A Secret Vow: A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (21 page)

Chapter 14

Mortar

I’ve spent my whole life chasing another gear. I always wanted faster, more torque, more whip, more engine beneath me. I’ve never been satisfied with good enough. When I was a racer, long ago in a previous life, it had been easy to keep pushing. There were numbers to it back then. If the dial on the dashboard ticked up just one more notch, I knew I’d gotten there, and that I could be happy for a brief moment. It never lasted, of course, but there was always one glorious second of
Yes, this is it. This is what I’ve been searching for.

Like everything else I’d ever chased—pussy, money, among a million other vices—the stuff I had got old quick. And then it was on to the next, the endless hunt to find something to scratch the itch that never quite went away.

The weird thing was that I never even cared what caused it. I didn’t need to understand the reasons why I wanted to go faster; I just needed to do it. As long as I was besting what I’d done before, it was easy to ignore the underlying complexities.

Now, though, as I lean my bike damn near on the asphalt while whipping around one corner after another, I know exactly why I’m desperate for just a little bit more speed: Kendra.

The reason I’m desperate to go faster has a shape and a name and a voice. She’s a petite, ebony-skinned goddess with a body from a half-remembered dream and a laugh that could make me hard from a mile away. She’s carrying my baby.

Kendra.

I hear the angry cries of a suburban parent as I tear past their family playing on the sidewalk. I don’t give a damn about them. Fuck his family. If he was a real man, he would understand what it means to defend what’s yours. He wouldn’t just cry out at some stranger who threatened his own flesh and blood. After all, Grady had threatened my family, and I’m not about to be content with merely sitting back and saying, “Well, please don’t do that, Mr. Officer,” while hoping he decides to humor me. No, I am going to kill him as soon as I get the chance.

Protect what’s yours
, screams my brain on repeat. It’s a mantra, the lifeblood of every action, the drumbeat to every move. I’m on my way to protect what’s mine.

After Colin died, I thought I wouldn’t ever have to care about anyone but myself ever again. I’d sealed up that part of my circuitry, never to expose it to the world again. Fuck the rest of them, right? What’s mine was just me—or so I thought. Kendra had been a challenge at first, merely a hurdle to jump over for my pleasure. But now she is so much more. She is everything to me. I cannot lose her.

At the same time, I’m thinking to myself that if I do lose her, it’s my fault. How could I have been so dumb? Sending some no-named prospect I barely recognized to guard what matters most to me? If anyone else had done something so stupid, I would have told them they deserved everything that came their way.

Hell, maybe I did deserve it. Maybe this was the karmic consequence of a lifetime lived on the wrong side of the law. I’d stolen from people who needed the money much more than I did. I’d hurt people who told me no. I’d threatened people into listening to me, even when doing so meant that they and their friends and families would suffer as a result. And I didn’t give a damn. I’d just kept on, always gunning for a new level.

I could no longer hide behind the excuse that I was simply taking care of my brother either. That had always been the convenient explanation. I took because he needed things; I threatened anything that threatened him. But now he is gone. I can’t lean on him like a crutch anymore. And the time is long overdue to start understanding why I do things.

The answer is clear: she is the reason.

I peel up to the house. It’s too quiet. I kick in the front door, racing down the hall and through every room, but I know before I even finish looking that she’s gone already. There’s no sign of a struggle. Looking in the bedroom, I see the bottom drawer of the bedside table has been left open. I take a glance in its contents and notice that the gun I keep there is missing.

I swallow hard.

What have I done?

Chapter 15

Kendra

“Make a sound and I’ll have to hurt you,” Marley whispers in my ear. I can feel the tip of his gun pressed painfully against the vertebrae in my lower back. We’re walking outside, down the sidewalk that lines the quiet neighborhood street. I see one of the mothers across the street. She’s playing in the front yard with her kids, watching them chase each other in circles as a dog nips at their heels. She sees me walking carefully down the sidewalk and offers a cheery wave and smile.

“Wave back,” Marley growls. I lift a trembling hand and shake it in the lady’s direction. If only there was some way to beg for her help. I don’t know what she’d do, but anything is better than letting myself get dragged away like this, marched out of my own home at gunpoint.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that lady? To have a family to play in the front yard with, a dog and babies to feed? To have my biggest problems be getting the chores done or something silly in my day job? But my life and hers are on opposite ends of the spectrum. She’s worried about the grocery shopping; I’m worried about getting shot.

Marley parades me down the corner. We turn at the intersection and head towards a Galveston Police Department patrol car idling on the side of the road. Crossing the street, we approach the car. Marley yanks open the back door. “Climb in,” he instructs me, helping me to clamber inside the vehicle. I get halfway in and freeze.

Grady is sitting on the far end of the backseat, sprawled comfortably over the vehicle’s interior. He’s picking at his teeth with a toothpick, looking as casual as can be. He eyes me and hardly reacts. “Hurry up,” he says languidly. “Can’t be waiting for you all day. Lots of things to do.”

I gulp, but don’t move. Marley presses the gun into the back of my thigh. “Let’s go,” he says. I slide the rest of the way in. He slams the door shut behind me and walks around to the driver’s side. Stepping up into the vehicle, he releases the brake and we cruise away down the street, heading closer and closer towards something that I couldn’t dream up even in my worst nightmares.

I recognize the path we’re taking as we wind through the suburban maze. It’s the same one I’ve taken almost every day since I first came home with Mortar. Two lefts, a right, straight through this intersection onto the road that runs parallel to the beach.

We’re headed for my studio.

I don’t know what to say. I’m trying not to look at Grady, though I can tell he’s staring straight at me as he continues to pick at his teeth with the sliver of wood. I don’t see any signs of the outraged fury he’d displayed the last time we met. It’s not that icy cool reserve either. It’s something else. He looks completely at ease, like a man waiting for the next bus to come pick him up. Like everything that’s about to happen is predetermined. Like there’s no turning back. I hope to God he’s wrong.

We come to a stop outside the studio. Grady opens his door and gets out without saying a word to me. Marley turns back from the front. “Out,” he says. His voice is somewhere between sad and empty. I can’t decide what to make of him. He’s a traitor, of course. He lied to my husband, to the Angels, to me. But there’s something about him that makes me wonder if he is trapped just like I am.

Grady walks around and opens my door. I step out, refusing to look at him. I can feel his eyes on me, those piggy, beady eyes, scanning me up and down relentlessly. I won’t look back. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

“We’re going upstairs,” he says eventually. “To see your art.”

I can’t help it; I turn to face him. “Mortar is going to come find me, you know,” I tell him. “And he’s going to kill you as soon as he gets here.”

He doesn’t react. No chuckle, no grimace, not the slightest bit of emotion. It’s like I’d told him the sky was blue. “We’ll be long gone by then,” he replies flatly.

Marley is still squeezing the gun in his hand. He points with it towards the broken door of the studio. “Open it,” he says.

I walk up and start to insert the key into the lock, but I pause for a moment when I see the
Sold
sticker plastered across the rusting iron. So Grady wasn’t joking. He really did sell it. I’d half-thought he was just making things up to mess with my head. It doesn’t matter either way, I suppose. I am going to die here today if he has his way. What do I care if the place was sold or not?

The door sags off its hinges, but holds tenuously to the frame. I step back. Grady walks in first. Marley motions for me to follow as he takes up the rear. We mount the stairs and emerge onto the second floor landing. The light pouring in through the open window is golden and beautiful. A strange thought crosses my mind:
This isn’t such a bad place to die.
Then I shake it away. I don’t want to die. For the first time in my life, I have so much to live for: a husband, a baby, a future. I can’t let all that be taken from me.

Grady opens his arms to the ceiling and sucks in a long breath of air. “Yes,” he says triumphantly, “this is the place. This is where it’s all meant to happen.” He turns to look at me as Marley moves quietly behind me and pulls my wrists behind my back gently. He starts to tie them together with a length of cord from his back pocket. “Do you believe in fate, Kendra?” Grady asks me.

What an odd question from a man like Grady. I’ve never heard him talk about anything that couldn’t be fucked or punched. He isn’t a theoretical guy; he likes his reality under his fingertips, where he can control it.

I think about it, putting aside for the time being how strange it is that he is asking me something like that. Fate. Is that something I could believe in? If so, fate dealt me a cruel set of cards. Gave things to me and snatched them away the second I’ve started to enjoy them, over and over again—that’s the fate I know, the one that’s been with me my whole life. I used to think that I got what I deserved. I wasn’t pretty enough to deserve a man who loved me for who I was, instead of just for my value as a fuck toy that could be used and discarded at his leisure. I wasn’t creative or smart enough to be able to afford the studio I’d fallen in love with. That was just me, my lot in life—eternally rejected. Fate was a cold-hearted bitch.

But now, I’m not so sure. Why the change of heart? Why do I feel like, this time around, things might be different? The answer is as obvious as it is true: Mortar.

If fate gave me to Mortar, then I can forgive the years of cruelty I suffered through to get here. It makes it that much sweeter to fall into his arms and give myself over completely. To know that I’m safe there. To know that I’m his. If the physical and emotional bruises suffered under Grady’s fist and tongue were what I had to endure in order to reach Mortar’s kiss, then fate and I can call things even.

“Well?” Grady asks, interrupting my reverie. “I’m talking to you, bitch, answer me.” A fiery anger is starting to burn along the edge of his voice. The languid calm is eroding quickly, like oil breaking up on the surface of the water to reveal the turbulence underneath.

“Yes, I believe in fate,” I tell him. My chin is thrust high. Fate gave me to Mortar. I have to believe that it will get me out of here.

“That’s a mistake,” he says. “There’s no such thing. As far as you’re concerned, I’m fate. I’m the one who decides what happens to you.” He walks over to the window. Pressing his hands against the frame, he looks outside, taking in the scenery. I see him breathing slowly and carefully, like he’s trying to stay under control. I wonder why.

He continues, “You had a choice. You could have come back to me, you know, and I would have forgiven all this. I would’ve forgiven your little indiscretion, in due time.”

I can only imagine the horror that I would have had to go through in order to earn Grady’s “forgiveness.” Images of broken teeth and black eyes flit in front of my mind’s eye like a flock of birds. The half-remembered sensation of gagging on him as he shoved himself down my throat.

“I’m never coming back to you, Grady,” I tell him. Marley finishes tying the knots around my wrists. He guides me to a chair, pushes me to a seat, and starts lashing me to its wooden frame. “Not in a million years.”

Grady whirls to face me. “That’s because you’re a filthy, lying whore,” he accuses. His finger jabs the air between us as he stalks closer. His eyebrows are jammed together in an angry downward V. His mouth is a thin, snarled smear.

I don’t say a word. I’m afraid to push him any farther. He’s going to hurt me if I upset him anymore—not kill me, just torture me for as long as he thinks he can get away with it. I know who he is at his heart. He’s a monster.

“And do you know what happens when I have to deal with a filthy, lying whore?” he asks. He’s a yard or so away from me now. He bends down to rest his elbows on his knees, drawing his face level with mine.

I’m trembling. Marley isn’t saying a word as he leans against the wall to my right, gun still clasped in his hand.

“Answer me, Kendra,” Grady growls in a low voice. He leans closer.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. Fear is choking me, curdling in my stomach, turning the inside of my skin icy and blue.

He straightens to his full height. “They get hurt. Whores get hurt very, very badly.” He turns and walks over to a large painting stretching across one wall. He studies it, chin in hand, as he stays silent for a moment.

Sweat has started to drip down my brow. It’s the cold, sticky kind, the kind that covers you when you wake up in the middle of the night after a horrible dream. But this is no dream. This is real. This is my life. This is my fate.

“It’s a beautiful painting,” Grady calls to me from where he stands in front of my painting. “You’re really talented, Kendra.” He pauses. “Shame it’s all got to go.”

I see the tendons on his forearms stand out as he seizes the painting by each edge and rips it from the wall. He tosses the broken frame into the middle of the floor. It slides to a rest at my feet. I look down at it. Who knows how many dozens of hours of work I poured into that thing, sketching, planning, revising, painting delicately along the faintest pencil guidelines to bring the scene to life? Who knows how much sweat I gave to it, how badly the cramps in my hand hurt from holding onto the brush so tightly and for so long? Who knows how much of
me
went into it?

Grady doesn’t give a damn. He ripped it from the wall like it was nothing.

He starts pacing around the studio, tearing canvases from their easels and sculptures from their stands. He picks each thing up in his hand, considers it for a moment, then hefts it into the growing pile in the middle of the floor.

Every time I hear the shatter or tear of a piece of my art, it’s like that destruction is being duplicated in me. Each piece was an escape from Grady when I needed it most. To have him destroying them all in front of me is like he’s reclaiming me, making me his again. Like he’s erasing every futile attempt I ever made to get away from his all-encompassing reach. He’s fate, dragging me back down the rabbit hole.

The stack of tattered, broken art is growing as he moves through and wreaks havoc on my studio. Each time he pulls the next object down, he roars, “Whore! Slut! Backstabber! Die, bitch, die!” He knows what these things mean to me. He knows this is torture.

“Bitch!”

Shatter.

“Cunt!”

Rip.

“Cocksucking slut!”

Let it all collapse.

He finishes his first circuit of the room and stomps in front of me. His hair is flopping in front of his face, which is flushed and splotchy with sweaty rage. I turn my head to the side. I don’t want to look at him. I can’t.

He lunges forward, wraps a hand around my throat, and tips me onto the two back legs of the chair. “Look at what I’m doing, you whore, don’t fucking look away!” He’s squeezing harder now, leaving purple indents in the soft skin of my neck. “You should never have left me! You stabbed me in the back! Well, this is what you get now. You don’t get to look away, oh no. You get to watch while I break everything you love.”

He fumbles in his pocket and withdraws a zippo lighter. Clicking it to life, he holds the burbling flame to the edge of one ripped canvas. It catches quickly, the oil paint feeding it in a panicked frenzy. The fire grows as it consumes one long panel and moves on to the next. I can already feel the heat lapping around my ankles.