Brawn: Lethal Darkness MC (22 page)

I was surging with the desperate desire to run away and hide. My skin was crawling with anxiety and fear; my mouth felt dry and sticky. I forced myself to stop chewing my nails and instead to clasp my hands in front of me obediently. Maybe, if I acted apologetic—even though I’d truly done nothing wrong—he wouldn’t hurt me too badly.

He stopped when he was right in front of me and spread his feet wide. I was quivering from head to toe. This was it; the punch was coming. Everything up until now had been just a honeymoon period, a brief oasis in time before the hitting started. The future looked bleak from this moment forward. It looked painful.

Micah raised a hand towards me. I closed my eyes, waiting for the strike to land.

But instead, he cupped my chin softly. His fingers were more delicate than I ever could have imagined.

“Open your eyes, Paris.”

I forced them open, trembling.

“There’s something you should know about me,” he growled. “I’m a jealous son of a bitch. I don’t share. Never have. I don’t play nice with others. When I want something, I want it all to myself, now and forever. And you…you’re like nothing else I’ve ever had before. With you, the need to
have
everything is more intense. It’s clawing at me. I don’t just want you now. I want you from years ago. I want your whole life. Do you understand me? I want you to belong to me so completely that it’s like you’ve always been mine. The thought of another man even looking at you makes my skin crawl. I’m a flawed man, and this is one of my deepest, but it is what it is.”

He paused to look deeply into my eyes before continuing. “The thing is, I can’t and won’t force you to accept those terms. I meant it when I told you that I’m not your prison guard. Your old man may have taken away your choices, but I’m not him and I won’t do that. So you need to decide right now. You can stay here, with me, on my terms. Or you can walk out the door and go anywhere you like. It’s your call.”

He let his hand fall away from my chin and crossed his arms again. He took one last look at me, like he was trying to soak up the images of me, sear me on his retinas, as if it might be the last time he would ever see me again. Then he walked around me and into the bedroom.

“Micah.”

He was halfway across the room. The light overhead cast dim, twisted shadows across his muscular back. He stopped, but didn’t turn to face me. The air was thick and heavy.

“Micah, I’m not going anywhere. I’m yours. No one else’s. Just yours.”

Slowly, he turned around. He was bigger than ever, it seemed, or maybe that was just my imagination running wild. The fear that had corrupted my thinking was transforming into an intense, trembling energy. How could I ever have thought he would hit me? Of course he wouldn’t. Of course not. It felt like the last vestiges of doubt were getting purged from me in a flood of emotion that I couldn’t possibly resist. The only thing I could do was give in to it.

Give in to him.

“I’m not a normal man, Paris. If you’re choosing me, you have to know that it won’t be a normal life.”

“I don’t want a normal life. I want this. I want you.”

Before I could stop myself, I ran over to him and jumped into his arms. He caught me without blinking, and my lips crashed into his. His skin was still damp to the touch from the river, and as he threw me onto the bed beside us, my wet hair splayed out like a fan over the comforter. He fell on top of me, his body hot, his touch roving and insistent.

I didn’t want to be wearing clothes for a second longer. Without waiting for him, I stripped his baggy shirt over my head and immediately reached for the buckle of his jeans. He slid out of them and tugged at mine, not even bothering with the button but instead just forcefully yanking them down until they were off and gone and he could take his firm cock and push it into my hot, desperate cunt and start to fuck me, to fuck me hard and fast and with the most furiously intense passion I’d ever seen or felt or heard of. I was moaning by the third stroke and it felt like just seconds after we’d begun that I was coming. I wasn’t sure whether I was coming because of his manhood penetrating deep into me or because of his masculinity pouring around me like hot wax, but it didn’t matter, because I was coming either way. I clawed at his back and felt blood start to run from where my nails dug deep, but that didn’t matter either. What mattered was his mouth sealed against mine and the frantic pumping of his hips to drive deeper and deeper into me. He wrapped my legs around his waist and used my hips to pull me towards him, to ensure that every single inch of him was diving as far as possible into me as it could go and then just a little bit more. He stroked a rough thumb across my clit and the lightness of that mixed with the thick density of his fucking made my eyes roll back into my head and my toes curl.

Micah wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and forced my head up. “Look at me,” he commanded. He hadn’t stopped thrusting since the moment he entered me. I didn’t ever want him to stop. Little moans and whimpers escaped my mouth as he stared into my eyes like he thought he could see my soul there. He started talking. The words poured outwards like a tidal wave. Neither of us cared if they made sense. What mattered was that it was his voice, Micah’s voice, my
husband’s
voice and the voice of my baby’s father, that came rough and never-ending.

“You’re mine, all mine. I want all of you, no,
need
all of you, won’t stop until I have all of you. I put a baby in you and I’ll do it again and again until we’re both dead and gone, and even then, I will own you and keep you to myself. I don’t share, I won’t share, I can’t share. Paris, you’re mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”

He came again, hard, filling me up for the second time in as many hours. I knew it then: I loved him.

# # #

A little while later, after we both had showered and put on clothes to sleep in, we were lying in bed together. I was curled against his side with my head on his chest, rising and falling with his breaths.

“How is it better every time?” I murmured.

He knew what I was talking about of course. My heart was still fluttering from the sex, despite how much time had passed. My body was exhausted, but my brain refused to let me sleep.

He rumbled something I couldn’t hear because my ear was pressed on his pec. What he said wasn’t important though. I had everything I needed already. I had him next to me. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. Before I knew it, we were both asleep.

Micah

I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when I clomped into the clubhouse the next morning. My body was a little sore from all the rough-housing with Paris, but I’d never felt lighter on my feet. I felt downright giddy, like a fucking schoolgirl. But goddammit, I was loving it.

My mood immediately took a down turn when I waltzed around the corner and into the hallway. Bear and Bolt looked up at me from where they sat on the floor with half-empty boxes arranged messily around me. They blinked dazedly a couple times, looking like goddamn zombies, then turned back to the papers without saying a word. I frowned.

Stepping into my office, I saw Zeke and Carter hunched over the conference table. Judging by the frightening number of cigarettes smoked down to the butt and stubbed into the ashtray in the middle of the table, they’d already been there for hours.

As I walked in the door, Carter roared “Argh!” and stood up suddenly, flinging his seat behind him and plunging a knife into the wooden table top. He was seething. I could almost see the steam rolling out of his ears. His eyes were bugging out of his head, rimmed with red, while his nose flared out like a bull in the ring.

He heard me clear my throat and raised his gaze to me, but it was like he could barely see me through the haze of fury clouding his vision. “This is fucking impossible!” he snarled. He picked up a sheath of papers and shook it in the air over his head. “It’s all fucking ruined! I can’t read a goddamn thing. We’ve been here for hours, fucking
hours
, and we’re not anywhere closer to finding this shit!”

“Calm down, Carter,” said Zeke. His voice was level and cool, as always, but I’d known him long enough to hear the exhaustion underpinning it. I guessed the night’s rest hadn’t helped restore their patience much. They both looked ready to eat a bullet rather than dig through one more pack of water-stained files.

Zeke looked at me. “Not going well?” I asked.

He took a fresh cigarette from the almost-empty carton at his elbow and tucked it in between his lips, then retrieved the lighter out of his breast pocket. “Not exactly,” he growled while lighting it and taking a drag. “Just too much damage from the flood. Here, take a look. This is the best thing we’ve found.” He held out a browned piece of paper, turning up at the edges.

“That shit is useless, I’m telling you,” Carter muttered as I walked over and took the paper from Zeke’s hand.

“It’s all we got,” Zeke replied.

I studied the page. It looked to be a newspaper clipping. If I squinted, I could make out the date. It was from a few weeks after Anton and Tristan’s wife were found dead. The headline read,
With
No End in Sight, Murder Investigation Called Off.
The article was still damp, and most of the ink in the paragraphs below had run together. I didn’t think it mattered though, because the first line said, “Lacking promising suspects and any substantial evidence, local police have temporarily suspended their investigation into the murders of…” before trailing off into blurry nonsense.

My eyes roved over the sheet, looking for anything else that might be useful. I felt Carter watching me and nodding his head. “See?” he said. “Useless.”

Something caught my eye. “What’s this?” I asked.

Zeke frowned. “What?”

I held out the page and pointed out something on the bottom edge. “What’s that look like to you?”

He brought it close to his face, wrinkling up his nose as he tried to get a good view. “Ain’t shit,” Carter said from across the table. “I’ve looked at that thing a hundred times already.”

“Micah’s right,” Zeke said. “It’s something.”

“Lemme see that again.” I laid the clipping flat on the table and hunched over. Carter and Zeke came to stand on either side of me and together, we all stared down at the handwritten scribble I’d noticed just below where the text of the article ran out.

“Looks like
turnip
,” Zeke said.

“No, it’s
turning
,” Carter countered. “That’s a g, not a p. See the little squiggle underneath?”

“That’s just a pen mark, not a g. C’mon, use your head. Didn’t they teach you kids how to read in school?”

“Turner,” said a voice at the door behind us. “It’s a name.
Turner.
”

All three of us whirled around immediately. “Sorry, boss,” Bolt said, panting. “He insisted that he had to see you. I was just gonna bash his face in, but he said you’d know what was going on.”

“That’s okay, Bolt. Let him in.” Bolt stepped aside and James Porter came shuffling into the office. He looked like he was favoring a bad knee, and he was wearing a bathrobe and house slippers, but it was the folder clutched in his fist that really had my attention.

“Boris Turner,” the man said as he hobbled over to where we were standing, pushed through to the table, and laid the file down flat. He opened it up and started thumbing through the contents before plucking one out and raising it up to me like it was a medal he’d just won.

I took the paper from his hands and read it as quickly as I could. What I read made my heart start racing at a million miles per hour.

Seeing Carter and Zeke’s confused faces, James started to explain. “The police department somehow never released this to the media. They had a whole file full of stuff like that, in fact. I couldn’t believe I still had it. I remembered I made some copies of it—not that I was supposed to do that kind of thing, of course, but I was friends with Lenny, who ran the file room, and we used to bowl together, and so—”

“Get on with it, old man,” Carter snapped. Zeke gripped his shoulder and Carter growled but fell silent.

Porter cleared his throat and continued. “Sorry, sorry. Anyway, I was a cop at the time, yeah? Different unit, beat cop instead of murder, you know how it is, but anyhow, not important. Apparently, word came down from on high that the investigation needed to end right away. Inconclusively was the word that was used. Came straight from the commissioner’s mouth, according to my sources. Whoever had that woman and your, uh, your
friend
bumped off, he must have had some pretty powerful friends. It takes serious influence to get a double murder investigation cut off. But whoever it was, he had that kind of influence, and the whole thing went kaput. They stashed all of the files they had into the storage closet and told the press that they didn’t have any leads and they couldn’t keep devoting resources to the case. So they moved on. And that was that. No suspects, no witnesses—at least, that’s what the press was told.”

Zeke’s eyes narrowed. “But what?”

“But there
were
witnesses!” James said, beaming with pride. He pointed at the paper I held in my hand. “Boris Turner. He was there! Lived in the apartment right across the hall from where it happened. He saw it all. The cops interviewed him, but he was in shock and his memory was so jumbled up, and they didn’t have time to sort it out before the commissioner’s order to put a bow on the whole thing. So his side of the story got buried. Until now.”

“Let me get this straight,” Carter interrupted. “There was another guy at the apartment complex that night who saw the man who did it. He was interviewed by cops. Then, before they could follow up on what he told them, the police department ordered that the investigation be squashed.”

“Yes, yes,” James said, nodding. “That’s right.”

“That’s bullshit!” he exclaimed. “Motherfucking pigs!”

“Anyway,” Zeke drawled, “now that it’s been broken down so our simple-minded friend here can understand what’s happening, can you tell us what that paper says, Micah?”

“What’s it say, boss?” Carter asked eagerly. “Can this Turner guy ID the bastard?”

Everyone’s eyes shifted to me. I let the paper fall onto the table. “It doesn’t say shit,” I mumbled.  “His statement doesn’t make any sense.”

Carter snatched it up and scanned it furiously, but as he read, his face fell further and further. By the time he reached the bottom, he looked depressed enough to jump out the nearest window. “Whoever took down this statement didn’t give a damn about getting it right. It’s just a bunch of nonsense. ‘I saw a man in a mask, oh wait, it was a woman, no, it was a pygmy dwarf.’ I mean, what the fuck, man?” He fell into a slump in a nearby chair. “We’ve still got nothing.”

“We need to find the guy,” Zeke said quietly. “If we talk to Boris ourselves, maybe we can wring some sense out of him.”

“Yeah!” said Carter, jolting forward. His eyes were suddenly glistening again. “Let’s find the motherfucker! He’ll talk. He won’t have a choice.” He looked back and forth at us excitedly.

“What do you think, Micah?” Zeke asked me.

“It’s a good idea. Any lead is helpful at this point. Put out the word for everyone to start looking around for this Boris Turner guy.” But then I noticed James was wringing his hands and frowning. “What is it?” I asked, turning to him.

He swallowed a lump in his throat before pointing to the file. When he spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper. “Next page.”

I plucked up the next sheet of paper in his folder and started reading. When I finished, I buried my head in my hands on the table.

“Please tell me that’s good news,” Carter whispered.

“It’s an obituary,” I said. “Boris Turner is dead.”

# # #

I’d thanked James and sent him on his way with a renewed offer for him to call on the Lethal Darkness if he ever needed assistance with something. He’d been as helpful as he could have been, but I was still steaming fucking mad. It didn’t seem like there would ever be an end to this shit. We’d come so close to a breakthrough, but now we were knocked back on our asses, planted firmly in square one. It felt like someone was toying with me. And all I could think of was Valeriya, begging me to bring a close to her misery.

I picked up the obituary and read through it again. I’d read it a thousand times over in the hours since James had left, but it kept niggling at me. Something just didn’t sit right.

Carter and Zeke were back to digging through the documents. At first, they’d had some real zing in their movements, but as the minutes wore by and the clock hand ticked loudly in the silent room, they grew more and more despondent, until they looked every bit as depressed as they had when I had first walked in the room that morning.

The obit was dated a few months after the investigation had closed.
Boris Turner, 23, passed away suddenly yesterday evening… Designated no heirs… Is survived by his uncle, Victor, and cousin, Vasily…

I froze. His cousin, Vasily.

The memory practically slapped me across the face:
Sergei shouting at the pimply teenage boy, “Go on, Vasily, get the hell out of this room. I don’t want to look at you.” Turning to me and giving me an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. “My apologies, Micah. My son is often useless.”

I leaped to my feet and grabbed my jacket with one hand and my keys with the other. Carter whirled around to look at me. “Where are you going, Micah?” he asked.

I growled over my shoulder as I swept out of the room, “I’m going to pay our friend, Sergei, a visit.”

# # #

Six pairs of eyes locked onto me as I barged in through the door. I had a Russian henchman pinned in a headlock, my gun pressed against his bleeding forehead. The men surrounding the poker table with cigars clamped in their mouths looked stunned at the sudden intrusion.

“I need to talk to you, Sergei,” I thundered. “Right now.”

Sergei looked around at his companions and shrugged, then set his cards face down on the table and stood. As he walked over to me, he pointed at the man in my arms and said, “Come on, Micah, let poor Dmitri go. He did no wrong to you.” I relinquished my grip and let the poor motherfucker go.

“Put some ice on that or it’s going to swell up like a bitch,” I advised. He grunted as he stumbled away down the hall.