Dragon: A Bad Boy Romance (11 page)

“When did they stop, exactly? And when did they start?” I say.

“The first one was in May, early May. The last one was the day before my birthday,” he says.

There's something there, a pattern in the information. I can nearly see it. I close my eyes, my mind racing.
You gangster piece of shit. Get what's mine. Gangster piece of shit. Tony's birthday. Gangster piece of shit. The engagement party. Get what's mine, get what's mine, get what's mine...

I open my eyes.

“Tony, when did you first meet Carl?”

“The- the golf tournament. At the end of April,” he says faintly. “You can't think...”

“It makes sense,” I say. “The letters started after you met him, and ended when they got engaged. He called you a gangster piece of shit the other day, and the note uses the same phrase. He talks about 'getting what's his' – Honey and him never, you know, did anything like that. Now the wedding's off, and he wants money. And he's a sick bastard with a track record of violence towards women.”

I wasn't completely sure, but spelling out to Tony has convinced me. It's him, the douchebag. I know it.

“The son of a bitch!” Tony roars. “I'll kill him! I'll bury him! That mother fucker!”

I give him a few seconds to work through the worst of it, but he's wasting time ranting. Time we don't have. Time
Honey
doesn't have.

“We need to find him,” I say. “Sit down and think. What do you know about him – where does he live, where is his office, who are his friends? We still have some time, he's not sent the drop point through yet. If we ask around, then maybe we can get a beat on where he's keeping her.”

“There's no need for all that,” he says, stabbing his phone with his fat finger. Despite his anger, his fear, his grief, he manages a tiny smirk. “I, uh, fitted a tracker to his car. When they first started dating.” He looks up and sees my expression of disbelief. “I wanted to make sure they weren't getting up to anything!”

“Tony... you're fucking crazy,” I say, half in shock, half in admiration.

“You're a fine one to talk,” he mutters.

He shows me the screen – it's a satellite map of the woods, out beyond the interstate. There's a small green marker in the center.

“How far?” I say, grabbing my keys.

“Maybe an hour,” he says. “Don't get your hopes up, though. It might not be him.”

I don't answer him. I don't need to.

It's him. I know it.

Chapter Ten - Honey

The emotions flicker through me uncontrollably as I stand there, trembling. It's all mixed up in my head, and I don't know
how
to feel, how to react. I start laughing, but it's not a genuine laugh. It's hysteria. From somewhere far away, I can hear myself, and I realize I sound like a crazy person.

It's him. It's Carl. I have a strange sense of relief, that I'm being held prisoner by someone that I know – which is insane. At the same, different strands of fear are running through it all. The old fear is there, like a familiar pain. The fear I felt every time his eyes would tighten during conversation. The fear I felt every time he came home from work and it hadn't gone well. The fear I felt when he didn't like my clothing, my attitude, my hair, the weather. Reflexively, I cringe. I've taken the bag off my head, turned the light on,
seen
him with my own eyes. He's not going to like any of that, and I know I'll pay the price for pissing him off. I realize that I'm hunching over, instinctively trying to protect myself from the volley of kicks and punches that will begin at any moment, but I can't help it.

There's a new fear, too. This one is a slow burner, not as finely tuned as the old fear. This is the fear that remembers all the words that were in the letters, all the things he said he was going to do to me. Things that are far, far worse than kicks and punches. The new fear remembers the way he would get hard whenever he turned violent. That stuff in the letters wasn't just some finely crafted bullshit, to scare my father. He's completely genuine in his intentions. And there's nobody here to stop him, nobody at all...

“I knew you were fucking him,” Carl spits, his face a twisted mask of hate.

“Wh-what?” For half a second, I think he's talking about my father, and then I remember where he grabbed me – outside Dragon's apartment.

“Don't try and deny it, you fucking whore. You went running to that
thug
as soon as I left you, even after you saw what he did to me!”

He points to his face. He's a mess, bruised and swollen. I think he may even have some teeth missing.

“It's all your fault! You did this!”

As he yells, I can see spit forming on his lips. He's losing control of himself. I've seen him angry before, but I've never seen him this unraveled.

“All you had to do,
all you had to do,
was buy a stupid fucking wedding dress, so that we could get married. After everything I went through, everything I put up with!”

He's advancing towards me slowly, as he speaks. His clenched fist is bouncing against his thigh, in rhythm with his words. I start to back away, deeper into the corner of the cellar.

“I
worked
for that money,” he's saying now. “Do you hear me? I earned it. I let my reputation - my
good name –
be dragged through the dirt. Not just associating with a common criminal, oh no! Actually agreeing to
marry into the family!”

He leans against the wall casually, smiling.

“Have I hurt your feelings? So sorry,” he says, clearly anything but sorry.

“You can't possibly have thought that someone like me would marry someone like you, though, surely? At least, not for love. The truth is, sweetheart, I'm a little short on cash. Well, quite a bit short, actually. Marrying you would have been a good deal for both of us – you'd have got a better match than you ever could have hoped for, and one way or another, I'd have got hold of the funds I need to cover my ass. Everyone knows that criminals deal in large sums. I've been drip-feeding the idea of a money-laundering scheme to your moron father for quite a while, now – but he made it clear that he wanted to keep the business strictly in the family.”

I'm not even shocked. The way he kisses my father's ass, the way he seems to have little to no interest in me – I always figured he wanted something from my dad. The only real surprise is that he's broke. The way he enjoyed looking down on everyone else, you'd think he was rolling in it.

“Now that you've fucked it all up, though, I've had to move to Plan B. Do you think it will work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he was quick enough to get rid of you, when he thought that you were going to get... hurt.”

His eyes darken at this, and I feel a chill of dread.

“He'd have married you off to the garbage man, if he'd asked. Anything to get you out of the house and away from danger. So, now that you're well and truly
in
danger, do you think he'll pay to get you back?”

“You know he will, Carl,” I say dully. “That's been the whole idea, hasn't it?”

He beams at me, as if I am a slow student who's finally grasped a simple concept.

“Yeah, I guess it has,” he says. “I mean, I was happy enough to go the wedding route, but then of course I'd have been stuck with you. This way is more of a pain in the ass, but it's quicker.”

He moves towards me once more.

“That doesn't mean we can't have some fun, though,” he says softly.

I sink to my knees in terror, trying to curl up into a little ball until it is over, what ever IT may be.

He's standing over me, his breath becoming quicker and louder as he enjoys the moment, and the power he has over me.

I look up at him. When Dragon found out what Carl had done to me, he had beaten the crap out of him – I can still see the evidence in the bruises and the welts on Carl's face. When Carl knew that my father would learn what he had been up to, he ran, rather than face my dad's vengeance.

But me? I'm nothing to him. Barely even a person. I'm cowering on the floor, next to a bucket of my own piss. Waiting for it to happen. Waiting for it to be over. Waiting for my father to pay up and get me out of here. All I've ever done is wait, while other people have made my decisions for me. Enough is enough.

I stand up, my hand wrapped tightly around the handle of the metal bucket.

“Fuck you, Carl,” I say. “Fuck you.”

Chapter Eleven - Dragon

I'm driving as fast as I can, without attracting the wrong kind of attention. Cop attention. Maybe some people would call the police in a situation like this, but Tony doesn't want to, and I agree with him.

There's nothing that they can do that we can't do ourselves, and
plenty
that they can try and stop us from doing, when we catch up with that motherfucker.
It's killing me, though, the pace and the traffic. I want to blast through them all. Anything could be happening while we piss about, crawling along...

Tony isn't helping. The tension is pouring off him in waves, and his eyes are fixed on the small screen, as if staring at the marker will somehow make everything be OK. Personally, I'd feel a
lot
happier if that marker was moving. If Carl is driving, it means he's not doing anything else – not doing anything to Honey. The sick bastard.

My eyes keep being drawn back to my knuckles, as they grip the steering wheel. They're still red and marked from when I was slamming my fists into his face. I should have killed him when I had the chance, or Tony should have, instead of worrying about his precious chain of command and who's business it was to beat the little creep's face in.

I think he knows this, though. His attitude towards me has changed considerably since the last time we met. He's not acting like the boss any more, and in a way it's a little unnerving, to see how quickly and how thoroughly he's come undone. Somehow, I've ended up in charge of the situation. On the one hand it's good, because it's like being alone. And being alone in a fight is all I know. On the other hand, I'm really struggling to keep my temper in hand, and the added pressure isn't helping any.

But I have to, there's no choice. Everything depends on me, and my ability to keep a level head. To think rationally. Because she's out there, alone, with no one to protect her.

Regrets keep piling into my head, one after the other. I should have ended Carl. I should have told her to stay, when she asked when we could see each other again. Because she was asking more than that, and I knew it. Everything I'd told myself, everything I'd told her, about why we couldn't and shouldn't be together – it was all bullshit. The truth is simple – I was scared of letting her in. Scared that she'd make the commitment, break with her father and be with me, and then she'd find out that maybe I wasn't worth it after all.

I've always told myself that being alone is the best way to be, but that's just another defense mechanism. If you're alone, no one can hurt you – because there's no one
there
to hurt you. And yet, I'm hurting now...

~~~~~~~

“Ten minutes now,” Tony says, still hunched over his phone. I glance over, and at the edge of the map I can see a new marker, a red one, inching slowly towards the center and the blue marker.
What the fuck?

“That red one,” I say. “Is that showing your phone or my car?”

I already know the answer.

“What?” he says belligerently. “You think I'm gonna let you drive my daughter around all day without keeping tabs on you, too? No way, mister. You're damn right it's your car!”

It's tempting.
God,
it's tempting. I want to point out that all his 'keeping tabs' have led to nothing. His daughter still got taken. And all his 'parenting' – the over-protective jailer routine – that doesn't work either. Yeah, he might have known where my car was twenty-four hours a day, but he didn't know what we were doing in it. The harder he squeezes, the more she slips through his fingers.

I want to tell him all about Honey and me, but I don't. Because what's the point? Anything like that – it can wait. Until after. Until we know what's waiting for us up ahead...

We're out in the middle of nowhere now, and the road is barely a road at all, just a hard-packed dirt trail leading through scrubland and bushes. We must be close.

Tony has stopped looking at his phone. His head is up, swiveling from right to left as he tries to make out anything – a car, a building – through the vegetation. His gun is drawn.

“You packing?” he asks.

“In the glove box,” I answer. “It's yours.”

“Good,” he says grimly, fishing it out and handing it to me. “Whatever goes down here, I don't want a trace of it reaching the cops. We handle this ourselves, you understand?
Whatever happens.”

I feel a grudging sense of admiration for him. He's managing to pull himself together enough to fight, and he's steeling himself for the worst. That takes balls, more balls than I thought he had left in him.

“There!”

He points with the barrel of his gun, and I see it. A twinkle of metal through the trees. It has to be a car. I slam on the brakes, and we jump out, guns drawn, and run towards the car. It
is
Carl's car, of course. It's parked outside a tumbledown stone shack. This has to be where he's keeping her.