Local woman killed in plane crash 4 page

The blond woman reached for the bedside lamp.

“No.” A whimper escaped Liv’s lips. “Not yet.”

Van moved their twined hands, hugging her arm to her waist. Her other hand held the device in a death grip. Mattie’s shoulders rose and fell with restful breaths, her little hand fisted in the blanket.

The lamp clicked off, drenching the screen in black. The video stopped.

Her heart plummeted. She wanted to restart it, tried to untangle her arm from his, but he held it pinned against her body. She balanced the phablet on her leg to punch the play button, and he snatched it away.

“No replays, Liv.” He forged his voice in an iron tone. “You know the rules.”

Watch it once and delete it. Their phones were monitored and swapped out each time Mr. E visited. No cameras and recordings allowed on the property. No evidence. No replays. No saved or copied files. No distractions from the job.

The job, the job, the job. Focus on the job. Be the job. Or else. It was all she was, a mechanical, hollow nothing that did anything needed to prevent the else.

A violent shudder snapped through her bones. As long as she lived, Mom and Mattie would be in danger. Her death would set them free. So many times, she came close but couldn’t do it. She was a weak, selfish cunt.

She pushed against his chest. “Let me go.”

His arm tightened against her waist. “The child will be fine.”

The child.

“She’s your child.” Spit flew from her lips, her voice rising. “Our child.”

He dropped the device and spun her off his lap. Her back hit the couch, the weight of him holding her down. Her pathetic struggle ended with her arms above her head, shackled by one of his hands, his other pointing at the phablet on the floor. “She’s not our child!” His volume hiked, matching hers. “She belongs to that woman.”

“A woman who probably works for Mr. E!” In six years and twenty-one videos, the blonde’s face had never been revealed. Mattie’s life depended on Liv. A failure during the job or a fracture in the rules promised another accident. Mom had been meant to die in that car. Mattie wouldn’t be so lucky. Only Liv could protect her, and the safest way would be to hide her from Mr. E. She could be anywhere in the world. Liv desperately needed her name.

“Wipe that look off your face.” He pressed his hips against hers, the steel of his irises resistant and unfeeling. “Even if you could find her, you can’t take her from the only mother she’s ever known.”

“The way you snatched me from my mother?”

His lips thinned into hard lines with clenched teeth in the middle. “Back to this again?”

“You started this when you accepted his proposal. You chose to ruin people’s lives.”

He released her arms, standing tall and imposing, and glared down at her. “Mr. E started it when he freed me from that goddamned slum.” He stabbed a finger at the front door as if indicating the direction of his crackhaggot mother. She slung drugs in El Paso, assuming she still lived. Liv knew he didn’t care either way.

Mr. E had freed him from his victimized life, trained him to be a deliverer, and paid him to kidnap a girl of his choice. Lucky for him, his choice ignorantly roller-bladed up to his car.

Her chest ached, her body felt cold. “You broke his rules.”

He’d taken her virginity not long after capture. Eight weeks later, he delivered her to the client, claiming she met the requirements of obedience and chastity. The former was accurate. Van had well and truly whipped the insolence out of her and replaced it with the trap of fear. The chastity, however, was disproved when the buyer brought in a doctor while Van waited for the exam results and the money transfer. The positive pregnancy test was a shock to everyone. Except Van.

She sat up, unable to glance away from the scar that perforated his prominent cheekbone, his face otherwise model-perfect from his clear, round eyes and full lips to the high, smooth bridge of his strong nose. His complexion glowed so vibrantly with health, one could almost overlook the four-inch red cut. The laceration Mr. E had given him when the buyer returned her without payment. The mate to the one she’d received minutes after his.

He watched her with a toothpick in his mouth and the harsh lines of intention etched around his eyes. “I saved you.”

Did he save her by impregnating her before she was sold? Or when he pleaded for her life as Mr. E held the gun to her head upon her return? What did a human trafficker want with a pregnant slave? In the end, Mr. E gave Van what he’d wanted: Her.

“Yeah, you saved me.” She clenched and unclenched her hands. “Instead of a life as a sex slave or a bullet in the brain, I got a disfigured face, my tubes tied, an illegal job, and a promise that I will never hug the only two people who matter to me.”

His darkening expression blasted her anger to her stomach. That look had trained her to avert her eyes and drop to her knees. But sometimes, in the dark, the intensity of his stare and the openness of his lust almost felt like love.

A muscle jumped in his cheek. “Someday, I hope to matter to you, because you are the only one who matters to me. You will always be mine, Liv.”

The promise propelled her to the night he’d preyed on her fear of him, comforting her while piercing past her virginal barrier. In that moment of frailty, wrapped in his strong arms, that scared, lonely girl had wanted nothing more than his devotion. She should’ve fought, should’ve retained some inkling of dignity.

That girl had realized, too late, something wasn’t quite right with his adoring smile. After that night, the matching scars, and the loss of Mattie, that girl fell so far the hand of God couldn’t pull her back. If manufacturing sex slaves in the house of evil was the only way to protect Mom and Mattie, to hell with God and everyone else.

Van rolled the toothpick between his lips and knelt in the V of her legs. “Shall we head to bed?”

The desire in his eyes knocked her backward. She pulled her knees up and pivoted, scrambling off the couch. “I have a job to do.”

He caught her before she reached the stairs, slamming her back against the wall, his lips a toothpick away from hers. His hand moved over her waist, fingers slipping beneath her waistband.

The way his breath hitched and the heat melting his steely eyes swept an uninvited warmth through her womb. When he spit the pick on the floor and slanted his mouth toward hers, she jerked her face away. Damn, his fucking lips. His kisses were potent, and she was too emotionally exhausted to pretend like they weren’t.

A strong finger on her chin turned her face back to his. “Don’t you dare look away from me.” He captured her bottom lip between his, nuzzling, and pulled back. Her heart raced and her weak fucking knees wobbled. His gaze roamed over her eyes, hair, and mouth, gorging on every detail. “Christ, Liv, you’re so fucking beautiful.”

She shivered at the compliment. Or was it the nausea tumbling her stomach? Why wasn’t she fighting him? Spitting and punching and running away? Was it his strength holding her against the door? The conditioning instilled in her as a slave? The connection they shared through Mattie? Or was it as shallow as lust in the proximity of those stark gray eyes and talented lips?

He shoved a hand through her hair and licked the corner of her mouth. “I won’t touch your defenses. Just give me everything else.”

Yet he’d already taken everything, and her walls against him were splintering. Even if she could bring herself to kill him, she was restrained by the contract on Mom and Mattie’s lives. A contract that would mobilize a hit man if he or Mr. E died suspiciously.

Her chest hurt, and her heartbeat thrashed in her ears. Sure, she could run. She could disappear somewhere they couldn’t find her. But Mr. E had promised that if she vanished, he’d make Mom and Mattie’s death so vile, it would reach national attention. Just to ensure it reached her attention.

Trapped in paranoia, she was terrified to make a mistake, her every action watched, judged, and used to threaten her family. Her nerves were so raw, she trusted nothing, connected to no one, and her loneliness was exasperated by her complicated fucking relationship with the man peppering kisses over her lips. She wanted to love him even as her fingers twitched to run a blade across his throat.

She spoke against his persistent mouth. “If the boy is suffocating on his own vomit, I won’t be around long enough to give you anything.”

His face tightened. “Very well. Go check on him.” He stepped back to give her just enough room to slip around him. As she did, a recognizable pang assaulted her scalp. She didn’t have to look back to know he held a chunk of her hair in his fist.

His creepy hair-thing fueled her race up the stairs, to the safety of her bedroom and to the boy she would destroy to keep her family alive.

Chapter 8

Liv rested her head against the box, absorbed by the rueful tune braiding through her mind, her ass numb from sitting on the subfloor. She should check on the boy, but the sight of his suffering would shred her already crumbling composure. The raw groans echoing from within the box were doing that enough on their own.

The other captives had fought her with vicious desperation. This boy’s determination was quieter, more calculating. She heard it in his steady, low-pitched voice, saw it in his alert gaze and tightening fists, and felt it in her increased body temperature and rapid heartbeat.

Dammit, she’d trained herself not to get attached to these boys. She uncrossed her knees and straightened her legs along the floor. She would need extreme mental focus to smother her attraction to this boy and maintain her icy indifference.

The lid was closed, but she could imagine the terror creasing his beautiful face. It set off her own memories, shooting pain into body parts that had been shackled, whipped, and violated by Van’s hand.

She pushed that aside. Self-pity would only earn her a stumbling misstep and a black-eye from Van’s fist. Her own punishments certainly wouldn’t make this experience easier on the boy. He needed a confident hand to guide him through the next few weeks. She climbed to her feet, her muscles tight with reluctance.

She opened the lid, knowing he wouldn’t hear the squeaking hinges nor would he sense her leaning over him. The Solfeggio frequency piping through the headphones overpowered his perceptions, his ability to reason, his entire universe. So much so, he probably wouldn’t even sense the change of air.

His lips stretched back in misery as he panted through his teeth. Perspiration wet his skin, streaking drips down his ribs with the heave of his chest. A lonely, weak moan reached from his throat and penetrated her chest.

As his body writhed against the walls in the narrow space and a pang of guilt cramped her gut, she forced herself to evaluate his distress. His rush of breath was panicked but not unrestricted. The chains confined his flailing but didn’t cut off blood flow. As for his mind, she just needed it intact enough to be trained, to pass the introductory meeting with the buyer, the final delivery, and receipt of the client’s payment.

After she delivered him, he would be dead to her. The same way she thought of the others.

Her eyes caught on his sculpted pecs, traveled along the dips and juts of his abs, and lingered on the impressive length of his cock where it lay against his thigh. Her fingers burned to touch him.

She gripped her stomach, disgusted with herself. He was even more attractive than the others, but he wasn’t like them. His matured masculinity was prominent in the thickness of his build and the determined set of his jaw. Most importantly, he had a family and community that would miss him. What a god-awful choice she’d been forced to make.

The turmoil inside her hardened into resolve. Ten weeks, a disciplined slave, and Mom and Mattie would be safe for another few months. It was how she measured her life, wasn’t it? In ten week increments, in the trade of slaves, one body at a time.

She checked the music player. The one-hour recording rolled through its second of twenty-four repeats. He’d only been in the box for an hour, but it would’ve felt like days to him.

Ironically, the drone of the 528 hertz was used in meditation as harmonic healing. When Van had shoved her in the box and slapped the earphones on her head, he’d said, “That’s a load of new age bullshit. After twenty-four hours of the same goddamned electrical wave passing through your skull, you won’t be healed. You’ll be fucking manic.”

He’d been right. She’d emerged wild-eyed, delusional, and willing to do anything he demanded to avoid another minute in that box.

Fuck Van and his thrills. When she’d fled from him downstairs twenty minutes earlier, the desire in his eyes had been vulgar in its blatancy. Why had he let her escape so easily? He didn’t give a shit if the boy vomited in the box, and he was too damned calculating to accept that excuse.

Always, he fucked her when he wanted her. Never did she participate with a willing heart. Yet their scrimmages didn’t involve physical force. He’d wear her down with a skilled tongue or prey on her guilt through the mistreatment of a slave. Sometimes, he’d simply threaten to alert Mr. E of her disobedience. It wasn’t until she’d met him that she’d understood the meaning of coerced consent.

She stared at the door, terrified to open it, terrified not to.

Surely he went to bed in his room downstairs instead of following her to the attic. If he’d followed her, he’d be out there with that poor girl, who had been asleep when Liv had dashed by in the race to her room.

Fucking hell. Checking on the girl was the right thing to do, no matter how badly she didn’t want to open the door. Mr. E didn’t give a shit how Van treated the captives as long as they met the requirements at the end of ten weeks.

Her stomach turned as she agonized leaving the boy alone. Goddammit, she was weakening already, and it was only his first night. Her chin trembled. He had to remain in the box. She couldn’t bend the rules and expect to mold him into an acceptable slave. But the girl was already trained and didn’t deserve Van’s needless tormenting.

She closed the lid and jogged to the keypad. If he was waiting on the other side, she could shut it quickly. If he was messing with the girl, she’d have to distract him. Deep breath. She entered the code and cracked the door.

Across the room, the incarnation of her fears sat on the cot, back slouched against the wall. The girl’s head dipped up and down between his spread legs, her face and his dick shrouded by her hair.

Memories ripped in Liv’s mind, sharp and desolate. She saw her own brown hair instead of the girl’s blond. She felt his cock punching the back of her throat and his fingers digging into her scalp. Their baby moved inside her, stretching her belly, making her bent position agonizing to endure.

Her blood pooled away from her core, leaving the frigid numbness of her year as a slave—nine of those months pregnant.

She swallowed the apparition of her past before it consumed her. The girl sucking him still retained her virginity, yet she was adept with her lips, mouth, and tongue. As one of the buyer’s requirements, Liv had spent the prior eight weeks teaching her the skill on Van. And in two weeks, Liv would deliver her to a man whose hand was as heavy as his wallet.

Van looked up and caught her eyes, flames of greed blazing in his. “Come out here and show her how it’s done, Liv.”

God, she hated him when he was like this. When he watched her with such hunger as he pumped his dick in whatever hole he could command. This wasn’t a training session for the girl. It was about Liv and him, and he was using the girl to tunnel Liv’s guilt.

She could tuck her chin, shut the door, and fall asleep in the musty familiarity of her mattress inside the safety of her room.

And let the girl stroke and suck him until he was done with her. She’d blown him a dozen times before during practice. Did one more time really matter?

Van pushed down on the back of her head, and her hands convulsed on the mattress.

Compassion was lethal to Liv’s well-being, but she couldn’t stop it as it shuddered over her skin and swallowed up her heart. She opened the door, passed the cot, another keypad, another code, and down the stairs, her insides bucking and tumbling. At the end of the hall, she stopped at the only closed door and dropped her forehead against it.

What was more horrifying? The footsteps pounding down the stairs after her or all the creepy shit waiting on the other side of his bedroom door?

His body slammed against her back, his exhales hot on her neck, his erection stabbing her tail bone. He hadn’t bothered to put his pants back on.

She mustered a stoic tone. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Oh, the sweet seduction of your words.” He slapped her ass, lighting fire through her jeans, and swung open the door.

Chapter 9

Liv stumbled into Van’s bedroom, unable to look away from the antique gun cabinet on the back wall, with walnut crests carved around the double glass doors. One might’ve expected a dozen prized shotguns displayed on the racks within. Instead, the cabinet was crammed with a menagerie of dolls and mannequins piled atop one another. Arms and legs askew, some still attached to molded bodies. Most were not. All of them bald and nude.

She rubbed the chill prickling her arms. “Little girls everywhere want to know, ‘Where do all the broken dollies go?’”

“Shut up, Liv.” He sidled around her, and his foot sent a tiny headless torso careening under the bed, its jointed legs tumbling after.

Why wasn’t that one with all the hollow-eyed faces pressed against the glass of the cabinet? Some of the heads were upside down. Others leered to the side or stared out into the room from beneath hinged eyelids. Dust-laced cobwebs drooped between the dirt-smudged body parts. If she shook the case, how many eyes would wiggle and blink back? She shivered. “You need to—” She cleared her throat, tried to put oomf in her voice “—do some housecleaning.”

“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.

Chapter 10

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.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 708