- Chapter Forty -

Her Mouth

Pavement a twisting shale serpent spanning miles in either direction, the dusted Phantom Drophead Coupé sped through deary countryside that hadn't changed in over an hour. Longer even, if pit stops were taken into account.

Sunflower stalks pointed the way along the guard rails, petals yellow as a solar flare seen through an antique sepia filter. Floofs of cottonwood danced through the sultry summer air, flatlands and fields sweeping the terrain like a motionless sea of jade and emerald. Landscape throwing out the occasional gust of wind that picked up tawny-white sands and carried them across the vast expanse of green, the only animal to be seen was some variation of cattle. Boring as boring could get. All the same, with the tinted windows rolled down just a crack to let in some fresh air, even the slightest change was welcome after hours of being couped up in the car with only his aide for company.

Atmospheric music was being played softly in the background - currently Placebo's Post Blue - through the opaque partition. Heady beat littering the few fleeting miliseconds of dead space between the pair, regretfully it was turned down so low that it was all but drowned out by business jargon otherwise. It wasn't his favorite song by any means, but that was the downside to the shuffle feature.

"Rafe?" Calling his name out a touch more shortly than was called for, the woman would have done the classic hands-to-hips pose if she hadn't been balancing all their work on her lap. "Are you still listening? This is really important."

If it was that important, it would have come up before one of the other seventy-one items on the agenda, the businessman thought to himself with a grumpy glance at his watch.

Mind kneading together the scream the woman had used while trapped under collapsed rubble and the terrible shriek emitted when told she'd have to fly some place, Rafe entertained the notion of throwing the woman out of the moving vehicle. She'd jumped once before and had survived, but the key difference was that the car had basically been in park, not doing what he guesstimated to be at least 70 mph.

Ugly as the press could have been, the reality would have been far worse: if he were to lose her now, he'd be stuck with their shared offspring permanently. Sweet as the temporary freedom from all the jabber would be, the reward didn't outweigh the consequences. Although if she kept at this same mechanical pace, he might just change his mind.

Wavering her on, instead of listen the multi-billionaire let his mind wander to what progress might have been made in his absence. Samuel had sounded so confident in his new theory that one couldn't help but to be hopeful.

"-Belgium office is still bitter about the whole affair." Unaware that she had lost her boss, Bai steam-rolled ahead, "Furthermore, the latest reports indicate that several of the lower-level workers are starting to rumble about a strike. Greed is all it is, but thanks to the nature of the front, we have to suffer the headache of unions." Sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose, just above her glasses, "The really frustrating part is that even though we're at the head of the table, this is a middle-management problem and needs to be sorted in-house."

Blah, blah, blah, something about a strike. His family might have been generous to the international operations and owned them in spirit and name, but it sounded to him like a problem someone else needed to handle, someone that actually had to live with these troublemakers. "Just have Michel deal with it."

Michel. Just hearing the name was enough to sour her mood. "Ha, he's incompetent on a good day! But..." Trailing off purposefully, if Rafe had been paying better attention he would have realized sooner that something was weighing on her mind. "My proposal was to speak directly to those that are being problematic, offer them a generous bonus in addition to the promise to talk about staff working conditions. Being stubborn for the sake of it, Michel insists that silence is the best option for now. Obviously nipping the problem in the bud would be best, but no, thanks to that disaster in Brussels, he won't hear a word I say! Even when I told him in as polite a manner as I could that what happens here could be detrimental to the outcome of our contract."

Only half-listening by then, the sole reason he could give her that much was because she made it impossible to focus. When it wasn't being done intentionally, there was just something in her voice, a kind of frequency that he couldn't block out no matter how hard he tried. Funny how thin the line between love and hate could be. Originally, being stuck in the car with Bai had its advantages, but being trapped and forced to talk about business for the last four hours had him wondering why he'd ever agreed to this form of travel in the first place.

"And was that over the phone or in person? Michel is a notorious-"

Upset transparent in every octave and written plain across her face, Bai didn't set the briefcase full of files on the floor so much as throw it, "Oh, I know exactly what that old pervert is! But please, do tell me what you've only heard! " Genuinely distressed by the memory and aching for support, as the woman looked her partner in the eye, she twisted around in the seat and clasped his leg, "You know my thresholds better than I do, but when he just asked me to..." Shivering, the woman broke off.

"To what?" Sympathy was a word lacking in Rafe Adler's vocabulary, among a few others, but jealousy and ownership were two concepts he understood very very well. Technically he knew that he couldn't claim Bai the same way he could any of the marvelous material belongings in his home, however that hadn't prevented the millionaire from viewing the woman as being his and his alone.

Words catching in her throat, it crossed the businesswoman's mind that she had said too much. Michel was an extreme, but far from an exception to what she encountered in her work. Maybe at this point she had earned enough slack to complain to the one person with the clout to do something about the situation, yet did she really want to go crying to Rafe? Bai had endured far worse than the likes of this one asshole, and she knew that there would only be more.

Now that she had said this much, there was no taking the words back. Oh well, little losses were acceptable in the grand scheme of things. "...Pretty much what the rumors say. I'd tell you forget it, but we both know that you won't." Honestly it almost made the woman swoon that she had someone so willing to tear apart a man for her. "I suppose I just assumed I was better than that." A smirk tugged at the corner of her deep raspberry smile, and her lashes fluttered just a little more than they would have naturally. "Untouchable."

More to the story, saying the rest out loud would have only served to anger the both of them.

For her first meeting with Michel, she had worn the dress Rafe had picked out for her; going a step above, she'd even had her hair done and donned some of her nicest jewels. Treasured as each piece in the private collection was, it wasn't often that the business woman adorned her person for the rest of the world to see. In hindsight, all that effort had probably sent the wrong message, but it was how these affairs went.

What didn't often happen was a twenty minute wait at the gate as his people checked her clearance - everyone knew who Bai was, either by reputation or by by sight, but she was known. Adding insult to injury, after an excruciating dinner of rebuffed attempts and unsolicited innuendos, her host had lost all semblance of grace and pawed at her as if she herself were an offer! Those days were long gone, and frankly the miserable old bastard was lucky all he suffered was a dinner fork through his thigh.

"Bai..." Unsure what precisely to say, the fortunate hunter lowered some of the walls between them and offered what comfort he could. Lips pressing into the side of her skull almost sweetly, he made an unspoken promise that this situation would be dealt with one way or another. If it fell on him, Michel would truly know what it was to be sorry.

Always a fine line to have such a beautiful woman making deals in his name, the Adler approach was to have the speaker cleaned up and dressed to the nines. Deeply possessive over the conquests that meant something, the problem Rafe encountered was that he never knew how often she had allowed it to go as far as all of that. On three separate occasions he had hired an actor to test her loyalties, but to her credit the woman had been prepared enough to know the faces and names of each of his business associates. On his fourth and most recent attempt, despite the great lengths he'd gone through to sell the lie, his shrewd associate not only saw through the charade but alway reminded him why she had been selected in the first place.

Pissed enough to rain fire and brimstone from the heavens when she saw her lover next, there was no denying that she was good.

Shocked (and secretly pleased) as she may have been at the show of affection, the fire that had been lit wasn't going to go to waste. "Shall I tell you how the subsequent meetings went, or would your rather keep what I so masterfully do a mystery?" It was a rhetorical question, because she gave no breathing room for him to even consider it, "I straightened that out with some rather fine silverware. He'd learned his lesson about what he said to me from that point on, and for a minute I actually thought all would be well."

And then Brussels happened.

"Michel would be on my shortlist for replacement, were he not a distant cousin on your maternal grandfather's side."

Honestly Rafe had long since given up questioning how she could possibly remember so much at once. "So what if he's a distant relative? Deal with him if he's so disruptive to your work." What was this, her first day on the job? Bai knew better than to come crying to him about problems she was perfectly capable of handling herself. "Kill him and find a suitable replacement to take his place, like you did with Abraham." Abraham wasn't family that he was aware of, but so far as Rafe was concerned, if anyone touched what was rightfully his, it was fair game.

"I... do have someone in mind, actually." Bitting her lip, the woman came clean about what was really on her mind, "I don't know, it's just that now that we have Daniella, cleaning up the family tree actually feels like it matters."

Wait a minute, not realizing the exact moment she'd gotten him fully engaged in the conversation, it finally clicked in that Bai had been building up to something this the entire time. Clever girl.

"That first time, I must confess that I was honestly scared you would hate me for pulling the trigger. But when the bullet left the gun, all of that went away, and everything was in the moment in a way I've never experienced since." Recalling an event neither ever referenced, she forgot the present and was once more transported to the past, "It felt so good, so freeing! Part of me knew it was wrong, but with you there... God," purring in the back of her throat at the memory, she nuzzled closer to Rafe, bringing his arms around her waist in the process, "it felt so good! When I close my eyes I can still remember the look on his face when you stepped out and took my hand. The surprise that slowly shifted to understanding, the regret and resignation that came just before the light faded in his eyes. Do you remember?"

As a matter of fact, he did. That night had never been spoken of since, but it was so clearly etched into his mind that it might as well have just happened. It was in the garden, the greenhouse in the center of mother's maze garden to be exact, the late summer breeze rolling through before the rains came. Unbidden, Rafe could even still hear the crickets chirping from unseen vantage points, smell the wild roses that crept along the glass walls. He always hated that place, because it seemed more important than he had.

Bai had been ordered to report in one last time, a death sentence for betraying her masters, but she'd done favorably enough that it was to be a dignified affair. Personally Rafe would have just dealt with her treasonous acts on the spot, however he was the reason that she had gone rogue, and everyone knew it. According to his mother's journals, she suspected that there was more to the story than anyone knew, that her own husband was going to spare the hired gun if she confessed to her folly and took his unspecified deal. As mother wasn't around to clarify her meaning, Rafe assumed that his mother thought father had an eye for the younger woman; it certainly wouldn't have been the first time his eye had wandered, but if that was the truth it was a one-sided love affair.

A mere bodyguard no more, Bai was his, and no one else's.

Then she went and ruined that by having a baby. Even now Rafe was less than fond of the idea that he had to share the woman, but he supposed that it was inevitable.

Growing cold for just a moment, almost as if their minds had arrived at the same place at the same exact moment, she struggled to shake the thought away. Again, that was a natural reaction to bringing up that unspoken period of their lives. Obviously the woman mourned for what had been lost along the way, would always mourn it, however he had closed it off from his mind. Yes, at the time there had been some difficulty for the man in accepting what had happened, but the reality was that playing house just wasn't in the cards. Go figure.

Swallowing the pill early on that theirs would never be a conventional romance, Bai had almost been destroyed by the loss, and as he'd recently discovered, she carried it to this day. Cocaine was the real villain in the story, the main culprit behind the scenes, yet there had been a moment she had had unfairly accused him and his indifference. Granted it was something he'd never told her before that fight, but he had just as affected as she had been. Everything could have been set right, could have been done better in the still-smoldering ashes of his own father.

Just as he was ready to push her away from the resentment, the dark-haired beauty brought herself closer, breathing him in as she curled against his chest. "You know how that night ended, but have I ever told you how it began?" Lost to the stars that had been shining in the sky, the woman resumed with a dreamy sigh, "We'd just come back from that music festival. You were so wasted I was scared that I would get drunk just from kissing you. But after you dealt with that bastard just for asking me for my number, I didn't care. I knew in that moment that I would have you forever."

Forever was a bit of a stretch, considering that that had only been their first date. Their first real date.

"When I saw the summons waiting for me, I was terrified that there would be a gun pointed to the back of my head at any moment. Considering how many times I'd done that to someone else, it only seemed fitting that the shoe would be on the other foot, but it never happened." Bai removed her glasses then, and for a moment Rafe thought that she was going to cry. Instead she simply set them aside she could lay her head against his shoulder. "Your parents had both warned me about pursuing something with you, your father with threats and your mother with a rather convincing show of concern. She told me that you would just throw me aside, that it would be suicidal to stay by your side. Obviously I didn't listen, but when I saw that letter waiting for me, I thought that maybe my time had come."

Aware of the game they had been playing, together she and Rafe had planned several different contingency plans, however once it became real, the fear began to set in. And that was when it had just been the two of them. "I knew that no matter how it ended, those last few days alone had made it all worth it. But still, I was terrified, all the way up until I saw your old man sitting there. There were no guards, no guns. There was nothing but him, a pruning set, and two cups of tea. He'd meant to poison me, just as I'd supposedly poisoned you." As if Rafe ever needed anyone's help.

That certainly explained the shattered tea set he'd discovered by the old man. "He should have just shot you."

Nodding slowly against the fabric of his dress shirt, there was no hiding that even after getting that confession out of her, it was still a painful topic. Even now that she had finally given birth to a healthy daughter. Lacing her arm through his and squeezing his hand, Bai brought her legs up to rest across the span of vacant seat behind her, "That's what I said to him when I got there. I told him I would die for you if I had to, but it would always be with a fight. He told me he wasn't going to kill me, not when I was carrying the future of his family. That was when he offered me the tea."

Indifferent and emotionally unattached to the subsequent string of unsuccessful births his partner had endured, hearing that his father wanted to put an end to the one pregnancy that meant anything to him made Rafe hate the other man that much more. Younger and so much more innocent to the world, that would have been his son! The man he was today knew that the child could have been everything to the boy he still had been at the time, could have altered everything as it was now. Maybe it had been for the best that the boy hadn't been brought into the world, but it wasn't for that miserable old bastard to decide!

Feeling the surge of raw, seething hate consuming the billionaire just from the way he'd began to shake, she held the man close to her own heart, shifting their positions from that of protector to the protected. His father was dead, yet somehow still so capable of reducing an otherwise wonderful man to this... She loathed the bastard for that. One to hold even the most nonsensical of grudges, for Bai the absolute worst offense was hurting her family.

Cheek poised so perfectly for his hand to cup, as his hand caressed the tender side of her face, Rafe thought better of it. A little lower and he easily could have choked the life out of her, but there was no doubt that she would enjoy that too much. No, prickling with the ghostly sting of rejection the man needed to lash out, to make his companion feel even a fraction of what he felt. Not a stranger to suffering herself, there was no earthly way it could compare to what he knew.

Thrusting her away would have been a good start. Only...

One of the rare few to delight in his combustible wrath, in truth there was always a small part that was scared that he'd push her too far one day. So far that day hadn't come, but it was just a matter of time.

Fallible, that same lost part longed to caution the woman. It wanted to keep her close until they were nothing more than dust, to shelter her from what he himself was responsible for throwing her into. Ideally that half could honor the promises he made to Bai, the ones he'd sincerely meant but had been unable to carry through with. Maybe if that part had ever won through, he could be half the father his daughter thought he was.

Crushed by harsh words and even sterner actions, Rafe wasn't able to reach out to that part of himself any more, not really, although he could still sometimes see it as if in a mirror.

"They're dead, and sooner or later my own father will join them." The woman spoke little of her father, and even less of her mother. In fact, the only thing Rafe really knew was her name had been Da. "You'll find Avery's treasure any day now, and then there will be no one left that can deny what I see every time I look at you." He loved what she did for his confidence (not that his ego needed the boost). "No one."

Nathan Drake could. Even if the evidence was staring him right in the face, the legend would still somehow find a way, just to spite him.

Definitely reading his mind this time, Bai sneered, "Drake's weak. He quit the search after a matter of weeks, and now reports indicate that he's settled down. You have a family too, and that hasn't stopped you!" Stating the facts, as she thought about it the word caught in her mouth. Family. "...Rafe?" Hesitating, she suddenly seemed diminished somehow, "Do you hate me for having Daniella?" It was a question she felt on the tip of her tongue often, yet she'd never been able to put it into words before now, "I know she was never a part of your plan, but has having her in your life really been so awful?"

In the earliest months of the pregnancy, Rafe had been surprised by each day nature hadn't taken its course, and while he hadn't taken any measures to hasten what he figured to be inevitable, there was a part of him that had almost been rooting for the worst. Bai would be insufferable for a time, and he himself would likely have to take off days at a time to keep his support stable. Things would keep, although the sooner it happened the better off the hunt would be.

Except the girl hadn't self-terminated like so many of the others. Doctors told the mother-to-be that there would be great risk, that even if the baby was born the odds would be stacked against her surviving past a certain point. As she did every time, Bai made every possible attempt to get the father involved, even knowing that she had been wasting her energy. Even if it meant her own death, it was obvious that the woman would do everything in her power to have their little one. By some fluke, against all odds it paid off.

Daniella was a fighter, even when things seemed their bleakest.

Illness knocked on the door in dozens of different guises, and each time had been thwarted; mostly it had been her mother's quick acting and his pocket book, but the girl couldn't be discredited in the rocky road to recovery. An infant at the time, she had survived the frigid and crushing cold of Scottish storms when even grown men had balked. As she aged, the girl had shown promise, a drive not unlike her mother's to do everything and anything that would serve in his own interest.

No, he couldn't honestly say that he hated the accident now, although he still hadn't fully embraced it yet either. "Daniella's here to stay, so that doesn't matter anymore." Tone brokering no room for argument, the billionaire erroneously thought that this was going to be the end of that discussion, not the opening she had been angling for the entire time.

Holding tight to the only man she would ever fully love in complete privacy, for a heart-stopping second he was scared that this was her way of saying it was happening again, "Do you see now why we need to be better for Daniella? If she sees it's okay to just go around killing her family, what's to say that she won't come after us one day?"

Apparently Bai really had lost her mind, because that was never going to happen. "Bai, breathe. Daniella isn't going to come after us. We both know she would never dream of doing anything that would harm me, and killing you wouldn't earn her any favors."

Just the very thing she needed to hear to assuage some of the notions worrying at her nerves, the woman nodded, "Of course you're right. I guess I'm just concerned about how hard she's been working herself lately... The night before we left, she actually made herself practice her routine until she passed out on the floor of her room..." From the sounds of it, that was becoming more and more common. "What if she remembers this all wrong and thinks that I was the one that made her do it? What if she makes herself hate me enough to cross you just this once?"

Utterly ridiculous on a number of levels, was the fearless Bai truly that scared of karma that she paled before a possible future where their little girl actually loathed her enough to seek retribution? Daniella's grandparents were horrible people that earned their own fates, but they were a hardship the girl would never have to know. As her parents, the girl would never understand half of what they endured, so there was no need to even think for a moment that the idea would occur to the girl.

In fact it was so outlandish and specific a fear that the icy eyed man had to ponder if this wasn't the bespectacled woman making a roundabout point about his recent parenting choices.

Once Bai had drawn out a conversation so long that an old crone had died during the course. Stalling a tactic the black widow knew well, his money was on the woman manipulating the conversation to this point just so she could make him feel guilty about sending a stand-in to watch Daniella's recital in his stead. Really the woman shouldn't have been surprised that he couldn't be bothered to attend a meaningless dance when the majority of her job was doing exactly that. Hypocrisy, thy name was Bai.

Manipulative as the woman could be, there was likely a deeper reason attached to the tail-end, such as annoyance of his tepid response to the girl's heartfelt performance. Mom the villain nine times out of ten, she was the one that gave the bitter dosage of reality while he was free to step in and play the encouraging hero. Truth one thing, delicacy was a subtly he hardly ever bothered with, even when it concerned the young child they shared.

Using the exact words "not your best work" on the ill-fated debut, the tiny tot had been inspired to work that much harder. All in the name of her daddy, Daniella had worked her little self to the brink of exhaustion on more than one occasion, but he hadn't seen a problem with the show of initiative.

Who knew, Daniella might have even earned hearing that he was proud of her for the effort. Then she had run herself so ragged that she'd collapsed half-way through the big number and had had to be taken to the hospital for observation. Playing her role even to the public eye, Bai had shouldered the blame; unbeknownst to the judgmental trophy wives in the group, it had not been silently. Nor had the anger subsided, it seemed.

"I don't know what more you want from me." All but shrugging the clinging silhouette off, Rafe's mind was abuzz with more harmful fates that involved more than a simple shove. "I already told her that not everyone can be good at everything they do. I gave her my permission to quit. Need I remind you who wanted her in that class in the first place? There's no merit in ballet."

For as much as Bai loved him, in moments like these she could just skin him alive, "I'm sorry there are only so many options for girls at her age! I suppose this means I need to add alternative toddler classes to the docket! Get our top men on the job, stat!" Taking a deep breath, anger only got so much accomplished when they were both right. "I know you want to make an upstanding figure that will do you proud, but this would have been good for her in other ways. It would have taught her balance and form, perfection if you'd have let her stick with it, follow-through, on that note! Social skills, I mean I could go on." Silence could be an effect tool too, but the blood was pumping too hard for that now. "I really do love that you're so adamant about how she gets shaped in something worthwhile and isn't just another ditz with a plastic card, much like all these others, but she needs some normalcy too! Being carted all around the world, never taking root, it can't be healthy." For all they knew, it could have led to her settling, or worse, or taking up with some disreputable trash in the distant future!

"You should have thought of that before." True, those were some valid points she had made, but logic had little place when things turned to red.

Eyes narrowing to nothing more than twin slits and nostrils flaring, everything about the woman screamed danger, "Before what, exactly?"

Just as dangerous a creature when given even half a chance, Rafe knew the exact words to use to grind the ax in for the kill. Staring her down now, her body suddenly taut and moving subconsciously into a more aggressive stance, the wrong word could have sent her over the edge and on the assault. It would have been as easy as a puppet master pulling the strings, and he had all the power to quell the situation or to turn it into a bona fide quarrel.

Reveling in these moments more than any other spent in her company (largely due to how the encounters ended), all he had to do was use the same lust that doubled as a weapon.

"Before you gave me the green light to fuck you."