Deliver (9 page)

“Nah.” He threw himself on the bed, naked from the waist down. His erection hadn’t lost interest. It stood tall and unabashed between the flex of his thighs as he reclined on one elbow and watched her with his unnatural patience.

His interest in his collection, however, didn’t appear to be sexual. None of his plastic friends were anatomically correct nor did they look well-loved. Much the opposite, in fact. A hairless mannequin slumped in the corner of the room, grime coating its nippleless coned breasts from years of inattention. One arm lay beside it, unattached. Its face was punched away, exposing the dark cavern of its head.

Above him, another mannequin hung from something like a meat hook jutting out of the wall. Bent at the waist, its arms and head lolled forward as if reaching for the bed, the far-away gaze on its face frighteningly reminiscent of young Pat Benatar.

“Van…” She jerked her chin at the aberration above him. He’d never answered her years of questions about his fetishes, but he’d agreed to tuck away the ones that chilled her the most. He knew Plasti-Pat Benatar topped the list.

He rose, unhooked it from the wall, and tossed it under the bed to join who knew how many others. Then he turned to her, gripping the base of his cock, and pulled, one long lazy stroke. “Your turn, Liv. Show the pink.”

A shudder bunched her shoulders to her ears. God, she couldn’t do this. Her panties were bone-dry, and her throat felt like a fucking Texas drought. “I can’t do this.”

His expression hardened, his thoughts likely sifting through his arsenal of manipulations. Of course, he could punch her or choke her, but he never had to. She wagered he’d either return to the girl or call Mr. E.

She moved to the narrow bed and perched on the edge. “Not like this.”

The muscles in his jaw relaxed, and he sat beside her, dragging a blanket over his lap. He didn’t touch her. They both knew he would fuck her before she left that room, and his ability to endure her dawdling was something she always used to her advantage. Which was stupid. It never helped her in the end.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the dirt-matted carpet. A wrinkle creased his brow, his tone hesitant. “You want foreplay? Seduction?”

She wanted real. She wanted to feel an essential, basic emotion that wasn’t bound to the wounds he’d inflicted on her, the ones that wouldn’t heal. “What I want, you can’t give.”

He swung his head toward her, eyes alight with pain. “I dried your face when you cried. I held you when you screamed. I haven’t left your side once in all these years. You have
me
. All of me!”

She masked her flinch with the stillness she’d perfected. The absence of motion made her feel less visible under his constant attention. She didn’t want him ogling at her. She didn’t want
him
. How could she? His kisses haunted her, the grip of his voice too painfully familiar in the dark. He was the cause of those tears, those screams, her fears.

The cup of his palm on her cheek drew her eyes to his, and the tenderness in his tone snagged her breath. “Sing to me.”

His other hand caught her chin, preventing her from looking away. She shook her head in the cage of his fingers.

“If you need your distraction, your defense tonight, then by all means, sing.” His timbre dipped, a sultry intrusion in her ears. “Your voice makes me so fucking hard.” He shifted his hands to curl around her neck, thumbs caressing her cheeks, her scar. “Sing to me while I’m fucking you.”

She hated that he’d figured out her
defense.
There were two mournful truths about their intimacy. One, he understood why she didn’t want to fuck him. Two, he was able to convince her to do it anyway. He knew her feelings for him were as complicated as her situation. He also knew that if he led her to that dead place inside herself, she would hide there without struggling while he fucked her. It was a tactic she resented and appreciated. “Which song?”

A happy hum vibrated in his chest, his scar a macabre extension of his smile. “Bring Me To Life.”

His requests never strayed from
Evanescence,
the essence of grace in despair.

She let the trembling dread roll off her spine, drew in a long breath, and warbled through the first verse. Slipping into steady, lilting tones, her reluctance to fuck floated away with the notes. She held his eyes and sang the words he wanted to hear as he removed her sneakers, shirt, and jeans. When he traced her c-section scar, she kept her mind on the song, on its expression of the life she couldn’t have and the broken shell she’d become.

He touched her hip bones with reverence, kissed the lace that covered her most private parts, and stripped the material with a ragged groan.

“I can’t wake up…” she sang, the lyrics infused with a longing he couldn’t sate.

In the next heartbeat, she lay bare beneath him, her disloyal body lubricating his entry, programmed to respond. He fisted the sheets, panting and rocking his hips to the rhythm of her faltering vocals. Against her will, his thrusts woke her hunger, massaging sparks of pleasure along her inner walls. She lost her voice and burrowed into the remote pocket of her mind.

He raised up, shed his shirt, and lowered the sweat-damp heat of his chest to hers. Circling his pelvis, he dipped his dick in and out and dragged his teeth over her throat. “Your pussy’s so hot, clenching around me.” He nuzzled her neck, his arms stretched above them, fingers linked with hers, his biceps contracting beside her head. “Your voice makes me want to shoot my fucking load. I’m going to come so hard inside you.” He sank and withdrew, his girth a piston of stretching, hammering power. His exertion intensified, pounding her raw. “Keep singing.”

Beneath a different man, in another life, she might’ve sang with a passion to match the intimate connection. With Van, she was a cold voice in a warm embrace, her pussy an entity of its own. The needy slit existed objectively, disciplined to accept and serve. She sang from that carnal place of flesh and superficial appetite. The place where emotions didn’t dwell.

His grunts deepened, the roll of his body sliding and slapping against hers. “Come now. Come all over my dick.”

The command tore the orgasm from her well-conditioned body. She focused inward, singing in her head, safe behind the shield of her mind as the sweep of unwanted sensations overtook the rest of her. She knew it could be truly pleasurable, and it had been many times with him. But she was too jumpy that night. She didn’t trust her feelings because every damned nerve in her body irrationally pulsed for the boy in the box one floor above.

Van arched his neck and shouted his release to the ceiling, his pelvis slamming once, twice, and done. Then his mouth covered hers, moved over her jaw, and latched onto the curve of her neck. His whisper laved her shoulder, hot and wet. “I love you.”

It was the part she dreaded most about these unions. Those gentle words bore the strength to shatter her from the inside out. He believed what he’d said, but she only had to think of him with the girl who, less than an hour earlier, was sucking him toward the same neck-arching finale.

So she responded the way she always did, with thick bitter silence.

He flicked off the bedside lamp, gathered her in his arms, and trapped her hips with a leg. She lay on her back, her face angled away from his, and her cheek pressed against the edge of the mattress.

Her gaze locked on an arm poking from beneath the bed frame.

The night could’ve gone worse. That could’ve been a real arm, decaying into the carpet and stinking up the scenery in Van’s garden of crazy. Despite all his cruelty and creepiness, he’d never killed anyone. She couldn’t say the same for herself.

But obsessing about her felonies was dangerous in this business. Human sex traffickers were systematic and violent. Didn’t matter that Mr. E’s three-person operation wasn’t linked to the realm of nationwide organizations. The punishment was the same. Mr. E could easily be some douche of a car salesman in nowhere Texas, but he was a douche with Mom and Mattie’s addresses. The minute she lost her focus, one fucking slip, and they were dead.

Van’s breathing steadied into the rhythm of sleep, and the weight of his arm and leg relaxed into pliancy. She eased from beneath him and caught herself before sitting up. Following the curve of the arm beside her pillow, she found his hand entangled in her hair, each finger meticulously coiled through its own strand.
For the love.
She stifled a sigh.

After a long-suffering endeavor to extricate her hair without waking him, she collected her clothes and crept into the hall.

As she walked to her room, her thoughts churned around the newest threat to her arrangement. Over six years, she and Van had captured five boys and two girls. All of them from ghettos along the Mexican border. Her first slave worked side jobs for a cartel, but the girl’s business connections hadn’t seemed to care when she went missing. None of their captures had been attached to families who would miss them.

Until Joshua Carter.

Not only would his parents devote their lives to finding him, his community would sponsor a massive rally to search for their football star. But the buyer’s demand for chastity had given her little choice. Boys without parents lost their innocence at young ages. There were no twenty-one-year-old virgin males among the sediment of broken families.

The boy in the box would be missed.

She reached the top of the stairs, her fingers finding the keypad with ease in the dark as Van’s words whispered through her head.

The job’s the same. The slave we deliver will be
exactly
as he ordered.

The goddamned job. She coded herself into the attic, tiptoed to the closet beside the sleeping girl, and selected tomorrow’s costume. Time to put on the mask. One that would hide her face and the fears it might show.

Boy. Eyes down, boy. Strip.
The haunting voice in Josh’s head penetrated the never-ending tonality blaring in his ears. The flat line of sound wouldn’t shut up. Not for hours. Not a single breach in range or volume. Hours and hours and hours.

Your name is whatever I want it to be. Boy. Boiyyyyee
. He knew he was imagining the voice, angelic in melody, cutting in its intent.

No matter what they planned to do, no way would he become a sex slave. He would not break.

His thoughts stumbled into a stunned silence, battling through the horrifically endless tone. How far would he bend if pushed? Especially without the strength that came with food and sleep. He’d dozed a bit off and on, but his body was flagging. His thoughts pounded to exhaustion.

He yearned to hear her sing, to invade his isolation and twine her soulful harmony around him. He needed to speak to
that
girl. Surely whatever lay beneath her chilling exterior wouldn’t hurt his parents.

That’s up to you.

Anger lashed through him, curling his fingers around the chain. An achy, unrelenting pain hammered his hips, back, and legs where they pressed against the wood. He wanted to choke her with the unforgiving chain and watch her stillness ripple with useless spasms.

He sucked in a breath, swallowing that hideous thought into the recesses of his gut where it could soften and disintegrate. Why? Because it was God’s place to judge her? Or because he’d been raised to look for the best in people? Or was it his need to believe there was a virtuous quality inside of her that he could free and possibly use to escape?

The voice faded. His ears told him the single note stopped, too, but its echo left a lingering shard in his mind. Would the tone begin again at any moment? Had they returned to pull him out of the box? Had they ever left? His ears were playing tricks on him. Or had his sanity finally fled?

Seemed like days had come and gone since the pangs of a full bladder began their unrelenting jabs. He wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer, but focusing on not pissing himself had diverted his mind from the weight of the chains, the eternal time in the box, and Mom and Dad’s safety.

His throat and tongue withered with each intake of waterless air. Maybe they’d already buried him in the box out back. Maybe his next exhale would be his last.

No, he would’ve felt them move the box. And his life was valuable. They couldn’t sell him if he was dead.

Something tickled his face. Another delusion. They’d left him alone for so long, his muscles were stiff from inertia, his fingers and toes numb from loss of circulation. Had they forgotten him? But the noise that had embedded itself in his brain was…silent. Nothing. Gone. In its place was the galloping thump of his hopeful heart.

The press on his ears vanished, replaced by the tingle of cool air. Then the blindfold lifted away. Blinding light stabbed his crusty eyes. He blinked, blinked, blinked, gasping, the chains clattering with his spasmodic attempts to free his arms.

Fingers touched his nose, removed the clip. His nostrils responded with greedy pulls of air, widening, clearing the snot, and filling with the scent of sweat and fear.

As his vision adjusted, the figure towering over him took shape. A gas mask encased its head. Three plastic circles darkened where the eyes and nose should be.