by Shaye Marlow
Zack appeared in the window. He opened the door, and my fingers curled into claws. I was prepared for him to try and drag me out, prepared to fight to the death… but he didn’t move.
“You’ve decided not to teach me?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Scooch over,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”
“What?”
“I want you willing. I’ll drive you home.” He made shooing motions.
I scrambled over the shifter, noticing the interior of the Jeep got a whole lot smaller when he slid in.
“So, what would you’ve done with the money?” he asked as he eased us into the woods. “You seemed interested… Do you have something planned?”
I was silent for a few moments as the Jeep bumped and rocked its way along the faint trail. Greenery swept by, fern fronds and twisted stalk reaching out to whisk the red paint. “Probably just escape my dad’s,” I admitted.
“So, George is your dad? Is he abusive?” Zack asked, drawing my head around. “He seems like a jerk,” he said in response to my raised brow.
“He is a jerk,” I agreed. Then I looked out the window.
“With seventeen thousand five hundred, you could probably get a really nice—”
“The answer is no.”
Zack nodded. “Why’d you learn to fly?”
“Similar reason, I guess, but it became a thing I love to do. I had my eye on a copilot gig, and ultimately flying for one of the big airlines, but that didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head, refusing to open that particular can of worms. Not now, and not with someone I barely knew.
We were climbing uphill, and I’d become reasonably sure Zack actually was taking me home. My father and I had a trail down to the Kuskana River, a trail we took four-wheelers down to go fishing, or if I wasn’t available to fly out for the mail. This wasn’t that trail—was barely a trail at all, really. I grabbed the oh-shit handle as Zack crawled over a half-decayed log.
“Okay, then. What else do you love?” he asked.
I glanced over at him, thinking about telling him I loved how he looked, loved the competence with which he drove, and the way he asked questions about me as if he were actually interested. But I wanted a clean break, so I didn’t say those things. “Flowers,” I said on impulse. “But don’t be thinking about getting me some, because I like the ones that are still attached to their roots.”
“Favorite flower?” The man glowed when he smiled. The stubble on his chin glittered, his eyes sparkled, and it was hard to look away.
“Tulip, followed by poppies. What’s a trebuchet?” I asked.
He spent five minutes explaining that a trebuchet was similar to a catapult, but different in how it generated thrust. Something about centrifugal motion…
“So the guys across the river—”
“The Trebuchet Gang.”
“—have trebuchets, and you have catapults, and you’ve got a little war going on trying to prove that catapults are better? You know that’s goofy as hell, right?”
His smile was goofy, his nod vigorous.
We were finally entering familiar territory. I recognized a marsh with a little lake at the center of it, and a huge, gnarled spruce.
“You have a phone?” he asked. “Maybe I could get your number?”
I shook my head. “Nope, sorry. Better all the way around if you just stay away.”
“But—”
“You’re from the wrong side of the tracks.” He’d pulled to a halt just short of my dad’s place, and I looked over at him. “And it’s better, for everybody, that you stay there. Don’t get involved with me. You don’t want that headache. Okay?” But I could see by his face, he wasn’t going to heed my warning.
Chapter Five
ZACK
Two Days Later
I put my hand over her mouth, and her eyes opened. For several seconds, Frances gazed up at me, and there was no shock there. Just relaxation, and maybe even a languid invitation.
Then her eyes widened, and I knew she was awake when she slammed her shin into my side, knocking me off the bed.
When I got back to my feet, she had a gun, and she was pointing it at me—along with a pair of hardening nipples. She wore no bra, revealing the perfect curve of perky breasts beneath a clingy tank top, and no pants.
I was appreciating her legs when the sturdy revolver’s hammer clicked back. I raised my hands, palm-out. “I’m not trying anything. I just wanted to apologize. I had my hand over your mouth so you wouldn’t scream before I could. I wrote you an apology,” I said, gingerly reaching for the note in my pocket.
She watched my hand like a hawk, and when a folded piece of paper emerged, she brought her eyes back to mine. “You’re apologizing?”
“Yes, for kidnapping you.” I unfolded the letter.
“You broke into my bedroom, in the middle of the night, to apologize?”
“Yes, and actually Rory pointed out that you’d probably not appreciate the breaking-in part, so I wrote you an apology for that, too. It’s at the end.” We stared at each other over her gun, me waiting for some sort of signal, some encouragement before I began. And her… well, I had no idea what was going on in her head. Hopefully something good.
“Would you like to sit?” I asked, gesturing to the bed.
She glanced at the bed, then down at herself. Then she un-cocked the gun, sat, and laid it on her thigh. She looked at me expectantly.
I took a breath. “Frances,” I read, “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have grabbed you like I did. It was wrong. I got excited, and you’re so beautiful, I just didn’t think. I’m very sorry Rory hit you—he says he’ll never do it again—and I’m sorry about restraining you. I’m also very sorry about breaking into your home and probably scaring you. It just seems like the only way to see you, what with your dad’s men, and the Rottweilers…”
“How’d you get past them?”
“I didn’t see the dogs. Had to tie one guy up and hide him in the brush, gagged, but otherwise, I just snuck.” At her nod, I went back to the letter. “I am very sorry, for all of it, and am hoping we can get past what has been a terrible misunderstanding and bungling of things on my part, to develop our professional relationship.”
“What?”
I folded the letter. “I was hoping you’d still be willing to teach me to fly.”
She laughed, then realized I was serious. “Zack, I was never willing. We talked about this. You asked, I said no.”
“The morning after sounded like a yes.”
“It wasn’t. And if it was ever even close to a yes, I quickly changed my mind.”
“Well, I’m hoping I can change your mind again.”
“By breaking into my room…?”
“I apologized for that,” I said.
“You can’t just do whatever you want and apologize to make it all better. It doesn’t work that way.”
I shook my head. “Would you please teach me? Please?” I added, giving her the big eyes Rory and I had practiced.
She laughed again, and then she was up off the bed. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, waving the gun around. She narrowed her eyes at me, snapped around, then paced to the door.
My gaze followed her, then strayed to her wall, where a small painting of red tulips caught the glow of a night light. She also had a flowered comforter, a few more flower pictures, and the potted plants I’d almost killed on my way through the window.
“You don’t even know I can teach you,” she said, pacing toward me. “A pilot has to have their flight instructor to teach.”
“Can you? Do you?”
She took a moment too long to answer. “No.”
“You can, can’t you? You’re a flight instructor.”
She growled. “I just said I wasn’t.”
“You lied,” I said.
She pointed the gun at me. “You… are irritating.”
“Will you teach me? Ther
e’s no one else.”
“So you’re saying I was your last choice?”
“No. Just… that I’m desperate.”
“So desperate you’d ask even me.”
“Y—No! I just… you were here, and…”
“So you’re saying I’m easy.”
“No!” I growled with frustration.
Outside, there was a shout.
Frances re-trained the gun on me, her little grin disappearing as though it’d never been. “Don’t move,” she said, obviously planning to hold me till her dad’s men came.
She needn’t have worried. I wasn’t going anywhere until she agreed.
“What can I do or say to convince you?” I asked. “I’ll give you fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Last time we talked, it was seventeen-five.”
“Fine. I’ll round it to eighteen. With that… hell, with that, you could probably afford to get indoor plumbing around here.”
Her eyelid twitched. Outside, the shouts had multiplied. Doors slammed as the commotion moved indoors.
“Nineteen thousand,” I said. “I’ll pay you nineteen thousand to teach me to fly. Just a month of your time, probably only a couple hours a day.”
“I won’t do it,” she said, “no matter how much you offer me.”
“Why not?”
“You and your brother are crazy. Also, you kidnapped me.”
“I said I was sorry!”
Booted feet stomped up the stairs. Somewhere in the house, an angry bellow rose.
“Please, Frances. Twenty thousand, and I’ll give you all the things you said you wanted. The bedroom, the food, and the cabin will be clean! I’ll get you a nice sheet set that matches,” I said desperately. “One with flowers on it. You’ll feel right at home.”
Slowly, she shook her head.
The door burst open, and I didn’t even try to fight them. George’s hunting guides dragged me down the stairs, and down another set of stairs, and into a dank basement that reminded me very much of Ed’s. There, they dropped me into a chair and strapped me in at wrists, ankles, and waist.
The guy I’d left in the brush came around and hit me a couple times, followed by Jerkface. He was still working me over when a low, gravelly voice ordered, “Hook him up.”
One of them ripped my shirt open, and another came at me with jumper cables. There was only so much shimmying and wiggling I could do, tied down like I was, and soon I had two heavy-duty metal clamps biting into the skin over either nipple. It hurt.
Finally, the man belonging to the voice stepped into the light.
Whoa.
He was big and dark, with bushy gray hair and beard, and a single eye as black as the patch over the other. A permanent scowl etched his leathery face, and that malevolent eye was locked on me.
He nodded, something clunked, and I shot upward in my chair. My spine arced violently as my muscles trembled. I shook, unable to move, to breathe. My heart flip-flopped. Just when I thought I might pass out, it stopped.
The one-eyed guy—had to be George—was still glowering.
I stared back at him, wondering why he’d chosen the nipples.
They flipped the switch again. My teeth clenched so hard, I thought they might break. My spine bowed, and in some detached part of my mind, I decided this was no car battery they were using. They must’ve hooked me directly to their generator.
Just a little after the abused skin around my nipples had started to smoke, they shut it down again.
I swallowed several times before I had enough lubrication to speak. “That tickled,” I rasped. Frances had his brows, I decided, watching the dark slashes shoot up.
The electricity slammed on. I danced in my chair.
When it shut back down, I rolled my shoulders back and returned his stare.
With a growl, George grabbed the cables, and ripped them off. I yelped as flesh tore.
He paced away, then came back, reminding me again of his daughter. “What is wrong with you?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“Trespassing, repeatedly. Getting yourself dumped in the river. And we found you in my daughter’s bedroom. Have you no fear?”
“Oh, I have fear. I fear… goats,” I said. “Babies. Hospitals. Marriage… Honestly, I think it’s good sense that I lack. I played hockey all through school, and my grades seemed to drop further with each concussion.”
George leaned forward and braced his hands on my wrists. “I don’t want you to come back here again. Ever,” he growled. “My natural inclination is to just bury you in a shallow grave and be done with it.
“But… I was guiding a dipshit today. Why is this in any way related, you ask? Because,” he said, drawing the word out into a hiss, “it took all day—I repeat, all day—to get him his bear. He made a mess out of skinning it, and he talked, the whole time, about his model train hobby. Not gouging his eyes out took all of my self-control. I’m fed-up, exhausted, old, and I just want to go back to bed.
“And so, tonight’s your lucky night. I’m going to let you go.”
He leaned forward so that his eye and patch filled up my vision. The chair creaked under his grip, and when he spoke, his hot breath hit my face. “But this is your final warning: If I find you back here, I will kill you. And I won’t make it quick and painless. I will make you bleed, I will make you scream, and I will feed what’s left of you to my dogs. You understand?”
ZACK
Five Days Later
The man in her bed was a light sleeper. It took him flopping back against the pillows after I’d punched him out to wake Frances.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Please don’t scream.”
She shot upright. “Son of a bitch. Are you kidnapping me again?”
“Nuh,” I said, staring at her naked chest. The light was dim, but I could see… everything. And I gotta tell you, this obsession I had with her was entirely justified. She had the prettiest breasts I’d ever seen.
She slapped away my reaching hand, then dashed out of bed to throw on a robe.
After getting a flash of naked buns, it took me a moment to remember my purpose. “Please, Frances.”
“Zack, you’re insane,” she hissed, tugging the belt into a knot. “That’s the definition of insanity, you know: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“Actually, I haven’t begged before. And also, I wanted to let you know your room is ready. The painting is done, new sheets. I even got you a nice headboard and nightstand, and I ripped out the astroturf, and Rory and I put in birch floors, instead. I spent all of yesterday on my knees, sanding them.”
“Zack…” She glanced toward the door. “You need to leave. I heard they roughed you up a bit. Whatever they do this time, it’ll be worse.”
“Are you worried about me?” She looked worried about me.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.” Frances put her hand on my arm and looked up at me imploringly. “Zack, please. Please, just be reasonable. Pay somebody in town to teach you. Forget about this, and go, before they realize you’re here.”
“I’ll leave… if you agree to teach me.”
She shook her head.
“Think of it as your good deed for the year. Think of your karma. Think of the fun we’d have.”
She snorted.
“I’m serious. I’d keep you entertained.”
Frances actually appeared to be wavering when the cry went up. She flew to the door and threw the bolt. “You need to run,” she said, hustling back to shove me toward the window.
“Not without you,” I said, resisting.
“Zack!”
I touched her hair, ran a fingertip over one loose curl. Then her cheek, which felt soft even through my calluses.
She reached up and covered my hand with hers. “You need to leave,” she murmured, her head tilted back, eyes on mine.
“No.”
“Zack, please. He’ll leave scars. He’ll take body-p
arts. And that’s if he’s feeling kind.”
“You can stop it,” I whispered, stroking her cheek with my thumb. “Just say yes.”
An angry man pounded on the door. “Frances!” he roared. George.
I pushed her behind me just before the doorframe gave up in a spray of splinters. George stood silhouetted in the opening, shoulders heaving with his angry breaths. Then he stepped back, and his guides flooded in.
“No. No!” Frances’s fingers caught in the back of my shirt and held as they dragged me away. Threads popped, and then her hands were gone.
The guides dragged me right up to George in the hall. The big man gazed down at me, the hall light casting a deep shadow in his eye socket. Then, the tangle of his graying beard parted slowly around surprisingly good teeth.
“Guess what,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m well-rested today,” he practically purred. Then he nodded to the burly bastards holding me, and they dragged me down the stairs.
They took me to what I was beginning to think of as his dungeon. Today, there was a table instead of a chair, which made me wonder if he’d actually been expecting me, actually had a plan for me this time.
I started to fight. But there were just too many of them, and they were just too damn big.
They slung me onto the stainless-steel surface—which reminded me quite a bit of a fish-cleaning table—and several men piled on, pinning me there as others wrestled my arms down and secured them with straps. A few of my kicks connected before they got my legs, too.
One of them brandished a pair of scissors. I struggled as he approached, held my breath as he slid the bottom blade of those wicked-looking shears beneath the hem of my shirt. Snip. Snip. Snip, the scissors went. The Christmas sweater I’d been wearing parted, then fell away.
George appeared, a giant shadow—he was easily the biggest man there, tall and thick and heavy—in my periphery. Watching, all in darkness except for those flashing teeth as his men removed my boots and socks. “And the pants,” he said.
The cold steel slid under my waistband, then sheared easily through the layers of denim. I considered asking where they’d gotten those, even as I mourned the last pair of jeans that’d actually fit.