“Why would she do such a thing? Do you think Francine is involved?”
“No, she’s just always been selfish and thoughtless. She likes to show off, and Lizz has always felt guilty because Moria, Francine’s mother, was mentally ill, and Lizz’s son refused to do anything to help her. He was like Perry. An entitled spoiled brat. He drank with Moria instead of trying to get her sober. Neither one of them seemed to care about Francine.”
His hands on her foot were more than magic, making her feel boneless. Even discussing a difficult subject was easier because she was floating.
“I’ve reached out to her over and over as often as I could at various times, but she always seemed to resent me. Tonight, when she came to the store, she was driving Lizz’s Cadillac. The thing is, I know her license was suspended because she’s had multiple DUIs. I also know Lizz prizes that Cadillac. It’s her baby she takes out of the garage, drives around the block to show off and then puts back to bed, so to speak. Francine shouldn’t have been driving it, and she was already on her way to being drunk. I was fairly certain she took it without permission.”
Player put her leg down, reached lazily behind him and pulled a jar of cream to him. He once again picked up her feet and put them across his thighs. He didn’t say anything but looked at her with his eyes, twin blue flames, silently telling her to keep going. The next thing she knew, he was using the cream and pressing deep into the soles of the feet with his fingers in a deep tissue massage. The entire time he watched her expression for her reaction to see if it was too hard or not hard enough. As far as she was concerned, he knew her intimately, because he applied the exact amount of pressure she needed.
“She was wearing the necklace and earrings to an extremely valuable set of jewels Lizz has. They’re worth millions, more than just about anyone here would have in their homes, and like an idiot, Francine just walks out of the house unattended with them on. Then she goes out with Perry. That’s how drunk she is, Player. I tried to stop her, but by that time she was so angry with me and she’d turned on me. I should have just called the cops and turned her in instead of thinking how Lizz would feel.”
“What made her angry with you?” His voice was quiet. Washing over her so gently.
Instead of answering, she asked a question of her own. “How did you get the name Player?” Zyah hadn’t known she was going to ask—the question just came out. In the darkness, between the two of them, for some reason, her inquiry sounded soft. Quiet. Intimate.
His gaze flicked to hers. Those blue eyes of his, so like ice at times. So like flames other times. Right now, alive with pain. With memories. She felt them moving through his mind. He could have locked them away, the way he did when his past escaped, but he kept massaging the cream into her feet, ankles and calves, creating a miracle of relief.
“Sometimes Alena or Lana would come back to the dungeon and they were so bad. So torn up.”
His eyes met hers again and her heart nearly convulsed, there was so much pain there. Zyah swore she caught the sheen of tears in all that blue before he looked down at her leg. His hands remained absolutely gentle, never wavering once. Never stopping. A part of her wanted to stop him, but it was so huge that he was going to share something voluntarily with her. She wasn’t seeing it, snatching it like some peeping Tom from his mind. He was giving it to her, and she wanted that from him. She would treasure it.
“When they were little, they would call out for the ‘Player.’ I could make music out of just about anything. Turn the silliest things into instruments. My name, Gedeon, was sometimes hard for them when they were so hurt, so they called me Player.”
Zyah swore he was shredding her heart in a whole new way. The raw pain in his voice was so real, it filled the room to capacity and was impossible to contain. The walls expanded and contracted and wept for him along with her.
“There was a time I couldn’t bear to hear that name because it brought so many memories back, none of them good, but then I realized that Player had saved them, Lana and Alena, so many times during their childhood. When the worst of the pedophiles came, pretending to be instructors, the ones we knew would hurt them or possibly even kill them, I could cover their bodies in the illusion of sores so they wouldn’t take them. And when I was too ill myself to protect them that way, when they came back battered, I could be their Player and transport them from the dungeon on the wings of music for a short time.”
“I think that all of you, growing up the way you had to, were lucky to find each other.”
His fingers never stopped moving. “I never thought of it that way. I suppose we were. I always thought I was lucky that I didn’t have siblings to be held over my head like some of the others did. Reaper and Savage. Preacher and Lana. Ice, Storm and Alena. Transporter and Mechanic. Sorbacov knew how to force them to do his bidding. Czar had six younger siblings. If he didn’t toe the line, Sorbacov threatened them all the time.” He ducked his head. “I think Czar took a lot of hits for me.”
“What does that mean?”
“When I was younger and we had to go to the dinners and bring the bombs I built, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to engage with the other children at the parties. Czar spent most of the time trying to cover for me so Sorbacov wouldn’t punish me after. He was afraid Sorbacov would kill me himself, or worse, give me to the kinds of men who enjoyed killing a kid for the pleasure of it.”
His blue eyes had gone from heat to ice. “Babe, this was supposed to be a good night. We’re not talking about this kind of shit. Let’s talk about your grandmother and how great she did today. She’s sick of being cooped up. I told her about the Floating Hat and said you and I could take her there for tea one afternoon and we’d go to Crow 287 for her birthday dinner. She really needs to get out of the house. We could invite some of her friends. Alena has a back room big enough, I think. If not, we can hold it at the clubhouse. She’d like that.”
Zyah burst out laughing, because her grandmother would lord it over everyone that she’d had her birthday party at a biker clubhouse or in the back room of Alena’s restaurant.
FIFTEEN
Gedeon loved the silence in his mind when he built things, especially bombs. Everyone left him alone. He could sit quietly outside in a little corner of the garden where it was mostly overgrown with tall heather grasses surrounding the bench and table where Sorbacov would place all the pieces for him to put together. Next to the equipment would be a cold cup of water. The water was always clean, from the spring. It tasted good, and he’d learned to sip at it and make it last. He’d tried to save it and bring it back with him for the others, but Sorbacov never allowed that, so he didn’t waste it.
On the other side of the table, lying across it, was the dreaded flogger. He hated that instrument. Sometimes, when he worked, Sorbacov would brush the leather strands over his back, up and down, almost as if he wanted to distract him. Gedeon would go deeper into his mind, hide himself there with the complicated calculations, with the way things clicked into place for him, the trajectories and patterns that made sense to his brain.
Nothing about Sorbacov made sense. There was no logic to him and his depravities. As a child, Gedeon had tried to find ways to please him, but there was no real way to do so. Pleasing Sorbacov didn’t earn rewards. Sorbacov liked to cause pain. He rewarded himself. Gedeon learned to read his moods, but that didn’t always mean anything either. It was better to just disappear into his own mind and build as fast as he could, making each object more and more complex. Building each faster than the one he had before.