Defiance (New Adult Romance) (Isaac & Maya) (2 page)

2

Isaac

“Is Maya okay?”

“No,” Jace chokes, breathing heavily. “No, she’s not okay. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Holy shit I’m glad I overdid it on the benzos tonight. “Did he take her?”

“No. But I think he might have… I’m not sure. He was inside her bedroom for about 45 seconds before she started screaming and fighting back, and that lasted for another minute until we actually got inside. When I got in there, she was naked, his pants were undone, and—”

“You’re sure it was only two minutes?”

“Positive. I reviewed the tape. He slipped past us wearing a hoodie and walked in behind a few guys coming home just like we do.”

“I don’t think Luke would have been that quick about it. She was naked?” I ask, clenching my jaw.
Glory curses and runs over to her phone.

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure she has a fever. She might have been sleeping like that.”

“She has a fever?”

“Uh huh,” he answers. “I’ll get to that in a second. When I got in there, he punched her. I wouldn’t be surprised if he broke her cheekbone.”

My stomach turns as I picture it. “Fuck…”

“He only got one shot in before I pulled him off.”

“Are you with her right now? Can I talk to her?”

“No. Isaac… There wasn’t time for any plans. Oliver had to help me kick the door in and Piper saw him.
She knows what’s going on,” Jace explains and I exhale in relief. That’s why he sounds so shaken up. “After we chased Luke off, Maya started having a panic attack and hyperventilating. Since she can’t really breathe anyway, it was pretty bad, and—”

“Wait a second, back up. And calm the fuck down, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out, I sort of already have a plan for Piper finding out,” I assure him.

“You do?”

“Yes.”
Too bad it probably involves you losing her.
“Is Maya sick?”

“Yeah. It started out as a cold about six weeks ago, but it keeps coming back. She’s just as stubborn as you are, she won’t go to the doctor. Maya’s not eating very much and she only sleeps like four hours a night. She’s just… fucked up man, she’s not handling this very well at all. I know I should have told you, but I didn’t see any point giving you yet another thing to worry about
and she begged me not to.”

“And you fucking listened to her?”

“Yeah,” he says. “A few times. I didn’t tell you that Luke visited her at school and came to their house. He also had someone following her for a few weeks. And… Isaac, he threw AJ across the room. That’s why she was limping that day.”

“That was a month ago!” I yell. “What the fuck?”

“Dude, you were really messed up. We had it under control.”

“Oh yeah, obviously you guys had it completely under control,” I spit back. Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes and resolve not to rage out on him. Who the hell is Glory talking to? Fuck! “Jace,” I say as calmly as I can manage. “Bottom line it for me. Where is Maya?”

“Uh, well, she’s safe, but that’s another huge problem.”
Of course it is.
“Piper said she was taking her to the hospital, but they went to her mom’s apartment downtown and that place is Fort fucking Knox. We’ll try to set something up at this cafe across the street, but we won’t have any eyes on the place until the sun comes up. Piper won’t answer my calls…” he trails off, choking up a little.

You did this to yourself, Jace.
I’d throw it in his face if it were true, but really, it’s on me. Like everything else, including keeping my shit together and remembering what Glory just told me. “Vesuvio,” I whisper, giving him the codeword we chose to end the entire operation. We shouldn’t have said any of this over the phone.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.”

“One more thing. Luke drove up here in a fucked up torture van. We popped the tire so it’s still here.”

“Wow.” He left a creepy rape van in front of their house. What shitty timing for a golden opportunity. Fuck it, I might not get another chance. “Then Marsala.” That’s the one we chose for calling the cops after we clean up.

“Done,” Jace answers, but he doesn’t hang up like he’s supposed to.

“I’m not that pissed off. I swear. She’s alive right? And Piper… sorry about Piper. I’ll call you soon.”

“Okay,” he whispers and the line goes dead.

“I’m going home tonight,” I tell Glory as she approaches me.

She grabs my wrist as I fumble with my phone. “I already chartered a flight. We leave in an hour.”

“Oh. Thank you.” I stumble over to the window and stare out at the flashing neon lights. He was only alone with her for two minutes, that just isn’t enough time. But what if it was? If she was fast asleep and already naked… she must have been so terrified. I can’t let myself think about this shit, I’ll lose it. Either way, he fucking hit her and he will fucking regret it.

“Is Maya alright?”

“I doubt it, but she’s safe at her roommate’s mom’s place.”

Glory’s next breath is filled with a relief that I really need to understand. “Tell me that Jace isn’t fucking Piper MacNamara.”

“I could say those words, but I’d be lying.”

“You had him watching them, didn’t you?” she asks. I shrug at her as she glares at me. “Goddammit, Isaac. Are you fucking crazy?”

“Probably.” 

It’s difficult, but I resist the temptation to interrogate Glory about Maya while we’re at the hotel suite because I want her cornered in a plane, unable to escape. But once we’re in the air, I just can’t bring it up. I’m not sure if it’s the right move. Hell, I’m not sure I know how to play this fucking game anymore, a lot of pieces have moved around on the board tonight.

The only thing that matters is getting Maya into my arms as fast as possible, but I don’t know how I should do it. I can’t be impulsive. Getting her back will be relatively easy,
keeping
her is the tricky part, it always has been. Though for all I know, the FBI or whoever the fuck deals with human trafficking rings will slap a pair of handcuffs on me as soon as I step onto the runway.

Glory won’t let that happen, despite the fact that she’s still incredibly fucking angry at me. I can see the fury in her eyes every time she glances up at me over the top of that glass of s
cotch. She’d at least give me a heads up. I hope. I can’t fucking take this silence anymore.

“So who do I call to turn myself in, Glor?”

She chokes on her drink and her eyes widen. “Fucking nobody,” she exclaims, coughing.

“You said you flipped on him. Isn’t that what I should do?”

“I said I’m eager to, I didn’t actually do it yet. Well, not exactly. I deflected attention away from myself.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

“It’s pretty complicated, Isaac.”

It always is. But Glory’s tapping her toe and her eyelid is twitching a little. That only happens when she’s nervous because she doesn’t have the upper hand. Hopefully, I can use that to my advantage. “Just spit it out,” I say. She shakes her head and pulls out a magazine. “I don’t fucking think so.” Leaning forward, I take it from her hands as calmly as I can manage, but I still end up ripping it away. “What is the plan here, Glory?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about how I know your
girlfriend
,” she snaps.

“Ooo, touchy,” I laugh. “It must be one hell of a plan.”

“Fuck you, Isaac.”

“If you think I’ll let you turn this into another screaming match, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m sure I can pick up a fucking phone and call basically any police station or government agency and they’ll tell me who I should speak to,” I inform her. Glory tries keep up the jilted lover act, but that definitely fucking rattled her. Obviously, she’s in as much trouble as I am. For a moment, I feel a little smug until I remember that means she could end up in prison. I might see red every time I look at her right now, but that won’t last forever. “Gloria, if you need me to play this a certain way, you’d better fucking tell me while you have a chance. Because I’m a little fucking desperate here and I’m running out of willpower to keep my shit together. I can’t avoid doing something stupid if I don’t know what that is, so start fucking talking.
Now
.”

Her shaking hand reaches into her jacket for her vial, but I grab her by the wrist before she can flick it open. Our eyes meet and I try to hold onto my anger as hers fill with tears, but I can’t. I’m still taken off guard at the sight of her crying. “You’ll hate me,” she whimpers.

“You hate me right now, so maybe we’ll just end up even.”

“I don’t hate you, Isaac.” We both laugh for a second because it’s not true. “Okay, maybe a little,” she concedes. “But it will wear off like it always does. This won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Unless you don’t really love her, yes, I do.”

“We don’t need to talk about Maya right now.”

“Yeah, we do,” she chokes, pulling her hand away, but I grab the vial before she can fucking overdose and leave me hanging. “Because we’re about to go see Piper’s father and you need to know what happened so you can use it against him if you want her back.”

3

Isaac

That is not what I expected Glory to say. “Well, I can’t hate you forever if you help me get her back, can I?”

“Maybe not.” Smiling timidly at me, she pinches the bridge of her nose and starts to speak, but then we hit turbulence so rough it’s soon becomes concerning. We bounce around for a few seconds and stay silent for a few more until we’re sure it’s passed.

“This is really going to piss me off, isn’t it?” I say, leaning back in my seat. Glory cocks her head to the side and shoots me a quizzical look. “I suppose this is a good time to mention that I’ve become a fatalist. That was totally a sign.”

“Fate.” Glory nods, crossing her legs and lighting up a cigarette. Just one of the many perks of private jets. “Yeah, I can see that, especially in this case. I should have invited her over for dinner when you were younger. It would have spared us all some grief.”

Now that’s an interesting image. I wonder if Maya would have liked me back then. I would have been all over her. “She told me that she met my father when she was ten. I assume she met you then, too?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“You said that you weren’t even seeing him professionally around that time because of my mother.”

“I lied to you,” Glory says. “I don’t understand why, I never did. I guess we
can chalk that one up to fate, too.”

“He never fucked her.” I try to sound sure when I say it, but it still sounded like a question.

“No, I don’t think he ever did. And come to think of it, I specifically asked him not to. Try to keep that in mind.”

“So that’s how her name got halfway on the ‘daughters to keep his dick out of’ list. Why would you ask him not to do that, Glory?”

“Because I really liked her. She reminded me a lot of myself in some ways.” Her voice cracks and she takes the final drag off that foul cigarette and lights up another. “Holy shit,” Glory murmurs. “She totally reminds me of you, too.”

“Yeah. So why don’t you stop stalling and tell me another thing that we have in common.”

“Maya was twelve. She was a very inquisitive kid. Everybody said there was something wrong with her, but she was just extremely intelligent. I could see the wheels constantly turning whenever I looked at her. She didn’t really interact with the world, she just… absorbed everything. I think she was just paralyzed with too much information.”

“Still stalling, Glor.”

“Baron and I… well, you know we’re a little ruthless when it comes to money.”

“Just a little, huh?”

“You’re not exactly a saint yourself, Isaac.”
Fair enough
. “So the District Attorney is a pretty good friend to have. The problem was, Carl was a pretty clean guy back in the day. If you can’t buy him, one of the easiest ways to make a friend is to get some dirt on him. But there wasn’t any. We had to make some.”

“And how’d you do that?”

“I seduced him. It wasn’t that hard, but I did feel a little bad about it because I liked his wife. I still do, actually.”

“I’ve heard this story before, just with different people. Tell me where Maya fits in.”

Glory’s face contorts and my stomach starts to churn. “I didn’t know Maya was following us, but your father did. And he just let her, he probably got a kick out of it. There were so many kids around whenever we went up there that summer. Piper’s mother is the superwoman, have-it-all type. She was busy with all of them and running for reelection… it was pretty easy to disappear. Plus we had a totally legitimate excuse to slip away after dinner to discuss ‘business.’ But that’s not what we were doing. It’s all my fault,” she chokes. “I got a kick out of doing it while Lynn was in the house. Just smile right at her after dessert and saunter off to go rock her husband’s world. She trusted me, she was totally clueless.”

“So I take it Maya was just as sneaky back then.”

“Yeah, she sure was. She disappeared after dinner a few times herself. That kid could climb the fuck out of a tree,” Glory laughs. Jealously mingles with my concern because I didn’t know that about her. “Carl’s office was on the second floor and it had this giant oak outside the window. That’s how Maya watched us. She was just curious about sex, I guess, especially the kind we were having. I never could get her to admit how many times she saw, but the night I noticed her was… a little rough. Even for us.”

“Did Dad just watch or did he…”

“He didn’t just watch. We definitely pushed Carl out of his comfort zone that night. He was in my mouth and your Dad was in my ass. It didn’t exactly appear consensual, but it was. It probably looked like I was actually fighting back to her. I wasn’t, but you know how I am…”
Yeah, you can be extremely fucking convincing.
“We heard a branch snap and this little squeak. Carl looked over and started swearing, so I did too and I saw a pair of shocked blue eyes staring at us and a bunch of frizzy blonde hair. Baron just laughed. He knew she was hiding in that fucking tree the entire time.”

“Fuck.” I guess it’s pretty easy for Maya to picture me with Glory.
I am so sorry, Rookie.
Glory wipes a tear away and lights up again. She’s definitely remorseful, which is rather rare. “It’s not your fault, you didn’t know she was there.”

“I’m not finished with the story yet.” She draws in a hitched breath that turns into a sob. It takes her a few moments to calm down before she can talk. “We agreed that I should be the one to talk to her. I wasn’t exactly thrilled. The next day I took a walk down to the shore and waited. Piper was a troublemaker and Maya wasn’t, so I was hoping I’d catch her when she snuck away from the other kids. I did. It was a very awkward conversation, but we sort of hit it off. She had a million fucking questions.”

“About what she saw?” I think I know where this is headed and decide it’s best to take another Xanax so I don’t completely explode on Gloria.

“Yeah. So I explained that sometimes it looks like a woman doesn’t want something even when she does. And that sometimes sex can hurt and feel good at the same time.”
Holy shit
. “And that just because Carl was fucking me doesn’t mean that he didn’t love his wife or that he wasn’t a good person. That’s just how men are. She told me she already knew that and she wanted to know why girls weren’t the same way. I told her that we could be, you just had to learn how to ignore the jealousy and that men get just as jealous as we do, they just keep it a secret. It turned into a long talk about the way the world really was. I kind of forgot I was talking to a twelve year old.”

“So, what? You just fed her your fucked up philosophy on how trivial emotions are and that real love doesn’t exist?”

“In a sense. I thought it was a fresh perspective and I still maintain that it’s good advice, but I didn’t think she’d take it so seriously. I hadn’t met her mother yet, I didn’t realize Maya was being raised by a textbook psychopath.”

“What?” This just keeps getting better and better.

“Oh, yeah,” Glory scoffs. “As soon as I looked into that woman’s eyes, I knew. She is completely fucking soulless, and that means quite a bit coming from me.”

“Maya doesn’t see it that way.” She feels guilty because her mother loves her more than her siblings.

“We see what we want to see. Anyway, the whole point of talking to her was to find out how to keep her quiet. I tiptoed around it for a while, but eventually I flat out asked her and she said that she never intended to say anything and we didn’t have to worry about it. Why would she want to embarrass Piper’s mom and hurt her feelings? If it wasn’t me, it was just going to be somebody else.”

God, she said shit like that so many times about Luke when I first met her. “I bet you just loved hearing that,” I snap.

“Yeah, it got my attention. I told her that information like that could be leveraged to get something she needed. And you know what she wanted? A grown up she could talk to that would tell her the truth about all the things that she didn’t understand. I thought she’d want something from Carl, but she was too fucking smart for that. She knew that I was the vulnerable person in this situation and I had what she really wanted. Answers. So whenever we visited that summer, I had a very inquisitive little shadow popping up behind me at every opportune moment. I tried to be mad, but I was impressed. She really started to grow on me.”

Looking upwards, I cover my face with my hands and see an impressionable young Maya sitting quietly on a tree stump taking perfect mental notes while Gloria poisons her vulnerable little mind and confirms every ugly thing about life and men that her jaded mother ever told her. Only Glory isn’t some desperate, man trapping waitress. Glory is an entrepreneurial genius that rose to the top in a man’s world. Someone Maya probably respected right away. If her mother and the successful woman she blackmailed into being her mentor think it’s true, then it has to be. It all adds up. That’s how her mind works now, and that’s how it worked back then.

This has been so much worse for her than I ever could have imagined. Every time I walked out her door, a vision of Glory’s face probably popped into her head and told her that’s just how life works and she needs to accept it. And of course, she just kept it all to herself because if she didn’t, she knew I’d do something really fucking stupid like stop going over there.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Glory says quietly.

“You have no idea what I’m fucking thinking.”

“Yeah, I do. You think it’s all my fault that Maya got involved with this.”

“Okay,” I laugh bitterly. “Maybe you do know what I’m fucking thinking.”

“Well, you’re right. And not just because I inadvertently mind fucked her. It gets worse.”

“Of course it does. That seems to be the theme of the day.”

“I didn’t see her the next summer. Carl and I had a falling out. But the following summer, we’d reconciled and I had… Isaac, I swear to God, I didn’t realize what he was. I fucking swear.”

“What who was?”

“Luke,” she whispers. “I poached him from your Dad. He was working for me and I brought him up there.”

“You…” Holy fucking shit.

“Maya was so excited to see me, but I didn’t want her hanging around because things were a bit tense between me and your father. I didn’t want her on his radar. But she was also excited to see Luke. She managed to ask me if I thought it was a good idea to go after him and I told her yes. He came from a poor background and so did she, they made sense. She was a little young for him, but… she was never going to do any better.”

“A little young? She was fourteen fucking years old.”

“She was almost fifteen.”

“Do you have any fucking idea what he did to her?” I shout.

“Yes,” Glory croaks. “They were flirting at dinner and he motioned for her to follow him into the house. She was so cute and giddy. But then Lynn turned her head and she almost saw them, so I distracted her and she didn’t notice that they’d slipped away. I figured I’d do Maya one last favor. When I saw her face a few hours later… well, she wasn’t so cute and giddy anymore and she was the one that didn’t want to talk to me. I’ll never fucking forgive myself,” she sobs.

Even though the plane starts bouncing around again, I get up and try not to fall over as I put as much distance between myself and Glory as I can. The overwhelming need to hold Maya in my arms is always there, I’m never free from it, but right now they are screaming for her. So is the rest of me. I curl up in a ball in the fancy leather seat and howl into the expensive suede pillow. I feel like I’m drowning. I knew that I’ve been ripping her fucking heart out every single second since our bubble popped, but I had no idea how much I was hurting her. And right now she’s probably curled up in a little ball too. She’s trying to shake away the hours old memory of Luke’s hands on her body while she tries not to picture my face as I shove my dick into the woman who helped him rape her the first time. There’s a tear streaking over her throbbing cheek and I’m not fucking there to kiss it away. Eventually, she won’t be able to stay awake and she’ll be trapped in the dark with him and I won’t be there to pull her out of it, either.

I can’t take it anymore. She has to know I’m on my way home. Hell, as far as she knows, I’m only a few minutes away and she’s probably waiting for me to come get her. I try to keep my breathing steady while her burner rings, but when Jace picks it up, I break down completely. I have never needed to hear her voice this badly before, and I can’t. It totally freaks him out and I blubber out the codeword that we agreed meant that I was leaving the country with Maya ASAP. He asks if I’m serious and I can’t say for sure if I am because I suddenly remember that I’m probably going to spend a good deal of time in prison for being such a despicable human being. Glory told me there was some way to avoid that and use the fucked up story she just told me to get Maya back.

Jace isn’t exactly convinced that I’m okay when I tell him that was just a momentary setback, but I hang up on him anyway. Taking a deep breath, I pull my shit together and force myself to walk back over to Glory, who flinches when I get close.

“I’m not going to fucking hit you,” I snarl, taking a seat. “You said I could use all of this as leverage to get her back. Expound on that.”