Marked: Chapter 15

Harley sleeps like an angel, with her hair fanned out on the pillow behind her. She hasn’t moved once since she fell asleep hours ago. It’s as if a calm has settled over her soul.

My phone finally goes off, and I grab the call before it wakes her up. It’s already noon, but last night was a lot for her. She needs her rest.

“Hey.” I take my phone out of the bedroom and head into the living room. “What do you have for me?”

“Plenty. These assholes aren’t doing a good job of hiding,” Jeff starts.

“Maybe they don’t need to. If they have a Special Agent on their payroll, no reason to believe they don’t have more powerful people on there, too.”

“That could be true.”

“So what do you got?”

“Well, turns out Dustin and Artie were cousins. Couldn’t find much on Dustin other than what we already knew.”

“Who did he fucking work for?” I push the curtain away from the window enough to look down at the street.

“I’m getting to it. Damn, you’re impatient today.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and take a deep breath. “It was a long ass night.”

“All right, I’ll get to it then. Artie has ties to the Blackwood family. Got busted a year ago with a tiny bit of product on him, and the Blackwoods sent their best attorneys to get him out of the jam,” he says.

“They sent high-powered attorneys down for a drug dealer?”

“Yeah, seems overkill, right? I’m thinking Artie wasn’t just a low-level dealer. Especially if he was sent last night to take you and the girl out.”

My jaw clenches. “I didn’t realize the Blackwoods had dealings in Chicago. I thought they stayed on the east coast.”

“Nah. Jimmy is the youngest of the brood. He broke away from New York a long time ago. He’s been in Chicago for the last fifteen years. But he’s not peddling just coke.”

“He’s the loan shark of the family, isn’t he?” Fucking Mafia families have their hands all over the fucking country. So long as they stick to shit that doesn’t involve the innocent, I leave them alone. There are bigger monsters.

“That’s where he got his start.” There’s a crackling on the line.

“And Vince? The phone number I gave you?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean when I say they’re not hiding. It’s listed to a Vince Scaletto. His rap sheet is a little more…disturbing. He spent five years in max security for multiple rapes– not all women, and not all adults. They tried to get him on trafficking, but nothing stuck.”

“Only five years?” Even the most corrupt judge would have a hard time giving that little of a sentence to those charges.

“Yeah, those Blackwood attorneys were able to get the conviction overturned.”

“Everything leads back to Jimmy Blackwood, then.”

“In the end, yeah.”

“Well, we’ll pay him a visit after we speak to Vince.” Taking a Mafia son out will need more finesse than one of his low-level thugs. He’ll have people surrounding him, and possibly force of his family behind him.

It doesn’t let him off the hook, it just means we need to watch our steps.

There’s more static on the line, like it’s fading out.

“Phone’s gonna die on me. These prepaids are getting shittier,” Jeff complains.

I chuckle. “They are when you go cheap.”

“I’m saving for retirement. Not all of us get field bonuses.”

“You couldn’t stomach what I do. Besides, you have that wife and kid to protect. You’re fine right where you are.” There’s movement behind me.

Harley is up, finally, brushing her hair from her face as she walks into the living room with a sleepy smile on her lips.

“You’re right.” More static. “If I get more, I’ll get in touch.”

“Thanks,” I say to a dead line. He really needs to pay better attention to the equipment he uses.

“Who was that?” Harley pulls her hair into a ponytail as she makes her way to the kitchen. I don’t miss the way her hips sway as she walks. Or the gentle curve of her ass that peeks out from her pajama shorts.

“A friend, getting information for us.” I toss my phone onto the side table next to the couch on my way to meet her in the kitchen.

I slink my arms around her waist while she drops a coffee pod into her coffee machine, and kiss her bare shoulder.

“Sleep okay?”

“Yeah.” She freezes. “I did.” After hitting the brew button, she turns in my arms and faces me. “Not a single nightmare.”

“Were you expecting one?” Taking out Artie was her first kill. He deserved every ounce of pain he got, but Harley’s not the monster he was. It wouldn’t be surprising if she’d found it hard to sleep.

“I was.” She nods, pressing her palms into the edge of the counter. “After yesterday, I thought I’d be up the rest of the night with them. But nothing.”

I brush an errant hair from her cheek.

“How are you doing? With what we found out yesterday?”

She lifts a shoulder, but her eyes move away from mine.

I nudge her chin until she’s focused on me again. “No lying, Harley. Tell me.”

She frowns. “We didn’t find out much. I still don’t understand why and who, other than that Vince guy.”

“I was able to track down that Vince guy, well at least his last name. I have a little more digging to do, but I think I’ll know where we can find him soon enough. Then we’ll get more from him. It’s slow, but one monster at a time, right?”

The little wrinkles around her eyes deepen with her smile.

“Yeah. One bite at a time.” She laughs. “That’s what I tell my kids when they’re learning something new. You wouldn’t eat a bear all in one bite, right? No, you’d eat it one bite at a time, so that’s how we do the lesson.”

“Why would you eat a bear?” I ask.

She thinks about it, then shrugs. “I don’t know, none of the kids have ever asked.”

“Probably because they trust you.” I push back from her and open the fridge, grabbing the half-and-half for her. “Just like you trust me.”

“I do.” She nods. “It’s weird, right? Feeling this connected to someone this fast? It’s not normal. Maybe I am sick, like Artie said.”

“The world is a sick and fucked up place, Harley. You’re not the sickness.” I hand her the half-and-half as the coffee sputters the last bit of brew into her mug. “You’re going to be part of the cure.”

“You killed Dustin. Is that what brought you to town? Him?”

“Yes.” I nod.

“Why’d you kill him?” She pours the cream into her coffee while stirring in a heaping spoon of sugar.

“He was a bad man doing bad things.”

“Why won’t you tell me?” She drops her spoon into the sink.

“Because I like it when you sleep without nightmares.”

She looks over her shoulder at me. “Don’t start acting like I’m a fragile piece of glass. Not after what I did yesterday.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Fragile glass? You? Never.”

“Isn’t that why you call me your little bird? You think I’m a little innocent creature that needs to be protected in a cage?” She brings the mug to her lips and takes a small sip.

“No. I call you my little bird because you’ve just found your wings and are learning to fly.”

She smiles. “I think I like that.” She pauses. “But I still want to know what he did.”

“If I tell you that it’s better you don’t know, you need to trust me.”

She levels me with a stare, like she’s considering what I’m saying.

“I do trust you, Zack.” She nods. “But I’m tired of having things hidden from me.”

“I get that.” And I do. I spent over a decade serving in one of the top-tier special operations battalions in the Marines. I’ve seen things that would make Harley never sleep again, but I always believed we were the heroes. We were the good guys. But in the end, it was just bullshit.

We were fed lies to keep us going on missions, while the corrupt bastards back in their tents provided those that were considered trusted allies with innocents to abuse. All the while, we were made to stand guard, to hear their cries and do nothing.

Some fucking heroes we were.

“So you’ll tell me?” She edges toward me with a coy smile.

I chuckle.

“I’ll tell you this. He hurt a girl. He did things to her that were unforgivable, and for no other reason than he enjoyed it. I killed him because he was a monster.”

“And all monsters need to be slain,” she says.

“Yes.”

“But we’re not monsters?”

“No.” I rest my hands on her hips, pulling her closer to me, and kissing her softly. “We get rid of the monsters.”

She smiles after I pull back.

“So now we find Vince? What about Special Agent Laurens? She’s going to realize Artie messed up, and she might send more guys.” She takes another sip of her coffee and puts the mug down on the counter.

“I sent her a text from Artie’s phone, telling her all went as planned. I’ll watch for any messages from her on his phone, make sure she’s not looking for him.”

She hops up onto the counter and spreads her legs, giving me room to step between them.

“You’ve thought of everything.” She rests her arms on my shoulders, running her fingers through my hair. It’s so casual. So normal, these little touches.

A warmth I’m not used to runs through me, and I lean into her hands. “Have I?” I kiss her cheek, then her neck.

“Yeah.” She tenses. “Were you this methodical in the military?”

“I was.”

“And they didn’t want you to stay?”

“No, baby.” I kiss her cheek. “They didn’t like how I got rid of bad guys.”

Her eyes narrow. “But you were a soldier. Didn’t you do what they trained you to do?”

I shake my head.

“Not always. I wouldn’t let them get away with hurting people who didn’t deserve it. That’s why I got out.” A medical discharge, instead of a court-martial, because they didn’t want the publicity that would go along with the trial. Killing an Afghan commander while he was balls deep in a fourteen-year-old boy wouldn’t have been a good look for us. Our own commanding officer had brought him to the tent, and that would have been bad for relations.

“Okay. So, we find Vince.” She sighs. “Then what?”

I line up my eyes with hers and smile.

“We kill him, little bird. We kill him.”