Chapter 33

The bodyguard pulled out a cell phone and dialed a number. After a moment, he started whispering rapidly, apparently asking for instructions. It was obvious he was disgusted beyond belief and he made that clear to whoever he was talking to. He hung up the phone after a somewhat tense “Yes, sir” and then slowly walked over to Darius. The man was still holding onto his murdered girlfriend. Seeing her dead body brought up feelings of guilt in him. He felt like the horrible situation he found himself in was not his fault, but his boss’s. To be fair, he might’ve stopped what was going on but he had never really thought the idiotic drug lord would even consider taking things that far. He cursed silently at the cluster fuck he now found himself in.

He approached Darius now with his arms open, showing that he was harmless. He’d also made sure to re-holster his weapon. When he was finally noticed, the grief-stricken man’s eyes flashed up to him and spewed murderous hate.

The bodyguard hesitated a moment before he continued walking toward the extremely dangerous man now in a highly volatile frame of mind.

“Easy,” he told him. “I’m here to help you. I know you might not really believe that, but I am. My name is Michael Escher. As you can probably tell, I don’t really work for Marks.”

Michael started forward again, coming to stop just outside the man’s reach.

“We need to get you out of here,” Michael prompted. When Darius wouldn’t move, he leaned in closer to him and tried to force him away from Anna.

Without warning, Darius struck out, his arm a blur. The backhand swing hit Michael hard across his chest, knocking the wind out of him and sending him crashing into a table and its booth several feet away. When he was finally able to extricate himself from the wrecked table, his right arm was dangling uselessly. The blow and subsequent crash had managed to break it in three places.

“You need to get out of here!” Michael yelled, grimacing as more waves of pain ripped through his arm and chest. He walked back to Darius and knelt in front of him. He needed the man to get a grip and come back to reality but he wouldn’t. He just sat there, still rocking Anna’s dead body back and forth. “If you stay, the cops will arrest you. They’ll think you murdered her.”

That evoked a response.

Darius’ anger blazed out in waves. He gently set Anna down and bent forward to lightly kiss her forehead, lingering there for a moment. When he finally backed away, he turned to glare at Michael. His arm blurred again, but this time he didn’t bat the fake bodyguard away. His hand seized the other man’s neck and lifted him easily from the floor. The motion had been so fast that Michael couldn’t even see it coming and despite whatever training he had, there was nothing he could have done to stop the superpowered man. His feet kicked and jerked, making him look like a dying fish. A moment later, harsh gurgling noises were coming from his abused throat.

“Who the hell sent you?” Darius asked in a low, threatening voice. “What do you want from me?”

“Grghh…argh!” Michael tried to reply, but Darius’s crushing hand choked the words into meaningless garbage.

After a pause, he let him go and Michael fell to his knees, putting his hands on the floor so he could stabilize himself. His right arm buckled under the weight and he collapsed. Darius watched him struggle to get back to his feet, which took considerable effort. Michael was woozy and his body was wracked with pain, but he managed it. He stared at Darius as he rubbed his bruised throat with his left hand.

“We…need…to go,” he said, the words coming out in a croaked whisper.

“Go where?” Darius asked, his voice defeated and utterly miserable. His eyes kept going to Anna.

“Out of here, that’s where,” Michael told him. He managed to stay on his feet, despite having to fight off waves of dizzying pain. He started for the door. When he came to it, he turned around and waited.

Darius looked at Anna one last time and felt like the grief was going to eat him alive. Instead, he burned the image of her into his mind, making sure it would stay there and never fade with time. That image would drive him for the rest of his life and would be the thing that kept him going. Already he felt something like a black hole filling his chest, sucking everything inside him into it. The memory of his nightmare suddenly came back to him then. It was a vision of the same stony-faced Anna with dead eyes and a black, gaping maw leading into an empty abyss.

After he was sure that image would forever be burned into his mind like a brand, he turned and ran from all of it. Anna. Exclusive. Alex. Ashebrook. Cassie. Even Michael, whoever that guy was. He gave a surprised and somewhat angry shout of protest when he realized Darius wasn’t coming with him.

Darius left everything behind.

His stuff.

His car.

His friends.

Even his family.

Instead, he ran and ran and kept going. He ran from his life, the dreams he had, his goals, all of it.

When Anna died, the Darius Clarke the world had known died with her.

Alex turned on the light and looked around his room. He saw the crushed remnants of Darius' phone, but nothing else. He ran to their closet and looked inside. The duffel with Marks’ money in it was gone. It didn’t take him long to figure out what must have happened. Marks got to Anna and therefore, Darius. The drug lord had called his friend to let him know he had abducted Anna and Darius had taken off to try and rescue her.

Alex spun around and started heading toward the door. He thought he might still be able to help. That he might not be too late. When Cassie started following him again, he gently pushed her back.

“Stay here. It’s safer,” he told her, his voice firm.

“I’m going with you,” she replied, just as forcefully.

He was about to argue with her more, desperately wanting her kept out of harm's way, but when he opened his mouth to say as much, she put a finger to his lips and silenced him.

“Whatever’s going on, I doubt you have the time to waste arguing with me. Let’s go,” she said.

He stopped talking, realizing she was right.

She pushed past him and headed back the way they had just come.

Alex hurried to take the lead. They went down the stairs, out the back doors, and headed to his car in the lot behind the dorm. They both got in a few seconds later and his tires squealed as he peeled out of the lot. Without needing to even think about it, he drove to Exclusive. In his mind, that was the only logical choice for Marks to set up the money-for-the-girl switch.

“What’s going on, Alex?” Cassie asked, concerned. “Where are we going?”

“It’s complicated,” he said, but saw quickly that reply wouldn’t be enough. He sighed deeply and began to tell her the whole truth about what they had done. “We robbed Quentin Marks.”

“You did what?” she asked, shocked and angry. “Are you crazy? Why would you do that?”

“I thought I needed money. I was tired of being broke all the time and then I met you and all I could think about was how lame I was gonna be when I couldn’t take you anywhere nice for a date,” he started explaining, realizing how stupid that sounded as the words left his mouth. He turned his head to look at her to gauge her response. “And then Darius shoved an article at me that was talking about how Marks weaseled his way out of prison time for murdering a kid. I couldn’t stand to think of the guy just walking around like that. So I thought he deserved what we were going to do to him.”

“That was so, so stupid,” she replied. She saw that he was ashamed of what he did and what she must think of him. “He’s a psycho. Everyone knows that. I’m new to this place and even I know that!”

“I know, but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” he tried to tell her. “I really thought that and in some ways, I still do.”

“He might have deserved it, but still,” she said, losing some of her steam. “Alex, you didn’t have to rob someone so you’d have money to take me out.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking about how you deserved to be spoiled and how much I wanted to be the one to do it. That and I needed the money for my tuition.”

He caught her blushing and a little of his self-consciousness started to go away.

“That’s stupid but sweet,” she told him, smiling a little despite herself.

“That’s not…uh…really all of it, though.” He hesitated but forced himself to continue on. “Well, I guess I’d better start with saying that the heist was Darius’s idea. He thought it would be some sort of karmic payback for the bastard because of all the people he hurt pushing drugs and for the ones he straight up killed. At least, that’s what he told me. I found out later the real reason why he wanted to do it was because one of Marks' men was pretty much forcing Anna to…um…be his wh-wh...err...prostitute. Do not ever let Darius know I told you that. Or Anna. She’s been hurt enough by what happened to her.”

“Seriously?” she asked, dumbfounded. “A prostitute?’

“Yeah,” Alex responded. “A guy named Richard Williams, who is apparently Marks’ right hand man, forced her into it. Her dad owed him a lot of money and he was going to kill him. She sort of walked in on that and he gave her an ultimatum. Either work for him or he kills her dad.”

“That’s awful.”

“I know.” He nodded.

“So you’re telling me that my boyfriend and his best friend were the ones the news was talking about when they said Exclusive got robbed?”

Alex nodded, his cheeks reddening a bit.

“Wait. I remember the news said two people were killed that night. Some detective for the police and the guy you were talking about. Richard Williams,” she said. “Who killed them?”

Alex dreaded what he was going to have to tell her next.

“D,” he answered, heavily. “He told me about Anna and Richard Williams. About what he was doing to her. I thought it would have been a bad idea to go through with our plan then, but he convinced me that he was just going to just scare him into letting Anna go and leaving her dad alone. After we threw some of his men around, we went up to the loft to confront Marks.”

He spilled everything else, telling her all of it and not leaving out a single detail.

“I left D alone with Williams after I raced after Marks,” he continued, almost done with his story. “When I got back out, D had killed Williams. He killed two people and I let him do it. I didn’t kill anyone though. I swear to you I didn’t.”

He couldn’t even look at Cassie so he kept his eyes focused on the road. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he could see her. She just sat and stared out the windshield. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking and didn’t want to interrupt her thoughts. Then, after a few minutes of silence, she turned to him and smacked him across the shoulder, thumping his arm and making it jerk the wheel slightly to the right. He corrected his course and then glanced at her with a questioning look on his face.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Because you could have been hurt, you big idiot.” She glared at him and Alex let her be angry. She had a right to be. Robbing Marks was probably the second dumbest thing he’d ever done in his life. The first was signing up for that damn drug test in the first place. If he’d never found that flyer then none of this would be happening. On the other hand, if Darius would have been just as determined to stop Richard Williams from exploiting his girlfriend, he might’ve been the one to wind up dead. “They could have had knives, Alex. They could have cut you guys up, and for what? Money? You see? This is why men need women. They stop men from doing completely stupid things. At least they do when they know about said stupid things.”

Alex continued to let her vent, finding it the safest course of action. He didn’t want to get into the fact that the chances of him getting hurt or killed by a dozen or so normal guys, however tough they were, was about as likely as getting struck by lightning.

“Wait a minute,” she said, suddenly realizing something. “The day after you spent the night in my room, robbing Marks was the important thing you had to do wasn’t it?”

Alex winced visibly.

“I got all sexy for you and everything,” she continued, growing outraged now. “You are so lucky we have bigger problems right now.”

“I know,” he responded. His voice was still heavy with guilt and shame.

“When you took off toward the admin building, I found some bullets on the ground. Those were meant for me weren’t they?” He nodded his head. “Now you think Marks snatched Anna and D went after her?”

He nodded again.

She suddenly reached out for his right hand, his left steering the car through Ashebrook’s busy streets, and grasped it. She squeezed it reassuringly. She saw how worried and terrified Alex was and realized it wasn’t the time to chastise him for the mindbogglingly dumb decisions he’d made.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that,” she said, genuinely apologetic.

“No, no,” he replied, shaking his head. “You were right to be mad at me. It was arrogant and stupid and because of me they tried to kill you. Now they have Anna. I don’t know what I’d do if Marks kills her, Cassie. And I don’t even want to think about how bad D will lose it if he does.”

“Try not to think about it,” she told him, fidgeting with the diamond on her finger.

Alex glanced at the thing and wanted to be sure she understood something, even if it made her angry with him again.

“I want to be straight with you, okay?” he asked and she only looked at him, waiting for the rest of what he had to say. “You know I paid for that ring with a drug lord’s blood money, right?”

“I pretty much figured that out for myself and I definitely don’t like that fact much,” she replied.

His free hand moved toward it but she abruptly jerked her hand away.

“What are you doing?”

“I was gonna take it back,” he explained, confused by her reaction.

“I said I didn’t like the fact,” she clarified. “I never said take back the ring.”

“Oh,” he said, half-smiling. “Okay. So long as you know.”

“I can live with that knowledge.” She smiled, glancing down at the huge rock on her finger.

Her smile dropped off her face as soon as they reached Exclusive.