Breaking Rules

* * *

The jetliner soars into the dawn, nearing Paris. The sky around the plane throbs as pink and red as a beating heart, flayed open.

Beside me in the huge first-class seats, Georgie is a curving lump under a blanket, breathing softly in her sleep. She finally convinced me to recline the seat into a bed and lie down a couple hours ago so I might sleep. Lying awake is worse than sitting up and watching the television.

Maybe when we get there, Rae will have so much stuff planned so that I’ll be too busy to think. Maybe the French customs guy will be so inefficient and suave that he won’t even notice that the last visa and stamp in my passport was seven years ago in China and won’t ask me about it.

My right leg twitches under the blanket, a jump from my shredded nerves.

Beijing was such a long time ago.

Running away to Paris is buying time, but you can’t ever really buy time.

I glance at the text from Theo again, stored in my phone, and try to puzzle it out, but it’s as cryptic as before, which is to say that it’s not cryptic at all.

It’s not a puzzle. There’s nothing unclear about it. I’m just wishing some other meaning on it, refusing to understand.

But everyone knows what goodbye means.

* * *

Monday morning.

Theo rinsed his jaw and chin, washing away the excess shavings that he had trimmed off his short beard. His haggard reflection in the mirror mocked him, displaying all the soul-level conflict he’d been fighting the past week, if he had a soul. In the mirror behind him, the Italian-toned bathroom spread out too big for one man, the glassed-in shower and raised tub seeming like too many bathing facilities. The double sink was even one too many.

Lizzy was due to arrive at Theo’s house in a few hours.

Two days.

Under his golden-brown beard, gray tinged his skin from the repeated hangovers after drinking Mannix under the table to keep him away from Lizzy. The darkness under his eyes was from the stress of not beating the shit out Mannix for utilizing her for his sadistic rituals, and for touching her at all, and for even looking at her. Keeping a good-natured smile on his face the last week had taken every ounce of trial-honed acting skills Theo had ever had.

Hitting the gym in the morning to work over the heavy bag had burned off the testosterone enough that he could work and be civilized but had also acclimated him to thinking about punching Mannix in the face and breaking the crap out of that facemask-protected nose of his.

Two days. He would give her two days, until Wednesday.

Theo stared himself in his light brown eyes as his face dripped in the sink. On his right shoulder, the red and blue tattoo mocked him.

Lizzy was coming to Theo’s house today because Mannix was going out of town on a long-planned junket, because Mannix had to provide a substitute Dom for her in their sick total power exchange relationship.

Theo would wait two days to see a change in Lizzy—a reincarnation of the bright, beautiful, sunny little Lizzy with the filthy sense of humor who hopped when she was happy,—to convince himself that she was beginning to recover. If she admitted doubts about Mannix, he would keep to his plan.

Theo could adhere to his precious ethics for two more days.

Beginning Wednesday, he would do anything, anything to convince her to leave Mannix. Just like with a probably guilty defendant in an interview room, Theo would promise anything to get a confession and absolutely anything if it would save innocent lives beyond the prison’s walls.

Lizzy was an innocent, and he would save her.

He would call in Georgie and stage an intervention.

He would set Lizzy up in her own house if she needed a place to live.

If all else failed, he would seduce her, but if he broke both their hearts, he might send her right back into Mannix’s arms, and Mannix’s ropes, and Mannix’s whips.

Theo wasn’t sure what shape he would be in, either.

Wednesday.