“Which act will I be performing tonight? The big scary black man or the silent partner?” Uriel asks with a laugh.
“The second one, and bring a baseball bat if you have one,” Simon says with a grin.
Fuck me, why don’t I get to go on that? I love playing baseball!
Oh yeah, that’s right…. I have a wife now.
All the fun times are over.
Things start to wrap up quickly after that and all the guys make their exits, heading off to do whatever they need to do.
When it’s just Simon, Lucifer, and me left in the office, I ask, “Do you have all the files ready for me to check out? Also, I need a new phone for Sophia. I kind of ruined her old one.”
“Walk with me to my car. I’ve got the laptop, a phone, and your new mode of transportation,” Simon says as he stands up.
“Did you get a vasectomy, James?” Lucifer asks quietly and stares me down.
“Look, big brother, I love how you’re showing care for my body and all that, but drop the act. Why do you give a shit if I have swimmers or not?” I ask.
“Because I want to make sure that our bloodline does not end with my children or their children,” he says simply.
I point at Simon. “What about him and Meredith?”
“They’re already having children, so I’m happy.” Lucifer grins at me.
Simon sighs loudly and heads out of the office. “I’ll meet you out there. And if I find out it was you, James, who told Evie to ask me about where babies come from, I’ll fucking skin your cock and eat your heart.”
Don’t react. Don’t react. Don’t react, I repeat inside my head, doing my best not to laugh.
“See you at the car, Simon. Ask John or Gabriel, that’s more their style,” I say while still looking at Lucifer.
The door closes behind us before I ask, “Why?”
“Because, as I said, I want our family’s bloodline to continue long after our bones turn to dust,” Lucifer says.
I’m not buying it, but I’ll drop it for now.
“No vasectomy, although the leg wound I took over there could have been an issue,” I say. “But somehow some world-renowned surgeon just happened to be in Germany the day I arrived for surgery. Kinda odd, huh?”
“Yes, very odd indeed,” Lucifer says with an enigmatic shrug of his right shoulder.
I stand from my chair. “Alright, I’m out of here. I need to get home and take care of my babies and future wife.”
Heading to the door, I stop only when Lucifer calls out to me. “James, did you send Evie to Simon?”
“Fuck yeah, I did,” I say with a small chuckle before I leave the office.
Heading out into the hallway, I can hear Lucifer bellowing with laughter.
It’s not until I reach the front steps that I see I’m not going to have the last laugh of the day.
Standing in front of a shiny red Volvo station wagon, Simon grins at me, showing off his pearly whites. “The Nanny was kind enough to lend you her vehicle for the time being.”
10
Sophia
Disbelief slowly morphs into fear as my eyes scan over the pictures fanned in my hands.
Pictures of me.
Pictures taken candidly, with me completely unsuspecting.
I focus on the picture in the very front. It shows me from the side as I sit at the bar in what looks like a nightclub.
It takes me a minute to figure out where it was taken, but when I do I start to feel sick.
I haven’t been to a club for a few months…
I tried to go back to life as normal after the kidnapping but couldn’t keep up with the pretense. It was too hard to pretend everything was fine and I wasn’t damaged by what had happened.
I wasn’t the same, and I didn’t look at people the same. I was suspicious of everyone.
And after a guy tried to force a spiked drink on me…
Slipping that picture quickly behind the stack of others, I take in the next picture, my eyes working left to right as my anxiety grows by the second.
I’m walking to class with a group of classmates after having lunch uptown. I remember that day vividly because I kept feeling like someone was following me and watching me, but I never caught them.
I felt crazy and paranoid, like I was losing it…
In the next photo, I’m hiding behind a tree. There’s a smile on my lips and laughter in my eyes as I peek around the trunk. I can’t place it at first, then I recall visiting Beth last week. We were outside, playing hide and seek with Charlie.
The picture beside that shows me helping my father work in the front garden of our house. Both of us squatting down in the grass and digging through the dirt.
I stare at this one for a long time, my eyes drinking in my father as my heart aches at the memory. It was one of his rare days off. He’d been so busy with some secret case he was working on, I hadn’t seen him in days.
Swallowing past the tightness in my throat, I shove the picture behind the others and quickly flip through the rest.
Both the remarkable and unremarkable days of my life jump out at me, chronicled in no particular order.
All spanning over a few months.
The few months since I was abducted.
Not a single one appears to be taken before then.
Only a few of them look like they were taken from a distance, with an actual camera. The rest… they look as if they were quickly snapped with a cellphone, as if whoever was taking them didn’t want to get caught in the act.
Was it James?
Has he been following me and spying on me this whole time? Wouldn’t I notice him?
You’d think I would notice him.
Or did someone else take all the pictures? Take them all and give them to him for some unknown reason?
That seems the most likely answer. Otherwise, if James took them, why would he bother printing them?
Calming down a little, I set the stack of pictures to the side then grab the box and pull it to me.
It’s probably all surveillance…
They were watching me… for some unknown reason.
At the very top of the box are more pictures. Handfuls and handfuls of pictures. I sort through the top layer quickly, checking to see if there is anything out of place or especially creepy.
But no, like the other pictures, they were all taken when I was out somewhere in public. All taken when I was completely oblivious.
Classic surveillance.
I convince myself it was probably a private investigator, or one of Lucifer’s other men following me around, and keep sorting through the photos until I find something lodged within the stack.
I almost miss it at first, it’s so small. And it takes some digging to pull it out from under the weight of the pictures, but when I do, I’m only left more confused.
It’s a black elastic… the kind I use when I put my hair up.
It could still be a coincidence though. Practically everyone I know uses elastics like this.
I decide to dig a little deeper to be absolutely sure.
Lifting handfuls of the pictures out of the box, I stumble across another elastic.
No big deal. It’s still not necessarily mine, even if there are a couple of blonde hairs attached to it…
I keep digging.
I’m nearly to the bottom when my fingers poke and wrap around what feels like a small tube.