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Outside, I say to Susan, “My brother will be released from Dover General soon. Trap says we can set him up in Swallowtail, while he gets back on his feet.”
Susan’s fingers fly over her keyboard. “Consider it done. The kitchen is stocked with necessities, but if he has any favorites, just let me know.”
I thank her and head back to the house.
This can work. This can really work. Leo will have the support he needs. He can continue to see the psychiatrist and the nutritionist who’ve been treating him at the hospital. He’ll be removed from the temptations of the outside world. And he won’t have to check into rehab. Won’t have to live in a new facility, the same as all the old facilities where he’s failed before.
Most important of all—he’ll be close to me.
I owe Trap more than I can ever repay.
It’s easy to come up with ways to thank him. I can imagine a blindfold tight across my eyes. A gag pressing against my lips. I rub my wrists and tighten my thighs and brace for the sting of a flogger that never comes.
I want it, as much as I know Trap does. I’d be excited, even if Leo wasn’t moving into Swallowtail Cottage.
There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?
There’s no reason I can’t soothe the aching places in my soul. I can bargain for the things I desire, even if my choice was once taken from me by a madman. I can want pain from one man, want punishment from Trap when Herzog left me reeling.
That’s what freedom feels like. That’s what it means to heal.
I almost have myself convinced when Trap steals into the house for an unexpected lunch break. I test my conclusions, all my justifications, screaming myself hoarse when Trap lets me come.
We’re late to the press conference, which ignites a storm of speculation among the most avid paparazzi. But I can already sense boredom in most of the camera-waving troops. The shouts for our attention are fewer and less vigorous.
Trap and I read our prepared statements, avoiding any opportunity to editorialize. We thank Throck for all of his hard work, and we express our gratitude that we had the resources to deal with this matter when so many hard-working Americans would have been crippled or worse my such a potential miscarriage of justice.
We leave before the vultures are satisfied. But for the first time in weeks, I believe we’ve finally turned a corner. Our lives will get back to normal.
Or they would, if Jonas and Ansel Herzog were as easily disposed of as Bartholomew P. Carver.
24
TRAP
* * *
Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have monthly Diamond Ring meetings?
Oh. I did.
I latched onto the idea the first time the suggestion crossed Alix’s lips—before I’d ever kissed those lips. Before they’d ever closed around my cock.
She said it would build business. Make the freeport’s biggest clients loyal to me on a personal basis. Turn us into an exclusive group.
Well, it’s a pretty exclusive group—the guys who watched Alix knife Klaus Herzog. The poor assholes who were on the hook as accessories after the fact, same as me. The motherfuckers who are right now toasting Bartholomew Carver with my vintage champagne, drunk out of my crystal glasses, ten days after the fuckwad folded.
“So tell the truth,” Cole Wolf says. “Who’d you have to pay off to make the charges go away?”
“I didn’t pay a cent,” I say.
“What have you got on the AG?” Carl Braxton asks. The arms dealer has a solid instinct for weapons. But there’s no way in hell I’m telling him about the video. No way I’m ever saying out loud what Herzog made Alix do.
“I just walked into Carver’s office and told him we’d settle things the old-fashioned way,” I boast. “He unzipped his pants, I unzipped mine, and we both put our cocks on the table. I won by a good six inches.”
I hitch at my belt as more than one asshole fake-coughs, “Bullshit.”
“So if you’re through drinking my champagne,” I say, “you can each take a key off that pegboard and see what’s waiting outside.”
