Bounty (8 page)

“Can we go back to Boston now? This place isn’t exactly conducive to a reconciliation.”

“Fine,” she says, still solemn, but a hint of sparkle in her eye. “I’ll hear you out. But it isn’t a date.”

L
iam invites
me to his favorite dive bar in town. We have to drive separately, and on the way I start to question my choices.

He’s impossible to resist. He’s trouble.

The ghost of a smile wisps across my face. He called me that, too. Trouble.

My life is such a mess. Is this the right choice, giving this guy a second — no,
third
— chance?

I miss my mom.

Before I know it, I’m pulling up to a dive bar in a part of town not too far from my place, but in a little tougher neighborhood. The rain is coming down again. Liam is waiting for me.

“You weren’t kidding about this place,” I say. The walls are grimy, the floor is sticky, and the room seems to be lit entirely by those lovely neon beer advertisement signs.

“I don’t even know your drink of choice,” he says.

“Whisky sour,” I say.

“I’ll get two.” He winks.

We pick a booth and I crawl out of my rain jacket, hair just a little damp, feeling just a little crazy. He sidles up with the drinks right away.

Okay, time to jump right in. Let no one say April Fitzpatrick doesn’t get things started with a bang.

“I didn’t realize you were like me,” I say.

“Hmm?”

“Motherless.”

I don’t tell him that I’m not sure my mom really died in an accident. I don’t tell him how many lines I’ve already crossed, telling him these things.

I don’t tell him that I’m not sure I forgive him, yet, that I’m only here to hear him out.

I don’t tell him that I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m just a sucker for thugs with secret feelings.

But somehow our conversation unspools before me, an unraveling thread, and I start to pick him apart, pull at the seams, see the Liam that’s under the scruffy, handsome, bad boy exterior. The man behind those dark blue eyes.

He keeps trying to keep me out, and then pauses, tense, and breathes. Then his muscles relax, and he tells me one new luscious detail from his life. His past loves. His line of work in statistics and research, all the time he spends at the computer. His brother, who’s a junkie and in jail. His lack of friends. Every new detail should make me feel worse about him, but I only feel drawn closer.

My head is starting to feel drunk on it. Drunk on drinking him in. Or maybe it’s the whisky sours.

“I think I’m drunk,” and somehow the thought has skipped right from my thoughts to my tongue. “Oops.”

“Okay,” he says, and his smile is
warm
. He’s smiling warmly at me.

“Time to get you home.”

“I’m still not forgiving you,” I say, “necessarily. Jury’s still out.” But he’s helping me into my jacket and patting me between my shoulder blades, and it’s hard not to just let him.

“You’re not driving,” he says.

“Neither are you,” I insist.

“I’ll call a cab.”

And I remember, now, that he probably won’t be coming home with me. That he wants to go “slow.” That there’s something about him, even with all this sharing, that makes me feel… out in the cold.

Then again, I am now standing outside the bar.

“Oh, shit, left my jacket,” he says, and ducks back in.

It happens immediately and I don’t see it coming. It’s hands, on me, and my arms being wrenched behind my back, and something pressed over my face.

I try to scream but I can’t.

H
eading back
to our table to grab my jacket, I catch a concentrated whiff of April’s scent — something fresh and delicate, some kind of flower, but something deeper, too, like maybe a mossy creek. It smells amazing. Unique.

I’ve gotten back in her good books. I’m getting a treasure trove of useful intel from her. Even if I have to tell her things about myself I’ve never told anyone. It’s almost like a trade: the true things about her life, in exchange for mine. And in spite of myself, I find myself coveting the tiny, lovely details of her life. Her favorite welding techniques, the first flavor of ice cream she ever had, which friends stuck by her when her mother died, and which ones didn’t. I feel attached to these small pieces of her. I want to collect them up and clutch them to my chest. Collect them, like baseball cards or matchbox cars.

The sound of glass breaking tinkles across my ears just as I reach for my leather jacket, and I’m suddenly regretting our choice of destination. I never thought about how sketchy a dive bar could be if you were a small woman like April.

It’s probably nothing. But I quicken my pace back out to her.

I couldn’t have invited her to my place, though. She can’t see it — it looks suspiciously undecorated, filled with surveillance tools, weapons, and files on marks. Files on her father, in fact.

Yeah, no way she can come over.

Besides, I don’t even have a couch, and there’s no way I could handle seeing April on my bed. The temptation to lay her down on it, spread her out… it would drive me insane. Let the smell of her linger in my bedroom?

Yeah, no way.

Another sharps sound pierces the air just as I push my way through the door, and my heart drops. I should not have left April alone. Not for a second.

So stupid.

Devlin Sullivan isn’t the only bad man in the city of Boston.

I sprint for the door, shoving patrons and waiters aside, the only thought in my mind is April, April, April.

Slamming open the door, I catch a flash of her hair and dark shapes rounding the corner to an alleyway. Then I hear a gunshot, and I’m flying. April, April, April. Puddles kick up and pigeons scatter as I round the corner to find the beacon of her hair at the end of the alley, dozens of yards off.

I take in the scene in a split-second, multifaceted tableau: April, surrounded by four men, writhing, kicking, and shrieking into a gloved palm shoved over her mouth, hands scratching uselessly at the forearm wrapped around her neck. Her gun, skittered several feet further down the alley, clattered to the side. One man, clutching a knee, cursing in a language I don’t understand. Another one, securing her wrists, but getting kicked and kneed. The third, backing up, his hand clapped over his eye, hissing into his phone.

As I sprint down the alley, she bucks wildly, connecting her head with the nose of the man holding her, then stomping down, hard, with what I know are steel-reinforced boots, smashing the soft leather over the man’s foot. He jerks back with a cry, and in that split second she twists just enough so he’s no longer right behind her. With that small amount of space, she gets an elbow into his gut, and then a knee into the crotch of the incoming attacker, and when he doubles over, another one to his face. The way she moves — vicious, silent, with speed and accuracy — for a moment, she’s a super hero. She’s going to break free and deliver a righteous ass-kicking straight out of a comic book.

But this isn’t a movie, and even the most valiant struggle from an unarmed, fifty-kilo woman is no match for men twice her size. The man behind her rakes his hand into a brutal claw around her face, jerking her head back violently, while the eye-guy steps back in to pin and tie her arms.

I see red.

The next sixty seconds are a haze to me. I feel red, a seething, roiling rage in my muscles unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I see flashes of the men — hands, holding knives. Masked faces, then unmasked and bloody. The back of a head, smashing into a wall. A broken wrist, a twisted kneecap.

I’m disconnected from my body, my own hands making motions, completing tasks, while my brain has gone… elsewhere. There’s a shrill siren sound, distant, and then only the rushing river sound of my blood pounding in my veins.

My eyes blink uncontrollably, and I realize, after a moment of absolute stillness, that I am standing in the rain.

There are three bodies slumped against the concrete. One is emitting a whimpering sound, two are not. The third man must have run for it. I hear sirens in the distance.

And there — April. Pressed back against the brick wall, hands still secured behind her back, her mouth with a wad of cotton taped into it.

Her pupils are tiny pinpricks in a sea of terrified green. Her face is wet with rain or tears. Her entire body is vibrating with the effects of adrenaline. She’s terrified.

“April,” I reach for her but she recoils, and I realize that my knuckles are dripping with a slick, dark liquid.

Blood.

I broke those men’s bones. With my bare hands. I didn’t even pull out my gun.

She’s terrified of me almost as much as she was of them.

T
he only thing
I can hear is my heart, pounding in my chest.

Liam’s face, stricken and struck, hovers in my vision.

An outstretched hand drips deep crimson.

He saved me with his bare hands.

And now he lays them on me.

My heart slows.

“
O
h my God
, April. Are you okay? Jesus, fuck, are you okay?”

My hands reach back for her, slower this time, stopping before I touch her. She’s very, very still as my hands hover over her shoulders.

“Where are you hurt? We need to get to a hospital.”

She doesn’t respond, so I give her a moment, and then place my hands on her shoulders, gentle, so she doesn’t feel confined or trapped by my embrace.

“Can I get these,” I ask, hands fluttering softly down her arms to where her wrists are bound. Her face nods into me. I kneel before her and begin to work open the knots as gently as I can.

Once I’m no longer standing over her, looming, once she’s the one looking down at me, she bursts into muffled sobs. Unable to bury her hands in her face while I unknot them or let her sobs out through her duct-taped mouth, she huffs long and hard through her nose, over and over — the desperate sound of someone trying and failing to master themselves.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay now. We’re okay now.”

I keep up a soothing mantra until I get her hands free, and she immediately fumbles for the tape across her face, yanking it off herself. That must hurt, ripping off her bruised and bloodied skin, where that man, that asshole, clawed at her. Once she’s free of it, she flings the little strip of silver to the ground and sucks down massive gulps of air, the breath gasping through her lungs, tears pouring down her face.

“No hospital,” she insists, and buries her face in my chest. shuddering. She collapses like a marionette with cut strings.

I have to get her somewhere safe and examine her injuries. Now. If she’s hurt badly, I need to get her to an ER.

But she’s right — taking her to the hospital could be dangerous. We don’t know who did this, what their plans might be, or what kind of connections they might have. Not to mention the fact that we’d have to go on police record with the incident, shedding unwanted light on my investigation, and possibly scaring off Sullivan.

“Okay,” I relent. “No hospital. Yet.”

But I think she’s passed out. Or going into some kind of psychological shock. She’s not responding, but her breathing seems normal. I can feel her heart beating where she’s collapsed into me.

“C’mon,” I scoop her up in my arms easily. She’s just so small.

I need to make sure she’s okay. Who knows what those fucking bastards did to her. We’re closest to my apartment, so I take her there. This definitely wasn’t part of the plan, with my gear everywhere, but it doesn’t matter. April is hurt and she needs me.

The walk back to my place seems to exist outside of time. I don’t feel anything from my body — April is weightless in my arms, my feet are weightless on the pavement, the rain doesn’t touch me, although it streams in rivulets down my body. Only my heartbeat, and hers, prevails.

Maybe I’m going into shock as well.

It doesn’t matter. I muscle her into my spartan apartment, laying her out across the couch so I can get a closer look at her. I crank up the heat and start the shower, and when I come back she’s blinking back at me. She looks dizzy, dazed. She’s shivering violently.

“Liam?”

My breath escapes me in a whoosh of relief. She’s not unconscious. She’s talking.

“Hey, darlin’,” I say, the term of endearment slipping out. “Let’s make sure you’re okay, alright? Where did they hit you?”

“Liam, I’m —” her eyes cast about, peering into the middle distance. What is she seeing? “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for. Can I check you over?”

She nods, and I run my hands over each of her joints, starting from her neck to her elbows and wrists. Nothing appears to be broken, but the red and raised marks from where her wrists were tied make the rage simmer higher in my throat. I try to swallow it down as I check her legs, knees, ankles.

“Take a deep breath for me.”

She complies, the air shaking out of her through her shivers. I pull apart her shirt and life up her tank top to inspect her torso as she breathes – some bruising already, but not too bad.

Then, her face. Bruised. And claw marks, along one cheek. As I inspect them, her shaking worsens.

“L-Liam” The shudders course through her in waves — she’s shivering in a way I’ve never shivered in my life. Her lips are turning blue.

“Christ.” My clinical examination grinds to a halt, and instead I cradle her face in my hands. “Let’s get you in the shower, okay? I got you.”

I pull her to me again, stilling her tense chattering against my chest as I carry her into the brightly lit bathroom and the standing shower. My vision swims through the harsh incandescent light.

The shower is emitting inviting steam – it’s by far the nicest part of my apartment. Large and clean, surrounded only by clear glass. I pull us both, fully clothed, into the warm spray and we slump down to the tiles, her still tucked into my lap. I think carefully of nothing but the heat as April gradually stops shivering. I’m having a hard time focusing on anything else, anyway. I feel… blank.

I never liked hot showers, anyway.

I’ve been murmuring to her the whole time. It’s okay. You’re okay.

“Liam?” She sits further up, wiggling a little out of my grasp. A bit of clarity has returned to her eyes. “I’m okay. Let’s…” she looks down at us, with our wet clothes on.

“This is stupid.”

She wrestles her shirt and pants off, cursing just a little at what I imagine is the sting of movement over bruises, fabric sliding along her cuts and injuries. And then the paradigm shifts, and as I watch her peel her pants down her gorgeous round ass, I’m stupidly aroused. Maybe it’s the adrenaline.

I realize I’m still just sitting, watching her. Her skin, bruised and cut, her muscles, dancing across her back, her tiny waist. Her delicate hands. She looks so strong, but also like I could easily break her.

She bends over me, and I think she’s saying something as she turns off the shower.

“Liam.”

I’m standing again, but I don’t remember getting up. I want to ask her if she’s okay, but then I realize that it’s me who isn’t. I’m not okay at all.