Page 62 of Mending Me
“I love you, Bailey Brown. Eres mia para siempre?2.”
“I love you, too, Hank Martínez.”
1 You son of a bitch
2 You’re my forever (You’re mine forever)
35
HANK
My dad never came back around after our fight at my place. The next day when I went to work, I told Kolbi how he’d shown up and about our fight and he immediately sent someone over to place cameras outside my apartment. I told him he was overreacting and he told me to shut the hell up and let him do his job. When Kolbi set his mind to something, you couldn’t talk him out of it. Now I have a semi-state of the art security system at an apartment where I’m pretty sure my downstairs neighbors are growing weed.
Work kept me busy as many of the wealthy elites of the city were having end-of-summer parties and benefits, raising money for their favorite charities and needing security to make sure things stayed kosher. With the uptick in music festivals and galas, there were a high number of celebrity clients who hired us to be their backup security while they visited the city.
Bailey and I fell into a new routine together as September rolled into October. I would head to her place after work and pick her up on my bike. Then, we would ride back to my place, cook dinner, spend the evening together and go to the gym thenext morning. A few days a week we would lift together which I always loved because I got to make it very apparent to every man in the building that she was mine. There are few things I love more than getting to be her spotter and watch as her smooth, tight leggings stretched across her toned legs and ass. Once we were done, we would get cleaned up at the gym and I would drop her off at home before heading into the office for the day. She would tell me about the side gigs she picked up on the weekends and how she was saving whatever money she could to start her own event planning business one day. My girl had ambition. If anyone could do it, it would be her.
“Hank.” Kolbi’s deep voice cut through the almost silent office space and pulled me from my thoughts. “I need to see you, please.” He had a serious look to him and the instincts I had honed while in the service told me something was wrong. I closed my laptop and stood from my desk before heading towards the two glass doors that led into his office.
He was sitting at his desk with his hands in his lap and rubbing the backs of them with his thumbs. Knowing the guy since he was nine years old, I could tell that he was uneasy.
“Why are you doing that?” I pressed, flicking my chin towards his hands. He looked down and immediately stopped when he noticed he was giving himself away.
“Sit down, brother,” he sighed with a deep breath. I took a seat in one of the overstuffed chairs and stared back at my friend.
“Kolb…what’s going on?”
“We found something,” he started.
“Something?”
“From the night Bailey was attacked.” I sat up straight as if a metal rod had been implanted into my spine. Hearing her name and the word ‘attacked’ in the same sentence always made me sick to my stomach. It’d been nearly three months since I askedhim to look into her attack and part of me had given up hope that we would find anything.
“Let me see it,” I urged, standing up to move towards his computer.
“I don’t know if you should, brother, it’s not easy to watch. It wasn’t easy for me to watch and I’m not bringing the girl home with me every night.”
“Kolbi, please. I need to know if this is going to help her or not. Just let me see what you found.” He studied me for a beat, his lips pressing together in a tight line. I wasn’t sure what he’d found or the severity of it. Whatever it was, I was going to see it whether he liked it or not. I would tackle him from his chair and steal the computer off of his desk if I had to.
He typed on his laptop for a moment then turned the monitor towards me so I could see it. “It took some digging but one of our techs pulled this from a red light camera from the corner where the event hall she worked at sits. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them who they were looking for, just that they needed to search the cameras in that area from that night and send me anything they found.” His hand hovered over the play button and he looked at me, “You sure you want to see this?”
“I have to see this. This is my girl. I need to see if this is going to be something that will help her move on from this.”
He sighed deeply again, “If you’re sure.”
He pressed play on a grainy video that looks like it was pulled from an old, early 2000’s video camera. We watched as the timestamp rolled from 11:00 p.m., the seconds passing and the numbers changing as they did. After fifteen seconds or so, I could see a blonde woman exit the building holding two trash bags full of garbage and bounce down the front steps wearing a black dress and flats. Her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck into a ponytail and when she turned the corner down the alleyway, my breath caught in my throat.
Bailey.
Not long after she disappeared into the shadows, a figure wearing all black followed her into the alleyway. They were walking with their hood up so you couldn’t see their face but the figure had the same build and size of a man. The seconds clicked by and turned into minutes. Kolbi turned the playback speed up and I watched as almost twenty minutes passed. As the video sped by, my brain went to Bailey. What she went through during those twenty minutes. What she was still carrying with her now because of them. He slowed the video down just as the figure who had followed her into the alleyway walked out again, hiking his pants up as he looked both ways down the empty street. He turned and walked away as if he had done nothing wrong. My eyes stayed locked on the screen as a few more minutes went by. I looked at my friend, wondering why he wasn’t stopping the video. Then, his eyes closed and he swallowed hard just as she came out of the alleyway, stumbling and looking around for anyone who might be there to help. I watched as she fell to her knees on the empty sidewalk, held her head in her hands for a few moments, then stood up again and walked down the street out of frame.
I felt sick. More than that, I felt angry and enraged. Seeing her attacker just walk away as if she was nothing made me want to put my fist through a wall. I started to pace the office in an attempt to control the burning rage I felt in my core. Kolbi sat at his desk and waited for me to speak first. My heart sank for my girl, mi hermosa?1. As irrational as I knew it was, I was angry at myself for not being there to keep her safe. We didn’t even know each other then but my need to protect her was so strong that I wish I could have gone back in time to save her. I had reached the opposite side of the office when something I’d seen from the video struck me.
“Go back to when that fucking bastard walked out of the alleyway,” my head whipped back to Kolbi as I barked out the command.
“Rewinding now.” I hurried back towards his desk and exhaled deeply as the video replayed Bailey stumbling out of the alleyway and falling to the ground. Seeing her like that broke my heart and made me want to scream all at the same time.
“Stop, right there.” I pressed my index finger to the screen as he paused the video. It was grainy but with some cleaning up, the guy's face would be clear as day. We got him. “Why did the police not think to pull this video?” I asked, looking over at him.
