Lover At Last

SEVENTY-NINE

Assail did not condone swearing. In his mind, it was common and unnecessary. That being said, he’d had a shitty fucking week.

Down in the cellar of his house, in the vault, he and the twins had just finished organizing the haul for the last few days: Bills were stacked in bundles that had been through the counter, banded, and then sorted according to denomination—and the total was impressive, even by his standards.

All told, they had about two hundred thousand dollars.

The Fore-lesser and his merry band of slayers had been doing excellent work.

You’d think he’d be happy.

Not so.

In fact, he’d been a miserable fucking son of a bitch—and the reason for the bad humor just made him crankier.

“Go to Benloise,” he told the twins. “Get the next batch of cocaine and come back here to separate it.”

The twins were masters at cutting the stuff with additives and parceling it out into Baggies, and that was a good thing. The slayers were moving three times what had been sold before.

“Then make the delivery.” Assail checked his watch. “It’s set for three a.m., so you should have enough time.”

Getting up from the table, he stretched his arms over his head and arched his back. His body had been stiff lately, and he knew why: Being in a constant state of low-level arousal had tightened up the muscles in his thighs and his shoulders, among other physical aspects…which had been utterly resistant to self-regulation.

After years of not particularly caring for tending to his own erections, he’d fallen into a rut of pleasuring himself.

And all it seemed to do was underscore what he was not getting.

For the last week, he’d waited for Marisol to get in touch with him, expecting the phone to ring, and not because some unknown had shown up at her door again. The woman had wanted him as much as he had her, and surely that would lead to a reunion. It had not, however. And the fact that she had exhibited the kind of restraint he was struggling with, made him question not only his self-control, but his very sanity.

Indeed, he feared he was going to crack before she did.

Taking his leave, he went up the stairs and into the kitchen. The first thing he did was go over to his phone, in case she had called or in the event that Audi of hers had finally moved after seven nights of going nowhere fast: The damn thing had been parked in front of that house since he’d paid his visit, as if she mayhap knew he’d put a tracer on it.

Checking the screen, he saw that someone had called him, but it was a number that was not in his contact list.

And there was a voice mail.

He was not interested in fielding some human’s mis-dials, but as there was a chance it was a lesser breaking protocol, he knew he had to listen to the message.

As he accessed it, he walked in the direction of his humidor. He’d been smoking a lot lately, and probably doing too much coke. Which was painfully counter-intuitive—if one was already twitchy and frustrated, adding stimulants to that internal chemistry was gasoline to a fire—

“Hola. This is Sola’s grandmother. I am trying to reach…an Assail…please?” Assail stopped dead in the middle of his living room. “Please call me back now? Thank you—”

With a feeling of dread, he cut the message off and hit Call Back.

One ring. Two rings—

“¿Hola?”

Indeed, he didn’t know her name. “This is Assail, madam. Are you all right?”

“No, no—I am not. I found your number on her bedside table so I call. There is something wrong.”

He gripped his iPhone hard. “Tell me.”

“She is gone. She came home, but then she leave out the door right after she arrived—I hear her go? Except all of her things, her backpack, her car, it is all here. I was sleeping and I hear downstairs, someone is moving. I call out her name and no one answered—then I hear this hard noise—loud sound—and so I come down. The front door is open, and I fear she has been taken—I do no know what to do. She always told me, we do not call the police. I do not know—”

“Shh, it is all right. You did the correct thing. I’m coming directly.”

Assail ran to the front door without bothering to communicate with the twins; nothing was on his mind except getting over to that little house as fast as he could.

A second was all it took to dematerialize, and as he resumed form in the front yard, he thought that of all the scenarios he’d run through in his mind for coming back, this was not it.

As the grandmother reported, the Audi was parked on the street at the end of the walkway. Just where it had been. But what was of note? There was a scramble of messy footfalls disturbing the snow, the trail crossing the lawn to the street in a diagonal pattern.

She’s been kidnapped, Assail thought.

Goddamn it.

Jogging up the squat steps, he hit the doorbell and stamped his feet. The idea that someone had taken his female—

The door opened and the woman on the other side was visibly shaken. And then she seemed further taken aback as she took him in with her eyes. “You are…Assail?”

“Yes. Please let me in, madam, and I shall be of aid to you.”

“You are not the man who came before.”

“Not that you saw, madam. Now, please, let me in.”

As Marisol’s grandmother stepped aside, she lamented, “Oh, I do not know where she is. Mãe de Deus, she is gone, gone….”

He glanced around the tidy little living room, and then stalked out into the kitchen to look at the back door. Intact. Opening it wide, he leaned out. No footprints other than those he’d left a week ago. Closing things back up and locking the dead bolt, he returned to her grandmother.

“You were upstairs?”

“Sí. In the bed. As I said, I was asleep. I hear her come in, but I was half-awake. Then I hear…that sound, of someone falling. I say I come down, then the front door opens.”

“Did you see a car drive off?”

“Sí. But it was very far away, and the license plate—nothing.”

“How long ago?”

“I called you fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after. I went to her room and looked around—that is where I found the napkin with your number on it.”

“Has anyone called?”

“No one.”

He checked his watch, and then grew concerned about how pale the elderly woman was. “Here, madam, sit down.”

As he settled her onto the floral couch in the living room, she took out a dainty handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes. “She is my life.”

Assail tried to remember how humans addressed their superiors. “Mrs.—ah, Mrs….”

“Carvalho. My husband was Brazilian. I am Yesenia Carvalho.”

“Mrs. Carvalho, I need to ask you some questions.”

“Can you help me? My granddaughter is—”

“Look into my eyes.” When the woman did, he said in a low voice, “There is nothing I will not do to bring her back. Do you understand what I’m saying.”

As he sent his intention out into the air between him, Mrs. Carvalho’s eyes narrowed. Then, after a moment, she calmed and nodded once—as if she approved of his means, though there was a good chance they were going to be violent. “What do you need to know?”

“Is there anyone you can think of who would want to hurt her?”

“She is a good girl. She works at an office nights. She keeps to herself.”

So Marisol hadn’t told her grandmother anything about what she really did. This was good. “Does she have any assets?”

“Money, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“We are simple people.” She eyed his handmade, tailored clothes. “We have nothing but this house.”

Somehow he doubted that, even though he knew little of his woman’s life: He found it hard to believe she hadn’t made some cash doing what she did—and she certainly didn’t have to pay taxes on the kind of income she’d been bringing in from the likes of Benloise.

But he feared that a ransom call was not going to be forthcoming.

“I do not know what to do.”

“Mrs. Carvalho, I do not want you to worry.” He got to his feet. “I shall handle this promptly.”

Her eyes narrowed again, belying an intelligence that made him think of her granddaughter. “You know who did this, do you?”

Assail bowed low as a measure of respect. “I shall bring her back to you.”

The question was how many people he was going to have to kill to get that done—and whether Marisol herself was going to be alive at the end of it.

The mere thought of bodily harm to that woman had him growling in his throat, his fangs descending, the civilized part of him shedding as the skin from a cobra.

Whilst Assail left the modest house, he had a feeling what this was all about, and if he was right? Even just twenty minutes into the kidnapping, he might well be too late.

In which case, a certain business associate of his was going to learn new lessons in pain.

And Assail was going to be the man’s teacher.