CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Things could be worse.

Billboard was being led into a jail cell, but his temporary home was next to the one in which O’Shea was going to be kept. Only a few metal bars would be separating them. Not such a bad deal. And… score . There were no other prisoners being held at the moment, so they had the place to themselves.

The door slammed behind him, and he heard O’Shea’s close, too. That’s when he glanced over at her to tease, but saw something he’d never witnessed on her face before.

Pure panic.

“What is it, O’Shea?” Concern laced his voice as he headed right for the dividing bars between them, wrapping his fingers around the steel as if he could eradicate the barrier with his bare hands.

“O’Shea,” he prompted again. But it was like she hadn’t heard him. The fearless woman he knew was gone, and the one who’d taken her place had gone to the farthest corner of the cell and was crouched down, eyes unfocused, with her arms wrapped around her middle as she rocked.

“O’Shea,” he yelled, not caring if he was disturbing the officers outside the detention block. “Sweetheart. Look over here. It’s me. Billboard.” She didn’t turn to him, but remained locked in some kind of hell.

Dammit. He’d seen this behavior before, and he’d dealt with it himself. It was PTSD. There was no doubt in his mind.

There’d been a period in his life when…

No. Now was not the time to get distracted, revisiting his ghosts. He had to see if he could help O’Shea.

“O’Shea.” He lowered his voice, calling her again, but this time attempting to have it flow out of him like pure honey. “Everything’s okay. You’re not alone. We’re in this together. I’ve got you, no matter what. Now please, sweetheart, come over here and take my hand. We’ll wait for the good guys to get here, together.”

Her dead eyes turned to regard him as a shiver jolted her entire body.

“When can I come out?” she asked, her words reedy. It was a voice he’d never heard coming out of O’Shea before.

She sounded almost like…a little girl.

Shit. What kind of flashback was she having?

Billboard wanted immediate answers, but he patiently responded to her wobblily asked question. “We’ll be released as soon as Mizzay reems a few asses,” Billboard explained, wondering whether O’Shea was actually hearing him, and if she was, how much was getting through to her brain. “Remember? We were allowed one phone call, and we contacted Mizzay, our friend and the receptionist at SOS?”

There was no reply from O’Shea, but he hadn’t really expected one.

Billboard went on. “That woman was seriously headed for DEFCON 1 when we told her what had happened, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of spooks from some three-letter agency don’t storm this place with AK’s, ready for action.”

Billboard tried to keep his comments light and semi-ridiculous, maintaining a one-sided conversation, attempting to draw O’Shea out of whatever horror in which she’d become lost.

“Wouldn’t you like to move over closer to me?” Billboard finally urged after several minutes of talking about whatever popped into his head.

“She…she won’t like that.”

Shit. Again, with the creepy voice.

“Who won’t like it, O’Shea?”

There was something seriously fucked up being revealed.

“Grannie,” O’Shea whispered the name as if it were taboo. “You shouldn’t be here, Cedric. She’ll punish you, too.”

Fuck. O’Shea thought Billboard was Cedric. And her grandmother…? What the hell had the bitch done?

Billboard wanted to growl, but he also didn’t want to scare O’Shea, so once again he toned it down.

“Honey, your grandmother isn’t here, and you’re all grown up now. Cedric is at home with his wife. Remember? They have twins on the way?”

O’Shea blinked.

It was a start, so Billboard kept up his patter.

“And I’m right here beside you. I’m Billboard. I’m the one who’s supposed to be holding back secrets, but I guess you have some of your own, huh?”

She let loose a small sob, and it nearly broke Billboard’s heart. What had happened that his woman was so broken inside.

“Baby, I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. I promise. Now look at me. Please.”

Her ravaged face turned to his, and she whimpered. “I’m not supposed to talk to anybody.”

“It’s okay,” Billboard assured her, thinking fast. What was it his therapist did when Billboard was too lost in an old horror-loop to function? Right. She made him reveal what was going on in his mind.

“What are you seeing, O’Shea? Where are you?” he asked.

“It’s dark.” She trembled violently. “The closet is always dark.”

“You’re stuck in a closet, O’Shea?”

“Uh, huh,” she mewled in her little girl voice. “Grannie put me here.”

A closet. And her grandmother had put her there? What the fuck?

“Can you stand up and find the doorknob, O’Shea? Can you let yourself out?” Billboard almost didn’t want to hear her answer.

“I can’t. I’m in the cage. It’s locked. I can’t…I can’t…” she broke down and wailed.

“It’s okay, O’Shea. It’s okay,” Billboard tried to soothe, and it was killing him that he couldn’t get to her, and wasn’t sure exactly what to say. Was he making things worse, or better? The jury was out, so all he could do was continue to reassure her. “ I’ll help you get out of the cage and the closet, O’Shea. Mizzay and everyone on the team will help you, too, when they get here.”

O’Shea’s tear-stained eyes turned to his. “Why do you keep calling me O’Shea?” she simpered. “I’m Karen.”

Shit, shit, shit. This was bad. He’d never heard her refer to herself as Karen before. It must be the name she’d had in childhood; one that she’d clearly abandoned.

“You might have been Karen, once, but to me, you’ll always be O’Shea,” he promised her. “Do you remember when and why you changed your name?”

Maybe he could move her brain forward in time.

“I…hate Karen,” she said, vehemence suddenly overtaking her fearfulness. “I don’t want to be named for her. I don’t.”

“Who were you named for, O’Shea? Tell me.”

“ Her ,” she snarled. “My grandmother.”

Well, that answered that.

He could quiet her mind on that front. “You’re not Karen anymore,” Billboard reminded her with conviction. “You left all that behind. You became O’Shea; a tough woman who’s an officer of the law. You gained independence and lived with your brother. You came to Boston…” He kept talking, reminding her of the people they knew, like Brigid, Anna, and Ethan. He even talked about Zoe, and the way the savvy cat had led him to O’Shea at the town meeting.

About three quarters of the way through his spiel, he noticed her eyes weren’t quite so blank; her stare not quite so vague. Her tongue was actually darting out to lick her bottom lip nervously as she listened.

Billboard continued, delving into more personal territory. “You’ve actually been the strong one of the two of us, O’Shea. Did I mention that? You’ve been trying to get me to admit that I like you, and I’ve been fighting it. But sweetness, I’ve finally come to agree with you. Do you hear me? You’ve worn me down. You are going to be my girlfriend,” he told her definitively. “You’re going to move to Boston permanently, and we’re going to see if we have a future together, baby.”

O’Shea’s hand fluttered toward her throat, and she blinked for real this time.

“B…Billboard?” she asked raspily.

“Yeah, honey, it’s me.”

Billboard’s guts unwound the slightest bit; enough to laugh at himself. Where had all those gooey terms of endearment come from? He didn’t know, but if the words were working, he’d offer up every one he could think of.

“Where…where are we?”

She startled him with her question. Clearly, she was returning to reality, albeit slowly.

He’d give her all the answers she needed, but first he had to get his hands on her.

“Move over here O’Shea. I need to touch you. I need to feel your hand in mine before we talk anymore.”

She looked down at her fingers that clutched the neck of her shirt, then glanced over at Billboard. “You’re really here? In…” She gazed around, and a tremor took her again.

Ah, hell no .

“Look at me O’Shea. Focus. I am right here. And I’m going to stay here with you until Mizzay works her miracles.”

“Mizzay… Jail…”

Suddenly O’Shea was crab-walking over to him faster than he could have imagined a few minutes before. She reached through the bars to cup his face.

“Billboard?” she whispered, running her hands over his five-o’clock shadow.

“Yeah. It’s me,” he returned gruffly, grasping her wrists and turning his head to kiss her palms. “I’m here with you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

He’d say it as many times as O’Shea needed to hear it.

“I… I think I might have lost it for a while.” Another sob escaped from between her clenched teeth as she leaned her head against the bars.

“It’s okay,” he soothed. “We all have bogeymen. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you need to talk about it, though—about anything—I’m listening.”

“The bars…” she began in such a small whisper, he almost couldn’t hear her. “The cage…”

“It’s not a cage, O’Shea. It’s just a jail-cell,” he comforted, not letting go of her hands. He slanted his head until he was able to get his lips on hers, giving her the lightest of kisses. “Look around carefully. You can stand up. You can walk in here. I promise you it isn’t anything bad.”

It was. Sort of. But not the type of bad he figured O’Shea was remembering, and that pissed him off. If this grandmother of O’Shea’s was still alive—and he hoped sincerely she was not—he was going to hunt her down and make her very sorry she’d ever terrorized her young granddaughter.

“I know,” O’Shea told him, sounding more like herself with every second that passed. “It’s just that…”

“It’s okay,” Billboard assured her. “Your head got stuck in the past. Believe me, I get it.” And he did. Most nights, before he’d started therapy, he’d wake up in a cold sweat, thinking he was back in Estonia; a place where he’d been tasked with what his higher ups had called, “timely intelligence extraction”. A clean term for something that had been so very dirty.

But… enough . This Charlie Foxtrot right now wasn’t about him, it was about O’Shea.

He watched her carefully as her brows drew together. “I…”

Billboard placed a finger on her lips. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you do decide you need to get things off your chest, I’m here.” And I won’t judge, he wanted to add, but that would be a lie. He was already judging the hell out of the woman who’d caused his strong O’Shea to break down, and he was plotting revenge.

“It’s…okay. I want to.” O’Shea wasn’t shaking any more.

They both leaned against the bars, absorbing each other’s heat, and her body finally settled.

“I think I might have told you that my parents are beyond useless,” she began.

“You mentioned it, yes,” Billboard allowed. He’d had thoughts that they were a pair of fuckers, but with this grandmother thing…

“Well, my father is useless,” O’Shea explained. “My mother is…more complicated. She’s useless but also volatile. She’s prone to these unexplained rages. And in the past, she’d go after me or Cedric for infractions that were basically nothing. A wrong word said, a bit of food left on a plate. We never knew when her demons would arise, but when they did,” she gulped, “Cedric got the belt, and I…” she swallowed hard again. “I’d get hauled next door to my grandmother’s house.”

“She lived next door?” Billboard questioned so that he’d have a bead on where to find the bitch when the time was right.

“Uh, huh. She still does.” A shiver rattled through O’Shea, but it didn’t take her senses away from Billboard again, it seemed to strengthen them this time. “And she was monstrous.”

O’Shea’s shoulders straightened and she lost her haunted look.

“I’m sure, now, in retrospect,” O’Shea resumed, “that Grannie was probably the reason my mother was so horrible, but…” she turned hard eyes to Billboard’s. “How could she turn me over to the same woman who had ruined her?”

Billboard tried to pull an answer from the depths of his therapy sessions to give her what she needed. “We never know why brains work they way they do,” he told her. “Your mother was obviously broken by the things she’d endured, and she let that dictate the rest of her life. You and Cedric, thank God, were somehow able to overcome it.”

He didn’t know if he should continue to lead the conversation, but Billboard needed to know more. “Tell me about the cage.”

“I… You caught that, huh?” she asked, trepidation returning to her voice.

“I did. But if you’re not ready to give me details…” he trailed off.

“No. It’s okay. You’ve seen the worst of what it can do to me,” she assured him, then sucked in a deep breath. “When I was young, living under my parents’ roof, if I did something my mother didn’t like, she’d haul me next door, and leave before she could witness the consequences of dropping me there. But she was basically giving my grandmother unfettered access to deal with me in any way Grannie wanted. And what that bitch wanted was to lock me in a cage that she kept in her walk-in closet. Like an animal. Until she deemed me ‘chastened’.”

“And how long would that be?” Billboard bit the inside of his cheek. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Generally, a few hours,” she told him. “But occasionally it would be overnight.” O’Shea looked up at him with fear and anger all mixed up in her eyes. “This went on for years, starting when I was very young.”

Billboard held his cool, but just barely.

“How and when did it finally stop?” he questioned gruffly.

O’Shea mouth quirked up just a small bit, but he’d take it. It was the first sign of relief he’d seen on her face since they’d been tossed into the clinker. “I told you that Cedric and I lived together, right?”

“Yeah. After he got out of the service.”

“Yes, and no,” she clarified. “I actually lived with him before he enlisted, then stayed in that same apartment for several years. He paid for it while he was deployed, keeping me safe.”

Damn. What an awesome brother. Billboard would have to let Cedric know the depths of his gratitude.

“After Cedric came home from the service, we actually ‘roomied’ up again until he met Libby.”

“So he saved you,” Billboard stated.

“He did. My brother was strong, and got us both out of the hell we lived in. He’s a big guy. He’d gained his height and weight at eighteen, and that’s when he decided he was through putting up with my parents’ shit and my grandmother’s insanity. He basically gave them an ultimatum. We’d both be allowed to move out, or he’d make sure the cops knew about their drug habits, and the fucked-up situation at my grandmother’s.”

“And they backed off,” Billboard stated with satisfaction.

“They did. They’re useless cowards, all three of them. And for once, that worked in our favor.”

“Remind me to thank your brother. I have a feeling he and I are going to get along just fine.”

O’Shea raised a brow, some of her impishness returning.

“Oh? You expect to meet my brother?” she asked cheekily.

Billboard met her humor with another kiss to her brow, this time lingering on her soft skin, inhaling her lemony scent. He was hoping it wouldn’t be too long before Mizzay sprung them. Then he’d worship O’Shea’s entire body until she forgot all about being locked away. But in the meantime…

It was time to man-up.

“I don’t suppose, during all that’s happened tonight, you remember me calling you ‘mine’?” he probed.

“I might recall that,” she smirked, cuddling as close to him as the bars would allow.

“And…you don’t mind?” She was so damned independent; his biggest worry had been wondering how she’d take that; not just his possessiveness which they’d touched on previously, but his need to label her as his. Especially now that Billboard knew where her self-determination came from, he was afraid of blowing it.

“No,” she returned smugly. “I don’t mind at all. But,” she tapped her bottom lip teasingly, “I also remember a whole lot of ‘sweetheart’ and ‘honey’ stuff coming out of your mouth.” She reached through the bars, grabbed his chin, and gave it a tug. “Now that shit’s gotta stop.”

She beamed up at him and added an amendment. “At least when we’re out in public.”

She placed her lips to the chin she’d just yanked and gave it a loud smack.

Billboard laughed. “I think I can live with that.”

Thank God. His woman was back.