His word my hope secures…
“Imprisoned?” Chad whispered, his voice hollow, ghostlike. “You didn’t train willingly?”
“No. I was forced.”
With a hard bob of his Adam’s apple, he nodded. “Like me.”
Holy. Shit. My mouth hung agape at his words. This wasn’t true. “You were…what?”
Ignoring my question, he said with that same hollowness, “He swore to me. He swore he would take care of you.”
I jumped out of my skin when he let out a sudden roar, his rage like a scorching blow of fire…he was the dragon on his back.
He punched the chair in front of him, then kicked it. The chair was screwed into the ground so it didn’t budge, of course, but Chad continued to kick at it, kicked and kicked at it, trying to uproot it. Abruptly, he leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands. “All this time I thought you were well-off. I thought you’d gotten your parents’ inheritance and were living your life, missing them, and hating me. When I saw you in my club, I thought you were back for revenge. I had no idea…I had no…idea.”
I sat erect, alert, staring at his broken profile. Confused. “So you know who sent me, then?”
Several seconds passed before he answered, “Yes.”
“Who?” I asked eagerly. Because damn, this was something I desperately needed some insight into.
Raising his head from his hands, he looked over at me. His face was an agonizing art of pain and regret with blue streaks of wordless apologies. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what they did to you.”
We stared at each other for several long minutes. Just asking me to tread down memory lane was unbearable. I’m pretty sure he knew it would be a painful excursion for me, but was being temporarily selfish.
And to be honest, I wanted him to know, too. To know just how much he’d fucked my life. The number of choices I’d had in my life for the past twelve years. Zero. How my youth, my virtue, and innocence were yanked from me. That I never had the option to live. Only to serve, and obey.
He needed to know all of it. And he needed to hurt.
So I started out from the moment I regained consciousness in a dark and lonely room. Didn’t know how I got there, or who took me there. I’d only remembered being tied up and left in the closet in my bedroom, and where I’d cried and wailed into the duct tape until I fainted.
I told him about being starved, beaten and ill-treated, being punished for sins I never committed. I told him how I’d had to earn my rewards to survive, had to behave, obey. I told him of being forced to train.
When I got to telling him how I had to pay for my training, Chad got restless. He stood and then he sat back down and then he stood and sat back down, until he started pacing, as though the information was launching him into a whirl of insanity.
Over and over, he kept repeating, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Although I didn’t have to, I continued talking, just to hurt him, telling him all the details of my payment sessions—the rape, the abuse, the name-calling.
Pat on the back, I managed to tell it all without shedding a single tear. Guess I was stronger than I thought.
By the time the nightmare tale was over, Chad was on the other side of the room, sitting on the floor, back against the wall with his feet drawn up and his head lowered. The update had pronouncedly done one over on him.
For fifteen tortuously long minutes, neither of us spoke, giving words and sighs a rest, the air thick with grief, stiff with the unchangeable, and suffocating with the inevitable. Regrets and apologies unspoken, but potently palpable.
“Is that…” Chad’s voice broke through the silence. No longer cool and confident, but diffidently brittle. “Is that why you became a dike?”
I thought about it. “More yes than no.”
When he looked at me nonplussed, I explained. “The guard assigned to me never approved of the whole sex-for-payment arrangement. I mean, I was only eleven when it all began. And Saturday after Saturday he’d had to stand outside the door and listen to all of it. So at fourteen, when I realized I was never going to get immune to the abuse, I begged him to get rid of Mr. D. And surprisingly, but thankfully, he did.”
“He killed him?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because a couple months afterward, I was assigned a new guard. And when I inquired about the previous one, Miss B told me someone reported that he was the one who took out Mr. D, so he was being held and interrogated through torture.”
I looked down at my hands and sighed, feeling sick. Miss B had told me the reason The Big Man in Black had had a change of heart about me and my situation: his girlfriend had given birth to a bouncing baby girl. Enough said.
“When he finally confessed, they chopped his head off for breaking the rules.”
With a knowing twist of his lips, Chad nodded as if he was overly familiar with such consequences. Of course he was. “Who’s Miss B?”
“She was the trainer who replaced Mr. D.” I smiled as I said this. “My beautiful Sunday.”
Chad’s brows rose in question.
I answered, “Yes, the payment was the same. My captor insisted on it. But Miss B, she made me enjoy it. She taught me about my body and orgasms—”
“You do understand she was taking advantage of you just as much as the other sick, perverted fuck, right?” He was justifiably irate, visibly disappointed in my speaking favorably of Miss B.
“Yeah, but if I’m going to be forced to do something, I might as well enjoy it. And I did not enjoy having a cock rammed into me from behind over and over! So excuse me if I gave in to getting my cunt sucked, and loved it!”
Nothing.
“Look,” I went on, “I knew I was still a victim with Miss B, but she never made me feel like one. She made me learn to accept and make the best of my situation. That was what my life had become, and for the time being, there was no way out. She made me like everything about training that I loathed when it was Mr. D teaching. Learning different tongues, etiquette, cunning, the art of lying and seduction, busting guns and kicking the shit out of people. She made me enjoy fucking her.
The woman was nice to me, okay? You see me now, holding my shit together? It’s because of her. If she hadn’t taken over at the time she did, I would’ve been damaged for good, and the first mission they sent me on, I would’ve offed myself instead of the target to end my pathetic life. But she taught me better, that this wouldn’t last forever. That the light at the end of the tunnel might seem unreachable but it was still there, and as long as I could see it, I could reach it. So she’s why I’m still here, Chad. She’s why I’m still alive.”
“I’m sorry,” was all he said. That’s all he’d been saying. But then, what else could he say when all these years he’d been completely oblivious to what was going on?
“I hated men. All men have ever done to me was hurt me,” I told him. “Miss B, she made me feel exquisite, so naturally I gravitated towards women. I never knew…” My voice dropped to a whisper. “I never knew a man could make me feel better than a woman could…until you. With you the pull is intense and unable to resist, like this is the way it was meant to be.”
Clearing his throat, he leaped off the topic, having none of it. “When were you given your first assignment?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen,” he repeated.
I glanced over at him. He was eighteen when he eliminated my family… Holy hell. My family had been a fucking assignment. “Oh my God.”
Chad got up and moved across the floor, stopping in front of me and dropping to his knees, his doleful eyes peering up at me. “He gave me his word that he would send you back to the States and see to it that you received your family’s inheritance. You were supposed to die, but I refused to carry out the assignment unless you were excluded. For a whole week, I was beaten down and tortured for being defiant, starved and threatened with death, but I didn’t break: you had to live. Eventually, he agreed. He had to. Your mother was agile, clever, near-impossible to kill, which meant he had to use someone she trusted. Me. Consequently, he agreed to my terms….I had no idea, Tweety Byrd.”
His head fell into my lap, face pressing into my denim-clad thighs. “If I’d known, I would’ve gone back for you. Would’ve killed every last fucking one of them. I’m so…sorry.”
After a few minutes of cumbersome silence, he raised his head from my lap, and when his eyes met mine again, they were wet, eyelashes lumped together. “You never tried to run?”
Swallowing hard, my heart twisting at his pain, pain that I’d wanted him to feel. I nodded. “Twice. I tried to run on my second assignment, and on the fifth. Both times I got caught. The first was in Paris, and I thought ditching it to Scotland would work. In less than a day I was found. Second time was in New York; I thought what better place to get lost than in the Big City? Same. Found me within twenty-four hours.”
Chad blinked at me, one, two, three times. Then swore, “Shit.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
Jolting to his feet, he ordered, “Stand up.”
When I did as he ordered, he held me by the shoulders and spun me around. Next I felt his fingers pressing against my skin, moving here and there on my back, searching for something.
“What is it, Chad?” I asked again.
Giving no response, he kept searching until his fingers paused on the upper left of my back, near to my shoulder blade. His fingers applied pressure, feeling, ascertaining.
Another explosive expletive left him before he spun me back around and spared, “The fucker embedded a tracker in you.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “How?”
Surely I would’ve remembered someone planting a device inside me. Unless it was done when I was unconscious.
Grabbing my wrist, he started marching out of the room. “We need to get that out of you. Now.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But you’ve yet to tell me the who behind all this, Blood. Who turned us into these people?”
Still pulling me along, without stopping or looking back, he took an audibly deep breath, before answering, “My father.”
“…plant it under a cab or something. Anything that’s constantly moving…”
Consciousness kissed my eyelids, and I woke to the rumbles of male voices above my head. Chad was issuing a bunch of orders to two of his men, while a sophisticatedly dressed brunette standing beside him smoothed her hand down her neat, charcoal-pencil skirt, all but brushing up against him. When it seemed as though he was taking too long to give her his attention, she walked over to the coffee table and picked up a black doctor’s bag that was on it.
Taking out a pad and a pen, she scribbled something down, then ripped out the paper and handed it to Chad, telling him, “Seven days’ time, I’ll be back to remove the stitches.” As if she was more than familiar with the apartment, she walked off with a slight pout.
“Sophia, wait,” Chad called after her.
Catching up with the doc, he mumbled words not meant for anyone else to hear, but the woman was full-on attitude, clearly upset about something. And with a stiff spine, she left.
With a confused expression, Chad stared after her, then shook his head and came back to the sofa, where I was lying on my stomach.
Whatever drugs that woman shot me up with had left me temporarily paralyzed, because I couldn’t move at all. Only see and hear.
Chad caught me watching him as he approached, but quickly averted his attention to his men, shooing them with the order to leave the tracking chip on a moving inanimate object.
Audience gone, leaving only us, Chad knelt down by the couch, clasping his hands beside the cushion my head was on, then resting his chin on top of his clasped hands, leveling his face with mine.
“Was drugging me this much really necessary to remove a simple tracking chip from my back?”
“Sorry. We had to get it out.”
“You could’ve given me a goddamn leather belt to bite on and dig it out yourself.”
“No. You’re not an animal. I wanted this to be clean and painless.”
“Yeah, well, I think that stupid doctor bitch overdrugged me. On purpose.”
Something cold flickered in his eyes, as though he hadn’t considered that. He tried to cover his fury at the realization with a chuckle, but I could smell the evil emanating off his thoughts. “Yeah, I think she did.”
I tried to move my hand again, but there was no point. I’d have to wait at least an hour or two before my limbs started working again. Chad must’ve really pissed her off or something.
“You two have a ‘sex with meaning’ thing going on?”
He leaned in and kissed my cheek, and amazing grace, I felt it. “Used to.”
“If it’s in the past, why the hell is she still mad? Taking her shit out on innocent little me?”
A brow arched as he laughed out, “Innocent?”
“Of course I’m innocent,” I defended. “What did I ever do to her?”
Chad made a disgruntled sound, clearly unhappy about this. “Women are strange creatures I’ll never understand.”
Humming in agreement, I closed my eyes and smiled.
“You’ve grown to be so achingly beautiful, Jhay. You leave me impeded at times.” Pause. “In other words, I’m fucked with you. So completely fucked.”
Keeping my eyes closed, so he wouldn’t see how deeply his words affected me, I whispered, “You’ve known it was me all along, and you said nothing.”
“I was waiting for you to stop hiding,” he whispered back, his hot breath touching my skin, as if he’d drawn closer to me. “Did you really think I would see you again and not recognize you, Tweety Byrd?” He laughed, but the laugh was at me. “I thought about you every single day for the past twelve years. I thought you were in college somewhere, crushing on some greasy-haired drummer in a rock band or something. Having fun and living recklessly like girls your age do. Never in a million years did I think…” He trailed off, holding back.
I opened my eyes and found his eyes boring into mine with such raw emotion, I wished I could reach out and touch him.
“I guess I knew all along that you knew, but I preferred to believe you didn’t, because I liked being with you. I thought if you knew it was me, you wouldn’t kiss me the way you did, touch me, or take me. And I thought maybe you were thinking the same thing: as long as we didn’t say it out loud, it wasn’t real. I wasn’t me and you weren’t you.”
Chad let out a quiet laugh, as if that was the most ludicrous thing. “The second I saw you on that stage, I knew it was you. And I knew I wanted you. I didn’t see Tweety Byrd, so I never thought of you as Tweety Byrd. I saw Jhay. So mature, mind-numbingly beautiful and physically flawless, you booted all rational thoughts right out of me. Only two things made sense to me: I needed to steal you, and I needed to keep you. Even if I died in the process—because, I mean, you were trying to kill me.”
At the latter, I laughed. “Yeah…um, sorry about that.”
After a moment of contented silence, I asked, “Along with your father, who else is after me?”
This was nice. Being with Chad was nice. However, there was still a ton of unfinished business. With the unverified revelation that my old captor, The Voice, was Chad’s father, I couldn’t understand how the guy was sitting so calm and unperturbed right now. While I was there still struggling to wrap my head around the whole thing, wondering why on earth would his own father want him dead.
With an immense sigh, Chad shifted from kneeling to sitting on the ground, resting his head on the couch. “Can I just sit here with you for a while? I…I missed you every day, Jhay.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
His fingers found mine, lacing them together, and the next ninety minutes cruised by as we sat in absolute silence.
In a world like ours, a world of chaos, rage and war, turmoil and tragedy, death masks and evil veils, silence was a luxury.
Silence was golden.
It was Vivian who tugged us back to the present, beckoning us for dinner. By then, my limbs were in full function. If I ever saw that stupid doctor bitch again, I’d be returning the favor with a little twist to it.
Sitting up on the couch, I stretched, mumbling, “And just like that, another day bites the dust.”
Ta-da-dum. Day over.
In its slow and humble descent, the sun’s weak tangerine glow cast symmetric slim rays through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, the sunrays like security laser beams, slicing through and through the penthouse.
Evenings here had a different feel than back at my apartment. Evenings here were beautiful and soothing, shifting shades, especially as it reflected in Chad’s deceivingly warm dark eyes.
If only there wasn’t a hose of shit waiting somewhere nearby to start spraying on us, I could remain here with him. Because damn, no, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want the moment we were having to end. Ever.
But life was a bitch.
It ended.
Chad stood up from the floor and stretched, too. “We missed lunch. Come on, let’s eat.”
“And then you will tell me what the hell is going on?” I really hated being left in the dark.
“Yes.” Reaching down for me, he pulled me up by my arms and pressed me to him. “As long as you’re here, inside this building, you don’t need to worry. This place is a fortress. The windows are bulletproofed. I imagine you already know this considering you’ve been trying to get to me for months. If you could’ve gotten in, you would’ve gotten in, wouldn’t you?”
“I won’t feed your ego.”
Chad flicked a finger at my lips. It stung, but I smiled as I winced, because it was such a familiar gesture. One he used to do to me when I was a feisty little thing, always mouthing off at someone. It stung like a mofo, but it was always effective in getting me to shut up.
“I’m just assuring you of your safety here. Outside is a different story. So just breathe easy for now, okay?”
Folding my lips to quell the sting still lingering on my lips, I nodded.
Chad grinned. “Nice to see that still works.”
“Fuck off.”
Another finger flicked at my lips again, and I chucked him.
Jerking a step back, he full out laughed now. That sound, oh how I loved it.
Tapping my forefinger to my lips, I demanded, “Kiss it better.”
I was expecting him to deny me, but that expectation fled when he grabbed me and dropped his mouth down to mine in a heated hunger, like he’d been yearning for this.
Holding onto his biceps for balance, I braced myself against him and dug deeper into the kiss, giving, offering, submitting, surrendering.
The wave between us was stronger than just two people wanting each other sexually. A current that went far beyond sexual torridity was drawing us together. Like a whole that had been struck into two halves by a lightning bolt, being forced back together by a high current sea, pushing, shoving, not letting up until those two halves drew back together like magnets, until they stuck, sealing, healing, becoming a whole again. Becoming one.
Whether or not we shared fond memories of the past, it was wrong of me to be having these feelings for this man. Because following those fond memories were horrible, horrible memories also.
All of this was wrong. Me enjoying the way his tongue felt in my mouth, or wanting him to throw me down on the couch and fuck me into oblivion—wrong. These feelings, these wants, these cravings were forbidden.
Wrong.
Here, I wasn’t avenging my family. I was loving the enemy. Blood of my family forgotten.
How could I be so cruel to them? How could I betray them like this? Giving myself up, my whole body, my mind, my heart, my trust, to the person who turned me into an orphan, who threw me in the lonely darkness, who was the catalyst for my one dozen years of hell.
This wasn’t right. This was selfish. This was twisted.
Yet I couldn’t let myself stop. I couldn’t let myself not want the full gamut of the erection digging into my stomach. I couldn’t let myself not get wet from the smooth thrust of his tongue inside my mouth. I couldn’t not want him.
I just couldn’t.
Much to my displeasure, Chad broke off the kiss and took a step back from me, adjusting his jeans. “We need to eat.”
“We were eating,” I pointed out, moving in to pick up where we left off.
Chad laughed yet again, and I was loving the fact that I could make the taciturn, ever-serious, arrogant dickhead laugh. “Actual food. We need actual food.”
I crossed my arms. “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”
“I’m not,” he denied. “Just hungry.”
Through narrowed slits, I studied him for a heartbeat and a half. “Okay. Well, after we eat, you tell me what’s going on outside this fortress. And then we fuck for the rest of the night. Deal?”
No response. Only an arched eyebrow.
Uncrossing my arms, I went up on my tippy toes and whispered in his ear, “If you deny me your cock tonight, things are going to get really, really ugly.”
Without waiting for his response, I shouldered past him and sauntered to the dining area. Leaving him some time to get his hard-on under control.
Vivian prepared bacon-wrapped baked chicken, with sautéed vegetables and a home-baked garden pizza on the side. The woman could cook her knuckles off, had to give her that.
It wasn’t until my dinner plate was empty and I was biting into a slice of the garden pizza that I realized how hungry I’d been.
From across the table, Chad was watching me, amused, as if to say, I was right, wasn’t I?
He was right. We’d only eaten breakfast, and I spent hours updating him on the last horrific years of my life. Not to mention I’d been overdrugged. So, of course, I was starved. Just hadn’t noticed how much until the first morsel of food touched my tongue.
Chad’s dish was empty, too. But he didn’t seem interested in the pizza, sipping from his wine glass. Watching me.
Polishing off the last of my pizza, I wiped the corners of my mouth and broached, “I can understand The Voice’s coming after me. I failed a mission. And I’m in cahoots with the target. But as for the other person, that I don’t understand. What do they want with me?”
“The Voice?” Chad asked, a sardonic arch to his brows.
“Well, your father,” I corrected. “I dubbed him ‘The Voice’ because we only communicated over the phone. And that’s only when he was giving me a mission, or checking up on the status of one. For everything else, like giving me cash or upgrades, he sends his henchmen.” I picked up another slice of pizza and bit in. “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure any of his employers know what he looks like. But now that I know he’s Rafail Niiveux, I understand. You can’t very well be a good guy and a bad guy at the same time, can you?”
Chad’s father, along with his two other uncles, Vlad and Pavel Niiveux, were joint owners of the car brand Niiveux, which was one of the largest and most expensive car brands in the world which produced vehicles that only millionaires could afford.
From Niiveux stemmed a whole slew of other car brands, thus making the Niiveux brothers infamous billionaires. Little did I know Rafail lived a double life. Heck, they probably all did.
“Strange nickname,” Chad commented through a chuckle. “I would’ve gone with something more villainous.”
“Like ‘Veiled Demon’?”
“Something like that.” He sobered up. “My father has been spying on you long before now.”
“What?”
“He might not have trusted you—how long ago have you been assigned to kill me?”
I winced. “About seven months now?”
Chad nodded. “That explains it. Unless you’re trying to assassinate someone from the White House, no assignment should take this long.”
Appetite gone, I set my half-eaten pizza down. “So you’re saying he thought I was giving him the run-around?”
“If he sent men here to spy on you”—shrug—”yeah.”
“What a cowardly stinking piece of shit!” I erupted, tripping over my tongue in a tangle of words that didn’t make sense. “H-how many men has he given this same assignment? Twelve. And how many have you stopped in their tracks? Twelve! Did he seriously expect me to run in like a brave fool and make myself a number fucking thirteen?!”
“Calm down, Jhay,” Chad said in a steady, even voice.
“No!” I said, sweeping a set of utensils off the table. “I want to kill him! I want to kill that cock-sucking asshole my fucking self! First he fucks up my life, then he makes me a target because I failed a mission that a dozen men died trying to fulfill? Rafail Niiveux can go fuck himself!!”
“Jhay, calm down.”
“Fuck off!” I shouted at him. “Fuck right off!”
Unimpressed with my choler, Chad slammed a tight fist down on the table, swift and firm, and contents on the table danced as if a mini-quake had just licked the earth. “Calm. The fuck. Down.”
I shut up, but glared at him across the table, pretending he didn’t intimidate me.
Propping his elbows on the table, he locked his eyes to mine. They weren’t cold or threatening, however, but carried a gentle understanding. “Jhay, you’re freaking out because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared,” I denied.
“Yes, you are,” he said, sticking me where it hurts. “But I don’t want you to be afraid. I want you to trust that I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”
“Protect me?” I shrieked in disbelief. “How are you going to protect me from two different sets of people when you are still a target?”
“Jhay—”
“What are we gonna do, stay locked up in this bulwark? Yeah, until someone decides to launch a big ass bomb through your ‘bulletproofed’ windows!”
“Look, you seriously need to calm down.”
“I can’t.” And that’s when the tears began to flow. Because Chad was right, I was afraid. Life suddenly meant something to me and I wanted to live. “I’m not ready to die.”
Pushing back his chair, Chad got up and came to my end of the table, crouching down in front of me. “It’s okay to fear death. But Jhay, freaking out is not gonna help.”
“I used to wish for death,” I told him through a messy muffle of sniffles. “I hated my life and I just wanted to die already. But now I realize why I didn’t pull the trigger whenever I put the gun under my chin. It’s because I didn’t really want to die. I just wanted a way out.”
Taking my trembling hands in his, he whispered, “No matter how much we pretend, none of us really wants to die. Not even those who commit suicide. Some commit suicide because they’re tired of screaming out into the void and not being heard, so they do it for people to notice their pain. But I’m sure in death, they’re wishing they’d stayed and fought it out. Because they did get people to notice them, to hear them, but what’s it worth now that they’re dead? How can they be helped?” He squeezed my hands, warming them. “I’m glad you didn’t pull the trigger, Jhay. I’m glad you stayed and fought it out. Because I’m here now. I hear your screams. I notice your pain. And I’m here to help.”
“You’re gonna die trying to protect me and yourself,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t want you to die.”
“Funny,” Chad chortled in spite of the situation, “considering two nights ago you were aiming to blow my head off.”
That’s because two nights ago I didn’t know I still loved you. “I’m serious, Chad. I don’t want—”
“You’re not going to die,” Chad assured me, firmly positive. “I might…but you won’t.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“Remember that second person I said is after you?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, they’re not really after you.” He gave my hands another reassuring squeeze.
“They’re watching over you.”