Fallen Angel: Mythic Series, Book 2 (6 page)

David breathed a sigh of relief when the doorbell chimed. Ryssa had come.

Dressed once again in shabby but clean clothing, she looked more like she had the first time he’d seen her, but he didn’t know if he would ever get the mental image of her in her “uniform” out of his head. It made him think and feel things he just wasn’t comfortable dealing with under the circumstances.

Her face didn’t look nearly as bad as he’d originally thought. What he’d imagined to be bruises had probably been just shadows, or artfully applied make-up. Maybe it was zombie theme night at the club, and she’d been dressing the part.

Neither of them said anything as he led her to his mother’s room. That was probably a good thing; he didn’t want to give her the wrong impression. This was not a social call, and they weren’t friends.

Once again, he was not asked to join them. He closed the door, glad that he had seen Elizabeth’s eyes light up when she spotted Ryssa. And oddly disappointed that he was excluded.

Two hours later, he was still skulking around outside the room. Sitting, pacing, and straining to hear without actually pressing his ear to the door. Other than indistinguishable murmurs and the occasional sound of laughter, he couldn’t make anything of it.

Whatever the reason, Elizabeth had really taken to the girl. Woman. Whatever. How old was she, anyway? Her pale face and big eyes had a timeless quality that made it impossible to gauge.

Was she even old enough to work in a club like that?  Without all the crap on her face, she looked about as young and innocent as she could get without being jailbait. But her eyes – those damn gray eyes - they held more pain and experience than anyone that young could possibly feel.

David put a halt to those thoughts. None of that mattered. She obviously had problems. Lots of people did. Not his fault, and not his business, as she had so eloquently pointed out. The only thing he needed to be concerned with was making sure she wasn’t taking advantage of his mother. He needed to stay focused on that, and nothing else.

Thinking she’d been physically hurt, though – that bothered him. Not because he cared about her; he didn’t. Well, not more than he should. Anyone with a sense of decency would be bothered. She was young, she was female, and she was small. Yeah, she had a foul mouth on her and an attitude the size of Texas, or maybe Alaska. Yeah, she worked in a bad place and dressed up like some fantasy character in a deviant porn flick. But still. Some things were just hardwired into the male DNA, and seeing a woman hurt – any woman – was inherently wrong.

She hadn’t had any of those marks that first night, nor when he’d shown up at the club. Did someone there do it?  That guy that had come by and said something about a charge for him being there - was that her boss?  Ryssa had paled and begged him to leave, then said she’d pay... 

That queasy feeling in his stomach surged with a vengeance. Was he the reason Ryssa got hurt?  Is that why the big bouncer looked at him as if he carried the plague and told him in rough grunts and growls that he couldn’t use Ryssa’s name to get into the club when he’d tried again?

No, he shook his head. Couldn’t be. He was overreacting, that’s all. Right? 

Yet she had been begging him to leave, which seemed totally uncharacteristic at the time, and she’d looked scared...

Ryssa finally emerged from Elizabeth’s room, interrupting his thoughts. She barely spared him a sideways glance before making a beeline for the front door.

“Am I the reason you got hurt?” he blurted out, following Ryssa out the door. She ignored him. He used the benefit of his much longer legs to catch up to her and grabbed for her arm, catching her sleeve.

“Jesus,” he murmured, holding her delicate wrist in his much larger hand and pushing the material even farther. He found deep tissue bruises, and what looked like a series of puncture wounds around her wrists. Something dark and feral uncurled in his belly. “Ryssa...”

He looked again at her face, now not quite as unmarred as it had been before. Her skin seemed to flicker, then it was back to being smooth and pale again. He blinked and shook his head, certain that it had been a trick of his imagination. But those marks on her arm, they were real enough.

Ryssa reclaimed her arm and met his eyes only briefly. It was enough to see the raw, ugly truth.

David swallowed the lump in his throat. “Let me get my car. I’ll take you back to your place so you can pick up some things. You can stay in one of our guest rooms.”

She looked at him as if he had sprouted wings. “What?”

“You can’t go back there,” he said firmly. “I can take you down to the police station. You can file a complaint.”

Ryssa laughed. “A complaint? Are you kidding me?”

That gave him pause. “You can’t let him do this.”

She fixed him with those haunting gray eyes. “Yes, I can. He owns me. He can do whatever he wants.”

David couldn’t have been more stunned if a tribe of pygmies decided to squat on his land. “People don’t own other people.”

She smiled at him, but it was a sad smile. “Not in your world, David. But in mine...”

“We don’t live in the same world?”

“Not even close,” she breathed. She readjusted her sleeve, tucking it down over the worst of her injuries. “Tell Elizabeth I’ll be back tonight after my shift. Assuming you don’t do anything else stupid,” she added for good measure.

David was about to open his mouth, the protest already on his lips, when she held up her hand and stopped him. “Look. You don’t understand. I get it. But you have to trust me on this, Corrigan. Do us both a favor. Do what everyone else does, okay? Just walk away and pretend you didn’t see anything.”

Several minutes after she disappeared into the tree line, David was still standing on the front portico. He wasn’t sure what surprised him more - the things she’d said or the fact that she’d called him by his actual last name instead of Gilligan or something cruder.

The more he thought about it, the more he was sure the woman was batshit crazy, or at the very least, on drugs. A danger to herself and others. If he wasn’t sure his mother would hate him for it, he’d call the cops and have her taken into custody for psychiatric evaluation and a tox screen.

God only knew what the girl had been through, what had made her snap into a bona fide froot loop, but there was no denying she’d gotten herself mixed up in something pretty bad. There were professionals who might be able to help her. The bruises were real enough, as were the puncture marks he’d seen on her wrists.

Not yet, though. He needed – no, he corrected,
Elizabeth
needed – Ryssa nearby and available. Maybe he’d make a few phone calls after his mother...

David slammed a solid wall down on that train of thought. He would not think about that. Not now. There would be plenty of time for that later. Right then, right there, his mother was still with him, and he was going to make the most of every moment.

He forced the images of big gray eyes and alabaster skin mottled with purple – the only hint of color about her - out of his mind’s eye, ruthlessly shutting down the totally inappropriate protective instinct that had somehow risen, completely unwanted and unbidden.

She was not his responsibility. She hated him, and he didn’t trust her. End of story.

Turning on his heel, he went back into the house and closed the door behind him.

“Ryssa wouldn’t accept a gift,” Elizabeth said, almost causing David to groan aloud. Was it not possible to go five minutes without thinking of her?

He looked over at the gift-wrapped bag and frowned. His mother had put a lot of thought into the gift, and he hated to see her disappointed. Couldn’t the woman see how much it meant to his mother, or was she just that incredibly insensitive? 

“Did she say why?”

“She said she couldn’t.” Elizabeth looked at her hands, bemused. “That it wasn’t allowed. I think she’s afraid of someone.” David knew by the way her eyes had clouded over that Ryssa’s recent injuries hadn’t completely escaped her notice, either. “What do you know about her, David?”

An image of Ryssa in her Goth bondage gear shot through his mind, followed immediately by the deplorable slum she called home, while her words,
He owns me
, echoed hauntingly in his mind. No way in hell he was sharing that with his mother.

David raised an eyebrow and carefully neutralized his expression. “What makes you think I know anything?”

She gave him a patient smile. “I know
you
, David. You probably took one look at her and did a background check, convinced her only purpose was to fleece a sickly, gullible old woman.”

The color rose in his cheeks, but he didn’t deny it. His mother’s innate bullshit detector was apparently back to firing on all cylinders. “And what if I did?”

“I’m not judging you, David. I just want to know what you found out.”

He sighed. He couldn’t tell her the truth. Well, not all of it. She would demand that they hop in the car and drag Ryssa right back here with them. And, even though in a moment of temporary insanity he’d had the same thought, he couldn’t let that happen. The last thing he needed was Ryssa spouting all that ownership crap in front of his mother. For whatever reason, Elizabeth liked the woman and he didn’t want his mother finding out that she was a crackpot.

And he didn’t need her under his roof, smelling like moonlight and challenging him at every turn with her sassy, foul mouth.

But he had to tell his mother something. A watered down version of the truth, perhaps. At least that’s what he’d meant to do. Instead, the words tumbled out of his mouth on their own.

“Not much. She works nights in a Goth club down in Southtown. Real rough place, not even the cops go there. Lives in a shit hole a couple of blocks away that I wouldn’t keep a dog in.”

He clamped his lips together to stop the flow.

“What about her family?” Elizabeth asked, frowning. She didn’t seem nearly as surprised as he would have thought. Then again, his mother always had a sixth sense about people, an uncanny way of seeing through carefully constructed facades. It was one of the reasons their business had been so successful. She placed more value on her “feelings” about people than in their resumes.

David shrugged. He didn’t want to tell his mother that not even the professional private investigator had been able to come up with a last name, nor find out anything more than a home and work address – and those the PI had only gotten by following her. Brief looks at both the apartment building and the business left him with more questions than answers, but the PI told him point-blank when he’d handed over his one-page report that he was done, and refused to look into Ryssa anymore, no matter how much cash David waved under his nose.

Everything seemed to support his initial theory that the woman was nothing more than a glorified scam artist. The decided lack of information pointed toward a transient lifestyle and a false identity. Perhaps there was a perfectly logical explanation, but given her dubious employment, thrift-store wardrobe and piss-poor attitude, the most obvious explanation was probably the right one: Ryssa needed money, and his mother had it.

That’s what the cynical part of his brain said, anyway. There were other parts that were no longer so sure.

“We have to do something, David,” Elizabeth said as if picking up on his thoughts.

“I don’t think she wants any help, Mother,” he said as gently as he could.

“Maybe not,” she mused thoughtfully. “She seems to be rather headstrong.”

David snorted. His mother didn’t know the half of it. Ryssa had the temperament of a feral kitten and the mouth of a career sailor. She was fierce and proud and... Wait. Where was he going with this?

“Fortunately,” his mother smiled, pinning him with the same obdurate gaze he’d inherited, “I have a bit of experience with stubborn, headstrong people.”

He chuckled a little at that. She had always told him that he’d inherited his mulishness from her.

Elizabeth patted the bed beside her. “David, come sit with me for a moment.”

He moved closer and eased his weight down, taking his mother’s hand in his. He was shocked by how cold it felt. He sandwiched it between his own, willing the heat into her.

Her expression was serious. “I want you to make me a promise, David.”

“Anything, Mother.”

“I want you to look after Ryssa after I’m gone. She needs someone, David.”

No, she didn’t, he countered silently. She already had someone. He hated the bitter taste that thought left in his mouth. It was on the tip of his tongue to say so, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.

David shook his head. “You don’t know what you are asking for, Mother.”

“Please, David. It will be my last request of you.”

“Christ,” he muttered, fighting to keep the moisture contained in his eyes, where it belonged. “Don’t say things like that to me.”

“It’s the truth, David,” she said softly. “It is almost time. You can feel it, too.”

He lifted his chin defiantly. “I feel nothing of the sort.”

Elizabeth smiled, seeing her son’s stubborn streak blatantly showing itself. “Maybe she would be good for you, too,” she said quietly.

He snorted again, inwardly reeling at the implications. “Her?  Really?  That’s what you envision as a daughter-in-law?”

Her smile faded, and her expression turned sad. “What happened to you, David?  What made you so jaded that you cannot look past the surface and see what lies beneath?”

David felt her words like a slap. “Mother, I didn’t mean it like that.”

She sighed heavily and closed her eyes. “Never mind me, David. It’s just the ramblings of an old woman who doesn’t want her only son to wind up bitter and alone. I’m tired now. We can talk more in the morning.”

After a few more deep breaths, Elizabeth was asleep. Still reeling somewhat, David tucked the covers around her and kissed her forehead.

“I love you,” he whispered against her cool skin. But how could he ever keep such a promise?

“H
ey baby.”