Absolution (The Protectors, Book 1) (12 page)

Rage mottled Cole’s features and then he was on me like an animal. For every punch I gave, I got one back in equal measure. Neither of us held back as we turned our fear and frustration on each other. I had no idea how long the battle raged on for but it ended just as quickly as it had started when the sound of a gunshot pierced the silence. We instinctively jumped apart and searched for our mutual enemy but when I saw where the threat was coming from, I stilled.

Because it wasn’t one of our unknown attackers that had tracked us down to finish what they started. No, the threat was aimed solely at me and it was Jonas who was looking down the barrel of the gun that was pointed directly at my chest.

Cole

Blood trickled out of my nose and drifted over my lips and into my mouth but I didn’t dare move my arm to wipe it away. Even though the gun wasn’t aimed at me, I could see Jonas was shaking violently and I was afraid that if I startled him, he’d inadvertently fire. As much as I hated Mace in that moment, I didn’t want this.

“How long?” Jonas asked, his voice uneven. “How long have you been watching me?”

Mace didn’t seem as concerned about not moving because he did use his arm to wipe at the blood streaking down his face where my fist had torn into the flesh near his eye.

“Five weeks,” Mace said quietly.

I didn’t think it possible but Jonas paled even more. “Did you listen to me?” he whispered in disbelief.

Mace nodded. “I planted a listening device in your apartment the first day we met.”

Anger surged through me at that but Jonas just looked completely devastated. I glanced at Mace and saw that he wasn’t unaffected either.

“Why?” Jonas asked hoarsely. His pain radiated off of him and I actually began moving but Mace beat me to it. I held my breath as I watched Mace stride right up to Jonas until the gun was pressed against his chest.

“Jonas,” he said softly. “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you everything-”

“No! Now! Tell me now!” Jonas yelled.

Mace swallowed hard and then closed his eyes. “I was supposed to kill you.”

Even though I’d already suspected why Mace had been watching Jonas, it still tore me up to hear it confirmed. I couldn’t even imagine what Jonas was suffering.

Jonas didn’t say anything but he didn’t have to because it was written all over his face. Disbelief, terror, betrayal.

“Why?” Jonas managed to whisper.

Mace stepped back. “There’s…there are some papers in my bag…they’ll explain everything.”

But when Mace made a move towards the car to get them, Jonas yelled, “No! You tell me! I want to hear you say it.”

I hadn’t had a chance to look at the contents of the manila envelope in great detail after I’d broken into the apartment Mace was using to watch Jonas but I could tell by the look of horror on Mace’s face that whatever was in there was pretty bad. I could also tell that Mace didn’t want to have to speak the words aloud.

“I work for a group that delivers justice when the law can’t,” Mace began. “Your…your name came up in one of our investigations.”

“What investigation?” Jonas asked when Mace didn’t continue on his own.

Mace lifted his eyes so he could watch Jonas when he said, “We had information that you were a suspect in the sexual assaults of three little boys and the disappearance of a fourth.”

Jonas didn’t seem to register what Mace was saying at first but once he did, his face contorted in agony and his free arm wrapped around his stomach as if trying to stem some wound.

“You think…you think I raped…”

Jonas couldn’t even finish the statement before he leaned over and vomited.

“Jonas-” Mace cried brokenly as he stepped forward to try and support Jonas.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” Jonas screamed, waving the gun in his hand. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

More retching followed and then Jonas sank to his knees and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I didn’t…I wouldn’t-”

“I know, Jonas,” Mace said. “I know you’d never hurt anyone. I knew it the first time I met you, but I couldn’t get past the proof.”

Tears were coursing down Jonas’s face and I knew he was done. I was walking towards him when he asked, “Is there anything else?”

I glanced at Mace and then came to a halt when I saw his face fall. Fuck, how the hell could there be more?

Jonas lifted his eyes to meet Mace’s. His face was streaked with grime and tears and I wanted to beg Mace not to say anything else.

“I was given emails between you and Devlin. They suggested…they were intimate. They suggested you and he had been in a relationship from the time you were a teenager and that it was still going on.”

Soft, guttural cries tore from Jonas as he dropped the gun to the ground. He didn’t fight me when I put my arm around him and pulled him to his feet. His body felt cold against mine despite the warm evening and violent tremors tore through his body. I managed to get him up the porch stairs and held him against me as I searched out the spare house key that was stashed under a decorative planter.

Once we were inside, I flipped on the lights. Jonas shoved away from me and wiped at his face. The move hurt but I didn’t try to touch him again.

“The bedrooms are upstairs,” I said gently. “You can get cleaned up and rest,” I suggested.

Jonas didn’t respond but he did step around me, giving me a wide berth as if he was afraid to have any kind of contact with me, and went up the stairs. I turned back to the door to see if Mace was behind me but saw that he hadn’t moved at all. The flood lights turned off, burying Mace in a cloud of darkness. The fact that they didn’t come on again right away was telling. I had no doubt that Mace was suffering because I’d seen it in his eyes when he watched me help Jonas to his feet. I still didn’t have the answers I needed but I had the most important one…the one that had me leaving the front door open. Mace wasn’t a danger to Jonas anymore…my guess was that he hadn’t been for a long time.

* * *

I spent the next half an hour going through the house and stripping off the dust covers on all the furniture and checking the kitchen for supplies. There was nothing in the fridge but the freezer was stocked with food and the pantry wasn’t completely bare so I knew we’d be okay for at least a few days. Geoff, my friend who had inherited the house after his parents died in a car accident, had used this place as an escape from the real world in between deployments. It was isolated so I knew that we wouldn’t be getting any visitors investigating the gunshot Jonas had discharged earlier. The property was more wooded than I would have liked, but my hope was that there was no way for anyone to link me to the property and we wouldn’t be followed. And since Geoff hadn’t had any family left, I knew there wouldn’t be anyone coming to check on the house. Even with Geoff’s death at the hands of a sniper in Afghanistan last month, I suspected it would take a while for whoever was handling his estate to get around to checking on the remote property.

I still hadn’t heard Mace come inside so I closed the front door, but left it unlocked and went upstairs to check on Jonas. There were four bedrooms on the second floor and I checked each one. I’d expected to find Jonas asleep or at least resting in one of them but he wasn’t. I finally heard running water in the bathroom attached to the bedroom that had belonged to Geoff as a child, but the door was locked and there was no light showing from underneath the door. Concern went through me as I knocked and called Jonas’s name.

When there was no answer, I stepped back and gave the door one good kick, breaking it down. I flipped on the lights and slid the shower curtain back. My heart broke as I saw Jonas huddled on one side of the large tub, still fully dressed with water raining down on him.

“Jonas,” I whispered as I reached down to push his wet hair off his face. He was ice cold and I realized he’d run out of hot water at some point and hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared. Jonas didn’t acknowledge me in any way, so I turned the water off and reached down and wrapped my arms around and lifted him to his feet. His clothes soaked through mine and I cringed at how bitterly cold it felt.

“Jonas, I need to get these clothes off, okay?” I said softly. He didn’t answer me even when I gently cupped his face to force him to look at me. The emptiness in his gaze terrified me, so I focused on the task at hand. I wasn’t sure if he would stay standing on his own so I sat him down on the closed toilet and knelt down to pull his shoes and socks off. His shirt went next and I grabbed a towel and ran it swiftly over his hair and upper body. He made no move to help me in my efforts so I pulled him to his feet and put my arm around him so I could get him to the bedroom. After I sat him down on the edge of the bed, I made quick work of his pants and underwear and then pulled him back into a standing position so I could push the comforter out of the way.

Once I had him settled beneath the covers, I didn’t think too much about what I was doing when I stripped my own shirt off. My pants were damp but not soaked through like my shirt, so I left them on since I didn’t want to frighten Jonas when he came around, only to find himself in bed with a naked man. I climbed in bed next to him and pulled him against me and got us both covered with the comforter. Jonas’s skin felt like ice against mine and his shivering body had me tightening my arms around him. He still hadn’t acknowledged my presence, so I didn’t bother speaking to him. I just kept stroking my hand up and down his back as I tried to work some heat into his system. It took a good hour before I finally felt his body relax against mine and when I looked down, I saw his eyes had drifted shut.

I knew at that point that I should leave him, but I found myself needing the comfort that his body draped over mine brought. I’d been on an adrenaline rush from the moment I’d broken into Mace’s apartment and found his rifle, and the impending crash was hitting me hard. I actually didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep until I heard Jonas screaming next to me. At first when his fist slammed into my chest, I thought he was attacking me but then I realized he wasn’t even awake. His whole body thrashed on the bed as he begged his unseen attacker to stop.

I’d managed to get a hold of the arm Jonas had hit me with but in his terror, I couldn’t prevent him from kicking at me as his other fist struck me in the head. I heard the door to the room crash open and then light flooded the room. I looked over my shoulder to see Mace standing in the doorway and then he was moving. I was sure he was going to rip me off of Jonas thinking I was the one responsible for his screams, but instead he went around the bed to Jonas’s side and gently grabbed his flailing arm.

“Jonas,” he called out.

Jonas’s eyes snapped open and he looked wildly around until he settled them first on Mace and then on me. Awareness returned to him and then he closed his eyes and began to cry. He tugged his arm free of Mace’s hold, but instead of turning away from me, he rolled against my chest and wrapped his arms around me as sob after sob rattled through him. I laid back on the bed and held him as I whispered soothing words against his head and stroked his back. I spared Mace a glance who was watching us with such a pained expression that I wanted to reach out to him too. Mace took several steps back from the bed but instead of leaving, he turned the lights off and then sat down in a chair in the corner and watched us. I remembered his comment about having to watch Jonas do this night after night and some of my anger towards Mace receded a little. And was replaced with guilt.

What if what Mace had said was right? What if I had caused this by making Jonas relive Carrie’s murder and subsequently his own past?

“Don’t,” I heard Mace say so softly I barely heard him. I looked over at him. “Don’t put this on yourself,” he said quietly. “This is on me. Just me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that but I knew he was wrong. Because we’d both done this. And come tomorrow, Mace and I were going to figure out how the hell to fix it.

Together.

Jonas

When I heard the bedroom door open, I closed my eyes in the childish hope that my visitor would think I was asleep and leave me alone. I hadn’t been – not in any of the endless hours since I’d woken up to find myself pressed against Cole’s chest, my lips just a breath away from his nipple and my arm wrapped around his waist. The room had been dark, but I’d been able to tell by his even breathing that he was asleep and I’d carefully extricated myself from his hold so I could escape his touch. I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure what Cole’s role in all of this had been, but it hadn’t mattered because in that moment, I couldn’t stand his touch. My skin felt like something was trying to crawl out from beneath it and even the soft comforter had made me want to scream in agony. But I’d known pretty much right away that I was naked beneath the stifling blanket so I’d had no choice but to leave it on.

I’d rolled away from Cole but had felt my heart stop at the sight of Mace sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. Even without light, I’d known he was awake and watching me. I’d felt the bile creeping up the back of my throat as he’d watched me and I’d had no choice but to bury my face in the too soft pillow beneath my head in the hopes of quelling the nausea that rolled through me. A moment later the bedroom door had softly shut but it had taken me several moments to garner enough courage to open my eyes to see that Mace had indeed left.

I’d felt Cole leave the bed a couple of hours later as light started to filter through the curtains but I didn’t move and I was glad when he didn’t speak to me. I hadn’t moved after that, not even when my body began to cramp from the position I’d pulled myself up into. My brain was still struggling to process the events of last night after Mace’s bone-melting kiss, but I hadn’t been able to give much thought to anything other than knowing what vile things Mace had thought me capable of doing. The idea that he’d believed I was like the monsters who’d preyed on me the moment I stepped off that bus in Chicago nine years ago was abhorrent to me, and all I really wanted to do was wake up from what had to be another one of my many nightmares.

“Jonas.”

I flinched at the sound of Cole’s voice but when he sat down on the bed behind me and settled his hand on my shoulder, I jerked away from him until there was no room on the bed for me to escape to.

“You need to eat something.”

I forced myself to sit up, keeping my back to him. “I want my phone,” I said.

Cole didn’t answer me but I felt his weight shift off the bed. I closed my eyes when I sensed him come around to my side of the bed and sit in the chair Mace had been sitting in last night. I hated that part of me wanted him to try to touch me again.

“We can’t risk turning it on. Someone could be tracking it,” Cole said gently. “There’s no land line here but we’ll get some burner phones as soon as we can, okay?”

I nodded. “Is he still here?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want him here.” Even as I said the words, I knew that Cole wasn’t the only one to hear them because I felt a chill go up my spine. I forced my eyes open and glanced over my shoulder to see Mace standing in the doorway, his shuttered eyes watching me. He turned away before I did and I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

“Jonas,” Cole said as he reached for my hand.

“Don’t,” I whispered as I pulled my hand from out of his reach. “I don’t…I can’t…”

I didn’t look at Cole as I spoke but heard him settle back down in the chair. “We need to figure out what’s going on,” Cole said. “Like it or not, Mace is the only one who might have some answers.”

I managed a nod. “Do you…do you believe the things he said about me?” I forced myself to ask.

The bed next to me shifted and I felt Cole’s thigh brush against mine through the blanket. I tried to pull away but his hand snaked around to grab the back of my neck to hold me still.

“Look at me,” Cole said, the soft order leaving no room for argument.

I opened my eyes even as I tried to hold back the pain that bloomed in my chest. “I don’t believe one fucking word of it,” Cole said angrily. “And neither does he…not anymore.”

Not anymore
.

I knew he’d meant the words to comfort but they didn’t – they just reminded me of the lie I’d been living in from the moment Mace had walked into my gallery. I remembered the hatred in his eyes when he’d first looked at me and a shiver went through me.

“I saw it that first day,” I whispered.

“Saw what?”

“He wanted to hurt me. I was afraid of him but then he helped me. Some wood fell in the studio and he stopped it from hitting me.” I shook my head. “Why would he do that?”

Cole’s fingers began massaging my neck and I had to admit, it felt good.

“Because he knew on some level that whatever that shit someone told him you did wasn’t true. He was watching you long before he met you, Jonas. He probably had a lot of chances to hurt you but something held him back.”

My whole body began to shake as the reality I hadn’t even dealt with hit me. Mace was a murderer. He’d been hired to kill me which meant he’d likely done it before.

“I need a little more time, Cole,” I managed to say.

Cole nodded, his hand on my neck tightening just a little bit. And then he did something I hadn’t been expecting. He leaned forward and brushed his lips over mine. The contact was brief but it left me reeling. He released me the second his lips left mine and then stood.

“I left some breakfast on the nightstand,” I heard Cole say as he moved towards the door. “Come down when you’re ready.”

I nodded but didn’t look at him. As soon as I heard the door close, I lifted my fingers to my mouth which was still tingling. Cole kissing me was almost too much for me to handle. Almost. Because even though I couldn’t process what it meant, the warmth that spread through me afterwards helped chase some of the coldness away and I managed to climb to my feet.

As I made my way to the bathroom, I saw a cup of coffee sitting on the nightstand next to a plate stacked high with pancakes. I ignored the food and drink and went to the bathroom. I noticed the busted door but couldn’t remember how it had gotten that way. I didn’t remember much after climbing in the shower and letting the hot water wash over me.

I managed to find a new toothbrush in the cabinet under the sink and scrubbed my teeth and then got dressed. My clothes had been sitting on the end of the bed and I could see that they’d been freshly laundered. I eyed the food again but couldn’t stomach the idea of trying to force it past my lips. I took a couple sips of the coffee in the hopes that it would take away some of the exhaustion I was feeling. The coffee was sweeter than I’d expected and I wondered if Cole had made the assumption I liked it that way, or if Mace had had a hand in it since he knew I only ever ordered flavored lattes when I went to the coffee shop down the street.

The reminder of my daily coffee runs had me remembering the studio as bullets had started flying and tearing into the walls around us as we’d huddled on the ground. Only I hadn’t huddled when the first bullet had torn through the space – Mace had used his body to push me out of the way and shield me. And at some point, he’d gotten shot in the process.

I shouldn’t care. I didn’t.

Frustration tore through me as my inner voice called me a liar, and it nagged me even as I left the room and walked down the stairs as images of the blood that had stained my shirt washed over me. Mace’s blood.

I didn’t hear anything once I reached the first floor but the layout of the house was pretty simple and I found the kitchen with little trouble. But as I walked through the entryway, I spied motion to my right and saw Mace sitting at a small table in the alcove that the owner of the house used as a dining area. Cole stood next to Mace and I felt a little sick as I realized what he was doing. Mace’s flesh was torn open on his left bicep and Cole was in the process of stitching it closed. Mace didn’t even make a sound as the needle pierced his skin repeatedly but when his eyes caught mine, he flinched and then dropped his gaze. I couldn’t remember any time that Mace had actually looked afraid of me, not even last night when I’d held the gun on him, but that was exactly how he looked now. Like he wanted to be anywhere else.

Cole noticed me and then motioned to the chair at the opposite end of the table. I didn’t want to be so close to Mace but I knew I didn’t have a choice. The sooner we figured out what was going on, the sooner I could get away from both men. I’d already made a plan to call Devlin and Casey the first chance I got. As much as I liked being able to do things on my own like starting my studio, I had absolutely no qualms about relying on Devlin’s power and connections to help get me out of whatever mess I’d been tossed into.

Cole kept stitching as he said to Mace, “Tell us, Mace. Everything.”

It felt strange to not have Mace’s eyes on me when he spoke since he’d always been so direct with how he looked at or spoke to me in the past.

“The group I work for…we monitor a lot of different channels to pick out potential marks.”

I swallowed hard at the term but held my tongue.

“But we mostly use the Deep Web,” he said.

“What is that?” I interjected.

“It’s the internet beneath the internet so to speak,” Cole said as he continued to drive the needle through Mace’s skin before tying off the thread. “There’s a lot of illegal shit there including black markets for everything from stolen credit cards to body parts to child pornography.”

I found myself wanting to throw up again. Mace lived in a world where looking through that kind of shit was normal?

“You found my name there?” I said in horror.

“Our tech guy, Benny, has algorithms that look for certain crimes,” Mace said quietly. “From there we look at police reports, trial transcripts, whatever we need to determine if we should step in. Crimes against kids are high on our list. We also look for people who are trying to hire hitmen to take out a spouse or a loved one and we step in and stop it.”

“You kill them? The people you decide are guilty?”

I saw Mace flinch at that but then he stiffened. “We do what it takes get the innocent victims justice.”

Let Justice be done.

The tattoo on Mace’s chest made sense now but I wondered if I would ever be able to consider it beautiful again. And then I realized the direction of my thoughts. Did I even want to see it again?

“What did you find on me?” I managed to ask.

Mace motioned to a large manila envelope sitting in the middle of the table that I hadn’t even noticed. I noticed that my fingers shook as I reached for it.

The first few pages I skimmed after I’d removed everything from the envelope contained basic information about me as well as my lease on the gallery. Next were several pictures of me but they weren’t any I remembered someone taking. I finally realized they were surveillance pictures and most had been taken while I was doing inconsequential things like getting coffee or buying groceries. Except the last one.

The last one was a mug shot of me. I was holding up some kind of board that showed it was for the Boston Police Department and there was a date and a bunch of numbers beneath it. It was dated a year earlier.

“What is this?” I croaked. “I’ve never been arrested,” I stammered. “The only time I was ever in Boston since my parents kicked me out was when Devlin’s plane had to divert there because of weather.”

“From Paris, you mean?” Mace asked.

I nodded and then realized the date of that flight was within a few days of the date on the board the picture version of me was holding.

“My finger…” I whispered as I looked at the mug shot more closely. “I’d flown in for Casey’s birthday and I cut my finger while I was helping her in the barn. I had to get stitches,” I said as I lifted my finger to show off the scar on the outside of my pointer finger. “There aren’t any stitches in this picture,” I said as I flipped the photo to show them.

“Someone doctored it,” Mace muttered.

“What…what was the arrest for?” I asked even though the question sounded odd even to my own ears.

“The cops were looking for the man who kidnapped a nine-year-old boy whose body has never been found.”

It was little consolation that Mace didn’t refer to me as the one the cops were supposedly looking at. I flipped to the next page and then covered my mouth when I saw the images of four little boys looking back at me. They were all the kinds of pictures kids had taken at their schools. I felt like I was going to be sick as I skimmed the names written along the bottom of each picture. The page right after the pictures listed each boy’s statement and as I began reading the first one, I felt my stomach roll violently as I saw my first name listed when the boy was asked if he knew the name of the person who’d hurt him.

The nausea was so intense that I knocked the chair over in my attempt to get up and find a bathroom. I managed to make it to the half bath I’d spied near the front hallway but all that came up were the few sips of coffee I’d taken and then I was dry heaving. A hand settled on my back and then handed me a dampened washcloth.

“I’m okay,” I said, my throat burning as I spoke. It was Cole who was standing behind me watching me with concern but then he nodded and pulled some mouthwash from a small cabinet next to the sink and left the bathroom. I splashed some cold water on my face and rinsed out my mouth with the mouthwash before I returned to the kitchen. The stack of pages was still on the table in front of my chair but all the boys’ statements had been set aside and turned over.