Page 23 of Ends of Being

I growl, my head falling back against the headrest heavily as I groan, “Why are you being difficult? I just want to go home. I just want to be alone; I don’t see what the problem is.”

He doesn’t say anything for a beat, and I can tell he’s getting impatient with me, but he finally says, “Listen to me, Antoinette. I know you’re frustrated I can’t provide you with specific details on what’s going on, but I need you to trust me on this. My orders are to stay with you, and I will stay with you until those orders are retracted, whether you allow it or not. So, this means you have two choices here: the easy way or the hard way. You choose.”

I glower at him, the knowledge that this is the second time I’ve heard this line directed at me in a very short time span not being lost on me. “What do you mean, orders to stay with me? Orders from whom?”

He gives me a bland look but doesn’t even bother replying because obviously, I know where the orders came from. It just never occurred to me that Dare was all about giving orders to people. He’s a fucking accountant, for fuck’s sake. Last I knew, the only person he gave orders to were the copier repairman and maybe Accounts Payable for some new pens.

This is all so fucking weird, and there doesn’t appear to be anything I can do about it. I’m pretty sure giving him the slip either wouldn’t work or would just put me in a hell of a lot of hot water. And what if it’s true? There must be a reason he has these orders to stay with me.

I huff, glaring at him as I say, “Just tell me one thing. On a scale of one to ten, ten being life or death, what is the risk factor here that keeps you with me?”

He doesn’t even glance over as he replies, “Solid ten.”

My frown deepens, but I sit back in the seat and put my seatbelt back on. “Fine. Circle around the other side of the block. There’s a parking garage entrance under the building. Number fifteen. My car is still at the office parking garage, so my spot here is empty right now.”

Tony looks at me and smirks. He doesn’t say anything. I groan, then give him a knowing look that basically saysmy car isn’t still there, is it?

He just smiles some more.

That fucker.

Chapter Ten

Dare

Ihavetosay,being in jail hasn’t been terrible…so far. Of course, my “jail” consists of whichever room I feel like taking over within the police department. I did coordinate the “official” paperwork to have charges brought up on me and having me publicly denied bail was a pretty genius decision from Matt. Due to the events of the last forty-eight hours, it seemed best if I was on record as a guest of the local police department. That way, there is no question as to my whereabouts for the time being.

We’ve gone to great lengths to cover up the interconnected trail between me, Matt, and Tony. While most people know Tony is a colleague of mine, it would be almost impossible for anyone to locate the very beginning of our relationship. And the same goes for my relationship with Matt. There is a professional trail, and then there is a somewhat discreet, borderline-criminal trail of breadcrumbs that have been strategically placed wherever we want them to be found. There is a defined path for Darius the accountant, and another defined path for Dare, the less-than-upstanding citizen who may or may not exist.

Not that I consider myself a bad guy. I’m just more in that whole gray area of “I’ll do what I have to do regardless of what society tells me is morally correct” kind of lane. Society has a very skewed compass on what is morally right and wrong. We like to think that the moral high ground is differentiated clearly in black and white; however, there will always be that gray overlap where good and bad kaleidoscope together for survival. It just happens that I tend to live there most days.

The good thing about using the police department as my headquarters is that it’s very difficult for anyone to surprise me if they were to come look for me. Having to make an appointment to get a face-to-face with me makes it easier to be prepared when the name on the sign-in sheet doesn’t match the face of the person who will be sitting before you. And since I’m not a moron, I have a good idea who will be coming to pay me a visit. Dickwad.

One thing the three of us have always done is work in codenames, and because of this, we never mention the real names of anyone directly. For example, “jackoff”, “pissant”, and “dickwad” are all codenames. It’s not that I believe we’ve been bugged or that anyone is eavesdropping; it’s just easier not to slip up if you always do it. You never know when there may be little ears tuned in to finding certain names being uttered at any given moment.

I’m not a crime lord or a crime boss, and I don’t live in the criminal underbelly of the city. I’m more that guy in the shadows where you can fuck around and find out. When I was younger, I had established a fuck-off reputation out of necessity. I was always the smart guy, the nerdy guy, the kind of guy the bigger guys thought they could push around until one day, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to allow them to do it anymore, and that’s when things got ugly.

At first, all it did was cause more drama, more chaos, and more ridiculous violence that finally escalated to the point they realized they had two choices: leave me alone or die trying to destroy me. I wouldn’t say the “bullies created me”; all I’m saying is the bullies were the catalyst that pushed the beast out of me, giving him flesh and bone and breath. And the beast ruled me for many years until, eventually, I had built up an impressive enough reputation and wealth that returning to a so-called civilized existence was possible.

It took me many years to learn to be Darius again. To be able to distance myself from the darkness that drove me to an almost mythical level of Dare, the Beast, within the underground organizations. A few people made half-assed attempts to eliminate me, and a few more attempted to force me back to my morally-questionable alter-ego; however, after a few tries, they mostly gave up and left me alone.

And I had just started to master the art of being Darius the accountant when suddenly Dare the Beast was ripped back out of my body by one very sassy woman named Antoinette.

A lot of people think I’m a monster, an entirely ridiculous assumption given a monster doesn’t care about the black and white. A monster doesn’t care about gray areas. A monster doesn’t care about the well-being of society or family or a friend. If I was truly a monster, I wouldn’t have followed Antoinette out into the alleyway, and the events from that moment forward would have had no bearing on my existence at all. But I did, and they did, and here we are, once again ready to see who all wants to fuck around and find out.

It was such an odd feeling for me to suddenly be responsible for someone else. I’d been responsible only for myself for so long that the idea of being worried about the health and happiness of another person was entirely foreign to me. Initially, it gave me pause, and it took me quite a bit of time to grasp the fact that this other person’s life was important to me.

Okay, important isn’t a strong enough word to describe my feelings for Antoinette’s safety and welfare; possessed, obsessed, maniacal, and unhinged are some words that could be uttered with some level of accuracy throughout the last six months. The lengths my team and I have gone to keep Antoinette safe are extreme, and never once has anyone from my team made any comments on how completely out of character and potentially self-serving this mission has been.

Granted, I no longer employ very many people, and even of those few, Tony and Matt are the only two I trust without question. But having someone watched every minute of every day requires a certain amount of planning and strategizing that requires more than the three of us. Especially given the fact that Matt and I have to at least give the impression to outsiders that we’re living our normal, everyday lives. This is far easier for me since I always have the guise of working from home, and for the most part, my job is a show of smoke and mirrors in making other people money. Namely me, and all of my aliases and shell companies and whatever else I decide to tinker in.

Matt has to make a bigger public show of it, though he does have far more spare time since he took over at a smaller police department than the one he used to work at in Manhattan. At first, he was angry he was having to uproot his life and redirect a career path he had devoted many years to, but after a while, he seemed to enjoy the change and the flexibility it allowed. Unfortunately, there likely will come a time when he’ll have to choose between his life in law enforcement and his life as my morally grey counterpart, and that time seems to be drawing closer at an alarming rate.

Tony is more into freelance work, so he has the luxury of coming and going whenever he pleases, and I’m pretty sure he feels a special kind of kinship to Toni at this point. He’d never actually met her but had spent so much time in her company without her even knowing it that she started to grow on him like a little sister. He actually dubbed her “Sugarplum” as a codename.

At one point, he found himself checking in so often when he wasn’t the person designated to be responsible for her that he asked me to punch him in the face repeatedly. I mean, I happily knocked him about just for sport, but I totally get what he means. I’m probably the worst of everyone as my entire existence revolves around her day in and day out into a level of obsessive compulsion that almost chokes me.

And every once in a while, it all feels completely pointless because nothing has come of the incident. There was no whispering, no movement, and no call to arms; it was all just eerily quiet. Which was especially alarming hence our decision to stay operational twenty-four-seven. And it’s now, at this moment, as I’m standing in the corner of this room waiting for my visitor, that it’s all going to come to a head. This is the pinnacle. This is the deciding factor. This one conversation will tell me if everything we’ve done over the last six months was for nothing or if we were correct in our need to be proactive.

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