by Zoey Parker
He hadn’t caught so much as a sniff that Bastille had also been following the contract on Toro. Perhaps the other hitter was working a contract for Toro? No, that didn’t track. Milo had looked pretty deep into Toro’s financials before moving on him; there was no way he could afford Bastille. He wouldn’t have been able to afford Milo, either, and the fact that Silk Road had come to Milo indicated that Silk Road considered Toro much more of a threat than his narrow mustache and scrawny build would indicate. So, the odds were that Bastille was here for the same reason that Milo was. But why? Had Silk Road decided not to trust him after all?
Bastille seemed less surprised than Milo was, or else he’d become just as practiced at not showing his emotions. That made more sense; Milo was moderately certain that no hint of his surprise was visible on his face. He did, however, flash a bit of a grin at Milo before he drew the gun he wore in a hip holster and trained it right on Toro’s face. The other man’s complexion went pasty under his spray tan, and his hands gripped the armrests of his chair in a way that betrayed his concern. It couldn’t be enjoyable to face down death for the first time. It had been part of Milo’s life for so long that he no longer remembered how it felt to stare into that black chasm as a novel moment.
Bastille turned to Milo with a smile. Milo couldn’t see the other man’s second weapon, but in all the years he’d known Bastille and followed his career, the man had never been without two guns. He was equally precise with both hands, although he favored slightly different guns in each. It was a matter of time before Bastille had the second gun trained on him. Which meant that as much as he wanted to draw down on Toro and get the job done and over with, he needed to maintain control of the situation. And that meant pointing his gun at Bastille and raising an eyebrow.
There would be no cliched dialogue here, no “How dare you!” He shouldn’t have even waited a moment before pulling the trigger; the only reason he did was that Tess chose that moment to struggle in his grip. His aim went off, and he’d been trained too well to waste the round. He pushed Tess away, knowing she went to her knees and feeling crappy about that, but the woman had chosen to be used as a pawn, and that’s what happened to pawns. He could feel his head shutting down, his body switching into a kind of vision where he was presented with isolated images that allowed him to make decisions without providing any unnecessary information.
Toro, perhaps realizing that the two men were about to fire on each other, saw his opportunity. Milo would have pegged him for a guy who would run around the desk, but instead, he went over the top like he was running hurdles. He crashed into Bastille as the other hitter drew his second gun – damn him and his two weapons, Milo had tried it over and over but couldn’t ever get accurate enough with his right hand to make it worthwhile –, knocking him off kilter. Bastille’s training had rusted, apparently, because he fired a shot into the ceiling. Milo’s brain made a note to feel worried about unrelated casualties later – not because he inherently cared, but because it could bring trouble with the cops – and he stepped sideways to intercept Toro. Toro didn’t go for him, however, trying to run for the door and his escape route. He went for Tess, still on her knees. He dragged her up to her feet, shifting her in front of him just like Milo had done moments before. Bastille let out a snarled curse and brought his gun down on Tess. Tess screamed, and this time, Milo didn’t think she was exaggerating her terror even a little bit. He saw Bastille’s finger tightening on the trigger.
In a moment he wouldn’t understand for the rest of his life, he took the single step forward that put him between Bastille and Tess. He heard the shot fire; Bastille’s gun also bore a silencer, but a thing the movies always got wrong was that silenced guns didn’t make little pbt pbt sounds. They were still goddamn loud; they just weren’t “deafen you loud”. The gun was goddamn loud, and the pain in his shoulder when the bullet entered was also damn loud. It rocked him back onto his heels, and he had to fight to keep his feet.
He didn’t know what made Bastille curse a second time and decide to run. Milo saw both the goons, who were just now realizing where the hell they should be aiming, drop with neat little holes in the fronts of their heads and really goddamn messy disasters on the backs. And then Bastille ran through the main door of the office. Milo wavered again, then turned to face Toro, who was coming up from the ground and trying to hit him. Milo saw the dull metal of brass knuckles on the drug dealer’s hand and ducked just in time. The pain was breaking through his manufactured calm, and he could feel the neat precision he needed shattering in pieces.
And Toro realized that he had knuckles and the other man had a gun, a gun which even now he was lifting to finish the job. And he ran for his life.
Milo felt the adrenaline running out, and he dug into his emotional reserves to pull himself to his feet. Tess was shaking on the ground, curled up into a little ball, her head tucked into her knees. Intellectually, he understood that she had reached the end of her rope with what she’d seen. She’d see Bastille draw down on her and had to know that her life was very possibly about to end. Toro had pulled her right in front of him, ducked down so that she was all of a shield and none of a woman. Even if she knew the man was using her for sex and status, it was something different entirely to know that he was willing to trade her life for his.
He pushed himself to kneel down, knowing that if he didn’t get moving, he was going to be in serious trouble. She had clearly tripped some kind of internal alarm. It might be that Toro didn’t have that hooked up to anything the police would be reading, but Bastille carried a hand cannon that used huge bullets; someone might have died upstairs. The police were very likely on their way. He needed to get gone.
Leaving Tess behind was a possibility. She was going to be dead weight, possibly literally, as he tried to get out of the damn building. But with no one else left behind and no one to finger, dressed – or not dressed – the way she was, the cops wouldn’t be kind to her. Hell, they might harm her physically.
He might be a monster, but he wasn’t going to knowingly leave a woman to face that kind of shit alone.
“Come on,” he said to her. “We need to get gone.”
Tess’ face pushed up off her knees, tear-streaked, mascara smeared around her lower lids. “He would have—I could have—”
“I know,” Milo said. He heard the sharpness in his tone and pushed himself to be less of a flaming asshole. He softened his tone and tried again. “I know. I really do. But I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the cops are on the way here right now, and if we’re still here when they show up, you and I are going to have some serious questions to answer that neither of us wants to deal with. Am I right?”
Some sense seemed to come back into her exhausted and careworn face. She nodded jerkily, and with a little more prompting, he got her on her feet and moving. He wanted to put her in clothes, but he didn’t dare take the time. He did take a moment, once they got as far as the closet, to tighten the robe of her belt. At least she wouldn’t flash anyone on the way out of the building.
There was another hidden exit from the suite. From the way her eyes went wide when he led her to the door in the back of the pantry, he thought that even Tess hadn’t figured this one out. The pantry door took them into a narrow hallway which led to a service elevator. Barefoot and naked under her robe, she kept up with him, moving quickly and not forcing him to wait for her. That was something. He wasn’t sure his exhausted mind could handle a botched job and a hysterical woman at the same time.
It wasn’t until they were in the elevator, the door safely closing behind them, that she seemed to blink all the way back into her body.
“You got shot,” she said.
He nodded. There was a clammy warmth spreading down his arm; he didn’t want to look at it, notice how bad the damage was, until he was ready to really see. He wasn’t one to panic at blood, but why invite trouble he didn’t need.
“I did,” he said.
She took a moment and then clarified
. “You got shot protecting me.”
That seemed a bit more dramatic than what had happened, but he wasn’t about to argue with a grateful woman. And, yeah, he had jumped in front of her. So, her point was probably accurate.
“I guess. But don’t go all soft about it. I didn’t want another body to clean up.”
“You didn’t clean up any of the bodies,” she pointed out.
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “No, I didn’t. And we’ve both left DNA all over that room. Yours, not much of an issue, everyone knows you’re here. Mine? Problematic. So, let’s get the hell out of here, and see what we can do about cleaning up this mess.”
“I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that there’s a ‘we’ here,” Tess said.
He had to admit that the spunkiness she was throwing off got his dick hard all over again. She was pretty, and she was sexy – they weren’t the same thing at all – but he was also in a hell of a lot of pain and was pretty done with the conversation.
He took her by the upper arm and yanked her out of the elevator once it came to a stop. He didn’t say another word as he hauled her along the hallway and shoved her into the car he had parked at the end of the alley. When he pushed her into the car, she clocked her head on the doorframe. He didn’t think she’d hit it that hard, but she sagged into the seat, her eyes drifting pretty hard. Part of him was grateful; he needed a goddamn rest from how much he hurt.
The rest of him was wondering what the hell he was going to do with her.
Chapter Six
Tess woke up slowly. The first thing she noticed was the incredible ache in her head. Her memory was fuzzy, as if she was thinking back through cotton to see what had happened… that morning? Yesterday? Her time sense was gone. It could have been a few hours that she had been unconscious, or it could have been days. She was pretty sure it was more like hours, as if her body would have sensed a longer stretch of time passing, but she couldn’t be sure. But there was no way to really know.
She ached in all sorts of places, it turned out, not just her head. There were piecemeal memories, which settled back in slowly, like watching a handful of pictures appear on a computer screen in a slideshow, but without any particular sense of order. She remembered the appearance of the man, Milo, the hitter. She remembered seeing him dive in front of her to protect her from a gunshot. She remembered him wrapping her legs around his waist and fucking her until she came, screaming. That memory should have made her blush, but instead, it just made her crave him inside of her again. Big and thick and hard, nothing like Toro’s half-mast dick. She’d been wondering for months if he sent his goons to her because his own hard-on wasn’t reliable enough to fuck her anymore.
She pushed her eyes open, reaching to scrub them with the backs of her hands. Her right hand was fine, did its job. Her left hand, she realized quickly, was restrained. Something metal, something that rattled. She made herself glance up; she was handcuffed to the headboard of the bed. Well… That was a disturbing turn of events. She liked being tied down and fucked as much as the next kinky submissive girl, but it was friendly when consent was at least considered. Unless that was the game that was being played, of course.
It seemed obvious that Toro had not somehow gotten her back. After what she’d done, he would have just killed her, never mind tying her down and leaving her alone. Toro was not one to leave a snake at his back when he had the opportunity to cut its head off. And that’s how he would see her. She knew too much about his dealings, his business, his contacts. He couldn’t let her stay loose; he couldn’t let her be a liability.
Which meant that either Milo or one of Toro’s enemies had her in their “care”. If it were one of Toro’s enemies, she was fairly sure she would be in a nicer hotel room. Toro had a stranglehold on the city’s drug trade, but that didn’t mean he was the only player in town. It would make sense, however, for Milo to be in a nondescript chain hotel room, anonymous and unimportant. Just another businessman in the city. The handcuffs, however, were a bit of an annoyance.
Of course, when Toro was actually capable of keeping it up, they’d played like this more than once. She’d loved the sensation of the paddle on her ass, the crop falling on her thighs, her nipples and clit clamped and contained. He’d edged her, denied her, ruined her, everything he could think of to make her fall in line, and Tess had loved every second of it. When she was a dancer, she’d cultivated a bit of a switchy persona, able to top or Domme when her customers needed it, because it was better than no play at all. But left to her own devices, she was much more of a submissive. It was just that you could make money being a Domme-for-hire, while being a professional sub was a good way to get killed, if you weren’t incredibly careful.
She glanced around as she pulled herself up to sitting. She was completely naked, but she was fairly sure that all she’d been wearing before, leading Milo through the penthouse, was a silky robe. So, fair that she was nude. She’d been nude a lot, in a lot of situations that felt more awkward than this, so she was pretty sure she could manufacture some calm. She could even work around to being turned on by this; God knew it wasn’t all that much of a stretch. But she didn’t know where she was, or who had put her there. That was the part that was concerning. Well, and also that they’d felt it necessary to handcuff her in place. That was also… potentially concerning.
The room was very standard. It had that impersonal feel that screamed hotel room to her, something about the precise shade of beige on the walls, and how it was not quite perfectly meshed with the too-thin coverlet on the bed. She pulled her legs under herself and tried to come up with a plan.
But before she could even begin to organize her thoughts, the door to the bedroom opened, letting out a waft of steam. She hadn’t heard a shower running, but clearly, something had been happening. She slid onto her side, years of experience letting her fall into a comfortable, sexy pose without any real effort. When Milo stepped out of the bathroom, he looked towards her with his face neutral. He was wearing nothing but a pair of very short boxer briefs, his cock outlined against the cotton. As he caught sight of her, he kept that mild expression, but it was harder to hide the reaction from his body. His cock stiffened quickly, growing until she had to resist the urge to lick her lips. She loved how he refused to cover himself or try and disguise his pleasure in any way; her naked body was a pretty good naked body, as these things went, and she was proud to show herself off. It felt good and right, and as things ought to be.
“Good to see you’re still with us,” he said, but his tone implied that it wasn’t quite as good as he might have hoped.
She winced, just a little; she didn’t know what it had cost him to take her with him, but it clearly hadn’t been an easy situation. Carrying a naked, unconscious woman into a hotel room couldn’t have been a pleasant experience for either of them, even if she couldn’t remember it.
“I’m harder to get rid of than people might think,” she said. It was a really bad line, but her head was still aching, so it was the best she could do at that moment.
He reached down and adjusted himself, his cock even more carefully outlined now. She could see the ridge of his head, the thick line of his shaft, and she remembered how incredibly good he’d felt fucking her. But this was different now. Yesterday, she hadn’t thought she had a choice. Now? She didn’t belong to Toro anymore. She was quite sure of that. Did she belong to Milo? She certainly didn’t think so. But who was she, if she didn’t belong to someone? She wanted him to fuck her again, and she wanted to be able to say no to him, just for the novelty of the experience. She watched him rub his hand over the underside of his cock through his shorts, and she licked her lips, unable to stop fantasizing about wrapping her mouth around him, working to swallow him as far down her throat as she could take a man as wide and long as him.
“I want to be perfectly clear,” he said. They’d hardly talked yesterday, obviously; his voice sounded melodious and smooth, rich like whiskey, and just as delic
ious. “I took you out of that place not to protect you, but to protect me. You stay here until I’m sure you’re not a threat to me. I’ll keep you fed, I’ll get you some clothes, but you’re here until I’m done. You fight back, I will kill you. We clear?”
Tess swallowed hard, trying not to let the curl of fear she felt at his harsh words push into her brain. “Clear,” she said, pushing her mouth into a smile. “Perfectly clear.”
“Good.” He grinned, and it was a vicious sort of smile. “Do you know why you’re on the bed, and not in a cage, or tied up in the bathroom?”
She shook her head, her mouth running dry for a moment.
He moved to the end of the bed, tracing his hand over his cock for a moment. Her eyes followed the motion, and how could they not? God, it was incredible, huge and hard already, just from looking at her, and a few casual touches.