Chapter 24: Chapter Twenty-Four

Frankie rubbed the back of his neck as he walked down the stairs. He grabbed his duffel and went to the room where all the magic happened. He needed a code to unlock it yet his distracted brain couldn’t get it right. He stopped and threw his head back knowing if he missed this next guess the room would lock for twenty-four hours. He inhaled slowly and without allowing a thought to pass through his brain entered the code. The door clicked and swung open. He smiled to himself.

“See, you’re not losing it, Buddy, you’re fine,” he told himself as he walked in.

When he hit the lightswitch, his wall of screens flickered to life. Live feeds of every corner of his home started playing. Of course the first one he looked to was the one in his bathroom. Gloria was sitting on the edge of the tub. She had a towel wrapped around herself as she held her fingers under the faucet to gauge the temperature. The camera quality was phenomenal, allowing him to see the far off look in her eyes as she waited for the water to get to an appropriate level. Then as if sensing his gaze, her eyes flicked up as did her middle finger. He chuckled and switched the screen off.

Frankie went to the side table and set his duffel on top of it. He proceeded to take out all of the equipment he’d been able to bring back with him. He reassembled Tracy and put her up in her rightful place atop his gun rack. He checked the magazines in all of his handguns and clicked his tongue before adding “reload ammunition” to his neverending mental checklist. He felt lucky to find three remaining pipe bombs, a fully stocked med kit and seven of the eighteen knives he’d selected to come along for the ride. He updated his inventory catalogue to ensure his stock was accounted for.

Next he sat down at his computer and started going through the hundreds of emails he’d missed. A few of them were from Accardi but most of them were from the hundreds of men and women below him: Frankie’s responsibility. He quickly skimmed through the emails, flagging the urgent ones he would get to first thing in the morning and sending out texts to those that couldn’t wait. Four phone calls and thirteen important decisions later, he was finally able to log back off. He stood up and then remembered something very important. He turned on the screen to his right and checked the vitals for his little guest. A bit on the lower side, but steady. Stable. He shrugged. The man would live another day without food and water. He clicked the screen back off.

Frankie emerged from his fun room and went for the kitchen. He had one more important duty to fulfill before he sought the sweet refuge of sleep.

He opened the cooler still sitting on the kitchen island and looked down at the pastry. It was nothing fancy: chocolate on chocolate. But he hoped the gesture would make up for the lack of creativity. He grabbed his lighter and the candles that had been sent with the cooler and walked up the stairs. He hadn’t seen her emerge from the bathroom in any of the cameras so he knew she was still in the bathroom.

Frankie cracked the door open and paused. Gloria was still in the tub, facing away from him. Her head was laying on the tub’s edge, a towel wedged between her soft hair and the hard porcelain. She wasn’t moving. He opened the door all the way and still nothing. He padded across the tile, his socked feet making little noise as he approached. She was naked but the opaqueness of the water gave her a bit of coverage. Her eyes remained shut as he came up beside her and crouched down. Still nothing. Frankie leaned forward and placed two fingers to her pulse point. Her heart beat slow and rhythmic against his fingertips.

“It would have been a sweet little death,” she whispered, her eyes fluttering open slowly.

“You’ve been here for almost half an hour. Are you about ready for bed?” he asked, leaning against the tub on his forearms.

“Would I have to get out?” she asked as she closed her eyes and sighed pleasantly.

“I have something for you,” he told her, unable to hold it back any longer.

“What’s that?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

“Keep those pretty eyes closed for another second,” he told her. He pulled his lighter from his pocket, and lit the candles. He carefully maneuvered the plastic plate and set it on the still waters of the tub so that the pastry floated. “Okay, open,” he whispered, his gaze on her face.

She opened her eyes. The flicker of the flame drew her gaze to the water and the cupcake floating atop it.

“Happy Birthday, Gloria Lucinda Rubinov,” Frankie whispered.

Gloria stared at the “2” and “0” flickering above the chocolate cupcake. “It says 20,” she breathed, her voice shaky and uncertain.

“That’s your age, isn’t it? You were born on this day in 2005.”

She swallowed as a tear slipped down her face. She licked her lips and lifted the cupcake up with her fingertips. Frankie’s eyes widened as her shoulders started to shake and a whimper left her mouth. The few tears already trekking down her cheeks turned into a torrent. Fuck. What had he done?! Why was she crying? Sure, he’d never given a girl a present or baked good before but surely sobbing into it wasn’t the normal reaction, right? As the panic started to set in, Gloria suddenly turned, sloshing water onto him and the floor, as she reached a hand out to cup his face and kiss him. The kiss was short, fleeting but it calmed his spiking nerves in an instant.

“Thank you,” she breathed against his lips. She pulled away and stared down at the cupcake in her hand with her lower lip pulled between her teeth. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving her free hand in the air as if she knew exactly how ridiculous her reaction was.  “It’s just that…” Her emotion clogged her throat and she tried to swallow it down. “I’ve never…” She looked upward for strength.

“You’ve never celebrated your real birthday… have you?” he asked. She shook her head slowly.

“My mom… After my dad decided to make the agreement, my mom begged him to do one thing for her: change my age. I was small, always had been from birth. I was four at the time of the signing but I looked so much younger. She thought, maybe, if they doctored my birth certificate it would give her two more years to figure out how to save me. They took two years from me in a moment. Then spent the next sixteen years trying to take the rest.”

The wax from the candle had long since dripped onto the frosting and was now sliding over her knuckles and into the lukewarm water but he didn’t dare try to take it out of her hands. She still had a wish to make.

“Every year I would stare at those candles and wish that, by the next year, I’d be….” Her misty eyes met his and he felt a punch to the heart that knocked the wind out of him. “Free,” she whispered, as if saying it too loud would keep it from coming true. She looked back at the cupcake and the candles burned down half way through the numbers. She closed her eyes and he watched her face in the flicker of the candle light. Her lips moved and, though he could, he refrained from reading them. Then she opened her eyes and blew the candles out.

Frankie plucked the two candles off the cupcake and licked the frosting from them while she continued to stare at the pastry in wonder.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“I made it my business to know,” he told her, saving her from the nitty-gritty of it all: the hacking of systems, broken knee-caps, the bloodied knuckles, the dead bodies.

“Why me?” she asked, not for the first time. She turned her head to look at him straight on.

Frankie situated his chin atop his hands on the tub edge and watched a water droplet travel from her wet hair down the slope of her neck, over her collarbone and into the water. His eyes didn’t stop at the water’s edge though, they traveled to her subtle pink nipples just below the surface all the way to her knees poking up on the other end of the tub. There were so many things he could say. He had a list tallied in his mind of the dozens of reasons he pursued her, chased her across the country, stole her for himself. He decided on the easiest one and cocked his mouth into a smile that she could see straight through.

“What can I say, Vixen? I like me a challenge.” He dipped his index finger into the cupcake and smeared icing onto her nose. Her mouth dropped open in shock.

Frankie winked and stood up just in time to avoid her splashing his face. The water drenched his pants instead and he cocked a brow up as she wiped the icing from her nose with a smile. He sucked the icing off his finger and started undoing his belt. She let her head fall back against the tub as she continued to lick the frosting off the top of the cupcake with her tongue in a sensual way that made him instantly hard.

“Dessert and a show?” she asked. “I’m flattered.”

“Well, a birthday wish is a birthday wish,” he told her as he peeled his soaked jeans down his thighs.

“Hah! Like I’d waste a wish on something I could get without one,” she joked, taking her first bite of the cake. She moaned and her eyes rolled to the back of her head.

“Stop that,” he growled between his teeth.

Her eyes shot open. “What?”

“Teasing,” he scolded.

“I’m not…”

Frankie gripped the edge of the tub and leaned over it. “Do it again and I’ll give you the twenty spankings you’re due and add the ones you’ve missed in years past on top… with interest,” he warned, his face inches from hers.

She rolled her eyes again and licked the frosting around the edge with one long, swipe of her tongue. “Thank you, for the gesture,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome. I wasn’t sure how it would go over,” he said honestly, still hovering over her, unsure if he would be able to walk away now that the idea of smacking her bare ass twenty times had entered his mind.

“Why? It’s sweet,” she asked.

He shrugged. “Didn’t go over so well last time I made a grand gesture,” he whispered.

Gloria swallowed and her face tinged a rare pink. She looked away, down at her cupcake. “Right, I’m s…”

He cut off her unnecessary apology with his lips. He counted in his head, slowly, to twenty and then pulled away. He licked the chocolate from his lips that had transferred from hers. “Don’t stay in the bath for too much longer, Vixen. I’d hate for you to slip under the surface and be forced to save you… again.” He pushed away from the tub. “It’s getting rather tedious.”