Blackbird Fly Home (Doyle Global Securities Book 1) Page 6

  “Morgan sent us. Are you Noah?” Kelly said calmly.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m going to just take your fucking word for it. Where’s your ID?”

  “Back left pocket of my jeans.”

  Kelly felt his wallet being pulled from his pants. He could’ve swung around with an elbow to try to take control of the situation, but why? They were all there for the same reason.

  “Kel?” Cole’s shaking voice whispered but when Kelly glanced at him from the corner of his eye, the fear he saw there was, well, it felt like it was aimed at him instead of the man holding a gun to their heads. But that didn’t make any sense. Why would Cole be afraid of him all of a sudden? Kelly tried to shake it off by saying, “It’s okay, babe. Noah is just being safe. I would do the same thing.”

  “Kel, I, um, there’s….”

  “Shhhh, it’s okay, Cole.”

  “Where’s your ID?” the man said to Cole.

  “It’s in…”

  “I’ll get it,” Kelly said as he turned his head to look at the man over his shoulder, “If you touch my boyfriend’s ass I might get….angry.”

  The man, who Kelly now knew from his photo was Noah Pierce, nodded at him.

  So, he slid his hand into Cole’s back pocket and pulled out his wallet, handing it over to Noah.

  He watched as Noah opened the wallet and looked at the ID. He saw the man frown and then he paled as he looked up, his eyes bouncing between him and Cole.

  What the fuck?

  “Are we good here? You gonna put that gun down?”

  Noah took a few steps back as he mumbled, “Uh, I think I’ll keep it for a minute if you don’t mind.”

  “What? Why?”

  Cole spun around and his face paled as he looked at the man behind him, “Oh, shit,” he mumbled as his eyes went wide. “Um, um, um…..”

  Kelly glared as he looked between the two men, “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “It was an assignment, man. You weren’t here,” Noah mumbled, his fingers flexing on the gun by his side.

  “Oh, God, I didn’t know, Kel, I didn’t fucking know,” Cole said with a sob.

  Kelly turned to look at him, “Didn’t know what?”

  “That you were coming back!” he cried.

  Realization dawned on Kelly and he felt like he was going to throw up. “You, you, you two fucked?” he said but it wasn’t really a question, because he already knew the answer.

  “I told you. He was my assignment,” Noah mumbled.

  “To fuck him?” Kelly shouted.

  “Pretty much, yeah. We needed an in to his place. He had called to hire an escort for a few hours, so….”

  “Shut up, just shut the fuck up!” Kelly yelled as he clasped his fingers over his ears and turned away from them, “FUCK!”

  “W-w-w-we weren’t together, Kel. I didn’t think we would ever see each other again.”

  Kelly’s eyes moved back to Cole and he growled slightly.

  Tears slid down Cole’s cheeks as he desperately tried to think of some way to salvage this situation.

  “Noah?” a man’s voice said from the doorway. He looked like he’d just woken up from a nap because he was rubbing his eyes as he walked across the porch and down the steps.

  Noah stepped closer to him, meeting him halfway and that was when the man dropped one of his hands and threaded his fingers with Noah’s and leaned into him like he was his entire world.

  “It’s okay, baby. This is our protection detail. Remember I told you about that?”

  “Yeah, I do but what’s with all the shouting?” he said and then his other hand moved away from his face……

  And Kelly felt the ground under his feet slip away.

  “Jesse-bear?” Kelly whispered.

  “Kelly?” the man said with a gasp.

  Then Kelly’s glare turned back to Noah and Noah could see that he was seething with even more anger, “Baby? Baby? That’s my little brother you fucking asshole!”

  Kelly closed the distance between the two of them so fast that Noah had no time to react. He swung his fist and connected it with the side of Noah’s face with a loud crack.

  That’s going to leave a mark flashed through Noah’s mind as he quickly shoved his gun into the holster under his arm so he could have two hands to defend himself – and because he had the presence of mind to know that he didn’t want to shoot the man currently trying to beat his ass, the man who apparently was Jesse’s older brother.

  “Kelly, stop!” Cole shouted as he tried to join in on the fray.

  Yeah, Noah didn’t think that was going to happen. He’d seen that look in men’s eyes before. Hell, he’d felt it himself. That blinding fury that overrides all other rational thought.

  With a growl, Kelly swung at him again, but Noah managed to block it this time and then he kicked at Kelly’s knee, making it buckle and he dropped down onto it with a thud.

  For the few seconds that Kelly was down, it gave Noah a chance to reach into one of the side pockets on his tac-pants and pull out his taser.

  The moment Kelly was rising to his feet, his eyes blazing with fury, his fists clenched, Noah pulled the trigger.

  The last thing Kelly remembered as jerked and then started to fall as he lost all muscle control was Noah barreling into Cole to keep him from touching Kelly and absorbing some of the electricity that was currently coursing through his body. He’d never been more grateful to a man that he wanted to punch the fuck out of in his life.

  Fuck, this is gonna hurt, he thought as his body tilted forward and the cement came barreling towards his face at a dizzying speed. Without working arms to catch any of the brunt of his fall, he crashed flat onto his face on the concrete driveway.

  Nine

  Pain. Fuck. That’s a shit-ton of pain. Kelly lifted his arm towards his face to try to figure out why the fucking thing felt like he had run into a brick wall but warm, gentle fingers closed around his wrist, “No, babe, don’t try to touch it,” Cole whispered as he gently pushed Kelly’s hand back down until it was resting against his belly.

  “Hurts,” he mumbled.

  “I know, babe. Noah’s bringing more ice right now.”

  At the mention of Noah’s name, the memories of why Kelly’s face hurt flooded back. His eyes snapped open, or tried to anyways…since one was almost swollen shut.

  The first thing he saw were Cole’s loving, concerned eyes looking back at him. His fingers smoothed the hair back from Kelly’s forehead, “Don’t babe. Hear him out first, get to know him.”

  “I don’t need to get to know him, Cole. That’s my fucking baby brother and he fucking touched you!” Kelly tried to growl but it came out more like a whimper.

  “Here,” a voice said from behind Cole.

  Kelly managed to open his swollen eyes a little farther to look at the man he now knew as Noah as he handed an ice pack to Cole.

  “Put this back over the bridge of your nose, babe,” Cole whispered, “We need to try to get the swelling down.”

  “Is it broken? Has anyone checked it?” Kelly mumbled as he laid the ice pack down, wincing when he did.

  “Easy, babe. Yeah, it was broken. But Noah re-set it when you were out.”

  Kelly grunted. It was the closest he was going to come to a thank you at the moment.

  “So, who the fuck are you and what the hell are you doing with my baby brother?”

  “Jeez, Kell, I’m almost twenty-five. I’m not a damn baby anymore.”

  Kelly inhaled a sharp breath when he heard his brother’s voice, “Jesse,” he breathed out on an exhaled whisper.

  “Hey.”

  Kelly lifted the corner of the ice pack to see that Jesse was sitting on the large coffee table, facing where Kelly was laid out on the couch.

  “God, you’re so grown up looking.”

  Jesse’s head turned to look away at some unseen memory, “Yeah, well, a lot of things changed after you left.”

  “He was going to kil
l me, Jess, I had to leave. I thought, I thought I was saving you by leaving. I thought his anger would go with me. He hated me so much, hated what he suspected I was but could never confirm, hated what it meant for him as a father. When I left I figured he’d be relieved, I thought he’d go back to being…..”

  “Being, what? He was never a good father, Kel, not even when I was little. He was okay but nothing special. The only thing that ever made my childhood memorable, that made it special and good, was you. And then you left. You not only left, you fucking disappeared into thin air.”

  “Jess,”

  Jesse shot to his feet, “No, not now, Kel. You’re a mess and you need to heal. Get better, we’ll talk later.”

  Just as he went to walk away Kelly’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist, “Jess?”

  Jesse froze but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s really good to see you again.”

  Jesse nodded his head as his other hand came up to swipe at the tears that had begun to fall down his cheeks. Then he pulled free from Kelly’s loose grip and walked away……and right into Noah’s arms.

  “He’s not that eleven-year-old kid anymore, babe,” Cole whispered as he pushed the hair back from Kelly’s forehead again.

  Kelly had forgotten that Cole knew Jesse, had met him a few times when Jesse had hung out with the two of them after school.

  “He’s just, I just don’t want to see him to get hurt.”

  “If he does, you’ll be there to comfort him. But he’s an adult now, you need to let him make his own choices and his own mistakes. And you need to listen to him. What he has to say, what he’s been through….it hasn’t been easy, babe. It’s going to kill you that you weren’t here to protect him. But just remember, if you had stayed, not only would you not have been there to protect him, you wouldn’t be here now to get to know him again and I wouldn’t be here either…because we’d both be dead.”

  Kelly’s pained gaze met Cole’s.

  “Are, are we okay?” Cole whispered as his lower lip trembled.

  Kelly closed his eyes for a moment, “I hate the fact that he touched you.”

  “I know.”

  Kelly’s eyes opened, “But I’m the reason he did, I’m the reason you turned to escorts. I left without a word and it hurt you,” he pushed his finger to Cole’s lips when he opened them to protest, “No, I did hurt you, I hurt both of us. And there’s no way I could’ve expected you to never take comfort in the arms of others, especially when I did too. So, this is on me, Cole, I own it and I’ll deal with it.”

  “If it helps at all, I was staring at a picture of you the whole time and I called out your name when I came.”

  Kelly snorted, “No, that really doesn’t help,” he said and then he reached his hand out to find Cole’s and he threaded their fingers together, “I love you, so much.”

  “I love you too, babe.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Four hours.”

  Kelly tried to sit up, “Shit. I need to evaluate the security of this place and learn about the threat to, to, to….shit, the threat is to my brother?”

  Cole gently pressed on Kelly’s chest to push him back down, “Babe, Noah’s got this for now. Everything is locked down tight.”

  Kelly took a deep breath and sighed it back out, “Can you get him over here? I need to go over everything with him.”

  “You’re not going to try to punch him in the face again?”

  A smirk lifted one corner of Kelly’s mouth, “Not today I’m not.”

  Kelly heard the familiar sound of steel-toed boots as they made their way towards him.

  “Read me in on the Op,” he said from underneath his mask of ice-cold compresses.

  “Don’t you think you should maybe recover from your concussion first?”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that and I’m also going to pretend that you don’t know every ounce of my background that my father allowed you to see, which was more than enough to know that this bump on my face is nothing compared to some of the other shit I’ve had to fight my way through.”

  Kelly heard Noah sigh as he sat down on the table, “The man who is after Jesse, who’s after both of us, he’s powerful…..and very dangerous.”

  Kelly turned his head to the side and lifted one corner of the ice pack so he could look into Noah’s eyes, “And you know this how?”

  “We were…..together….for almost four years.”

  “Together? Like he was your boyfriend?”

  “That’s probably what he would call it but it’s not what I would call it.”

  “Can you please stop talking in riddles?”

  Noah sighed, turned to reach behind him, picked up a two-inch thick brown folder and thumped it down onto Kelly’s abdomen.

  “What’s this?”

  “My medical records during the four-years I was Jacob Knight’s boyfriend.”

  Kelly’s eyes moved between that folder and Noah’s face at least a dozen times until he finally held his arm up to Cole and said, “Help me up, babe. I can’t read this file lying down.”

  For a few seconds, it looked like Cole was going to protest but then, with a resigned sigh, he pulled Kelly until he was sitting up on the couch with that thick folder resting between his spread thighs.

  Cole huffed out his frustration, pushed to his feet and mumbled, “While you’re busy being a stubborn Neanderthal asshole, I’m going to go and talk to the only other sane person in this house. If you need me, I’ll be with Jesse.”

  Both Kelly and Noah watched Cole stomp out of the room. When Noah’s eyes came back to find Kelly’s, Kelly was glaring at Noah. “Don’t think I haven’t forgotten about the fact that you fucked my boyfriend, asshole.”

  “He wasn’t your boyfriend when I fucked him, asshole.”

  Kelly’s arm shot out as he blindly pointed down the hall that Cole had disappeared, “That man has always been mine, always. Don’t ever forget that. It kills me what he had to do in order to remain human when he and I were apart. I did that, Noah. Me. And I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. And now,” he took a deep, shaking breath, “now I’m finding out that my leaving fucked up my brother too? I don’t know if I can deal with all this.”

  Now it was Noah’s arm that shot out to point blindly to where Jesse was, “That man, your brother? He’s the strongest fucking man I’ve ever met. I was Jacob Knight’s victim for four years. He,” Noah’s breath hitched as he choked back a sob, “he survived with him for almost a decade.”

  Those words hit Kelly’s heart stronger than any punch ever could.

  Ten

  A decade? A fucking decade? But that would mean….

  “He left home when he was fourteen?” Kelly said as he looked through the vast living room towards the hall where the bedrooms were….where he knew that Cole and his brother Jesse were.

  “Yeah almost fifteen,” Noah said.

  Jesse. His baby brother. He had been in the hands of a what? … a monster? for the past decade?

  “What did he do to him?” Kelly whispered, his fingers shaking as he wiped them over his lips.

  “That’s his story to tell, Kelly. Not mine. Hell, I don’t even know all of it yet.”

  Kelly’s head whipped back around, “Don’t know, don’t know? What kind of a fucking boyfriend are you?”

  Noah’s mouth quirked up in a smile, “I’m not sure yet. I wouldn’t even call me a boyfriend, although he probably would.”

  At Kelly’s confused frown, Noah continued.

  “I just met your brother the day before yesterday.”

  Kelly opened his mouth to yell then what the fuck are you doing plastered all over him like a leech? But then he thought back to what he had actually seen just before he had tried to take Noah’s head off. It wasn’t Noah clinging to Jesse. No. It was the other way around. It was Jesse’s fingers clinging to Noah’s hand. It was Jesse’s other hand gently grasped around Noah’s arm, as if he needed
that second anchor. And it was the look in both of their eyes when they had glanced at each other – Noah’s had been compassionate, caring, nurturing, loving. Jesse’s had been wanting, hoping, loving and looking for guidance.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kelly mumbled as he slid his finger through his hair, “You, you’re the one who rescued him, who saved him, aren’t you?”

  Noah glanced down the hall, “That’s what I thought, Kelly but I’m beginning to wonder…….”

  “Wonder what?” Kelly finally asked when Noah didn’t finish his thought.

  Noah’s eyes turned back and pinned Kelly with a look of fear and vulnerability that Kelly knew all too well. “If he’s the one who’s going to save me.”

  Kelly stared at Noah for several seconds, wanting to say more, to tell him that he knew all about what it felt like to be saved by the man that you loved but he knew if he did that right now, he’d probably start crying, or he’d get pissed off again because he’d picture Noah and Cole together and that was a thought that he needed as far from his mind as possible.

  Instead, he flipped open that huge file that was sitting on the couch between his legs. After glancing over the first few pages, he really wished he hadn’t done that…because he felt like he was going to throw up.

  “Why?” he whispered as he continued to read about visit after visit for sprains, stitches, concussions, breaks.

  “Why did I stay?”

  Kelly nodded his head. He knew it was probably wrong to ask but he needed to try to understand, for Jesse’s sake, hell, for anyone’s sake, who had ever gone through this shit.

  “To understand that you need to know who Jacob Knight is. He’s not only one of the top lawyers in this state, he’s also one of the top lawyers in the country. He’s sought after to consult or to defend many high-profile criminal cases. And also, to teach because he’s got this commanding presence that holds people’s attention. He can talk his way out of just about anything – including why he just gave you a bloody nose or kicked you in the ribs or twisted your arm so hard that the bone cracked. It was never his fault. Dinner was late, his socks weren’t folded right, the wrong laundry detergent got used, the dishwasher wasn’t emptied fast enough, who knew what it was but he was such a smooth talker that he always, fucking always, made me believe that him hurting me was because of something I’d done wrong, that it was my fault. And he also made me feel like an imbecile who was no better than the dog shit on the bottom of your shoe. Nobody would want to be with a fuck-up like me. Jacob was doing me a favor by loving me – that’s what his words made me feel. When I finally decided I wanted….no….that I needed to get away from him, I’d just lost my job from calling in sick so often to hide my injuries and Jacob had sold my car so I had no transportation.”