The Assassin’s Heart

by Alexis Abbott

  I lunge in again, and I let my tongue pass over her pussy more fully, wetting the outer lips. The taste of her is better than I could have expected. Her honey fills my senses, from the warm touch to the heady scent to the taste that makes me hunger for more. I dig my fingers into her further as I start letting my tongue out in soft, gentle strokes across her lips, getting a little deeper with each stroke. I’m almost sure that this is her first time at this by now, even though she’s trying to play it cool, and I want to ease her into it.

  Finally, I start getting further past her outer lips, stroking the most private parts of her that only she has touched, probably in what she thinks are moments of weakness. The guilt heaped onto women for enjoying their own bodies is shameful. I hear the sheets crinkle softly as she grasps them with her hands, and I glance up to see that she has let her head fall back as I get deeper. I’ve barely gotten started, and she’s reacting as if we’ve been teasing each other all afternoon.

  Something about that makes me feel good deep down, on a level I very rarely get to access. I hold back a smile as I keep licking her, and at long last, I let the tip of my tongue brush up against her clit.

  I have to hold her thighs open again as she yelps, and her head jerks up to look at me with wide eyes. I don’t acknowledge her. I tighten my grip and push her thighs open, crawling further onto the bed and taking more of her into my mouth. My teeth brush against the sensitive flesh above her clit as I start tormenting it with my tongue, and the further I go, the wetter my face gets.

  Five o’clock shadow is starting to show across my face, and it brushes and scratches her lips gently as I eat her out.

  “Oh my gosh,” she breathes, her voice nearly cracking. The subtle weakness she shows makes my cock throb and pulse between my legs, and I desperately wish we had time for me to relieve myself more in her.

  That will come. Now that I’ve tasted her, I know it’s inevitable. I’ll have her again. But for now, I want to give her something entirely new.

  The long strokes of my tongue become brushes on a canvas, and as her rapid breaths get so loud that I can hear them, I revel in her. My tongue dives as deep into her as I can plunge it, and I take my time in dragging it up all the way to her clit, flicking it teasingly before withdrawing and starting over again. She starts pushing her hips up into me, letting out soft whines and desperately urging me to give her clit more attention. But every time she tries to time her thrust just right, I draw back, not giving her clit more than a flicker of hope each time.

  It doesn’t take long for her to get truly desperate. Her hands on the sheets twitch a few times. I know what she wants to do, but she’s nervous. This is definitely her first time doing this. Probably her first time being with a man.

  What does that make me?

  Am I truly the monster deflowering this girl after kidnapping her? She’s trying to hide it—is she self-conscious? That kind of thing would never bother me, but in fact, with Charity, the idea excites me even further despite myself. I crave her more and more as I realize how innocent and untouched she is, and I grow even more commanding, holding her hips down and taking complete command of the situation.

  Her sharp breaths soon become steady whimpering, and her hands finally jerk up, reaching out to run her fingers through my hair and clutch my head. She tries to push me into her, but I hold fast. She’s my victim now, utterly at my whim. I can deny her an orgasm as long as I want.

  And god, I draw it out longer than I would for anyone. It’s unkind, I know, but the sounds coming from Charity’s lips are as sweet as the honey coming from her lower ones. My face is doused, and she squirms and writhes in my grasp with awkward, clumsy motions.

  “I...I feel tight,” she whimpers, a hint of worry in her voice. That’s when it clicks beyond a doubt that I’m dealing not only with a virgin, but with one who may well have never had an orgasm before—not one like this, at least.

  I let my thumbs stroke her, and I give her reassuring squeezes even as I hold her down and subject her to my sweet torture. My tongue is unrelenting, and indeed, I feel a change in the way her pussy quivers to my touch. I’m driving her toward her orgasm faster than she could ever have expected.

  It’s my responsibility to guide her through it.

  “J-Jake!” she gasps, wide eyes looking down at me in fear as I drive her to the brink. “Jake, I- ohhhh goodness!”

  Her sharp cry fills the room and makes my cock throb as she comes in one strong, full-body orgasm that wracks her to the core. As she tries with all her might to clench her thighs and push my tongue away from her clit, a jet of fluid squirts out from her and hits me in the face, dousing me in more of her honey as she convulses in my hands.

  “What- I- oh gosh, Jake!” she whimpers, eyes closed and cheeks bright red. I give her soothing, approving groans in reply as I start lavishing her pussy with long, gentler strokes, guiding her through the orgasm with all the experience I have. Over the course of nearly a minute, she twitches and squirms on the bed, and at long last, when it comes to an end, I release her and look up at her with a face glistening with her fluids.

  “I-I’m so sorry!” she gasps, seeing my face and looking so genuinely afraid that I can’t help but laugh. “What’s funny? Stop that!”

  “You’re adorable, for your first time,” I growl, crawling up to her so that I can reach her face. I wrap a hand around the back of her neck and press a kiss to her lips, letting her taste herself on me. She moans softly into the kiss, and as if she hadn’t already melted enough in my hands, the kiss renders her a useless pile of jelly on the bed.

  “Was that...what was that?” she asks, pointing to my face. I turn my head to laugh again, and she bites her lip and slaps me playfully on the arm. “I’m being serious!”

  “It’s called ‘squirting’,” I say, stroking her hair, “and it’s perfectly normal. Not everyone does it, but it just means you...well, really enjoyed it. Your body did, at least. But what about the rest of you?”

  She breathes a few moments, looking delightfully messy in my arms before smiling softly, too overwhelmed to do otherwise. “I...yeah, I liked it a lot.” I grin and give her another kiss, rubbing her thigh before breaking away and going to get a towel from the bathroom to clean her up.

  “Good,” I say in a husky tone as I return and wipe her off, carefully replacing her panties and smoothing her skirt out. “If this evening stresses you out, just keep that in the back of your head.”

  “Wait,” she says, looking worried. “How did you know I’m...or was…?”

  “That this was your first time?” I say, toweling my face off with the same towel and flashing her a smile. “Don’t worry about it. Not everyone would count that as your real ‘first time’, but I don’t care about labels. I certainly enjoyed myself,” I add with a wink, and her cheeks redden again for a moment before she turns her head and smiles.

  “Regardless,” I go on, tossing the towel aside, “now’s not the time. Get dressed.” I check my phone’s clock, then hold it out to her so she can see the time. “We’re late.”

  Charity

  I bite my lip, standing in front of the mirror in our hotel room, wearing the long black gown Jake bought for me today, wondering how the hell I’m supposed to make this all look natural. During our shopping excursion today, the two of us stopped into a beauty shop to buy makeup and hair products, and luckily Jake seems to have an eye for this kind of thing.

  Of course, it helped that the attendant at the store there was eager to give me a brief tutorial on how it all works.

  She even gave me a quick mini-makeover (which she unfortunately wiped off before I left the store) to show me the basics. The woman must have thought we were an odd pair: this rugged, devilishly handsome tough guy in a leather jacket with a girl who looks as though she just broke free of a nunnery or some conservative boarding school. When she asked me what kind of makeup I usually wear, I truthfully admitted that I have never put makeup on in my life.

  Her eyes
went wide and her jaw dropped, as she was apparently unable to imagine that in this day and age, there are still women who go au naturel all the time. I was embarrassed, so I quickly added that on one occasion, my friend Aubrey secretly met up with me in a girls’ bathroom on campus after class to put lip gloss and a light coat of mascara on my face.

  Even that had scared me to the core, as I was terrified that somehow my parents would find out and punish me. It was enough of a push to convince them to let me attend classes, but if they found out I tried on makeup at school? Well, I worried that would be the unceremonious end to my academic career. But the shop attendant seemed only more excitable about my makeover once I explained that I was a makeup virgin. I suppose she doesn’t come across that opportunity very often in her line of work.

  Staring nervously at my bare face, with a tube of shiny mascara clutched in my hand, I think to myself, I’ve lost my virginity in more ways than one today.

  I glance at Jake in the mirror. He’s already dressed for the event, after having left to collect the car he’s renting for this evening. He’s sitting on the bed, pointedly not looking at me. He’s on his phone, giving me a little privacy to work on my look. I still feel giddy and disoriented from the magic he worked on my body earlier.

  I don’t understand how he was able to make me feel...like that. I have only touched myself a few times in my life, and it never turned out the way it did with Jake in control. In fact, it’s never felt particularly good or rewarding when I was by myself. It’s strange. I know very little about sex, admittedly, except for what I’ve sneakily read in magazines or heard second-hand from Aubrey.

  Most of the sex tips I gleaned from my covert research has led me to believe sex is more about pleasing your man, about making yourself as smooth and skinny and pretty as possible. It’s about being alluring and interesting—giving him a taste, but then pulling away before he can do everything he wants to do. It seems like the only pleasure a girl is supposed to have is whatever happy by-product occurs in the commission of his pleasure.

  An orgasm (a dirty word, according to my upbringing) for a woman is just a stroke of luck.

  Unnecessary.

  Unproductive.

  It’s all about him.

  Women are meant to orbit their men. A moon to a sun.

  And the way I was raised certainly has never proven to oppose this idea. I mean, I have always expected that eventually, I will be married off to some strong, silent, imposing man who will tell me what to do and provide for me. I don’t have to make big decisions. I don’t have to reach very far. I’ve always been told that it’s best to keep my desires small and accessible. Easy things like a shared home, a shared car, some children, a kitchen to cook in.

  Maybe permission to occasionally go to the movies unaccompanied or something. Don’t want for much, but don’t ask for much either.

  And for years, I’ve always kind of accepted that. After all, that’s how my mother lives, or seems to. She is stern and assertive with my siblings and me, but when my father is in the room, she wilts like a flower, turning to him for guidance and permission. Still, they seem to love each other, and I’ve never known anything else. I’ve always kind of based my ideals of a marriage on what observations I’ve collected from watching my parents interact.

  It doesn’t look especially exciting, but it’s comfortable, I guess. That’s something. A little stability in a world of frightening horrors and the vast unknown lurking beyond your front porch is a welcome thing, right? And if that means sacrificing my pleasure, my comfort, my lofty desires to get that little dose of predictability, it’s worth it. Right?

  But over the short period of time I’ve spent with Jake, he’s shown me a different world. One that is somehow both scary and intriguing. I find myself less threatened by him and more curious about him. It’s not often one gets the chance to see a villain up close and personal, and now that I’m here—as up close and personal as one could get—I’m starting to rethink my assumption of him as a villain in the first place.

  I mean, the teachings I grew up with would beg to differ. He’s a killer, and that should automatically mark him as a Bad Guy. Or so I’ve been led to believe. But then, so far he’s only killed other bad men. Worse men. Unforgivable men. So, is it really a net loss? I’m finding that the simple, black and white, easily categorized world I imagined is an inaccurate image. It’s not that easy. There are shades of gray between the white and black, and when you squint, you can find all sorts of wild, unexpected lives moving in every direction in the cracks.

  Jake lives inside a shade of gray. I can see that now. The rules of society, at least as I’ve learned them, don’t seem to fully apply to him. He takes the law into his own hands. He holds himself to a different set of standards than I’m used to. And now that I’m being carted around alongside him, maybe I’m inside that gray space, too.

  “How’s it going over there?” he asks suddenly, jolting me out of my thoughts.

  “Um,” I hesitate, blushing. “It’s not going at all.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” he reminds me gently.

  “I’m worried I’ll do it all wrong,” I confess with a sigh. “I-I’ve looked at makeup in magazines, and those dumb apps. I tried to follow along with what the shop girl explained to me, but I’m still scared. What if I try it and it looks terrible?”

  I can see Jake turn to look at me and smile in the mirror. “You’ll be fine. You can figure it out, Charity. I believe in you,” he assures me. “Just give it a shot.”

  I swallow hard, nodding. I take a deep breath and lean in closer to the reflection to start applying a modest layer of black mascara to my long lashes. It takes me a few frustrating tries to get it to stop clumping together messily, but finally I get the hang of it. I grin at my face in the mirror, impressed and proud of myself for getting there.

  Gathering up my confidence, I then apply blush, highlighter, fill in my eyebrows a little darker, and put on a brightly-pigmented red lipstick. It’s not the most technically-perfect makeup job, but it looks similar enough to what I’ve seen in magazines.

  Next, I decide that the easiest thing to do to my long brown hair is just to braid it. Luckily, I have younger sisters, so I have lots of practice French-braiding.

  It’s just another small way to pass the time when you’re cooped up in a house all day. I get a little fancy with it, using one of the many superfluous hair products to make my hair sleek and smooth, then creating a French braid over one shoulder. Lastly, I slide the brand-new sparkly ring onto my wedding finger and nod approvingly at my reflection as Jake sidles up behind me.

  “Damn,” he murmurs, leaning in to let his warm breath tickle my ear. He kisses the side of my head, letting his powerful arms draped around me.

  “Does it look okay?” I ask nervously. Why do you care what your kidnapper thinks of your looks, Charity Rivers? I hear my inner voice hiss at me, and I try to push it out of my mind.

  He chuckles softly, sending a pleasurable vibration down through my body. He looks at me in the mirror with a grin. “Charity, it looks way better than okay. You look fantastic,” he says.

  I giggle and turn away, embarrassed. “I’m not used to this. Any of this,” I admit. He takes my chin in his hand and tilts my face up. I can tell he wants to kiss me again, and that thrills me to the core, but he stops himself, not wanting to mess up my lipstick.

  “Get used to it,” he growls, those green eyes flashing with… desire? “Tonight, you and I both have to play the part. A wealthy young power couple attending a gala.”

  “I’m worried people won’t buy it,” I murmur.

  Jake’s phone dings and he glances at it. He offers me his arm, and I take it.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing. Fake it ‘til you make it. It’s time to head out. Come along, gorgeous,” he says with a wink. I feel warm and tingly all over, torn between shock, panic, and excitement. I don’t know what he has in store for me beyond tonight. If someone had told
me that I’d be willingly, excitedly attending a social event with my roguish captor tonight, I never would’ve believed it. But things change. And the way I feel about Jake tonight is a complete reversal of the fear and distrust I felt last night.

  We head downstairs, taking the elevator, and get into the sleek black car. During the long ride to the event, I lean into Jake. I know, logically, I should still fear him. And perhaps deep down a small part of me does. But although it makes no sense, I trust him. I feel safe with him in a way I can’t really explain. He makes me feel whole. He makes me feel… real.

  And in his eyes, when he looks at me, there’s a softness. The occasional flicker of something akin to regret, like he feels bad for giving me an ultimatum before. Is it possible that he’s starting to grow fond of me? It seems impossible but, then again, all of this is insane already. What’s a little more surreality on top of it all?

  Finally, the car pulls up to a massive estate, passing slowly through a gigantic wrought-iron gate. The mansion looms impressively over a gigantic lawn of topiary animals and expertly-manicured gardens. The house itself is easily over five thousand square feet, and it looks like it could swallow my parents’ house whole. Jake brings the car to a parking space between two other luxury vehicles obviously belonging to party guests, and we get out by the marble front steps. Jake locks the car, pockets the keys, and then we head inside with a nod to the dignified doorman. I can scarcely breathe as we walk into the lavish home.

  As soon as we step inside, I can hear the echoing swells of live jazz music coming from deeper within. We walk down a long corridor with a vaulted ceiling, stained glass windows on either side. Tapestries and paintings I recognize from my textbooks hang on the walls. There are marble statues and a few mounted family crests that look to be older than the country itself. The music and chatter of the crowds grow louder as we approach the main great hall. My lungs feel tight and my head is dizzy, but Jake gives me a comforting squeeze, which helps me relax.