Page 28
Asher
The tower block loomed in front of us all too soon, all four of us coming to an abrupt halt. Make that five. I assumed Baxter was here, too.
“Shit!” John said, his expression reminding me of how candid he’d been about his fears during the conversation at my desk. It was rare for him to show any true vulnerability, which only made the occasional moments when he did more jarring.
“Yeah…” Bellamy agreed.
“Neither of us have been here since that night,” John said. “I didn’t count on the memories coming flooding back. I did not have a fun time in that building.”
“I died in there,” Bellamy said, his voice quiet, “and I came back to life.”
John laughed. “Yeah, in the battle of shit memories, you win hands down, babe.” He turned to face us. “This is as far as we go.” Stepping forward, he clapped his hands on Calisto’s shoulders and brought their faces close together. “Now… you listen to me. You do whatever you need to do to walk out of there, right? No attacks of conscience. No being nice. Give the bitch her daughter, if that’s what it takes to end this thing. At least you bringing her back isn’t her having a powerful occult artifact she can use for other things, or a demon in her back pocket. And if her daughter turns out to be a super villain, then we’ll deal with that at a later date. All of us, including Ben.”
As pep talks went, it wasn’t a bad one.
“He’s right,” Bellamy said with a half smile. “Do whatever you need to.”
“As for you,” John said, letting go of Calisto and turning my way.
“Don’t bother coming back?” I suggested, beating him to the chase.
His lips twitched. “No. I was going to say you might not be that bad, that I may have been wrong about some aspects of you.”
“Really?”
“You can’t be that bad if Calisto likes you.”
“That’s almost heartfelt.”
“Yeah, well…” He looked down at his feet. “It’s not really the time for being a bitch, is it? But …” He lifted his gaze back to mine and pointed a finger at me. “This conversation stays between the four of us.”
I cocked my head to one side and studied him, unable to stop the smile that played on my lips. “Have the memory problems been plaguing you for long? Assuming you can remember, that is.”
John frowned. “What?”
I tapped the relevant button on the front of my shirt with my index finger. “Smile. You’re on camera.”
John’s face was a picture as he realized what I was getting at. “Fuck!”
“So just between the eight of us,” I said, “rather than four. And if I live to see another day, maybe I’ll ask Cade for a copy for my birthday.”
Bellamy tugged John away before he could come up with something cutting in response. “Come on. Even being this close gives me the heebie-jeebies. I never want to set foot in there again.”
“Comforting words,” Calisto said drily. “Just what we needed to hear before we set foot in there.”
Bellamy grimaced. “Sorry. You’ll be fine.” His gaze skipped to me. “It’s not like you’ve had any visions that say differently, right?”
Keeping my expression neutral took every iota of strength I had. “We should go,” I said, rather than lying. Thankfully, Bellamy didn’t push for an answer and neither he nor John said anything more as Calisto tugged me away and we set off toward the building.
“When is your birthday?” Calisto asked.
I didn’t look back to see if John and Bellamy were standing watching us go. If they had any sense, they’d beat a hasty retreat. “November 9th.”
“Huh!” Calisto considered my answer for a moment. “You’re a Scorpio.”
I shrugged. “I’m not really into horoscopes.” Something about that seemed to amuse Calisto. “What?”
“Course you’re not. Why would you be into predicting the future?”
“Maybe it’s because I have a better way,” I pointed out. “One that doesn’t rely on the position of the moon and the sun, or whatever else it entails.”
“Maybe.” We walked on a few steps, neither of us in a rush to reach our destination. “Aren’t you going to ask me when my birthday is?”
“March 9th,” I said without missing a beat.
“Correct. I’m a Pisces.” Calisto turned his head to smile at me. “Scorpio and Pisces are compatible. Did you know that?”
“I don’t need a star chart to tell me we’re compatible. I told you that on the first night we met.”
From Calisto’s glance to the side, I assumed Baxter had something to say about that. I threw caution to the wind. “What did he say?”
“Who?”
“Baxter.”
“He said…” The slight pause said Calisto was censoring Baxter’s words, or considering how honest he wanted to be in relaying them. “He said you should have gone all caveman on my ass that night and just dragged me into your bedroom by the hair, that it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.”
“Oh!” I really hoped that hadn’t been the censored version.
“Baxter can be quite crude,” Calisto said with a slight redness creeping into his tanned complexion. “Yes, you can. You know you can. I’m not arguing with you tonight. I have more important things to think about. We both need to be thinking clearly. Him, not you,” he clarified.
“I think all three of us need to be thinking clearly.”
We were close enough to the tower block now to make out the surrounding area. O’Reilly clearly cared little for aesthetics, a dumped black leather sofa with springs poking out of it taking pride of place in the middle of the car park. To its right, a skip overflowed with broken furniture and other stuff I didn’t want to look too closely at. John had described an overflowing skip months before, and I assumed it was the same one, still unemptied. The pièce de résistance was a burnt-out car, the occasional patch of blue paintwork visible through all the charring.
Calisto came to a stop and lifted his head to look at the tower block, something lurching in my chest at it being the exact moment from my vision. Click. The same expression of determination tinged with apprehension was present, and I already knew what would happen next. He’d take a moment. He’d gather himself, and then he’d square his shoulders and continue toward the door, where we were close enough to see the bulky outline of three men stationed there.
“I know you lied,” Calisto said quietly, his gaze still fixed on the tower block.
The words shocked me into silence for a few seconds before I found my tongue and remembered how to work it. “About what?”
He turned my way, no censure in his brown eyes, just an intensity that left me breathless. “About you being here with me tonight. If you’d been in the vision, you would have said so straight away. You added that when you knew it was going to happen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It does,” Calisto said with a slight smile. “On two counts. First, because you’re willing to sacrifice yourself for me, which is all kinds of sweet and something that could never not matter, and second, because if I’m selfish enough to let you do that, what does it say about me?”
He let out a slow breath. “So… I want you to walk away. I want you to go back to the van where Cade, John, and Bellamy are, and I want you to watch from a safe distance, so I can at least go in there knowing I’m not dragging anyone else down with me. A clear conscience, if you will.”
I studied him, taking in the determined set of his jaw and the slight narrowing of his eyes that said he was deadly serious. And then I said the only word I could to the offer to save myself and leave him to his fate. “No.”
He rounded on me. “What do you mean, no?”
“Exactly what I said. I made my decision and I’m sticking to it.”
“That’s—” Calisto shook his head, his body language a study in frustration.
I glanced at my watch while he was still trying to choose an appropriate word. “We’re out of time.”
As if on cue, Calisto’s phone rang. He fumbled it out of his pocket and put it on speaker. O’Reilly didn’t wait to be greeted. “I see you, Mr. Dominguez. And I see you’re not alone.”
“You never said I had to come alone. Anyway, Asher is leaving.”
I leaned closer to the phone so she could hear me. “Asher isn’t leaving. Either we both come in or neither of us does.”
“It makes no difference to me either way,” O’Reilly said. “One of you… Two of you. You can bring a marching band in with you as long as I get my daughter back. I assume you are coming in, that you’re not just going to stand there.”
“She must have binoculars trained on us,” Calisto muttered as he ended the call. “Either that or she has spies.” He turned in a slow circle, but the area was devoid of anyone apart from the men stationed at the door. “Last chance,” he said.
“I appreciate your concern about my welfare, but if you’re going in there, I am, too.”
Calisto sighed. “Baxter says you’re an idiot.” He rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not telling him that.”
“Not telling me what?”
“He said sexy idiot,” he finally admitted. “He likes blonds. You and John both get his seal of approval.”
“I would say he has good taste, but including John shows otherwise.”
We started walking, all the fight having gone out of Calisto. He was doing an excellent impression of not being nervous, but it was an impression. I wasn’t feeling too chipper myself. “You know as a kid when you role played in the school playground?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Despite being more of the bookish type, more likely to be found asking the teacher if I could stay in the classroom and finish my work than to be running around the playground and worrying about the ever-changing complex network of different social groups that needed navigating, I agreed.
“My friend Rory Carter always wanted to be the hero. He was Spiderman or Iron Man, or the Pokemon trainer when everyone was crazy about them.”
“And who were you?” I asked, quickly understanding the point he was trying to make.
“I didn’t care. I was just happy to be involved. But I was never interested in being the hero. Not then. Not now. Stepping up like this,” he said with a pained expression, “doesn’t come easily to me.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t care if that makes me sound wet,” he said.
I figured that point was more for the men listening in than it was for me. Maybe Griffin. Although, I doubted Griffin currently cared about anything except Ben’s welfare. “You don’t need to be a hero. You just need to do what O’Reilly wants without antagonizing her, and then get out of there and leave her and her daughter to it.”
“Yeah.”
“We’d reached the men, all three of them built in a way that said if they wanted to, they could have carried the burnt-out car to a new location without breaking a sweat. There was little conversation, the men favoring hand gestures as they subjected us to a body search that, despite leaving virtually no area unexplored, failed to pick up on the hidden cameras. I stifled my retort when one of them slapped my buttocks to signal his completion of the search. I needed to take my own advice about not antagonizing anyone. Despite my silence, he laughed at my expression. “Perks of the job,” he said with a smirk.
I considered how lucky it was he’d taken a shine to me rather than Calisto as we were ushered into the building, because I wasn’t sure I could have held back had it been Calisto he’d copped a feel of. “Lift is on the fritz,” was called after us. “You’ll have to take the stairs. Top floor.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” I said, once we were out of earshot. “They just want us tired.”
“Yeah,” Calisto agreed. “They don’t realize you’re up at the crack of dawn every day to turn your body into a lean, mean, climbing stairs machine.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining last night.”
“You kept my mouth too busy to complain.”
Even in the dark stairwell, I saw when Calisto recalled others were listening in on our conversation. I stifled a smile as he did his best to pretend he didn’t give a fuck while clearly withering inside.
The second click of the vision occurred on the sixth floor when Calisto stopped for a breather. “When we get up there,” he said between pants, “Baxter is going to look for Ben. He’ll come back and tell me what he’s found, but obviously I won’t be able to communicate it to you, so you’ll just have to trust me and follow my lead.”
“And if he can’t find Ben?”
“Then we’re already fucked and we should never have agreed to come here, so it doesn’t really matter what we do.”
“I can do most of the talking,” I offered. “I’m using to handling troublesome people without letting them get to me.”
Calisto laughed as he straightened in preparation to tackle another flight of stairs. “There’s a vast difference between the boss of an organized crime syndicate and disgruntled clients.”
“I wasn’t talking about clients. I was talking about Cade.”
Calisto barked out a surprised laugh. “Look at you being controversial.”
“Well, I figured that if I see Cade again, I’ll be too happy that everything turned out okay to care. And if I don’t, then it really doesn’t matter.”
“And it doesn’t matter if he fires you.”
“Not now,” I agreed, the way my gaze lingered on Calisto reiterating that I’d only ever worked there because of him. Not that I didn’t take pride in doing my job well. I did, and I was damn good at it, no matter what John might have to say about the approach I took.
We made it another few floors before Calisto needed to stop again. Hands braced on his knees, he looked to his left. “Shut up. You’re dead. That’s the only reason you’re not out of breath. Don’t tell me you were super fit when you were alive because I won’t believe you.” A pause, and then, “Yeah, right?” He shook his head. “He’s claiming he ran marathons. He’s full of shit. The only Marathon he ever saw was the chocolate bar before they changed their name to Snickers.” He smiled. “Nothing to say to that. No, I didn’t think so.”
“Only a few more floors,” I said.
“And then pure joy awaits us at the top. I can’t wait.”
I quite liked this harsher, more snarky version of Calisto. “At least it will be over with, one way or another.”
“True.”
The corridor at the top of the stairwell provided the third click of the vision. The fourth click arrived in quick succession as the short, stocky man with the red beard stepped out of the shadows to offer a mock bow to Calisto. “This way, your majesty,” he said, sweeping an arm out in front of him.
No laugh. In the vision, there’d been a laugh before the bow. Did it mean anything that it was missing? What had changed it? My presence? Something else? Was I grasping at straws to take something so simple as a good sign?
More men leaned nonchalantly against the wall as we traversed the corridor, watching us, but saying nothing. One had a cigarette between his fingers, smoke hanging in the air as he took a long drag. Click.
Another man appeared to bar our way. He was thin and wiry with shrewd blue eyes that said not much got past him. “Well, well,” he said, his gaze fastened on Calisto like I was nothing more than window dressing. “You actually grew some balls and came.”
“Nothing to do with growing balls,” I said, my tone even. “We had little choice.”
He turned his head to give me a once-over that lingered far too long for my liking. “Sure you were. London has plenty of detectives. What’s one less in the grand scheme of things?”
Calisto opened his mouth, but I got in there first. “O’Reilly seemed eager for our arrival when she called. I’m sure she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
He rolled his eyes. “Expert on her, are you?”
When neither of us answered, he turned on his heel and led us down the corridor.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
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- Page 5
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- Page 9
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- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
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- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28 (Reading here)
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39