly. “What’s wrong April?”

Because, of course it must be an emergency if I’m using my cellphone to call a number I’ve distinctly been told over and over to never call from a cell phone.

“I need to talk to dad,” I say, my voice cracking over the word dad. I’m so angry with him. And I need him so badly. I need his guidance, his reassuring words.

“April, honey, what’s wrong?” Dad is on the phone immediately.

His worried, accented, gentle dad-voice sends me over the edge instantly. All I can do is sob into the phone.

‘D-daa-“ I can’t even get it out. “Dad.” I take gasping gulps of air, trying to get him.

“Honey, is this about Alan? Because I tell ye, I never did like the look—”

“NO DAD THIS IS NOT ABOUT FUCKING ALAN!”

Somehow, that seems to work and for some reason I just start laughing. It takes a moment before I can speak again.

Dad waits patiently through my giggles, then asks, “Sweet pea, what is it then?”

I tell him the whole story, start to finish. Everything. I feel bad, again dragging Liam into it, but I couldn’t have lied, left anything out, if I tried. He gets the entire story, starting with who Liam is and how I’ve been seeing him, and God, maybe even falling for him, and how he saved me from those men. Even how we hooked up after.

The one thing I leave out is how he tied me up during sex. I can’t bring myself to say that and he really doesn’t need to hear that detail. And it’s not just because it’s an awkward thing to tell one’s Irish Catholic father — though it is — and not because it reflects poorly on Liam — which, to any sane person, I understand that it should — but because I loved it. I loved how it felt, how wrong it was, how out of control Liam was. And how it made me feel, right away, like I wasn’t going to be scarred by this. That I could jump right back into have rough sex, that I was strong enough to take it. I loved it. No, dad doesn’t need any of those details.

At the finale of the entire saga, Dad is furious. Ranting about Russians, and men who think they can get away with shit, and who knows what else.

“How did no one tell me about this. Five fucking guys, five guys I hire to protect ye, and they don’t do shit? And what about fucking you, Bert?” Ah. Yes. Bert, who is always listening in, ready to provide a service.

I listen as he fires Bert on the spot. I’ve never heard him talk like this. He’s furious and his words are slipping together in a way I’ve never heard before. Rougher.

“What do you mean, dad?”

But he doesn’t answer me directly. “This is fucking bullshit. Those guys are gonna get a piece of my… this is outrageous. And no one told me. Why didn’t you call me last night, April?”

He turns a small portion of that fury on me, and it’s honestly scary.

“It was just a mess. I don’t know. I was delirious. In shock. We didn’t even call the police.”

“Good,” he says and then makes the small click sound of a rapidly gaping mouth.

Oops.

I don’t think he meant to say that.

“About that, dad.” I half-expect him to start trying to explain… to reassure me. To make this all go away. To give me reasonable expectations so I can stop feeling this way.

To lie, I guess.

But he doesn’t do any of that. He just sighs.

“This is all a bit strange, isn’t it honeybird?”

I gather my courage in both hands.

“You’re a gangster. Is that why you don’t want me to call the cops? And why Russians tried to kidnap me?”

He laughs, a bit.

“Gangster. I like that turn of phrase. But, yes, April. Not all of your father’s businesses are… strictly legal. In the United States, at least. And with that territory comes a certain amount of operating under the auspices of another type of organization.”

“Organized crime, you mean.”

“If you like.”

I’m not surprised. Not now. I’m not even sure I would have been completely shocked a week ago. Or a month ago. Or a year ago.

It’s like when you read a book, and there’s supposed to be a really great plot twist, but when it happens you just kinda go “huh”. That makes sense. The clues were there all along.

I’m satisfied that I was right. And disappointed in myself for never having connected the dots before.

“Dad. I need you to explain. Everything.”

“I can’t explain everything, honeybird. That just wouldn’t be safe for you. But I can explain a little bit about what goes in to this, and where I draw the line. I don’t hurt kids, or women.”

“You hurt people? Dad, what the fuck?”

“I don’t, sugar, but as I said, these things come with the territory. People will engage in violence, and there’s a certain amount a man must to do protect what’s his. No more, but no less.”

“Jesus.”

“Most of all, I’m so sorry to have put you in danger. There’s a reason I wanted you to stay out of this.”

“Well, it’s a little late for that.” I know I sound petulant but he deserves to feel bad about this. “If it weren’t for Liam —“

“Aye.” My father’s voice is grave. “I owe that young man a great debt.”

“I don’t know if Liam will want —”

“I want to meet the man who saved my daughter’s life, face-to-face.”

“You mean, size him up?” I ask. Dad’s never been a huge fan of any of my boyfriends.

Not that it matters now, I guess. Liam doesn’t want to stick his dick in crazy, I’m sure. Not a second time, anyway.

“I just want to meet him. How’s tomorrow?”

“Dad, aren’t you out of the country? Wait…” something dawns on me. “Oh my God, are you like… on the run? Dad are you in trouble? Here? In the United States?” I’m freaking right the fuck out.

Is my dad literally on the run from the law?

“Don’t be dramatic, sweet pea. It’s complicated, but we’re fine. I want to meet this man.”

“I’m not sure Liam is exactly what you have in mind.”

“Liam. A good Irish name. In any case, anyone willing to risk his life for my daughter… I don’t care who it is. I want to shake his hand.”

“I was planning to just never see him again,” the truth slips out of me. “After all I put him through.”

“Nonsense. That young man deserves an explanation.”

“You mean I’m… allowed to talk to him about you?”

“Aye, honeybird. Not the whole story, mind you. I’ll have Bert —“ he pauses. “I’ll have Seamus send you some details. For Liam’s safety, mind, not my own. There are some things… neither of you needs to know.”

“Jesus Christ, dad.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, sweet pea.”

What a joke. My dad, the criminal, telling me not to use the mildest of curse words.

I can’t believe this is happening. And now I have to text Liam again and grovel. After all that I’ve already put him through. Maybe I should just go visit him in person? He could ignore a text. As he should, honestly — no sane person would want to stay involved with me after they got the shit beaten out of them, and then lied to about it.

God, I’m awful.

“Dad, I don’t know if tomorrow will work.”

“Fine, but within the week, honeybird.”

I have to do what my dad says. I always have, and now I realize, maybe I always will. There’s no denying him. He controls my business, he makes my life possible. And he loves me, protects me. And now I’m complicit. I’m in this.

At least now I have the go-ahead to explain a little more about the situation to Liam, I guess. I need to rest first, though. I need at least twenty-four hours without any drama.

I want to get back to my clocks, but my wrists and fingers and whole body aches. So I just accept that it’s going to be a Netflix night, and settle in.