NEARLY Trilogy

by Ashley, Devon

  And despite the physical pleasures he could offer, I still rolled over when it was over feeling as empty and lifeless as ever.

  The bed moved with Zander as he settled in behind me. His fingertips swept up and down my arm, almost like he was trying to comfort me. But it wasn’t the same as when Nick used to do it.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Seriously? My life sucks right now. It’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

  His fingers stopped and trailed their way off my skin. I could sense him rolling away.

  “How well do you know Friggs?”

  I heard him take his time releasing a breath between his lips. “I knew of his family growing up, but I didn’t actually meet him until we were adults. We both grew up similarly, but his father only ever ran slaves and was never challenged. At least not that I’m aware of. My father sometimes traded with his.”

  Lovely. Practically one big fucking family.

  “Will he hurt her?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it depends on his end game. If it involves you, keeping her alive is in his best interest. If he ever learns where you are, he could use her for ransom. Force you to decide whether or not to take her place.”

  Hard to believe, but I felt a little better hearing that. Not the part about taking her place, but the part where Friggs would be a fool to get rid of her anytime soon. Zander rolled into me from behind again, his heat already transferring to my naked flesh.

  What was Thea doing tonight? Was she warm in a soft bed? Breaking her back on a hard, cold floor? Forced to lay beside a man she didn’t know? Chained down with binds too tight to find a bearable position? In that godawful contraption Friggs liked to use? The questions were endless and relentless.

  And all were situations I’d already been forced into. How long until she could check every one of those off her list? And would we find her in time, before what happened to our parents happened to her? If it hadn’t already happened… I was already an orphan, and I prayed to God that I hadn’t lost my entire family in one clean sweep. If I had, I didn’t know how I’d survive it.

  My time in Finn’s apartment made me feel like I’d been sucked into a black hole. Lost and timeless. Forgotten. I was tired of just sitting here day after day, locked behind a door that could be knocked down at any moment. Several times I had contemplated climbing down the exterior of the building. I used to love rock climbing at my gym and I wasn’t that bad at it. It was something I thought I’d be willing to risk, but my legs were so shaky I didn’t trust my body’s ability to keep a firm grip on what little there was to grab. And I wanted to eat to help correct that, but I just couldn’t stomach much more than crackers lately. Even the soup I tried yesterday I threw up. My insides were just too stressed.

  Out of nowhere, the ever-silent Finn asked, “So who are you trying to get home too?”

  My head slowly pivoted his way. This was beginning to sound all too familiar. My nerves on alert, I responded, “Why are you asking?”

  “One, because we’ve been sitting in the same apartment for days and we’ve hardly said ten words to one another. And two, because I don’t drug people to find out answers. Call me old-fashioned – or shit, normal – but I figure people have the right to share what they damn well please. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then where’s your family?”

  “My parents died when I was fifteen. Car accident. Just really bad luck on an icy road. That’s when I got sent here. Needless to say, my uncle and I don’t completely agree on his chosen way of life. Neither did his brother, which was why my side of the family wasn’t in the business. Now I’m stuck here until I turn eighteen in two months.”

  “You’re seventeen?” I asked with shock. This guy looked nothing like a teenager. Early twenties, yes. Teenager, no. And by that I meant body, looks and way of speaking.

  “I have a lot of time to work-out here. Or had, before I had to play bouncer to this door.”

  “Why don’t you just leave?” I asked.

  “Can’t. Legally I have to stay until I’m eighteen. I won’t get my trust until I’m twenty-one, but fuck that. I’ll get a fucking job if I have to. I’m not living off Friggs any longer than I have to. I have to leave this mother fucking place.”

  “Again, why don’t you just leave? Or get emancipated?”

  “Look, I might not agree with what he does here, but like my father, I’m not out to put him in prison for it either. Going to court to be declared competent to take care of myself only risks exposing my uncle. My father wouldn’t want me to do that.”

  “Okay, so don’t go to court. Just leave.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, but it’s a pretty cushy life here. And before I brought you in, I pretty much had free reign. I want to leave, but I’m not in a rush to join the work force. It’s bad enough I’ll have to do it for three years.”

  Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “Yeah, how awful.”

  He turned his head, looking at me like I was ungrateful. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” I snarked back. “Forgive me, but it’s hard to sympathize with a silver spoon when I’ve been working since I was sixteen and have now been abducted by some fucking sex slave guy. Sorry I’m not more compassionate about your trust woes.”

  “Fair enough,” he replied, shrugging it off and returning his gaze back to the television. I watched for a few minutes too before asking, “Why does Friggs keep you here? I mean, couldn’t you live somewhere else and still be under his care?”

  “I was living somewhere else. But since your sister and her friend busted him, we’ve been living here. To be honest, I don’t really trust the guy. I’m pretty sure he’s looking for loopholes to inherit the money left to me. I’m beginning to think the only reason I’m still alive is because another death might look suspicious.”

  “You don’t think…”

  “That my parents’ accident might not have been an accident? I don’t know. And it’s not something I’m going to look into while I’m living here.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered, at a complete loss for words. I really didn’t know that man at all. It made me sick.

  “What would you do? How would you get out of here without them noticing?”

  “For me it wouldn’t have been that hard. They didn’t pay too much mind to me on the cameras. But now? We’ll need them distracted enough that they’re not watching all the video feeds, but a select few. Most of them pivot so they can be avoided if you’re patient, but some are stationary, so odds are you’re gonna get noticed eventually. But if you can get outside, you can lose them in the woods. But it’s gonna be a trek.”

  “Why not just steal a car?”

  “’Cause they’re all equipped with GPS. There’s nothing you can steal here that can’t be located. Including you.”

  I shot up in a stiffened stance. “What?”

  “You might have one by now, too. Any recent cuts on your skin that look a little too perfect? He uses a laser to make the incision so it would be small.”

  I immediately began scanning every inch of my arms.

  “He usually inserts them beneath the ass or the back of the shoulder. Places you’d find hard to see yourself.”

  I was gone in a flash, heading for the mirror in the bathroom. I climbed the counter and searched my backside as best I could, shifting the oversized clothing as I went. It was hard to spot anything twisting my head around like this, which unfortunately was spiking my headache and making me nauseous.

  I was rolling my head back to stretch it when he offered, “Want me to look? I know what to look for.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then realized he could do a far better job than I could. “Okay, yeah,” I answered, my voice still expressing the concern I felt. But I had to know. He leaned in closed, searching from the back of my knees up. I wasn’t completely comfortable pulling the hem of the shorts all the way up, but at least I was the one doing it. Made me feel slightly in
control of what was going on. When he found nothing, he began with the second leg. Nothing again. I climbed down and let him scan my back, lifting the shirt as he went. At one point the pad of his thumb traced my skin a few times. “Well?” I inquired impatiently.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think you have one. You didn’t come in like most girls. Maybe he meant to get you tagged once you were tossed in the basement, but I got you out before they got to it.”

  He did the shrug thing he seemed to favor before walking out. I slowly began to follow him back into the living room to resume our prior seating arrangement. “So they can’t track me if I leave?”

  “Lucky you, ‘cause it would be a real bitch to take care of that. I’d either have to cut it out or shock the shit out of you. I don’t recommend either. Especially the shock, ‘cause we wouldn’t necessarily know if it worked or not.”

  My lips curled with disgust. Neither seemed like something I wanted to happen. My expression fell away when I thought about Megan. How Nick had to cut hers out. How no matter what she did, someone always seemed to track her everywhere she went. My arms wrapped tightly around my waist, looking for security. Which was funny, because I was anything but safe. I was locked in an apartment with a guy who I didn’t know, locked in a bigger house with a bunch of rapists and their psychotic leader, who I’d been dumb enough to fall into bed with. Fuck, in love with, really. I really was stupid.

  I closed my eyes and thought of home. My real home. Not the fake one I had the past several months. I wanted to be back in my old room at the house I grew up in. Mom and Dad downstairs. Sharing a bathroom with Megan and fighting over every single little thing. Or at least fighting with Claire. Claire and I had ton of sisterly fights. Over the dumbest shit. Megan I’d never fought once with. Like she was too burdened with everything else to go at it with me. What I’d give to have the old days back, where our biggest problem was what to wear the next day and finding decent pimple crème.

  My eyes widened as I suddenly remembered. “My parents! Do you know what it was I told them when they drugged me? They said they were checking it out.”

  With a perplexed look on his face, he shrugged. “No, sorry. And they’re not gonna tell me now.”

  “I think it was something about my parents. Friggs thought one of us could tell him my sister’s location.”

  “Well, if you told him anything, I guarantee he’s already looked into it.”

  It wasn’t difficult for Finn to interpret the terror spreading across my face. “Hey, I’m sure it’s fine. It’s not like she’s here. If she was, there’d be more men on duty. Trust me. My uncle has gone off about her and that Zander guy a lot. He isn’t going to let them get away twice.”

  That was what I was afraid of. I might be able to slip away into the night without much thought, but no way Friggs was ever going to let Megan go. Ever. I prayed she’d just stay out of it, but I knew she’d never be able to.

  Sweat dribbled down from my hairline, sliding all the way off my face in one sleek line. I let it go undeterred, too focused on nailing my punch-kick combos. For half an hour now, all I could hear inside my head was the loud pump of blood rushing to keep pace with my pounding heart, the breeze from the open garage cooling my skin as the heat within rushed to keep it flushed. It was only when I paused my attack to grab a glass of water that I realized how silent the world outside had gotten.

  Curious, I made my way out to the drive and swept my eyes panoramically across the forest. So quiet. My skin began to shiver with goosebumps, and it wasn’t because of the cold. Made me wonder what was going on out there that would silence almost everything but a few chirping insects. Stag? Mountain lion? Whatever it was, I didn’t want to meet it personally, so I headed back to the garage. But before I could even make it back inside, feet stomped loudly, coming at me from several directions. I whipped to see what they were but I was grabbed as soon as I did. I was fighting the hand over my mouth when I felt the stab to my ass. I kid you not, it took less than five seconds to feel the effects. Severe lethargy overtook my arms and legs and it became harder for my stressed lungs to keep up with the demand of my heart, so much every breath felt strained.

  Hands fought against me but it wasn’t much of a fight on my end. My eyes became heavy with sleep and gravity took me all the way to the ground.

  Pressure pushed outward inside my head. Pinching my eyes only made everything feel worse. Groggily, I rolled onto my side, holding my stomach, where I felt completely nauseous. I could already tell I was wearing some kind of dress or chemise, and a pair of underwear I could feel were incomplete in the worst possible place. I groaned instantly. Where the fuck were my clothes?

  The floor was hard and cold beneath me, like rough concrete. My eyes were sleepy, but I forced them to open. The first few blinks were blurry, but the object next to me slowly came into focus. Zander – slumped against the wall and completely bruised and bloody and freshly beaten to a pulp. My body snapped alive. “Oh-my-God, Zander?” My hands were bound with an excessive amount of twine that scratched and burned my wrists, so it was an awkward crawl all the way to him. “Are you okay?”

  He seemed barely conscious, but his head managed to roll my direction, his swollen eyes barely able to crack open to see me. He slowly licked his lips, surely picking up some of the blood that leaked from the busted lower one. Even that simple movement seemed to pain him.

  His wrists were bound in front, too. Enough time had passed for his wrists to redden and his bruises to make themselves known, so I began to wonder exactly how long I had been out. “How long has it been?”

  He shrugged while trying to clear his throat, which sounded thick with mucous.

  “Long enough for…” I asked, leaving my question hanging, not wanting to say it out loud in the lair of the beast.

  He shook his head. Fuck. I was suddenly wishing I was still unconscious. Especially now that I’d noticed we were in a small room by ourselves. With fucking bars keeping us locked down. Seriously, who the fuck puts a real cell in their home? There was light coming into our space from the hallway, blindingly bright, considering I expected to be on an underground level.

  Then again, this was Friggs. Maybe the dungeon was on the penthouse level.

  I looked down at what I was wearing. I was in a skimpy red satin chemise with black mesh over my breasts that left nothing to the imagination. Worse? It dipped in the center almost all the way to my belly button, with nothing but a black satin tie holding me together between my breasts. Fuck. What was with this asshole and red?

  Zander groaned when he tried to shift. The more I looked him over, the more I pitied him. “Shit, Zander,” I said softly. “Are you alright?”

  Air shot out through his nose. I knew him well enough to know I’d just given him another good laugh. Because of course he wasn’t alright. I crawled into a sitting position beside him and swept some hair off his forehead. Some of the blond strands were stained pink with blood.

  My own body ached, but it was from my workout, not anything Friggs and company did. My sweat had dried on my skin and felt itchy because of it.

  “Why’d they do this?”

  With a raspy voice, he answered, “Finances. He wants access to my accounts.” I could tell it physically pained him to talk. And the way he grimaced afterward, he probably had a broken rib somewhere. I was just going to go with the obvious and say Zander didn’t give Friggs the information he wanted.

  “How’d they even know where we were?”

  He cleared his throat before struggling to say, “I don’t know. They shouldn’t have. No one I sent out knew our location.”

  “You’re right,” a voice bellowed from around the corner. Both of our throats groaned when we saw it was Friggs coming into view, two douches following his wake. The prick looked just as I remembered, which pissed me off. He didn’t even have to change his looks any, just move far enough away from the authorities looking for him. Their reach would only extend so far in a search.
r />   “Where’s Thea?”

  He completely ignored me as he unlocked the door and stepped inside, his eyes fixed on Zander. It wasn’t Friggs’ knuckles that were bruised and smeared with dried blood, but the goon to his right. “That man you had in contact with my associate didn’t know where you were.” Friggs began rolling the sleeves of his cream linen button-down shirt up to his elbows. “Rather annoying, actually. But do you know who did?”

  Friggs crouched down before him, balancing perfectly on the forefront of his bare feet. “Come on, think real hard. You can do it.” Given his physical condition, I had serious doubts that Zander’s head was properly functioning. His poker face was dead set, so if he did know, he wasn’t sharing. But on the other hand, Zander was smart enough not to give anything away to a bluff, either.

  “You don’t have Daddy anymore, but you do have…”

  I watched as Zander’s eyes slowly narrowed while remaining mute.

  Who? Who did he have? My eyes jumped back and forth between the two like a tennis match, but neither seemed to budge. The two men behind him were incredibly still as well.

  “If you talk now, we won’t have to involve him in our discussion.”

  Zander continued to stare quietly.

  “Burns, why don’t you bring our new friend in here,” Friggs suggested in a commanding tone. The man on the left disappeared from our cell. Half a minute later I heard another metal door squeak open, but it seemed rather far. How many of these damn cells did he have?

  “Tick-tock, Alikzander,” Friggs warned.

  That got the narrowed slits of Zander’s eyes to lessen, giving him a more questioning look rather than an evil glare, like his real name was something Friggs never knew about him. Hell, I never did. I could’ve assumed Alexander, but not the offbeat pronunciation of Alikzander. Feet shuffled closer as they made their way down the hall. Zander’s gaze fell downward, his eyes moving back forth, like he was going over some things in his head. Only when the feet reached the cell did he look up.