The city is dark now, the street-lamps illuming the bits of unbroken glass so that I can see my reflection.
I look changed, even if I’m dressed in my steel suit as usual.
She’s changed me.
I need to see her.
The hunger flames in me and my desire reaches a deafening, roaring chorus.
“Jase, I want you to hire the best three private detectives you can find. Use men, we’ve hired before. Michaelson’s Detective Agency is a good place to start. They’ve worked well for us in the past. Set one detective on this location and one on the other, and then set the third to combing through our jobs for the past month for any likely candidates for revenge, as you mentioned. That should get us started. We can’t wait for the police and the fire department, not when we have the funds to handle this ourselves.”
“Of course, boss. Good idea.”
“What do you think?” I ask, looking at him in the night-dark reflection.
A good leader knows that it’s always to his tactical advantage to get the opinion of his troops.
“Just that maybe we should hire a fourth and have him look into any way this could be personally motivated.”
“Yep, do that,” I tell him.
“Motherfuckers,” Jase sighs, kicking some black-dusted debris. “It makes me want to tool up and ride out, sort this bastard out ourselves.”
I feel a smirk rise to my lips, the same smirk I’d feel after a gunfight, gun smoke lancing the air. A stab of nostalgia hits me.
It’s hell when you’re over there, a senior officer told me once, in one of his more open moments. But when you get back, son, it seems like heaven.
Jase and I make our way out of the building and onto the street. He nods to me shortly and then turns to walk toward his car. I head in the other direction, where I’m parked, and slide behind the wheel of my sleek, tinted-windowed sedan, the sort of car that isn’t so showy that it draws attention to me everywhere I go.
I have a garage full of toys, of course, but maybe part of me knew that I’d end up driving toward Downtown this evening, toward Kat’s house.
When she applied for the training job with Janine, she left her address on the form, and as I glide through the city, crossing the bridge and the sparkling night-shadowed water, I try to tell myself that this isn’t a breach of trust.
Or maybe that’s just a lie.
Maybe I’m just giving myself an excuse to see her.
Because I fucking need to see her.
My mind floods with the image of her standing in my bedroom after she told me she was a virgin, her whole body somehow looking sensitive, like I could touch her and she’d spark into a million shivering sensations of need and want.
Now, despite everything that’s happened this evening, I feel my manhood becoming solid in my pants, pressing against my underwear as thoughts of the arson burn away in the flames of my woman, my fucking woman.
I come to a stop outside her apartment building, a rundown, dilapidated place on the very outskirts of the city, near the industrial estate, far away from the hipster coffee shops and the artisanal markets that make up the more gentrified sectors of the city.
The walls are more often covered in graffiti this far away from Uptown as not, and as I slide into an alleyway to hide my sedan, I notice that several stray, raggedy-looking cats are perched on dumpsters, watching me intently.
I step from the car with a weight on my chest, thinking about my woman, my virgin queen.
When she told me, I just felt everything seize inside of me, every part of me getting ready to unleash everything I’ve held back for years. I never thought I’d lose myself so completely and quickly to a woman, but when she used that word – virgin – it was like fucking magic.
Because even if I already knew she was mine, now I know she’s all mine.
No one else gets to touch her.
Ever.
And I can’t wait to tell her that.
I’m about to press her apartment buzzer when something bites into the back of my neck, a jagged stabbing pain that shoots through my body and tries to send me toppling to the floor.
I hear a buzzing noise and clench my teeth against the spearing agony.
I’m being fucking tazed.
“What the fuck?” somebody growls behind me, surprise heavy in their voice. “Drop, fucking drop.”
Nope.
I fight the urge to collapse even as my muscles begin to tighten and threaten to fail me. My circuits are trying to shut down as I reach up and grab the crocodile-mouthed Taser teeth, and then I throw it to the floor and let out a ragged breath of pure rage.
Whoever did that is going to regret it, really goddamn soon.