Dark Desires (Dark Romance Boxed Set)

by Cerys du Lys

  He tried to pull away – a reflex action – but El’s grip was tight, and the movement made him cry out again.

  In her hand, his dick was rapidly softening and when she looked down she saw that it was turning purple.

  When she looked up, his whole upper body had twisted and then, abruptly, his fist was swinging towards her.

  She dipped out of the way, still holding him tight, jerking his broken shaft and making him cry out once again.

  “Don’t do it,” she hissed. “Don’t try to move. It’ll only make it worse.”

  He made as if to swing again, but then caught himself.

  Tears were streaming down his face and he was breathing rapidly through gritted teeth, biting down on the pain, powerless before her.

  “Listen to me,” she said, “and listen carefully.”

  He was groaning now, a long moan broken by the gasping sound of suppressed sobbing.

  “You listening?”

  She waited until he nodded, then continued.

  “Taqaandan done carefully is harmless, like cracking knuckles. I didn’t do it carefully.”

  He let a sob out, then bit back on it again.

  “Done roughly and it causes penile fracture, a rupture of the tunica albuginea, and it requires prompt surgical intervention. Delay, and you might be permanently disfigured and lose functionality. Worse, that pooling of blood in the surrounding tissues can lead to gangrene and all they can do then is amputate. You understand?”

  He grunted, and made as if to pull away, but she still had him tight and he cried out once more.

  “So tell me: how do you contact the man?”

  He glared at her, but kept his mouth shut.

  She pulled down on him, just a little, and he gasped, his jaw still clamped shut.

  “Do you call him? Does he call you?”

  She pulled harder, twisting her wrist, and he cried out again. “Stop! Stop that! You fucking bitch...”

  “How?”

  “He... he calls me sometimes when there’s work needs doing.” His voice kept breaking as he spoke, the pain so intense.

  “And the number’s on your phone?”

  He nodded, unable to resist a glance across to where he’d put his phone and wallet on top of a unit when they’d come in. “Not in my contacts, but it’s under Recent. Just a number. No name. A Spanish number. Now will you just fucking well let me go? I told you I don’t know anything, you crazy fucking–”

  She was the crazy fucking bitch who just squeezed his broken penis even harder and he fell quiet with another sharp gasp, mid-sentence.

  She stood, every movement transmitted through her hands to his dick.

  Eye to eye with him, she stared him down for long seconds until he looked away.

  Control. She had to stay in control.

  She let him go, turned away, aware in her peripheral vision that he had taken a step towards her and raised that fist again. She turned, and he was doubled over, clutching himself.

  “I wouldn’t try moving,” she said. “It’ll only hurt.”

  He looked up at her, and she saw that he was thoroughly broken.

  She moved across the room, found the land-line phone and tossed it to him. He caught it and cried out again at the movement.

  “Call an ambulance,” she said. “And tell them it’s urgent.”

  She picked up his mobile, and while he called 999 on the land-line she checked through his recent calls. She took a pen from her jacket and wrote a foreign number on the back of her hand. Then she opened his wallet and emptied it of cash. She left the cards: she knew enough to sell them on to people who did these things, but he’d have canceled them before she reached the end of the street and she didn’t have time to waste.

  She went to the door, then looked back to where Danny Taylor was curled in a ball on the sofa.

  “You may not think it,” she said, “but you’ve just been lucky, Danny. Very lucky.”

  Then she turned and left.

  4

  She’d gone to a cyber café, Googled the number, and found a listing for a bar in a resort near Alicante. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find any more information than that. Late by then, she’d hopped on a bus back to her room, and now she sat on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest.

  She felt safe here. The room was hers and no-one but the authorities and the prisoners’ rehabilitation organization that owned it knew she was here.

  She surveyed the room.

  She had almost no possessions, other than the clothes she was wearing and a few more tucked into a chest of drawers. All that she owned would fit into the shoulder bag she had come out of jail with.

  She took a deep breath.

  She was really going to do this.

  She went to the window, opened it, leaned out and threw up, retching again and again, even when her stomach was empty.

  She was going to do it.

  §

  The next morning she pawned her wedding and engagement rings for £250, even though they were worth far more. Then she went to a travel shop and bought tickets with cash.

  “And a hotel?” the woman said, but El shook her head.

  “It’s so much easier to have accommodation booked in advance. We can–”

  “Just the flight, okay?”

  Something in her tone cut the woman off, and stopped her pushing any more.

  A few minutes later El was on a bus, heading for the station and a train to Gatwick, and by that afternoon she would be in Alicante, looking for a bar.

  Inside

  1

  She tried not to remember.

  If she could simply press ‘Undo’ and remove those twenty months then she would.

  But instead that time haunted her, even now that she was out.

  More than that: it had reshaped her, redefined her. It had made her the woman she now was.

  §

  The one who lay awake at night, her head full of vivid flashbacks. Her heart racing, her breathing madly erratic, feeling desperate to run but with nowhere to go: the bitter irony that even once she had been released she was plagued with that panic, the kind you get when you know you are confined, trapped behind a locked door. Once you had been imprisoned, it seemed, a part of you must always feel locked in.

  And when she did manage to sleep, she dreamed, and they were the kind of dreams that when you woke in the middle of the night you could not ever go back to sleep again.

  She burned with an anger she had never even imagined possible before. She would give anything not to have become the woman she was now but, failing that, she burned with the need to avenge.

  §

  Some things, no matter how hard you battle to suppress them, can never be buried for good.

  “Just remember,” said one of the screws on her first day. “We get all sorts here. Nobody’s going to pick on you just ‘cos you’re posh. They’ll pick on you ‘cos you’re not polite or ‘cos you look down on them, or ‘cos you treat them like shit. But they’re always going to try it on, you hear? Jus’ need to learn how to stand your ground without rubbing people up the wrong way.”

  Moments of kindness like that stick. The screw, a stocky black guy she later came to know as Sam, didn’t need to help her. All he had to do was get her from her orientation interview to her cell. He didn’t have to say a word, let alone give her any kind of hints about how in Hell she was going to survive in here.

  What Sam told her was a pretty good guide. More than anything, the simple reminder not to treat her fellow inmates without respect was probably the best bit of advice she had ever received.

  What he’d omitted to tell her, though, was what you do when you’ve been polite and not condescended, when you’ve treated someone with respect and still that’s not enough to protect you, not enough to help you escape from your past.

  §

  Anja found out about Eleanor’s past.

  Anja was a big, strong woman with a heavy, angled jaw and an acce
nt from some eastern part of Europe. At first she seemed friendly. She was one of the first inmates to approach Eleanor, coming over to join her during their association time after evening meal on Eleanor’s first full day inside.

  “Hey, Red,” she said, referring to Eleanor’s coppery hair, “you got any burn?” Then, in response to Eleanor’s blank look, she explained, “Burn. Smokes. Tobacco.”

  “I’m sorry... I don’t...”

  “Hey, it’s okay, Red. You don’t smoke, that’s good. So when you get some burn you just give it to me, eh?”

  Eleanor didn’t know what to say. Was this big, scary woman leaning on her to provide her with tobacco?

  Then Anja laughed and said, “The look on your face! It’s okay, eh? Listen, you’ll get used to it here, you know? Most of us just a little mad, you know? You got any weed?” She laughed again. She seemed to get a kick out of confusing Eleanor and then acting as if it was all a joke. “So tell me: what you in for, eh?”

  That threw her. She didn’t know what to say. I was protecting my husband who, it turned out, had a sideline in people-trafficking and drugs that he’d been keeping quiet from me. Nice little hobby of his, you know?

  “I... I was an accountant,” she said.

  Anja nodded, knowingly. “Is what I thought,” she said. “It’s what I said, isn’t it, Sylv?” She said this to the mousy little woman standing nearby, who had been taking everything in. “I said she’s white-collar, didn’t I? You fix the books and they lock you up. A real threat to society, eh?” Then, to Eleanor again: “You listen, girl. You stick with me, okay? I’ll get you through.”

  §

  You had to take help wherever you could, Eleanor had reasoned. She still hadn’t worked out that everything comes with a price.

  Towards the end of evening association, the women started to drift back to their cells.

  Eleanor watched them go, but suddenly found that she couldn’t move. Couldn’t make herself get out of her hard plastic chair and walk back to that tiny space, just to wait for someone to come and lock her in. She felt sick. She felt that rising swell of panic that would become a permanent feature of who she was. She couldn’t do it.

  That was when Anja came across to her again, standing over her like a barn door, she was so big and square. “Hey, Red,” she said. “You got to do it. You can’t just sit there all night, you know?”

  Eleanor nodded. “I know,” she said. “I just...”

  Anja reached out and Eleanor took her hand, allowed herself to be hauled to her feet.

  When Anja didn’t let go, Eleanor felt the first surge of a different kind of panic. She looked into those steely blue eyes and suddenly felt very small. She tugged her hand again, and this time Anja let go.

  “Pretty hair,” said Anja. She reached up and brushed her fingers through Eleanor’s hair. “You scared to go that cell,” she went on, “we still got time before bang-up. You come back to my place, yeah?”

  She didn’t have to say anything: Anja read her response, had probably read that kind of response dozens of times before when she’d hit on a newcomer.

  “Is okay,” said Anja. “I’m just being friendly, you know? Need friends in a place like this.”

  With that, she stepped back to let Eleanor pass. Then she said, again, “You stick with me, you hear? We’ll be friends.”

  §

  The kind of friends who lie in wait...

  A couple of days later, as Eleanor walked from her cell, heading for evening meal, Anja and Sylv were waiting for her. One moment she was walking, head down as if she could melt into the background; the next there was a painful grip on her arm, a fist in her hair, a hand over her eyes, and she was being hauled off her feet into a cell she had been passing.

  She opened her mouth to cry out, but a wad of coarse fabric was shoved in – a pair of socks, balled up together.

  The fist in her hair tugged her head back and down so that she feared her neck might snap. It held her there, her throat exposed, and she knew this was it, the end. Everything had led up to this: a pathetic beating in an anonymous cell for reasons she didn’t understand.

  “Hey, Red.”

  Anja.

  She couldn’t answer, could only wait to see what might come next.

  “I said we’d be friends, you remember that, eh?”

  She paused, as if waiting for an answer. The hand came away from Eleanor’s eyes, then, and she could see that she was being held by the short, mousy woman, Sylv and a big black girl who looked barely into her teens, although she must be much older than she looked.

  Anja stood before her, staring at her, a muscle twitching in her jaw.

  When she had Eleanor’s attention, the big woman took a step towards her and, with almost no back-swing at all, punched her hard in the belly.

  It felt like an explosion in Eleanor’s midriff. A pain like nothing she had ever known, an intense surge of nausea, a feeling as if the air had been snatched from her lungs and wouldn’t return. She cried out, against the wad of socks in her mouth, and swallowed desperately for air. The pain just wouldn’t go. It transformed, and kept coming back in wave after wave of dull aching.

  She couldn’t breathe. She was going to be sick against that balled sock, would probably choke on her own vomit.

  She stared at Anja, through a mist of tears.

  “We’re friends, right?”

  She thought Anja was going to hit her again, but the woman tensed and held back, before continuing: “You should get to know me, eh? I wasn’t born here, you know? You hear it in my accent, eh?” She laughed, her tone vicious to Eleanor’s ears. “I grew up in Durrës. You haven’t heard of it. Second city in Albania, ancient place. I went to school, you know? I did good. I had dreams.”

  She had come up close as she spoke, her words spraying spittle over Eleanor’s face. Now she reached up and brushed her knuckles against Eleanor’s hair again.

  “So, Red,” she said. “Now you know me. And you know what? I know you. My friend, Sylv – she asked some questions, you know? She found out who you did your accountancy for.”

  They knew.

  A hand in her hair, the fingers locked together then and tugged, tipping Eleanor’s head back again. Now, Anja dragged a fingernail down Eleanor’s exposed throat, sharp and scratching, making Eleanor gag against that wadded sock again.

  “You want to know how I got here?” said Anja. “You want to know what I did?”

  Eleanor couldn’t answer. She could only fight not to choke and struggle to clamp down on her terror.

  She had to get through this. She had to survive. That’s all she could do.

  “I killed a guy. Judge was kind, though. Said there was lots of – what? – mitigation. That’s the word.”

  That finger on her neck again.

  “I got a guy, and I ripped out his throat with my bare fingers. You imagine how angry someone has to be to do something like that? How hard it is to do?”

  That sharp, hard fingernail, dragging a furrow down Eleanor’s neck.

  “You know what makes someone do a thing like that?”

  Still, she couldn’t answer, still gagging against the socks, the angle of her neck, that sharp pressure on her throat.

  “People like you.”

  Anja’s hand closed around Eleanor’s throat now, a sudden hard pressure like a ring of steel clamped tight.

  Eleanor’s body bucked in automatic response and the women at each side fought to hold her still.

  It could only have lasted a split second, that sharp, sudden pressure around her throat, but it felt far longer. And then it was gone, Anja had stepped back, and now El slumped forward, retching so hard that the socks spat out onto the floor and suddenly she could suck air in through her bruised throat, tasting blood and vomit as she swallowed and that act of swallowing hurt almost as much as Anja’s grip had done.

  They let her fall, landing on hands and knees on the hard floor. She was still sobbing and gasping for air, her whole body f
linching at each swallow, each time she dragged air through her battered throat.

  A kick to her side winded her again, and she knew beyond doubt that this was a beating she might not survive.

  She fought each breath, tried to pull more slowly, tried somehow to calm herself.

  She looked up at Anja. People like you. She didn’t have to ask what she’d meant by that.

  Traffickers.

  People who kidnap women like Anja from Eastern Europe, drug them and sell them to whoever pays most. People who steal these women’s lives, steal their dreams, steal their possibilities for a life anything other than this.

  She hadn’t known.

  She hadn’t known what Jeremy had been involved with. Hadn’t known her own husband, it turned out. She really had been blind to it all.

  But when she had found out, she’d protected him. She’d helped him cover his tracks.

  She hadn’t committed those crimes. She wasn’t a people trafficker. But the sentencing judge had said that didn’t matter, and she knew he was right. She might not be the person who had kidnapped and sold people like Anja, but she had protected a man who was responsible. She’d prolonged the suffering of Jeremy’s victims, and that made her as guilty as he was.

  People like you.

  Another kick, and something in her chest shifted – a rib cracking?

  She felt dizzy, as if she was on the edge of blacking out.

  Another. This time to the face, and there was a mushrooming of pain and the sudden metallic tang of more blood in her mouth.

  She coughed, spitting blood onto the floor and gasping at the pain shooting through her face and chest.

  She just had to get through.

  Voices then. Raised voices, breaking through the blanket of pain that smothered all her senses.

  Shouting.

  Anja. Other women. A man.

  She peered up, saw dark blue trousers... a prison officer.

  Seconds later, Anja and the others had gone, and Eleanor was able to sit back on her haunches and look up into the sympathetic face of Sam, the prison officer who had first shown her to her cell after her orientation interview.