Defiance (New Adult Romance) (Isaac & Maya) (3 page)

“Isaac, I am so, so sorry.”

“Actions speak louder than words, Glory.”

“Okay,” she answers shakily. “When Maya’s father died, I was worried about her. I tried to convince her to call in that favor so she could stay in a good school. She told me that she didn’t want to be the sort of person who would do something like that.”

“Gee, I wonder why. Blackmail worked out so well for her the first time.”

Glory drops her chin and closes her eyes. “That favor is still sitting there. And Carl loves Maya almost as much as his own daughter, he will be devastated when he finds out she’s involved in this. If she asks him to help her be with you, he will.”

“Even though I’m Baron’s son?”

“Yeah, well, that might be a problem, but there’s an out for that part, too. We need you to do us a favor. I know the timing is fucked up.”

“Ya think?” I snap.

“Isaac… when you talk to the investigators, you might have to relive some rather painful memories,” Glory says softly, rolling her lips together as she struggles to look at me. “They, um… well, they mentioned that they want to know who was involved with any children and you’ll be in a unique position to give them that information. We just need you to keep one name out of it. Just one guy.”

My anxiety shoots through the roof and my throat tightens up, so I close my eyes and think about Maya. I can’t quite manage to conjure up the sensation of her fingers on my skin, but I can see her face and almost hear her say my name. The only thing that matters is getting her back. We have a real fucking chance now and as long as I focus on that, I’ll keep breathing. “Fine,” I agree. “But I don’t want to know his name yet, okay?”

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“No, not really,” I say. “I’m assuming he’s a fucking bastard that you two were doing business with and if I point him out, it’ll lead straight to a major fuck up on your part. Maybe take down a company or two?”

“Yeah, something like that,” she murmurs.

“So who cares if he fucks little kids, right?  Maybe we’ll just pretend there are jobs at stake in a miserable economy.”

“I guess there are.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” I growl. “That definitely makes it okay. We’re practically doing the world a favor.”

“Isaac—”

“We are done talking. Call Carl. If he has something to do today, it’s cancelled. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

4

Isaac

Unfortunately, Carl’s in New York and he can’t get back until tonight at the earliest. I go completely ballistic when she tells me and wind up smashing a heavy crystal decanter through the limousine window. That was pretty stupid but it felt fantastic, so I don’t fucking care. It’s not Glory’s normal driver and she somehow manages to convince him not to call the police even though I’m screaming ‘go ahead and fucking call them’ the entire time.

“Very mature, Isaac,” she chides me as the frightened driver sits our bags onto the sidewalk where we’ll be standing until we can get another ride.

Eyes narrowing, I refuse to answer which only further proves her point, but I don’t give a shit. Fuck mature. It has gotten me absolutely nowhere. I’ve been keeping my rage in fucking check this entire goddamned time because that was supposedly the ‘smart’ course of action and I refused to do something stupid for a short term gain. But if I had followed my instincts, Luke would be fucking dead and Maya would be cuddling her perfectly healthy cat in her bed while she reads some bizarre paper on mathematical theories or something else I can’t comprehend. Mature can go fuck itself.

It is rush hour, but word must travel fast in the limo driver world because suddenly every service Glory calls doesn’t have any available cars to pick us up. We freeze for nearly an hour as the heavy snow falls until she finally breaks down and lowers her standards, cursing me as I hail a cab. It’s such a quintessentially awful cab too, complete with sticky floors and a driver with horrible taste in foreign music. Glory is absolutely horrified and it’s a long ride in crawling traffic to her house. She glares at me in disgust until I pick up a piece of mysterious debris from the seat and flick it at her.

It hits her right between the eyebrows and we both attempt to contain our amusement at my childish outburst, but we can’t resist for long. Once the laughter fades away, I can’t get the rage back and there’s nothing to hold onto. I can’t freak out but sitting still is impossible, I’m trapped in a waiting room and crawling out of my skin. Every second might as well be an hour.

When we get back to her house, Glory decides to take a nap. Must be fucking nice. I resolve to stay under this roof even though I’d rather be anywhere else. Despite the fact that I can’t stand looking at her, there’s no fucking way in hell that I’m leaving Gloria unsupervised. She has to be up to something, she always fucking is.

After a while, I peek into her room and realize that she’s just sleeping. My paranoia is getting the better of me. I’ve been awake for 27 hours and I won’t be able to do shit for at least 11 more. There’s no way I’ll be able to fall asleep like this, so I do something incredibly fucking stupid and call Maya’s real phone. It’s not on, but I get to hear her voice when it goes to voicemail. I love her voice so fucking much. I can’t leave her a message but I can’t hang up either, so when she finally turns her phone on there will be a few seconds of heavy breathing. I hope it doesn’t scare her and that she realizes it’s me.

I finally decide to mix a shit ton of
Valium with triazolam because that always knocks me on my ass and flip on one of the wildlife documentaries Maya got me for our birthday. There’s nothing left to do but disappear for a while. The sun is setting when I wake up and I try to jump out of bed right away, but I’m so fucking groggy it’s hard to move. Glory insists that I shower and dress professionally and I tell her to fuck off. Then she tells me that I’m essentially meeting my girlfriend’s father in a couple hours and better stop acting like the reckless, impulsive 22 year old little asshole that I am and pull my shit together. That really puts it all in perspective. I guess mature has its place after all.

“Are you ready?” she asks when we pull into the parking lot of his office.

“Exactly how the fuck does one prepare themselves for this type of thing?” I shoot back.

“Isaac…” she almost laughs, shaking her head. “I suggest you remove the word fuck from your vocabulary for the next hour or so because believe me, I will be the only one in the room that thinks it’s cute when you get like this.”

“Fuck!” I exhale in frustration. “Don’t call me cute. You don’t get to call me cute anymore. I’m still pissed off at you.”

“I’m still pissed off at you!”

“Good!”

Glory starts to snap back at me, but stops herself and chuckles. “I guess I’ll be the adult here and end this. You’re nervous and you probably should be. Carl can be rather combative sometimes and his ass is really on the line here. He’ll assume the worst about you right away. Don’t prove him right by losing your cool. Don’t push back
if he pushes you. And don’t bring up Maya right away, I want him to feel secure and show his cards first, then we can reveal the catch.”

I almost tell her to e
ase up with the fucking orders, but she is just trying to help. “Right.” I try to swallow but my mouth is so dry it hurts.

I can’t fuck this up. Everyone is gone except for the security guards, who know exactly who we are and direct us to the elevator. Glory tries to take my arm, but I shrug her away. This floor of the building is completely dark except for a light at the end of the hallway and I feel like I’m marching toward the guillotine, but I can’t let it show.

“What the hell?” Carl gasps when I follow Glory into his office. “This is the witness?”

“Yes,” she answers

“Are you insane? You brought Baron’s son to my office?”

“I did.” Glory takes a seat and motions for me to do the same. “Isaac has become aware of the investigation and plans to seek immunity in exchange for telling them whatever they want to know, so I thought it would be best to control the fallout.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t have to avoid this anymore. Bill Waters died of a heart attack this spring and you’ve stalled them for so long that I had time to clean up the paper trail that links me to that disaster with him and Baron. I don’t need this kid. Maybe you do, but that’s not my problem.”

“This is definitely your problem Carl. If you think that Bill was the only one tying you to this, you’ve got another thing—”

“If
you
think I’m going to fall for whatever bullshit you’re about to pull—”

“Oh, you wish it was bullshit. I know you Carl, so climb off your high horse and—”

“High horse? Unbelievable…”

It quickly goes to shit from there. Voices rise, insults are exchanged, blame gets tossed around, names get dropped and I just sit there staring at them while they scream threats at each other and try to get the upper hand. The massive amount of inappropriate sexual tension just makes the entire argument more surreal.

Great. First of all, I have no fucking clue who Bill Waters is, nor any of the other people they’re talking about, so if that’s the guy Glory wanted to keep out of it, I don’t have a lot to offer. Which means I can’t use him to get Maya back and I need to find a better way.

But the most fucked up part is that neither of them seems to actually give a shit that
human beings
are apparently being bought and sold like cattle. They’ve both known about it for a while, and they know way,
way
more than I do. This whole thing could have gone down two years ago if they’d let it, though they can’t agree on who was doing who the bigger favor by covering it all up. How many frightened little girls got smuggled over in a shipping container in that time?

Granted, I might be sitting in prison at this very moment if they had cared more about right and wrong than saving their own asses so I can’t exactly climb up on a high horse of my own, but I can’t believe how little it concerns them that people were suffering in indescribably horrible ways because they didn’t want to lose any money. From what I understand, that’s all it’s about. Neither of them seem to be facing any time, just professional and financial ruin. I guess that’s just as bad from their perspective.

Carl slams his fists on his desk and tells Glory to get the fuck out of here, but she just sits backs down and lights up a cigarette. Her cheeks are flushed and that is definitely her come hither stare. That fight
really
turned her on and I think it had the same effect on him. If I wasn’t here right now, this is the moment when they’d start fucking. Does that mean I should leave? Because if that was part of the plan, she should have mentioned it.

Piper has her father’s super dark brown eyes. That’s probably why his hateful glare feels so familiar.

“Stop looking at him like that,” Glory snaps. When I glance over at her, she doesn’t look amorous anymore. “You have no fucking right to look at him like that.”

“I know exactly what he is.”

“You have no idea
who
he is. Isaac is a lot better person that we could ever be,” she says. I can’t help it. I still like when she gets all Mama Bear on my behalf, I’m not sure that will ever go away.

“Speak for yourself, bitch.”

“Don’t fucking call her that,” I blurt out, much louder than I intended.

“She likes it quite a bit, kid. You have no idea,” he laughs.

“Excuse me?” I reply. “Because unless you’re—”

“Isaac!” Glory cuts me off before I remind him that you only get to say it when you’re screwing her, kicking my foot and giving me her shut-the-fuck-up eyes. Oh. Maybe he doesn’t know about us. That doesn’t seem humanly possible based on the way word seems to get around, but who fucking knows. He’s supposed to show his cards first, so shutting the fuck up is probably a good idea. “Isaac hasn’t been involved with Baron for almost six months,” Gloria says. “He walked away. And he knows very little about what we were just talking about, that was all news to him. His father keeps him away from most of it, he always has.”

“Well, that’s very touching, but now it makes even less sense that he’s here.”

“Simon White,” she whispers, glancing at me. I have no fucking clue who that is, but it certainly wiped that smug look off Carl’s face.

“What about him?” he asks, trying to keep up the cool exterior that’s rapidly crumbling.

“You know what that man was.”

“I didn’t know at the time.”

“Neither did I. Do you honestly think that will make a difference?”

“I can’t think of a reason it will come up. That was quite a while ago.”

“It will come up. As soon as Isaac walks through that door, it will definitely come up,” Glory says, looking downward.

For a moment Carl seems a little confused, but then a light bulb goes off above his head and all of the sudden, he doesn’t look as hateful. “Oh.” His pitiful stare looks a lot like Piper’s too. “I see.”

“You know how happy it will make Dan to take him down.” That’s the lead investigator I finally got Glory to tell me about. Apparently everybody’s on a first name basis. “Nothing will stop him. He’s been looking for a way to get at Simon for years, and all this kid has to do is point a finger. Isaac doesn’t know anything current, really. Nothing concrete anyway, nothing that will get him out of this. He’ll have to go a little farther back, it’s his only move. And as much as I’d like to see Simon rotting behind bars, I don’t want to go down with him when they tear his whole life apart and A leads to B leads to C. Neither do you.”

“So, what, is this a heads up or something? Because if it’s his only move then… well, it’s his only move.”

“There are a lot more names he can drop than Simon’s. He’ll be fine if he leaves that one off.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Carl spits in disgust. “Meeting you and Baron was the worst day of my life, do you know that?”

“I’m sure it was,” she replies

“This is beyond wrong.” Nice to hear someone finally say that word. “I don’t know you, Isaac, but I am not asking you to do this. She is. If you want vengeance, it’s yours. I’m not standing in your way.” Carl gets up and pours himself a drink. “I can’t do this anymore. I simply cannot do this,” he croaks.

“Oh, grow a set, Carl,” Glory scoffs, striding over to him and pouring a drink for herself.

“There are no words for you, Gloria. No words.”

Piper absolutely adores her father. She wants to be just like him. To her, he’s one of the greatest men that has ever walked the Earth, a social crusader, a man of integrity. Someone who makes a difference, who fights for those who can’t fight for themselves. And I can see where that comes from as his shaking hands pour another glass for me. Obviously, he has more than a few skeletons in his closet, but I bet Glory and my father helped put a lot of them in there. Carl MacNamara is a good person.

“So will you do this for us or not, Isaac?” My stepmother on the other hand… not so much.

I always blamed it on my Dad, but I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that she’s actually relieved I’m in this position and she can ask me to do this. She could give a fuck about what that guy did as long as she doesn’t ruin her image. What he’ll continue to do. The only problem is, I don’t fucking know exactly what that is. That name means absolutely nothing to me. Nothing. Obviously, he’s a sick fuck with a sicker fetish, but if they hadn’t just made that crystal clear, I’d have no fucking clue. But there’s no reason she and Carl have to know that, especially if it means I’ll be holding Maya sooner rather than later.