Close Protection (5 page)

Lena was upset when Ramon’s clumsiness had ruined her plot to seduce him. When she finished tending to her bloody nose and came back to find her room empty, she was furious. Her door was still locked. She checked under the bed, in the closet, and behind the curtains thinking that Ramon must be hiding somewhere in plain sight. The alternative was absurd.
Did he really jump off the fucking balcony?
Having eliminated all the other options, that was simplest one left.

Shocked that she had been beaten again, she climbed into bed and tried to forget how Ramon had felt pushed against her body. How he had tasted, his lips so close to hers. How she had wanted him, not for the sake of playing with his head, but simply to have him, even for only one night.

The next morning, Ramon said nothing about their encounter the previous night. Neither did Lena. For now, it was a secret that they would share. A battle in which they had both won nothing and  sustained injury too embarrassing to admit their involvement.

Lena did not cease in her attempts to seduce Ramon, and Ramon did not relent in his efforts to resist her. The day passed uneventfully. Lena continued her year-long habit of wasting her days in front of the TV, gossiping with old friends, laying out in the sun, and talking with Tia about anything that did not involve her feelings about Ramon.

In turn, Ramon seemed to give her a wider berth. He, having been the victim of Lena’s cunning, developed a healthy respect for her. He no longer ignored her, but merely observed her with a careful and critical eye. This made her happier than she would have guessed. It provided her with the attention that she craved, but in a way that did not leave her feeling as though she was covered in a thin film of oil the way that her step-brothers’ gaze did.

She even briefly entertained the idea that she and Ramon might be able to be friends. He was smarter than she’d given him credit for, or at least more clever. And the respect that she felt from him was the most intoxicating high that she’d ever known. For the rest of the second day, it seemed to Lena that things were going rather well.

Dinner was, for the first time she could remember, enjoyable. All five of them ate in Zeus’s study. The dining room, Ramon concluded, was not safe until curtains could be installed in the living room, shielding the family from sharpshooters in the trees surrounding the estate.

              Zeus insisted that Ramon not talk business around the dinner table, an edict that made him quite uncomfortable at first. But after giving an abridged version of his life story, he seemed to loosen up a little. For the first time she could remember, Lena found herself involved in a real conversation with her family. She was beaming by the time they finished their meal and prepared to settle in for the evening. As they were getting up to go, Zeus stopped Ramon and told him to stay. There was no way for Lena to warn him about what was about to happen next. Someone who did not know her stepfather would not have a keen sensitivity for his mood. But Lena did, and she did not doubt that the words that he intended to have with Ramon would not be kind.

“Am I paying you to fuck my daughter?”

Zeus was standing about two feet away. His face was bright red, he spat each word with precise articulation. He did not raise his voice. He could not have been more terrifying.

“No sir.”

Ramon had been on the wrong end of ambushes like this enough times to know the drill. Roll with the punches. Don’t get defensive. Don’t play dumb, but don’t cop to anything you don’t have to.

“Then would you like to tell me why you’re trying to fuck my daughter?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”

It was a risky move. If Zeus had somehow gotten wind of what had happened last night, Ramon might have just dug his own grave. But if he hadn’t and Ramon confessed unnecessarily, well he could imagine how much worse things would be if Zeus actually had something to be angry about.

“Galena tells me that you made an inappropriate pass at her the other day.”

Zeus’s voice was matter of fact. He spoke the way that you’d ask a child about their day at school. It was not accusatory. It was not angry. Ramon began to sweat.

“I’m very sorry sir. If I said something to your daughter’s offense, I did not mean to. I’ll apologize to her first thing. It won’t happen again.”

Ramon did not sigh in relief just yet, although he was reasonably certain that he’d managed to avoid catastrophe. He wasn’t sure what Zeus was talking about, but it wasn’t what had happened in her room the night before. It probably wasn’t her skinnydipping stunt at the pool, or that torturous run that he’d had to go on, ten feet behind her spandex clad body as it glistened and moved under the evening sun.

“See to it that it won’t, Mr. Sanchez.” Anger was rising up in his voice now, and the hairs on the back of Ramon’s neck stood up and he felt his stomach drop away into emptiness. “Because if I find out that you’ve so much as
looked
at her sideways…”

He turned and walked back to his desk, sitting in the huge leather chair. He made a show of rolling up his cuffs and setting his thick arms down on the desk. Ramon could see the entire octopus tattoo on his right wrist now. It was an awful and gory thing, pierced by spears, bleeding from slash and puncture wounds, and surrounded by the flotsam of defeated foes. It seemed entirely unlikely that the corpses were without direct significance to Mr. Buldova’s life work.

“I’ll just let you imagine what I’ll do to you.”

             
On the other side of the door to her stepfather's office, Lena was attempting to eavesdrop on their conversation. She’d taken a glass from the evening meal and had it pressed to the smooth wood panel. The conversation between Zeus and Ramon was intense, he spoke softly and deliberately, the way that he did when he was most angry. But they were too quiet for her to make out anything distinctly.

              She heard her name, but an instant later was interrupted by a knock on the door. She waited, hoping somebody else would answer it, but when the knock came again, she left her post and opened the front door.

              “Why haven’t you been answering my calls.”

              Lena’s heart dropped into her empty stomach. She tried to close the door, but Damien stopped it with his foot and pushed it open, stepping over the threshold of her house.

              “It’s good to see you too, Damien.”

              “Shut the fuck up. Why have you been ignoring me?”

              His words were loud and slurred. He looked to be on the edge of tears and his hands shook with rage or regret. Lena lowered the glass in her hand to her side and hid it behind her back. Damien made no notice of it.

              “Answer me you fucking bitch? Are you fucking someone else? You think you’re better than me?”

              Lena backed away but Damien followed her into the living room. She could smell tequila on his breath. She turned to run to Zeus’s office but Damien caught her shoulder and spun her back around. Without thinking, she swung her arm in a wide arc, smashing the glass into the side of Damien’s head. There was a scream and the sound of shattered glass hitting the tile. There was a lot of blood. But it only took a moment for Damien to straighten up. The rage in his eyes had intensified. He looked exactly the way that he did the last time he’d hit Lena. She tried to pull away from him, but it was no use. He had a grip on the bust of her dress and pushed her back through the shattered glass, up against the wall, and pulled back his hand.

              There was a scream outside Zeus’s office. Ramon did not wait for the old man before moving to act. He opened the door and ran out into the empty dining room. He turned just in time to see Lena whirl around and smash a drinking glass against the side of a man’s head.

              Ramon would later be embarrassed by how long he stood paralyzed. The sight of his prissy princess of a client fighting like a barroom brawler was simply too much for him to comprehend. When her victim rose up, undeterred, he snapped back to attention.

              The man grabbed Lena by the collar and pushed her across the room. She hit the back wall with a thud and the man drew back his arm to strike her. But Ramon was already on top of him.

              When the man went to throw his punch, he was caught off guard by a strong hand at the crook of his elbow. Ramon pulled and the man went down to the ground with a thud. Lena tried to drop on top of him, her fists balled and her teeth gritted in primal aggression, but Ramon held her back easily. With one arm around Lena and one foot on the man’s chest, he looked back and forth between them, trying to sort out what had happened.

              Once it dawned on Lena that she was not going to be allowed to attack the man, she relented and Ramon let go of her. She started towards the dining room, turning on a dime and delivering a swift kick to the man’s ribs before Ramon could do anything to stop her.

              He turned to the man on the ground who had the good sense to know when he was beaten.

              “Let me guess. Damien?”

              “Let me guess. The whore’s new fuckboy?”

              Ramon leaned onto the foot on Damien’s chest, putting more weight on his sternum. Damien groaned as the air in his lungs was forcibly removed.

              “My name is Ramon, and Mr. Boldova pays me very well to see to it that Lena is neither harmed nor bothered by anyone. If you want to find out just how well he pays me, come back here again.”

              Nobody ever called Damien a fast learner, but he caught on quickly to Ramon’s lesson. As soon as the boot was removed from his chest, he scrambled to his feet and ran out the door. Ramon watched him as he sprinted to a car that had been left idling in the driveway. He climbed in and the engine roared as he peeled out and raced back to the gate at the main road.

              When Ramon turned around, Zeus was standing in the middle of the broken glass in the living room looking around, trying to figure out what had just happened.

              “Why are you and Damien fighting?” he asked Lena as though their brawl had not been terribly out of the ordinary.

              “Because he’s a stupid selfish jackass,” Lena spat.

              “He’s a nice boy. You should give him a chance.”

              Ramon acknowledged that it might have been possible that he was missing part of the picture, but he failed to see any way of looking at the situation that made Damien look like a “nice boy”.

              Lena seemed to share his thoughts on the subject. She gave her step-father a sour look and stormed away towards the stairs. Zeus threw up his hands and walked back to his office.

              Left alone in the living room, Ramon closed the house and locked the door, then went to the kitchen to get a broom. He cleaned up the mess, straightened the furniture back out, and made a note to have a conversation with Lena and Zeus about how Damien had gotten into the complex, and why he had been allowed to get to the front door without a meeting with one of Zeus’s henchmen.

              Once order had been restored to the living room, Ramon went upstairs to check on Lena.

              Lena wanted nothing more than to grab a piece of glass from the floor and cut Damien’s throat with it. Ramon had stopped her, for which she was equal parts grateful and grudging. She was upset that Ramon had interfered at all. If he’d have let Damien hit her, she could have gone to the police with him as a witness and had his sorry ass locked up. Not that her father would have let her do it. Not that Damien’s father ever would have let him see the inside of a jail cell. But all the same, now that Damien was an adult, his crimes would go on the record and stay there.

              Maybe she couldn’t make any of his crimes stick, but at least she could sink his reputation.

              As angry as she was with Ramon, she was even more upset with her step-father. She’d told him
everything
that Damien had done to her, just like she’d told the police. The police didn’t do anything. They couldn’t, not really. But she’d expected her step-father to. She’d expected
him
to give a shit. She’d never been angrier in her life. Zeus Buldova was one of the few people in Florida who could have touched a single hair on Damien’s head, and he had no desire to do so.

              And now, after countless abuses, he still defended that shithead. Still couldn’t see why Lena didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

              She’d been so blind with rage, so high on adrenaline, that she didn’t even notice the shards of glass in her hands and feet until there was a knock on the bedroom door and she sat up and saw the blood all over the door, the floor, and her comforter.

              “Fuck off,” she sobbed.

              Ramon opened the door and looked inside. He disappeared for a moment, then returned with a first aid kit.

              “Is there a problem with your hearing or something?” Lena asked.

              Ramon didn’t respond. He opened the first aid kit and took out a pair of tweezers, some gauze, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and several pairs of rubber gloves..

              “Give me your hands,” he said with a calm and quiet voice.

              Lena hesitated. She hated to do anything that Ramon told her to. Hated his rules. Hated the way that he ordered around.

              “The longer you wait to get this taken care of, the worse it’s going to be.”

              The pain had already started to hit her now that the adrenaline was waning. It was terrible, made worse by the fact that she couldn’t touch anything without aggravating the shards of glass in her palm. Her left hand was shaking so hard that she couldn’t have begun to use the tweezers on her own.

              She surrendered her hand to Ramon, who took it gently, holding her by the wrist and leaning over her hand. He had to stop to turn on the lamp by the side of her bed, then returned to tend to her cuts. He was careful and delicate with his work, but there was no way to go about removing the dozens of tiny slivers without inflicted a great deal more pain.

              But Lena gritted her teeth and stayed strong while Ramon double and triple checked every cut, making sure he hadn’t missed anything. He pulled out one final splinter, nearly invisible save for the cloud of blood that coated the exterior. He dropped it into the top of the first aid kit and let go of Lena’s hand.

              She began to climb out of bed, but Ramon gently stopped her with an arm across her shoulders.

              “I need to do your feet now.”

              Lena leaned back and allowed Ramon to put her feet onto his lap. He grimaced when he saw them. The splinters had been driven deep into her feet and had torn and slashed her flesh when she stomped away from the fight. Lena hadn’t even felt it until now.

              She watched as Ramon took a deep breath and leaned in low. He worked with laser focus, methodically finding and removing every sliver of glass from Lena’s feet. It took him nearly an hour. Every second was miserable for Lena. She nearly passed out from pain a number of times, but she never managed to slip into the comfort of unconsciousness. By the time he had finished, Lena was in such a deep state of surrender that she hardly noticed him get up and go to the bathroom.

              He returned a moment later with a fresh pair of gloves and a damp cloth.

              “This is going to hurt.”

              He was not lying. Lena gritted her teeth as he cleaned her wounds, first with warm water, then with the biting sting of hydrogen peroxide. After that, he wound her palm and soles in loose coils of gauze wrap, securing the ends with little metal clips.

              “You should stay off of your feet for a few days, at least, and avoid using that hand as much as possible.”

              Lena begrudgingly accepted his help to get into a comfortable position to sleep. She tried at first to push herself up, but realized that without the use of either feet and one of her hands, it was hard for her to do even that much on her own.

              “Can I get you anything before I go?”

              She said nothing. The indignation of submitting yet again to Ramon had been as humiliating as his earlier intervention had been infuriating. He turned to leave. A funny feeling in Lena’s stomach caused her to call out to him as he went. He stopped and turned back to her.

              “Wait.”