Proof (Targes Executive Protection Book 1)

The room I was in was virtually pitch dark, but my eyes, out of necessity, adjusted quickly. More importantly, my other senses kicked in. For once, I welcomed the darkness. I reveled in it. The silence of it. The protection it offered. Even though I was never truly safe, the little room that kept me locked away from the rest of the world was the only friend I had. It literally had my back.

I took a long drag on the bottle of beer that was in my hand and finished it. I knew it wasn’t real. None of it was ever real. But at some point, my brain had started giving me little gifts like a frosty cold beer or a greasy burger that was so big I could barely open my mouth wide enough to take a bite of it. There was never any taste to it or the beer, though, so I’d never understood why my own brain would sabotage me. And what the fuck was the useless organ doing by giving me a beer? A beer? Why not a strawberry milkshake that was so thick it took a spoon to “drink” it down?

I turned and flung the imaginary bottle at the wall. I loved the burn in my upper arm. That wasn’t imaginary. Releasing my rage wasn’t something I did often but when I did, it gave me memories, not fantasies. I could smell the freshly cut grass even though I couldn’t feel it. I could hear the crash of the waves even though I couldn’t see them. My entire body felt the powerful idle of my Mustang, even though the car would be beyond my reach for the rest of my days.

Unfortunately, there were some memories I wished I’d never remember, no matter how much rage or hate I threw back at the world that had forsaken me.

One memory in particular played on a loop inside my head during my forays into reality.

It included the tentative, soft brush of inexperienced lips against my own.

“Sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never kissed⁠—”

I slammed my hand against the side of my head, hoping to banish those words, those touches, forever.

I chugged the next beer before throwing it against another wall, or maybe the same one. I wasn’t sure. Just as I reached for the third imaginary beer, my instincts kicked in.

It, or rather who, was just what I needed. There was nothing imaginary about the soft, slow footsteps coming up behind me. The unintelligible words that were spoken didn’t matter. It was the same old story but a different dance. For once, I was grateful for whatever piece of shit seeking his fifteen minutes of fame had been locked in my cage with me. It didn’t matter what kind of weapon the guards had given the guy; it wouldn’t change a damn thing. Maybe there’d come a day where it did change things. Maybe there’d be a day where I’d spend every minute of every hour with that beautiful loop running through my head and then I’d let it all go forever.

I’d want my pick of guys, though. It would be someone whose perversions hurt kids. There were plenty of those kinds of guys available in my reality. Regrettably, I’d probably be given only one guy to take out of this world. Hopefully he’d be the worst of the worst. I’d let him take my life with whatever killing tool he’d been given, but I’d make sure he’d feel the cut of the blade so he’d be right behind me as we made the fiery journey to hell.

I let the bottle of beer I’d been reaching for disappear in a wisp of smoke. I prepared to adjust my eyes to the bright lights if the guards decided they wanted to watch the show in full color rather than the less enjoyable night vision.

I closed my eyes and focused on using the senses I had available to me to locate my attacker who was behind me. Oddly enough, while I normally kept my back to the wall in the corner of my cell, today was different. I liked the idea of leaving my back exposed… almost like I was drawing my attacker in. I pulled his smell into my nostrils, fully expecting the scent to be foul and nauseating, not woodsy and clean. I brushed the oddity off and listened for the footsteps that would tell me which direction my attacker was coming from. The cement floor would make it next to impossible to hear but I knew where every groove and pebble of concrete was in the room. If the guy was heavy enough, I’d hear one of those pebbles crunch beneath his weight and I’d know where he was. If he was a heavy breather, that would also do the trick.

Cass.

There it was again. The voice…

The asshole was talking to me in a gentle tone like I was some kind of wild animal caught in a trap and he was trying to set it free. The fucker had no clue that I wasn’t the one who was trapped.

As I sensed him getting closer and closer based on just his smell, I remained where I was, leaving my back completely exposed. Energy pulsed through me.

I didn’t wait for the guy to touch me. Not with his hands and not with whatever lethal toy he’d made himself or the guards had given him so there’d be more of a show for them to watch.

I spun around, bringing my elbow down hard on the man’s left arm before spinning us so I could shove the man’s face into the concrete wall. I expected the guy to scream as his nose broke from hitting the stone, but all he did was let out a soft moan.

Cass.

The sound of my name being whispered like it was coming from the heavens themselves caught me off guard. I quickly recognized the trick for what it was and jerked the guy around and slammed him against the wall again, hard enough to temporarily steal his breath. I quickly ran my free hand over his body to look for his weapon but found none.

“They didn’t really give you much of a chance,” I growled.

Cass, sweetheart, I need you to open your eyes. I need you to hear me.

The familiar voice threw me off my game for a second time. How the fuck were the guards managing it?

“It’s not real,” I whispered beneath my breath. The guards were always trying to find my weak points but to use that voice to distract me…

I didn’t allow myself to react because if they knew about that… about him, I’d be exposing my jugular and that would be it. I took my fury out on my now defenseless would-be attacker. I’d never killed any of the men who’d wanted a crack at besting me and making a name for themselves among their fellow inmate buddies, but I’d always left enough proof behind to make sure that the fifteen minutes in the spotlight the guys had wanted wouldn’t be the good kind of fifteen minutes.

Today was different, though. They’d come after me with a new kind of weapon, his voice, and I had to shut that down now or I wouldn’t survive even one more day in this place. And I needed to survive. I couldn’t explain why, but it just was. When I was ready to enter the bowels of hell, it’d be on my terms, not theirs.

I wrapped my fingers around the man’s neck. It was thinner than I expected, but what did it matter? A killer was a killer and someday I’d be one for real. I’d already been branded one, so why not turn fiction into fact? Who knew if I’d get this chance again?

Cass, please open your eyes for me, the man begged. Something sent surges of electricity through my head.

God, how were they doing this? Had I gone mad like they’d promised me I would? I could feel the man’s fingers wrapped around my wrists, but he wasn’t fighting to get free. Why not? The man was facing the last moments of his life and yet he wasn’t struggling as his oxygen was slowly being cut off.

“Butterflies,” the man before me said hoarsely. “You don’t like butterflies. I promised to always protect you and that means from butterflies too.”

Holy hell, I’d completely lost it. All of this was some kind of insane dream. I released the man as my head began to pound harder and harder. I could hear coughing and gagging sounds, but I now knew that they weren’t real.

Or were they?

What the fuck was real?

Was I even real anymore?

I backed up the thirteen steps it would take to reach my cot. It wasn’t thirteen steps, though. It was more like five or six before my legs hit something. I knew everything about my cell. I knew the way it smelled. I knew that the single drip of water falling from the faucet was always exactly forty seconds apart. I knew how many steps it took to get to the toilet and the sink.

So why five or six steps and not thirteen?

And butterflies? Butterflies?

I hadn’t realized that I’d spoken the word aloud until that voice, that now hoarse voice, said, “Tell me about the butterflies, Cass. What don’t you like about them?”

“What’s happening?” I whispered because I felt like I was spinning around in circles and if I stopped, I’d never be able to regain my footing.

“The butterflies. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

I nodded. The voice was right. They really were beautiful. Even as I considered the thought, my stomach began to twist in on itself.

“Why don’t you like the butterflies?”

Exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks. Why was I thinking about butterflies? How did the voice even know about them? I’d never told anyone…

Several images flashed through my brain all at once and I could barely make sense of any of them. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on just one of them. It was an old, grainy photograph.

“My mother,” I murmured as I studied the picture so it would never leave me again. The woman was pretty. Dark feathery hair that fell just below her ears, a big wide smile—the natural kind someone had when they were caught off guard by the flash of the photographer’s lens. She was holding a baby in her arms.

“She’s wearing a hospital gown,” I murmured as the picture became clearer and clearer. “She’s smiling like… like she’s really happy.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture and that was when I saw it. “A butterfly,” I whispered. “She has… she has a butterfly on her arm.”

“Do you mean a tattoo?”

I nodded. “It’s so beautiful. She’s so beautiful.”

The darkness in my head began to clear and one of the other images started to come together. Sitting on a log, the peace and quiet of the woods around us… us.

“JJ?” I whispered. I still couldn’t see anyone except the people in my head. But I knew the man sitting on the log next to me. I would always know him because he was a part of me. I was so afraid that it wouldn’t be his voice that answered. Or maybe I was afraid it would be his voice. I didn’t know what I was anymore.

“Yeah, baby, it’s me,” I heard JJ say, his voice cracking. Why was he so upset? Had someone hurt him?

“Can you open your eyes for me, my love?” he pleaded.

The endearment was what convinced me that maybe my eyes weren’t open like I thought they’d been. And that it was JJ who was asking me to open them. Even if it was some fucked-up way to finally send me over the line that separated the sane from the insane, maybe that was a good thing. Maybe insanity meant all I’d ever see, feel, touch, and hear would be gone. I’d be gone long before my life ended in a rotting, putrid cell. Maybe insanity meant I’d get to be with JJ forever.

Insane or not, JJ wanted me to open my eyes. I only knew one way to do that, so I allowed my senses to take in my cell’s sounds and smells.

They were all wrong. There was no foul stench, no dripping faucet. I couldn’t remember sitting down but I was, and the mattress beneath me was thick and soft. I could smell sandalwood. And the sound… it was the lapping of water against something.

“Cass, please,” I heard JJ beg.

He was in front of me. Even if it was all a dream, I didn’t care; I wanted to see him. It seemed to take forever to open my eyes because I was afraid of what I’d see. A dark cell, iron bars, guards looking at me like I was some kind of exhibit for their amusement.

But I had to see him. I needed to see the face of the man who’d stolen into my mind whenever I’d needed him; I needed to hear him tell me he was mine and I was his.

Forever.

“JJ?” I repeated, this time more clearly.

“It’s me, Cass. It’s really me. I promise. Just open those beautiful eyes of yours and we’ll be together again.”

I nodded because JJ didn’t lie to me. JJ loved⁠—

The return to the present was like a thousand tiny bombs going off in my head at the same time.

JJ loves me. He told me so just this morning⁠—

Reality hit me like a ton of bricks as I opened my eyes. There’d been no prison cell. There’d been no attacker. I hadn’t put my hands around a would-be assailant’s throat.

I’d put them around JJ’s.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I shouted as I stepped backwards. There was no stepping backwards though because I was sitting. I was sitting on a mattress that was ten times thicker than the one in my cell.

I tried to stand but everything began to spin and then I was back on my ass on the mattress. Gentle fingers wrapped around my elbow, steadying me.

“Cass, I’m fine—” JJ began as his hand closed over mine. I automatically yanked it away and scrambled back to put distance between us.

“I was going to kill you,” I said in complete and utter disbelief. How had I not known that it had been JJ the whole time? I should have known on some instinctual level.

“Cass, I swear to you⁠—”

“Your neck,” I said in a guttural voice that didn’t sound anything like my own. The red marks on JJ’s neck would turn blue in a matter of hours. So would the cheek that had hit the wall when I’d slammed him into it. Blood trickled down from a gash on his temple.

Blood I’d made his body shed.

Me. Not the falsely accused me. Me. Here and now.

I’d tried to kill him.

No, not try.

I’d been killing him by slowly cutting off his oxygen. If his voice hadn’t reached me, his lifeless body would be lying at my feet.

“No!” I shouted in denial. I clambered off the bed and got as far away from JJ as I could. The wall stopped me. Not a concrete one, though. JJ was coming toward me, but there was no escape because I was cornered. During my outburst, I’d instinctively sought out the safest place in the room.

The corner.

The corner that’d always had my back, both literally and figuratively. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on my ass.

JJ was in front of me a split second later. He grabbed my face. I tried to pull free, but his grip was hard, painful even. “You listen to me right now, Cassius Ashby,” he bit out. He was pissed. Really pissed. “You promised to love me and that it would be forever. Nothing I did and nothing I’m going to do will ever change that. That’s what you said. Did you mean that or were those words a lie?”

“No,” I said with a violent shake of my head. “Not lies.”

JJ’s voice had softened a little, but he was still angry. “Last night after you told me you loved me, you also said you had to tell me some things that you knew were going to hurt me, but they were things you couldn’t keep inside any longer or they’d fester between us.”

I knew where he was going with this. “It’s not the same, JJ⁠—”

“Shut the fuck up, Cass,” he snapped. “You don’t get to say it isn’t the same thing until you hear what I have to say. You saw me at my worst, and you assumed that you had all the answers to explain away my behavior, right?”

I nodded but didn’t say anything because I owed JJ my silence.

“I wasn’t in a coma because of the bullet. The doctors put me in a medically induced coma to give my brain time to heal but then they couldn’t bring me out of it. When I finally did wake up, I saw Sully and all these strangers looking down at me like I was some fucked-up science experiment. Sully was the first one to explain what had happened, but I didn’t understand him. Not that day or the next or the one after that. So not only couldn’t I talk, I also couldn’t process, I couldn’t think. I was just… stuck.”

JJ eased himself to the floor so he was sitting next to me. He slowly ran the fingers of his right hand along the inside of my forearm until his fingers were linked with mine.

“It took another six months of speech therapy, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and pretty much every other type of doctor to get to me to a place where I understood that I’d been shot and while I would be okay, I had to learn how to do certain things over. By then, my brain had healed enough for me to process things. That should have been a good thing, right?”

I shook my head because I knew JJ to his core. He was a survivor, but he was also a realist. He would have known what was in store for him to become “okay.”

“Every baby step of progress that I made was applauded as if I’d just won an Olympic medal or something. My voice was the last thing I got back. The first thing I wanted to do was scream at the top of my lungs that none of those people had saved me. They’d condemned me to a life I hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t been able to tell them that in the beginning, though. I couldn’t even write a note to say I wanted a DNR form. I was literally a prisoner of my own body.”

The idea that JJ hadn’t wanted any life-saving measures to be performed in the event his heart stopped beating or he was no longer able to breathe on his own made me sick to my stomach.

“When I was released from the hospital, there was this huge crowd of people waiting for me. A lot of them had signs that said they loved me. Officers I’d never met were there by the hundreds. One microphone after another was thrust in front of me. I was a hero. Not one of those people seemed to get the fact that I hadn’t done anything heroic. I’d been shot, I’d bled out on the street, and the paramedics, surgeons, nurses, and pretty much everyone in the hospital behind me had put my body back together. They’d been the heroes. And yet there I was being celebrated as if I’d done something to earn those people’s adoration. The whole thing made me sick. There were officers sacrificing their lives in the line of duty every day and yet I was the hero,” JJ scoffed.

“I didn’t know how to compartmentalize, though. I blamed everyone for what my life had become. I hated all those doctors and nurses and other medical workers, I hated the EMTs who’d gotten my heart started while I’d been lying there in the street, and most of all, I hated the media because they had no idea what I’d become. Hell, they probably would have sold even more papers if they had known.”

JJ lifted his hands and separated them as if scanning a billboard or marquee.

“Hero cop found frequenting gay bars. Medical miracle officer engaging in gay sex with strangers,” JJ called out as if he were actually reading the headline. “After that, the tabloid fodder would have begun. Do you have any idea how many pictures of guys fucking me in dirty bathroom stalls would have ended up on the internet? What would that have done to my brother’s fledgling business? What would he have thought about what I was really doing every night when I told him I was going to hang out with some buddies at a bar to watch the game?”

JJ paused and drew in a deep breath to calm himself before continuing.

“I didn’t compartmentalize. I played one role during the day and another at night. Losing even that small piece of my past made it feel like I’d lost all of it. My mind would convince me that the life I’d led up until the moment where everything went blank was some kind of lie or trick that my brain had come up with. Sometimes I still don’t know how to reconcile all the different versions of myself that have popped up. At one point I wondered if I might have that multiple disorder thing, but when I looked it up, it said people who suffered from it were being protected by alternate personas who took over when the person couldn’t deal with something. I knew all my personas. I was in the driver’s seat the entire time.”

Releasing his fingers from mine, he used one to stroke over my cheek. “Until you,” he said softly. “You saw them all and you accepted them, even if you didn’t agree with them. You saw something in me that was worth fighting for, but it wasn’t something you could do for me. All you could give me was the promise of a tomorrow that would someday be different. You took all the bullshit I threw at you, and you accepted it. You loved me anyway. You hurt when I hurt, you celebrated when I celebrated.” JJ paused for several beats. “You loved when I loved.”

“I would have killed you, JJ,” I admitted in a shameful whisper. “I hurt your arm, I slammed you against the wall, I put my hands around your⁠—”

JJ gently grabbed my chin so he could force me to look at him. He brushed his mouth over mine. “Sweetheart, you’re forgetting one piece of pretty important information,” he said with a soft smile. “You may be stronger than me, but believe me, I’ve taken down bigger guys than you. Tactical training was kind of a requirement in the academy, and I’ve had years to put that training to good use.” He grinned victoriously.

Despite the ugliness of what had just gone down between us, I couldn’t help but let some of JJ’s cheekiness rub off on me.

“So you’re saying you can take me down?” I asked.

“Remind me to give you a little demonstration of my skills when we have a very big bed in a very empty location and a very remote place where no one can hear your screams,” he said with a slight arch of his eyebrows. The idea of wrestling a naked JJ for the prize of who got to be in control in bed eased the cramping in my stomach.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I responded. My eyes fell from the bruise forming on his cheek to the welts on his neck, and I couldn’t keep myself from running my fingers over the red marks. “Why didn’t you stop me?” I asked in all seriousness.

“Because you needed me,” JJ responded.

“I don’t understand,” I said. His words made no sense.

“You were back in that place. That fucking cold, ugly place where the only thing you needed to do was survive. But this time you needed something else. Something you put away in one of those boxes in your head.” JJ ran his fingers along my temple and then through my hair.

“You needed me to come for you, Cass,” he said softly as silent tears began to slip down his face. “You were waiting for me to fix everything and get you out of that place. That’s what I was trying to do. I couldn’t let you spend even one more second in⁠—”

I captured JJ’s mouth and kissed him over and over again, sometimes by just brushing my lips over his, other times by slanting my mouth over his and letting our tongues dance for the briefest of moments. I forced myself to end the kiss because my body was already responding to his proximity and neither of us were in a place to do anything about it.

Still, that didn’t stop me from staring at JJ. It was the only thing I could do. The only thing I wanted to do.

He’d come for me. It may not have been the scenario I’d envisioned in those early days, but as soon as he had been able to get to me, he’d unlocked the door, taken my hand, and led me from the depths of hell and into the warm, welcoming rays of the sun.

JJ had come for me.

I was free.

Finally, truly free.