Sweet Renegade (14 page)

Chapter Eight

*Beau*

I wait patiently behind Lizette as she searches for her keys to her condo. We are finally back in New York. Our flight got delayed and then cancelled, so we ended up having to take a red-eye back. It is now four in the morning and I am beat. Lizette agreed to let me stay at her condo since it is closer than mine. All I wants to do is sleep. And snuggle. And maybe make love to my girlfriend in the morning.

Lizette gets the door open and steps inside the dark condo. I follow. We place our bags along the wall in the entryway before moving into the living room. Lizette whispers something about getting a drink as she slips into the kitchen. I yawn and stretch as I watch her, my back to the rest of the living room and hallway that leads to the bedrooms.

I start to get this weird feeling that someone is watching me. Knowing that it’s not Lizette, I turn around. Lizette’s brother, Dennis, is standing directly behind me. I jump and yelp in surprise, never having heard him approach. I am about to say something to him, but I notice the look in his eyes.
Oh fuck!
His eyes look deadened and his face is eerily blank, no emotion anywhere. He looks fucking scary as shit. It hits me that he is possibly in the middle of a flashback, given his history.

“Dennis?” I ask cautiously.

“Where is she?” Dennis replies, his voice low and deadly.

His overgrown hair and his scruffy face are not helping him look any less threatening; if anything, it makes him look deadly. My heart starts to pound. Dennis is definitely not in the here and now; there is no recognition in his eyes at all. I don’t know what to say, I don’t want to make the situation worse by saying the wrong thing. And who knows what will be a trigger for the former Marine in front of me.

“Denny?” I hear Lizette ask from behind me, but Dennis’ eyes never leave mine.

“I asked you a question,” he barks.

“Dennis, I’m Beau, Lizette’s boyfriend, remember?” I say, hoping that’s a safe thing to say.

Something flashes in his green eyes, but it’s not good. He moves so fast that I don’t even have a chance to fight back. My legs are kicked out from under me and I have no choice but to go down hard with Dennis following me down. My breath whooshes out of me and I can’t breathe as Dennis lands over me, straddling my chest, his knees on my arms, rendering me completely helpless. I swear the move was something straight out of an action movie. For a guy who is missing part of his leg, he moves pretty damn quickly. Dennis has a hand on my throat while the other is pressing the barrel of a gun into my cheek. I didn’t even know he had a gun in his hand until the cold steel touched my face. The man is solid muscle, probably weighing the same if not more than me. I try to lift my arms and buck my body to dislodge him, but it’s no use, he doesn’t even budge.

“Dennis! No!” Lizette cries from somewhere behind me, but I can’t see her. I can’t see anything but the menacing look on Dennis’ face. I hope she stays where she is and out of harms way.

“Where are you keeping her?” Dennis snarls in my face.

My mouth works but nothing comes out. The sheer terror racing through my body is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. The man on top of me could kill me in an instant and have little or no knowledge of it afterward. The hand at my throat tightens, making it harder to breathe. If I could bring my hands up, I’d be grabbing onto his wrist right about now. I buck under him again to try to dislodge him, but he is unmoving.

“Dennis…Dennis, please don’t hurt him, I’m begging you,” Lizette pleads. The fear in her voice does nothing to calm me. If
she’s
scared, then I have every right to be scared. And I am, like shit-in-my-pants scared.

“WHERE IS SHE!” Dennis bellows in my face. I can feel the rage and hatred rolling off him in waves. This is not going to end well for me. I can feel it.

I squeeze my eyes shut and fight to control my breathing before I hyperventilate and pass the fuck out. It doesn’t help that I can barely breathe to begin with because of the hold he has on my throat. I can see spots dancing across Dennis’ face, so I know my brain is not getting enough oxygen already.

“She’s in the kitchen, Dennis,” I wheeze as best I can.

The gun digs farther into my cheekbone and I can’t help but wince at the pain. I will definitely have a bruise if I make it out of this alive.

“LIAR! You better tell me where my wife is right fucking now before I blow your head off!” Dennis shouts, his voice seething with hate and disgust.

My eyes fly open. “Wife?” Both Lizette and I ask at the same time.

“You killed her, didn’t you?” Dennis rasps. The raw devastation in his tone breaks my heart into a million pieces. “You killed her.”

“Dennis, it’s Beau, you’re in New York,” I try as calmly as possible, but I can feel my panic rising.

Dennis doesn’t seem to hear me and instead continues to grill me with questions about his wife. I can feel that this whole situation is boiling up to the point where I have no doubt that Dennis is going to pull the trigger and I’m going to die in front of Lizette. And then Lizette will have to live with the guilt that her brother shot me. I close my eyes again and say a silent pray for my mother; I hope that she will be understanding toward Lizette when she finds out what happened to me. I don’t want her to hate Lizette for this because it is not her fault; she has no control over her brother. He’s not even living in the present right now.

“Open your eyes, motherfucker! I want you to look at me when I pull this fucking trigger!”

I drag my eyes open in hopes that Dennis can see the plea in them. I pull in as deep a breath I can get and hold it. This is it. This is the end. My girlfriend’s brother is going to end my life. A life that I’m not done living. I can hear Lizette crying and pleading with Dennis, but he hasn’t even acknowledged her once. I glance down at the gun pressing into my cheek and I can see Dennis’ finger pulling back the trigger.
Holy fucking Christ!
I don’t want to die like this! I buck under him again, fighting to get away. Dennis clamps his hand down tighter on my throat and drops more of his weight on me. Jesus, he was holding some back?

“Dennis! Please don’t kill me!” I plead for my life, tears streaming down my face.

Click.

Click…click…click.

My eyes flip back up to Dennis’. The man is looking at his gun in confusion. He removes it from my face and takes his hand off my neck so that he can pop out the magazine. He frowns when he sees that there are no bullets in it. He then drops it and pulls back the slide to look into the barrel. No bullet. I blow out a relieved breath.
Oh, thank the fucking lord!

“Why are there no bullets in my gun? That’s not right,” he murmurs to himself.

Dennis blinks at his gun for a moment, trying to understand what is going on before he glances down at me. He blinks a few more times, looking confused, before I see recognition flash in his eyes. He looks at his gun then back at me one more time before his eyes widen in horror.

“Oh fuck,” he rasps, his voice pained as he realizes what just happened.

He quickly scrambles off me, his back hitting a wall, stopping him from going any farther. I suck in a full breath for the first time since he attacked me. Dennis lets the gun fall from his hand and clatter onto the floor next to him. I lie there gasping, staring up at the ceiling, tears still running down my temples and into my hair. I cannot believe how close I came to dying a few seconds ago.

Lizette runs to me, dropping to her knees next to me, her hands immediately cupping my face. Tears are flowing freely down her cheeks as her eyes scan over me. A sob escapes her as she pulls me into a tight hug, her neck buried in mine. I push up to an elbow and wrap my free arm around her, pulling her close.

“It’s okay, I’m okay,” I whisper to her.

Lizette pulls back, cupping my face again before placing a tender kiss on my lips. She then sits back on her heels, her hands falling from my face as she turns to look back at her brother. Dennis is sitting against the wall, knees bent, chin to chest with his fingers laced behind his head. I can practically feel the agony and guilt coming off him. I give Lizette’s hand a reassuring squeeze before I crawl over to him and sit down next to him, wrapping an arm around the tortured man’s trembling shoulders.

Dennis shakes his head. “I can’t…I can’t do this anymore…”

“Do what?” I ask softly.

“Live,” Dennis chokes.

Lizette gasps, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. “Denny!” she cries, fresh tears rolling down her face. “Don’t say that!”

Dennis lifts his head and pins Lizette with a disgusted glare. “If I had kept bullets in that gun, your boyfriend’s brains would be splattered all over your fucking floor right now!” he snaps.

“You need help, Denny. Please, stop being so stubborn and just go get help,” Lizette pleads.

“I’m not worth it,” Denny says dejectedly.

“Hey, that’s not true. We’ll take you to the VA in the morning, okay? We’ll get you the best care possible,” I say.

“Why would you do that after what I just did to you?” Dennis asks, turning his head to look at me. I hate the look in the man’s eyes - the look of a man who has given up all hope.

“Because you didn’t know what you were doing. Like Lizette said, you need help. I will never hold what happened here against you, but you do owe it to me to at least try to get treatment,” I reply.

Dennis searches my eyes for a moment before he nods in agreement. “Okay,” he whispers. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Beau.”

I nod. “I know.”

After sitting in silence for a moment, Lizette speaks up.

“Denny, you were asking Beau where your wife was? Do you know why you would say something like that?”

Dennis scrubs a hand hard over his face and gets to his feet. He walks over to the window, leans on the sill, and stares out. Lizette and I wait patiently for him to talk.

“During my last tour, I started seeing this woman, she was an English reporter. We fell in love quickly. I knew that she was the only woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, so I asked her to marry me and she said yes. One of my Marine buddies is also an ordained minister; he married us even though it wasn’t going to be considered legal in the U.S. since she wasn’t a citizen and we didn’t have a license. But we wanted to be married, and when we got back to the States, she was going to get dual citizenship and we were going to get married for real. We were only married for two weeks before a group of rebels grabbed her while she was doing a report in an area known for kidnapping women foreigners. She was so stupid. I had warned her…begged her not to go there, but she did it anyway, for her story,” he croaks and hangs his head.

Lizette is crying softly next to me on the floor. I gently pull her into my lap and hold her. She drops her head to my chest and wraps her arms around my waist. I can’t imagine how she is feeling right now, hearing of her brother’s heartache for the first time. She obviously had no idea that he had gotten married while he was away.

“I didn’t find out until a day after she was taken. I showed up at her hotel room and found her cameraman and assistant freaking the hell out. When I finally got them to tell me what happened, my stomach filled with dread. There was no way that I was going to find her in time to save her. By the time I got back to base and was able to get a rescue mission together, I had a terrible feeling that I was going to be bringing back my wife’s body.”

Dennis pushes off the windowsill and goes to sit on the couch. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He pulls in a deep breath and continues.

“By the time we were able to locate her, a whole other day had passed. Nothing could have prepared me for what I found. She had been raped, tortured, and then beaten to death. I went ballistic, killing ever motherfucker I could find in that house.”

Lizette lets out a strangled sob and presses her face harder against my chest. My own eyes are burning as I try to hold back tears. No wonder Dennis is so fucked up. I can’t even begin to imagine the hell this man has been through.