The scratch of the washcloth on the back of my neck stilled for a moment, but he didn’t say anything as his hand lifted my hair so he could get off all the blood that was keeping several longer strands stuck to my skin.
“Anything you’ve heard about families not wanting daughters in Asian countries is true. My parents already had one girl, and when I made an appearance, they decided they were plenty happy with the little girl they already had and didn’t want to bother with another one. I ended up in an orphanage for girls outside of Seoul. That’s in South Korea.”
Stark snorted from where he was hovering behind me, and I closed my eyes as I felt him carefully running his damp fingers through my gross hair. “I know where Seoul is, Noe.”
I cleared my throat and crossed my arms over my chest. “Yeah, you would. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t anywhere else in the world besides the Point. Like nothing outside of here is real. Anyway, I was adopted by a family from the Hill when I was six. I didn’t speak any English, had never been anywhere besides the orphanage, had never really seen a white person before. It was all terrifying. I felt like a little doll they dressed up and toted around when they came to Korea to finalize the adoption. I cried so hard on the plane to the States I made myself sick. Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright were appalled and apologized for my behavior endlessly. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I could tell they were disappointed. I was so sure they were going to turn the plane around and take me back. I honestly wanted them to, even though the orphanage was overcrowded and underfunded. It was what I knew, and everyone there looked just like I did.”
I sighed and closed my eyes as his fingers worked against my scalp. He was good at that. I’d like him to do it when he wasn’t trying to pick chunks of dried blood out of my hair.
“The Cartwrights. June and Bradley. They seemed to be nice people. They’d been trying for another kid for a long time with no luck. She really, really wanted a little girl. I’m not sure how they ended up looking at foreign adoptions, but they did and found me. It was a good life for a while. They didn’t have a ton of money, but it was enough. I never worried about being hungry or cold. They put me in special classes so I could learn English, and once I picked that up, it was clear I was pretty gifted. They never balked at giving me the kind of education I needed.”
He grunted behind me and I felt his fingers work against the base of my skull. It pulled a groan out of me and loosened some of the pressure and pain that had my brain in a stranglehold since I opened my eyes.
“Something went wrong.” It wasn’t a question. He was smart enough to know a girl didn’t give up a sweet deal like that without a very good reason.
“Went way wrong,” I snorted and tried to fight back the way those memories made my skin crawl. “June and Bradley had a son who was four years older than me . . . Aaron.” I felt the air stir dangerously behind me and I wanted to warn him that he hadn’t heard anything yet. “When I was little, he acted like I didn’t exist. Classic only child syndrome. He never liked that he had to share his parents, or their time and energy, with me. He was resentful and mean, but the Cartwrights always believed he would grow out of it when he was older. He did, but what he grew into was something much worse.”
I shivered and pulled my legs up so I could hug them and rest my cheek on my knees. “When I started to develop, when I started to look like a girl instead of an androgynous blob, people started telling me how pretty I was, how exotic and striking I was. What they meant was how different I looked with my white family. They never thought we were related to begin with, and as I got older, more and more people just assumed I was Aaron’s girlfriend and not his sister. It made him proprietary and possessive. He started acting like he really did own me, like I belonged to him in some sort of twisted way.”
A familiar fist squeezed tight in my chest as I recalled the first pair of unwanted hands that tugged at me, pulled and pinched. I could remember it so clearly, saying no over and over again until it felt like my throat would bleed.
“I tried to talk to my parents, to the school counselor, to one of my science teachers. They all said the same thing, that I was reading into something that wasn’t there. Aaron was just friendly, overly so, and his affection was his way of letting me know that he finally accepted me into the family. The first time he raped me, I was fourteen. I cried so hard when it was over, I made myself sick.”
He went still behind me, his hands falling away from my head. The air around us seemed to pulse and vibrate with an energy I couldn’t name. It wasn’t a fun story to tell.
“The abuse went on for two years. No one listened, no one seemed to care. I thought it would stop when Aaron went away to college, but every weekend he came home, every holiday he came back for, he was all over me, angrier and more violent the older I got. I fought him, God, did I fight, but it never got me anywhere. When I was sixteen, June walked in on us. She heard me crying and saw me trying to get away. She freaked out, but not because her son was raping me, but because she was worried what people would think if it got out her kids were fucking. She was convinced herself I lead him on, that I asked for it. She tried to tell me I was getting what I’d deserved. The next morning, she and Bradley sat me down and explained how I had to keep it quiet. They couldn’t imagine how things would look on the outside. They were worried about Aaron’s future. I told them over and over that I didn’t want him touching me, that he forced me, and they insisted that I was confused and emotional. I waited until the house was empty, when they all went out for dinner, to pack up my stuff. I left the next day.”
I exhaled long and slow, the pain inside my chest having nothing to do with the beatings I’d survived the last two weeks. “They found me. The cops picked me up as a runaway and each time I told them what was going on at home, June would show up and say I was sick, that something was wrong with me. She had the cops convinced I was crazy and fabricating the abuse. Time and time again, they found me and brought me back. No one would listen to me. No one would help me. Each time they did, things with Aaron got worse. I was his favorite toy and he never wanted anyone else to play with me. They wouldn’t let me go to school anymore, wouldn’t let me out of the house. I was a prisoner, but what was worse was that they acted like I should be grateful for what they were doing for me. They reminded me I was in this country without a family and homeless without them.”
The bed shifted as he pushed off of it. I could feel him standing at the side, looming like a heavy shadow over my shoulder. “I got away again when I was eighteen and June got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. They were at the hospital a lot so I managed to escape. I did my best to disappear. I went totally off the grid, started squatting and living on the streets. I got good at being able to disappear. I found a guy who made me a shitty, fake ID and erased the person I was. I thought about leaving the city altogether, but this was the only home I’d ever known. I also realized there was a need for someone like me, someone who wanted no one to know who she was or where she belonged and could do the same for them. The Cartwrights have never heard of Noe Lee and I want to keep it that way forever.”
He exhaled long and loud. “Noe, because you said it over and over again. Noe, because no one listened.” Again, they weren’t questions because he already knew the answers. “Fuck.” The word was sharp and sounded like it had been pulled from some dark and painful place inside of him. “I need to get some air. Holler if you need anything.”
I knew it was an uncomfortable road to walk, and I had expected his anger when I was done leading him to the end. But I hadn’t expected that so much of that anger seemed to be directed inwards. I usually felt like I needed a hug whenever I told anyone about my past, but at the moment, it was my battered body and my uncertain feelings about Stark that kept me from throwing my arms around him instead.
I couldn’t figure out Snowden Stark, and it concerned me how much I wanted to tinker with all his pieces to figure out how he worked. They said he was a robot, but they were w
rong. He was something far more complex. He was more along the lines of the feared artificial intelligence that always took over the world in science fiction movies.
In those movies, when the AI started to feel, began to grapple with emotion and feelings . . . well, that was when everything fell apart and the humans ended up dead.
I sure hoped Stark’s story had a different ending.
Stark
I looked up from a bank of computer monitors when a cup of coffee was set down by my elbow. I tugged off my glasses and rubbed my tired eyes. There was no sleeping after Noe pulled back the curtain and let me peek into her past. I hated her story. I hated even more that it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, or a version of it. I hated that I’d lived inside the less horrible parts of that story myself when I was younger. Trapped somewhere I didn’t want to be, caught up in an impossible position I couldn’t get out of. It twisted me up inside and I was almost resentful of the fact that Noe was strong enough to get out and rewrite the story with herself as her own hero. In my version, there were no heroes. There was nothing more than a tragic ending and a whole lot of innocence lost. In my story, the heroes were villains, and I was a stupid pawn in a game I still didn’t know how to play.
“You been down here all night?” Booker asked the question even though the answer was obvious. I hadn’t moved from the security room in the loft’s basement for hours. My legs were numb. My back was stiff. My mind was going a thousand miles a minute, but I was oblivious to all of it because a couple of hours ago, reviewing security footage, I’d seen Jonathan Goddard crawl out of that mangled shipping container. A blacked-out SUV had wheeled its way to the wreckage, and the Mayor had managed to limp his way inside. He was alive.
I picked up the coffee and ran a hand over the rough stubble that now covered the lower half of my face. “Yeah. I was watching the container for survivors.” Even though Benny wasn’t someone I wanted to spend my free time with I realized everything he was risking for to save Noe. I was hoping he made it out of the fray and was on his way to the person that he’d been willing to deal with the Devil for.
Booker grunted as he leaned against the desk. He was back in a severely tailored suit. One cut specifically to hide the bulge of the gun he wore strapped to his side. “It records. You could have fast forwarded through the footage this morning. You didn’t need to watch it all night.”
I knew that. I was the one who had installed the security system. It was top of the line and had all the bells and whistles. It didn’t require any human interaction to operate, but this human couldn’t pull himself away. The steady stream of visuals, the low hum of surveillance footage being recorded, soothed some of the wildness that was alive in my blood after listening to Noe explain why being homeless, alone, and hungry was better than being home. The machines did what they were supposed to do; they didn’t have stories that made my guts feel like lead, ones that turned my heart inside out and made my head feel like it was caving in. All these feelings were going to bury me. I couldn’t breathe through them, couldn’t think with them circling around every thought.
“I know. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I would come down here and see if anyone made it out. Benny pulled himself out not long after you got Noe free. He looked pretty banged up, but he was moving under his own steam.” I was surprised how relieved I was when I saw the dark-haired man stagger into sight. I knew Benny only went after Noe because Nassir had him by the balls, but he got her out when no one else could. Even if he was a self-serving asshole, I felt like I owed him, and I was glad he hadn’t gone down doing this final favor in his hometown.
“If he was moving then he’s fine. He’s already gone. He has someone waiting on him, and he was anxious as hell to get back to her. Gotta say, I’m glad he’s gonna make it. If a shithead like Benny can find a girl willing to wait on him, that means there is hope for the rest of us rejects.” He took a sip of the coffee he had clenched in his hand and lifted an eyebrow at me. “Anyone else make it out?”
I dipped my chin in a half nod. “Goddard. Got picked up a little before dawn, but he was barely moving. A clean-up crew showed an hour ago and pulled out the bodies of the cop and some skinny guy. They dumped them in the water along with the security detail you took out and wiped the container clean. They went after the surveillance tapes.”
“They freak out when they realized there was none?” Booker sounded slightly amused. Nothing good went down at those docks, and a lot of that nothing good fell under Nassir’s watchful eye. The only surveillance that happened on the shady waterfront area came from this building. It was just one more way that Nassir kept his finger on the pulse of everything that went on in his city.
“Yeah. They definitely seemed confused. You would think a guy like Goddard would know more about the place he uses for all his dirty work.” Noe was far from the first person to pay a visit to that shipping container.
Booker snorted. “Guys like Goddard think they are above any kind of law. They think they can explain away something like a midnight visit to the docks with a few careful words. He has his supporters snowed. What he declares as the truth they’ll believe, even with the facts right in front of them.”
Goddard was the kind of politician who ensured the rich got richer and pitted the poor against one another. His supporters were influential and well off. They wouldn’t want to rock the boat by questioning why the man who paved their way on easy street was skulking around in the middle of the night, in the slums, with an armed escort. It would take more than a video of Goddard going in and out of that container to push him off his pedestal.
“I know all about guys like Goddard.” He was exactly like the men who made me a deal I couldn’t refuse. He operated the same way they did. Stripping away choice and putting the vulnerable in impossible situations. It was going to be an absolute pleasure to flip the script and put this asshole in a position that was impossible to wiggle out of. “You tell Titus about the dirty cop?”
Booker nodded. “I did. He was pissed. Guess he won’t have to kick ass considering the guy is now fish food. He also mentioned Reeve left a bunch of stuff here when they were using the loft I want to put Noe in. He said she was welcome to any of it.”
Reeve Black was the cop’s stunning baby-momma. Before they had been parents-to-be, she’d been a witness to a crime and the girl the entire Point despised. Titus was supposed to keep her safe and at a distance. He’d failed at both but got the girl and the bad guy in the end, so he was still a hero. Reeve was all long legs and rocked the body of a stripper before the cop knocked her up. She was still round and stacked in all the right places, but now those places were overshadowed by her baby belly. Anything she left would be the opposite of what Noe typically wore, but I guess it was better than Booker’s hand-me-downs, which swallowed her up.
“I’ll let her know.” I’d checked on her throughout the night. After everything she’d been through, I wasn’t surprised that she was exhausted. She didn’t move. She slept still as stone, which I figured was unusual for her. She didn’t flinch or make a sound when I touched her pulse at the hollow of her throat, and she didn’t make a sound when I touched the full curve of her lower lip. I knew it was inappropriate, that I shouldn’t have my hands on her in any way when she wasn’t aware of it. But I needed to know her heart was still beating. I had to feel her breath on my fingertips to calm the raging inferno that was burning every rational thought and every sane and reasonable part of me to ash.
“She was working on getting up when I headed down here. I told her I was leaving for the day and that you were hiding down here in the Batcave. She didn’t want breakfast or coffee, but she did say she wanted a shower.” He pushed off the desk and flicked his fingers over the diamond cufflinks that were attached to his shirt. Even badass enforcers liked a little bling here and there, apparently. “You might want to check on her. She looked pale.” He reached out and clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder. “And get some sleep, boy genius. You look like shi
t.”
I grumbled a half-hearted agreement and pushed to my feet so I could follow him out of the basement. He paused at the entryway and gave me a look that made my spine stiffen. “If you need a piece, there’s a Sig Sauer in the kitchen behind the Froot Loops. There’s a Glock in the closet in my bedroom, and there’s a ten gauge in the armoire in the guest room.” His eyebrows quirked upwards and a small grin tugged at his mouth. “There’s a twenty-two hidden underneath the sink in the bathroom, and God forbid you need it, there’s an AR-15 in a lockbox under my bed. The key is in the nightstand.”
Booker had an arsenal scattered throughout his apartment. I wasn’t the least bit surprised, but I was a tad intimidated. I knew my way around a weapon, but I’d never been in the position where I’d ever had to use one to defend myself or someone else before. Usually my hands and the training I received under the tutelage of good ol’ Uncle Sam were enough to get the job done. “Good to know, but if someone is badass enough to get through all the security I set up around this place, then they’re probably coming in better armed than I’ll ever be. I’ll get Noe moved over to the other apartment today.” I selfishly wanted her out of his bed.
“Give her the nine mil that’s behind the cereal.” He said it in a way that left no room for argument.
“How do you know she can handle it?” I didn’t like how familiar he was with her after such a short time. It bugged me that he acted like he knew her when I had barely scratched the surface.
He lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “Something tells me there isn’t much that girl can’t handle. She’s made of tough stuff.” He slipped out the front door before I could agree with him. She was made of tough stuff, the kind of stuff that didn’t break no matter what was thrown at it.
I was dragging ass when I took the stairs up to Booker’s unit. Typically, I could run up the three flights and not even get winded, but I was running on fumes and the last traces of adrenaline. My brain was fuzzy, and my normally sharp thoughts felt scattered and unruly. The past and the present were at war in my mind, and the battle for which one made me feel worse was raging.