“There’s a house on the corner of 34th and Wind,” Mason tells him. “A black older model Monte Carlo parked out front. I can’t see much down the street. Everything is too far from the traffic cam there and the plates of the car are coming up dry.”
“I’ll call you back if I need anything,” he says before hanging up. He doesn’t expect trouble from anyone though.
He spots the car easily enough.
He makes his way around the house before deciding to park on the street off to the side and a block away. He doesn’t expect trouble but he had to be sneaky to get information on what the fuck is going on and what the hell Stella is up to.
Thank fuck he threw on sneakers. His oxfords would have made way too much noise especially if Brooks is there too.
He gets to the back of the house and can see shadows moving through the lit window of the small craftsman style house. He lays low to make out what the voices are saying and who they belong to.
“How is she?” he hears Stella ask.
“Rough,” Brooks gruffly replies
Brooks and Stella are inside. With someone else.
And he needs to know who that someone else is…right this fucking minute.
Chapter Eight
“Be a good girl, Ari. Don’t hold grudges and try your best to please them. For me, my love.”
Her mother’s last words, her mother’s final request, plays over and over again. It’s the only thing she can hear or make sense of through the fog…through the darkness that’s trying to overtake her.
She should let it win for once.
She’s so tired of fighting it. And this time is worse than any other time before it. She doesn’t know if she has the strength nor the will to fight anymore. What’s the point? No one should exist like this. Even the dogs in those extremely sad Sarah McLachlan charity videos have more hope than she does.
Her fingers furiously scratch at the itch on her arm again. She’s bleeding, probably from opening the scab there…again. Fuck it. Let her bleed out. Let this despicable feeling and overpowering shake be over with.
It’s cold. She shivers and her teeth chatter. Yet, she also knows, there’s no real way except one to get warm.
One second, she’s curling into the bed with the covers, and the next, she’s crawling on her hands and knees to the toilet.
The floor seems to be quicksand, slowly sucking her down. She looks at her hands to make sure it isn’t actually quicksand and realizes she didn’t make it to the toilet. There’s vomit on the floor in front of her.
Oh fucking well. The toilet was probably freezing cold anyway.
Like a hopeless dog, she loses the strength to keep herself up and falls to the floor. The smell of her vomit assaults her nostrils but at least she can feel the warmth of it on her cheek.
“Oh no,” she hears a woman’s soft voice.
Believe it or not, she can even feel the light on her skin from the open doorway. Her senses are heightened but they are functioning chaotically.
Gentle hands swipe away at her hair, keeping it out of her face.
“Oh, Ariana. Let’s get you cleaned up.” The voice is familiar. Tender.
A set of strong arms and hands carries her into a brightly lit place and settles her down onto cold ceramic. It has to be a bathtub. That much she knows. She knows likewise that the set of hands belongs to the man who took her out of that den. A den where Cristian had taken her per Isabella’s orders. A den where she was used over and over again by one of his friends.
At least it was only one man this time. There must be a God who answered her prayers.
As for the man who took her and brought her here? Should she be grateful? She doesn’t know yet. She doesn’t know what his plans are for her. Maybe Cristian’s finally sold her permanently instead of leasing her out. Or maybe, leaving her to her own demise and dying of whatever blend Cristian injected into her system this time would have been her true salvation.
She can’t go on like this any longer.
Her debt should be paid in full by now regardless of what anyone says. And if death is the only way to call it even then so be it. She’d welcome it right now. At least there would be a possibility for her to see her mother again. She’d ask her beloved mother why she’d forsaken her to this life. She’d ask what she’d done to deserve this existence.
“How much longer before the doctor gets here?” the woman’s voice asks impatiently.
“Not too long,” the man replies.
Warm gentle hands wipe her face with a cloth. The stench of her own vomit disappears from before her nostrils. Scents of aloe and peonies waft in its place. How she loved peonies.
She might be in heaven after all.
Chapter Nine
Brooks must be off his game or extremely busy for him to make it this far into the house without even a glimpse of the man’s shadow.
He follows the soft voices to the bedroom and waits at the doorway, careful to stay against the wall and out of sight. He can hear water quietly running in what must be the bathroom. The shadows dancing on the floor says both Brooks and Stella are busy inside that bathroom.
So he slides in through the door and observes. The minute he makes out what’s being said, he steps right into the doorway.
Eyes wide, he takes in the scene of Stella on her knees next to the bathtub. Brooks is wringing out a hand towel at the sink.
He didn’t care what they were doing. All he cares about is why there’s a woman in the tub and barely conscious.
“What the fuck is going on?” he practically barks.
Stella looks startled but she regains her wits back quick enough. Brooks didn’t even give him the courtesy of a glance but instead hands his boss the wrung-out towel. Maybe Brooks did know he was here the whole time. The man is indecipherable.
“She needs help,” Stella says quietly as she wipes the sweat from Ariana’s forehead.
He steps inside the large bathroom and studies Ariana. It’s certainly her, the woman he hasn’t quite gotten out of his head. She’s shivering, pale, and clammy. Sickly looking. Completely different than the beautiful and smiling woman who sat next to Jazzy at dinner two weeks ago.
“Overdose?” he asks incredulously as if it should be a surprise. He’d known from the start she was a user.
“Not by choice,” is what Stella replies with.
“What the fuck does that mean?” he growls. The memories of Daisy, Jazzy’s biological, mother invades his thoughts but he quickly puts it back in the box. “Someone isn’t going to hold down the assistant of a fucking Romano and stick needles into her arms, Stella.”
“In this case, that’s exactly what happened,” Stella hisses back.
She’s on her feet now, hands on his chest and shoving him out the bathroom doorway.
“We talk out here,” she says and throws the towel back to Brooks.
“What the fuck is going on? What the fuck are you doing this time?” he asks.
He didn’t mean for the question to sting but he knows it does. It wasn’t his intention to imply that she was getting them into some other shit like she did when she put a hit on a fucking mob boss of the highest-ranking.
That hit resulted in Isabella being forced into their lives.