Cocky Secrets (Cocker Brothers #29)

41. Luna

FORTY-ONE

Luna

I t feels like I’ve drunk five liters of Jack Daniels. I open my eyes, but nothing is in focus. There is a distant beep, but other than that, silence.

Is this a dream?

Shapes come into focus. A beige rectangle. A black square high above that. A huge white blob to my left.

Am I paralyzed?

Wiggling my toes takes everything I’ve got, but I do feel them moving.

It’s like this fog doesn’t want to leave.

I’m confused. Lost. Bone-weary.

My hand is warm. So are my thighs. They feel heavy as if someone is holding them down.

Am I chained up?

Did Matias’s men drug me?

I have to stay quiet in case they are listening.

If they think they’ve won, they’re wrong.

I will get out of here.

I will never give up.

Something is in my nose. It hurts. The white blur to my left becomes a curtain. I look down and see a bearded man sleeping on my legs. My hand is warm because his is. Our fingers are entwined. He looks familiar.

He looks like…

Oh…

I remember now.

I snuck into the mansion thinking I was being so sly. But they were watching me, acting like they didn’t see me coming. They tied me up. He sneered and wondered aloud what he should do to me. His bodyguards had waited, enjoying it.

Then the explosion of action. “Someone’s here!”

Matias rasped from his bed, “Go get whoever the fuck it is!”

I glared at him with the hate of all the women he’d hurt, glad to see him sick and frail with cancer. If I died that night at least I knew he’d follow soon after.

But that wasn’t enough.

One of those men was his son. I found that out when I was being gagged. He was due to inherit the business and perpetuate what they’d done. And then another man would take over. And another. And it would never end.

They had to die, but I didn’t know how. I had machine guns pointed at my head and no way to break free of the bindings, to grab them.

And then Jett appeared, with his Tasmanian Devil friend. He didn’t want me to do it. But then he found out the truth.

I pulled the trigger over and over. Turned and looked into his eyes and saw understanding and respect.

And it was done.

But where am I now? I don’t understand. Staring at him asleep on my legs, I try to speak but my mouth is dry. My jaw feels stiff.

Barely able to move my fingers, I squeeze his hand. Like a gun went off in the room, Jett sits upright and looks around. Then at me. His beautiful eyes go wide, staring at me with shock.

He jerks forward in his chair, clasping my hand to his hard chest as he reaches to touch my face. “Sunshine?”

I nod my head just a little; it’s all I can do.

A grin grows on his face and he shouts, “NURSE! NURSE!!!” His eyes go dark and he asks me, “Do you know who I am?”

Parting my lips, I painfully rasp, “Jett.”

He whoops and rises up, fist-pumping the air like an idiot.

“Water,” I whisper.

While still gripping my hand to his body, he cranes back to grab one from a rickety tray-table, and brings it to my lips. Lifting my other hand takes effort, but I do succeed in taking the small glass and nodding to him that I’ve got it.

“Holy shit, look at you!” he whispers like I just performed a miracle just by holding this cup.

“NURSE!!! SHE’S AWAKE!” he shouts at the door.

Swallowing is painful. I’ve never felt this way before. “Where are we?” I croak. “What happened?”

Those grey eyes of his cloud over as the smile disappears.

“Oh, Sunshine baby, you’ve been in a coma. You’ve been out for a long time.”

Fear pulls at me and all I can do is raise my eyebrows with the question I’m too frightened to ask.

Low and cautious, he tells me, “It’s been three months. Seven days.”

The door explodes with three nurses, and they all tell Jett to stand back. He doesn’t fight them, which surprises me. He and I are staring at each other as the nurses pull at cords attached to my body, fiddle with what I now realize is oxygen tubes in my nose. Doctors come in next. There is a lot of action. I’m questioned about whether or not I know who I am. I nod.

Then they ask me my name.

It’s Jett’s face I’m looking at when I answer, “Luna.”

His eyes fill with a man’s kind of emotion, the kind that’s distant and full and confusing to him.

“What’s your last name?” the doctor asks.

Still on Jett, I whisper, “I don’t have one.” His lips tighten as he pushes off the wall.

“Alright, let her rest.”

The doctors don’t listen to him. He stands by as they inform him there are many things they need to check due to the severity of my head trauma. I have to wiggle toes and fingers for them. I have to recite dates. And finally when they’re satisfied, they tell us both I’ll have to stay to be supervised until they know it’s safe. As they file out, one of the nurse’s looks over her shoulder at Jett with a small smile. He doesn’t notice.

He pulls the chair back to my bed from where they moved it, and sits down, grabbing my hand immediately. “How you doin’?”

“Not used to the attention,” I whisper. He hands me more water and I drink it on my own. He takes it and sets it down and I notice his hand is shaking.

“Luna,” he murmurs to himself before he meets my eyes. “That’s the moon in Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s the opposite of Sunshine,” he says with an attempt at a smile. Despite the effort, I can tell he’s shaken.

I get it. I don’t know what to do with him either.

“You called me that as a joke,” I whisper. It’s all I can do. My voice hasn’t been used in months and my throat feels terrible.

“At first.” He pauses. “Must be weird losin’ all that time.” I nod. “You want to know what happened?”

“Yes.”

The story unravels as he explains what he knows, from beginning to now. He’s a man, so the details are blunt and brief. When he tells me the women were pregnant, I gasp. His handsome face registers surprise. “You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“You used to live there, didn’t you?”

Shaking my head a little, I rasp, “Different house. They were prostitutes. They all took the pill.”

I used to watch them take it every day, given to them like clockwork at eight o’clock every morning, like the drugs they give inmates in an insane asylum.

“What is that, Mommy?”

“It’s to make sure we stay in business, Luna.”

I only learned what that meant later on, when I was adult enough to understand.

“Why pregnant?”

Jett leans back in the chair. “You can make a lot more money selling babies. A lot of infertile women in the world dying to be mothers.”

Horror dives into my bloodstream. I remember the disappearing babies, the ones where the pill either didn’t work, or the women didn’t swallow. It must have given him the idea.

Jett rises from the chair and takes me into his arms. “Shhhh…it’s over.”

“Oh my God,” I stutter into the soft, black t-shirt. “He’s…so…evil!”

“He’s dead, Sunshine. He’s dead, baby. It’s over. You did it.” We stay like this until the sobs stop. Jett kisses my hair and looks in my eyes. “They’re safe now. A lot of them are reunited with family. Donations came in from all over. Some women got homes together.” I nod, sniffling. He reaches for a tiny hospital box of tissues and hands me one, shaking his head and muttering, “It’s a lot of fuckin’ therapy but they’re gonna be okay now.”

He gets up and walks to the door to make sure it’s closed. When he returns, I know something big is coming. In a low volume he tells me how his friends fixed it so I look like I was saving Matias.

Anger flashes into me. “I would never save him!”

“No no no!” Jett holds his hands up to stop me. “Don’t get excited. Think about where you’d be right now if we didn’t. With all those girls and the condition they were in? We had to call the police. We NEVER call the police. Understand? We had to make you the hero. Which you fuckin’ are!” He lowers his voice to somberly add, “But the law wouldn’t see it that way.”

I’m so upset. I know he’s right, but it still makes me furious for anyone to believe I’d come to that bastard’s aid.

“I’d rather be in jail.”

Jett goes for my hand but I tug it back. “Luna, you know the truth. That’s all that should matter. I stopped caring about what other people thought of me a long time ago.”

Meeting his eyes, I stare at him. He’s right.

I’m too stubborn to tell him that.

“You just called me Luna,” I whisper, glancing away.