“Ha!” She grinds her hips up into Rico’s hands, her eyes closing completely now. “You’re such a fucking pussy, Rebel. Don’t go shy on me now.”
The irony of that statement isn’t lost on me. I’m hardly shy. I’m sitting here, conducting a conversation with her about murdering a member of a federal agency while she gets finger fucked by her bodyguard. “I’ll give you one day to think on it,” she says. “And if your answer’s no then you can either…agree to ship,”—she’s growing breathless now—“my fucking drugs, or you can handle your problems on your own. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“In the meantime, there’s one more…thing that I want from you.”
“Which is?”
She opens her eyes, lazily glancing from me to Carnie. “Him. I want him to come assist Rico over here.”
Carnie’s cheeks flush. Of all the Widow Makers, he’s the most highly sexed, most fucking reckless when it comes to women. He has a different woman stumbling out of his room every single goddamn morning, and yet right now it looks like Maria Rosa has caught him off guard. “You want me to…you want me to fuck you?” he asks.
“I want you to stick you dick inside my mouth while Rico fucks me,” she informs him. “Now.”
Carnie looks to me, as though I’ll be able to clarify whether this is some kind of trick or not. I simply shrug. “Better give the woman what she wants.” I hold back from pointing out there’s a strong chance she’ll bite his cock off. Carnie’s a reasonably intelligent guy. He should be able to figure out the odds of something really fucking bad happening all by himself. He shrugs back at me, breaking into grin. “This is one royally fucked-up situation,” he says under his breath, but that doesn’t stop him from getting to his feet.
The next fifteen minutes are interesting, to say the least. Carnie pulls his dick out—already hard, no surprises there—and Maria Rosa bends over, hitching up her tight red dress. Rico slides himself inside her, pulling the top of her dress down so he can palm her tits. She’s practically naked, her long, toned body on show apart from the small section of her stomach that’s obscured by her bunched-up dress. Just like she said she would, she blows Carnie while she lets Rico screw her.
Most people would find this situation very graphic. Confronting even. But I know this woman. Her head is perhaps the most twisted place on the face of the entire planet. Because while she’s bent over, letting two people penetrate her body, letting them screw her, she’s screwing with me. She didn’t ask to suck my dick. She wants me to watch. The whole time she’s getting reamed she’s staring at me—she doesn’t look away once.
So I just sit there and watch. This is my life.
Fucked-up shit like this happens to me all the time.
ALEXIS
I end up sleeping most of the day. Maybe it’s because I feel kind of safe with Cade, but I let my guard down. I can’t help it. It’s been so long since I’ve rested. Even when I have dozed, it hasn’t been proper sleep. It’s been like dipping my big toe into a vast and deep lake, too afraid to submerge myself for fear of drowning. Or in my case, being raped. So I pass out in the car and I sleep the sleep of the dead, barely waking properly to eat or stumble zombie-like to the bathroom when we stop.
All thoughts of escape fly out of the window.
Through the mugginess clouding my head, I glimpse at the clock on the dash at some point in the afternoon to find that it’s coming up on four p.m. I think that’s when I realize something’s not quite right. Or it might be later, when I wake to darkness out of the passenger window, and country music playing low on the radio.
I manage four words before I slip into unconsciousness again. “Drugged me, you fucker.” The words bleed into one another, barely audible.
I hear Cade laughing just fine, though. “Sorry, sweetheart. Easier this way all round, I’m afraid.”
I come to briefly when I’m being carried somewhere, carried in the dark. The sound of a motorcycle roaring to life, and voices, talking voices filter in and out as I sway with the motion of someone’s gait. And then nothing.
My head feels like it’s splitting apart when I wake next. Morning. It must be morning. Bright light blares through a set of thin voile curtains above…above the bed I’m sprawled out across. “What the…?” I’m not wearing the hideous, torn dress anymore. I’m wearing an oversized black T-shirt that says It Isn’t Going To Suck Itself with an arrow pointing downward. Clearly not something meant to be worn by a woman. So clichéd.
I’m already buzzing with anger as I throw my legs over the side of the bed. That anger swiftly makes way for panic as I realize I’m going to throw up. “Oh, no. Oh, no. No, no, no, no.” I get to my feet, the room pitching violently like a ship on rough seas. I don’t know where the hell I am. I don’t know where the damn bathroom is. I don’t have time to look for it, either. I scramble frantically, searching until I find something appropriate, and then I collapse onto my knees, puking up my guts.
The moment is brief but unpleasant. My body is trembling by the time I’m done. I look down at what I’m clutching in my hands, and my stomach drops all over again. A motorcycle helmet. I just threw up in a full-face motorcycle helmet. Great. Why the hell couldn’t it have been a trashcan?
I get up, holding the damn thing in both hands, cringing when I pluck up the courage to check out how bad it is. Because it’s bad. Really bad. The drugged food that Cade plied me with yesterday has mostly been digested, but what remained in my stomach is now seeping into the foam cushioning of what looks like a really expensive piece of equipment.
“Fuck.” I look around, properly taking in my surroundings for the first time. The place isn’t that big: a timber-built cabin made up of two rooms, the first and largest being a bedroom/living area. The second is a modern bathroom, complete with wet area and an overhead shower, tiled in slate. Very manly. I dump the helmet into the sink and turn on the tap, wincing as the water starts to fill inside it. Back in the main area, I try to figure out where the hell I am.
The huge bed I just slept in resides in the corner. A considerably large leather sofa, soft and cracked with age, divides the space into two. On the far side of the room, a monstrous flat screen television has been bolted to the wall. Bookcases, shelves, a desk with a stool shoved underneath it—the place is full of books and pictures and stacks of magazines. Odd bits and pieces dot the cabin. A snow globe—Welcome to Chicago!—sits next to a jumbled sheaf of papers, the skyline of the city in miniature inside, the roofs of the buildings already painted white. A photograph of a slim, beautiful woman with crystal clear blue eyes and a mass of almost-black hair butts up against a coffee maker on the narrow desk underneath the window. The woman in the picture is smiling, flashing teeth as she looks over her shoulder at whoever was taking the image. You can tell she’s laughing from the way her mouth is slightly open, her head tilted back. She looks familiar, for some reason. I touch my fingers lightly to the glass of the frame, feeling a bizarre sense of déjà vu.
When I look out of the window, there’s nothing but scrubby plant life, orange dirt and shale-like rocks for as far as the eye can see. In the distance, the ridgeline of a mountain range spears up out of the flat plains, made hazy and blue by the miles between us. The landscape is like nothing I’ve seen before in the flesh—not a place I’ve ever visited before. Not that I can remember. I’m about to try the handle on the door to the left of the window, ready to see if I am well and truly trapped here or not, when I hear the sound of splashing water.