The Hitman and the Escort

by Natasha Stevens

  The electricity flows through him … and into his wife, who is bouncing up and down on his dick.

  Both of them jolt and shudder, as the electricity crackles and hums through them, and their eyes roll into their heads, and they collapse onto the seat.

  And she looks at me.

  Her.

  Chastity

  Him.

  His face is chiseled now, and his hair is close cropped. He’s wearing a white shirt and he has a gun tucked into his belt.

  His eyes are gleaming in his head like emeralds.

  He looks so fucking gorgeous.

  I have a moment to think that, before I realize I’m about to piss myself with terror.

  He’s the spitting image of what his brother used to look like.

  And he’s pointing the gun at me now …

  Vladimir.

  Her.

  Her hair is blonde now. Her face is covered with smeared makeup but is rosy, flushed with sex.

  Her beautiful big tits are bouncing as she struggles to stand up, to get out of the way, to cover herself, to take aboard all this new information, this sudden change in the evening.

  She looks so fucking gorgeous.

  I feel my dick starting to harden.

  “Stop,” I say, in a low graveyard voice.

  Her face cracks apart as she looks at me; her lips tremble. “You,” she whispers. “Vlad. What … how …”

  “Shut up,” I say, and wave the gun at her, my silenced 9mm Glock, waving her to step out of the car.

  She fumbles with her dress and I say, “Forget it. Leave it. Out. Now.”

  She looks at me and tears are spilling from her eyes now, making more streaks in her streaked makeup.

  She looks so hot.

  I want to take her in my arms. I want to hold her and tell her not to be afraid.

  But telling her that would be a lie.

  She awkwardly crawls over the unconscious billionaire and his trophy wife, one of her high heels on, one having fallen off, still wearing nothing but black panties.

  “Okay,” I say, waving the gun at her again. “Stand right there. By that post. And don’t move.”

  I should box her up, so I don’t have to look at her, but I have to admit it gives me a tremendous rush, seeing her again after all these years.

  And I find I want her to see what I am now.

  Ten years, and countless bodies behind me, yet still she makes me feel like a helpless adolescent.

  Chastity

  The warehouse is cold, and I feel like I’m going to piss, vomit, or maybe just plain faint.

  I stand shivering, my arms wrapped over my breasts, sore from all the attention they got but nipples still puckered from the cold.

  I go ahead and kick off the other high heel.

  My heart is hammering in my chest.

  Being taken out of a car by a man with a gun would be terrifying enough under any circumstances, but Vlad?

  Where the fuck had he been for the last ten years?

  And what the fuck is he doing here? With a gun?

  All the years I’d imagined running into him somewhere. Every hotel, every restaurant I’d gone into all around the world, some part of me had been looking for him.

  And now here he is … with a gun.

  He tucks the gun back in his belt, eying me coldly, and reaches into the car and pulls out the former Miss Russia, unconscious, holding her like Frankenstein or the Mummy carry the girl away in old movies. Her thigh-high stocking has rolled down one leg, and her head and curly hair dangle limply, although she moans and tries to raise one arm.

  Vladimir puts her in a box nearby.

  It’s not exactly coffin size, a little bit wider and a little bit shorter. Maybe some kind of packing crate?

  He closes the lid and latches it and shoots the bolt.

  When my eyes fall on the other two open boxes nearby, I start to scream.

  Vladimir

  Her scream simultaneously thrills me and breaks my heart.

  Already she’s making me stupid. Again.

  The billionaire surprises me.

  He’s regained consciousness and he leaps into the open door of the limo as I turn to look at her.

  He punches me in the face, and grabs for my gun.

  Amazing that he doesn’t have a gun himself, but his hands are empty.

  I roll with the punch and hit him in the solar plexus as he climbs out of the car.

  He falls backward with a silent exhalation of air, his blue eyes wide.

  He’s still shirtless, and he’s well-built and he appears to be in good shape.

  For a fifty-year-old billionaire.

  But compared to me, he’s a couch potato.

  He reaches out again, trying to grab my gun; I grab his arm and keep him from falling, locking his arm under mine and hyper-extending his elbow.

  He cries out in pain, having finally caught his breath, and I use my other elbow to slam him in the face.

  His head cracks against the side of the limo, and I release him, and he goes to his knees on the concrete.

  Her shrill scream is echoing through the warehouse, and I realize I’m showing off for her a bit, as I do a side kick into the billionaire’s face, and he slams flat onto his back, his face now covered with blood from his smashed nose.

  The thump of his body on the ground is loud enough to shut her up.

  She stands there, trembling, hand clutched over her mouth, her big blue-green eyes wide with terror. Her tits are shaking as she stands there in her panties.

  My cock is fully hard now.

  Already she’s made me stupid again.

  Showing off … like a high-schooler again.

  Be a professional, I reminded myself.

  He’s groaning but stunned as I lift him – easily enough, though I’m sure he weighs 200 pounds – by the belt and carry him the short trip to the largest box. I toss him in, close the lid and lock it.

  Almost done.

  I turn to her and she says, “Vlad … I … are you … if this is about the … Ivan … the billionaire … I can just leave, you know I won’t tell anybody. I don’t know what you’re involved in, but I’ll just go. I just need my clothes, that’s all, I’ll just take my clothes and leave …”

  “No,” I say. “Get in the box.”

  I point the gun at her.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she says, softly.

  The voice and words of somebody who already knows that saying that very rarely helps.

  “I’m not going to tell you again,” I say.

  “Please Vlad,” she says, face streaming with tears. “Please, don’t make me get in that box. I’ll go with you, I’ll do anything you want, but please just don’t put me in that box. I’ll do whatever you say, but …”

  I tuck my gun in my belt and close the space between us and grab her by the hair; her shriek is cut off by my hand on her throat, causing her to gag.

  She tries to pull my hand away, but the pain is intense and her wide blue eyes are dilated with terror.

  She can’t speak, she can’t breathe.

  Fuck she’s beautiful.

  I want to kiss her plump lips, bite them.

  But I push those images away and say, “Do exactly what I tell you. Do you understand? Nod your head if you understand.”

  She nods, and I release the pressure on her throat.

  “I’m a professional killer,” I say. “I was paid to kill the billionaire and his wife, and make them suffer as much as possible.”

  She just stares at me.

  I’m holding her close now; her big tits are just barely brushing against my chest and her hair wrapped around my fist feels like silk. My cock is throbbing, bulging in my pants, and I press it against her stomach so she can feel it.

  She whimpers.

  “But you’re not just a witness or an innocent bystander,” I say in her ear, close enough to her to smell her, the same maddening clean smell that has haunted my dreams for all these years. “I
was hired to kill you, too.”

  And I lift her, around the waist and knees, and she doesn’t say a word, squeezes her eyes tightly shut, as I gently deposit her in the box.

  And I close the lid on her beautiful face, her trembling perfect near-naked body, and begin loading the boxes into the van.

  PART TWO

  Vladimir

  I keep thinking about the expression, “The one that got away.”

  It makes me laugh, to think of it.

  She sure didn’t get away this time.

  Chastity

  Being locked in a lightless box gives you a lot of time to think about all the mistakes you’ve made in your life.

  At first, I tried to think happy thoughts, to stay positive.

  I was thankful that I could breathe, for example.

  My hands crept around the padded interior of the coffin-sized box, and I could feel a series of small holes on the right side, through which a slight breeze seemed to be coming in.

  Some kind of oxygen supply, or ventilation, at least.

  So I lay in the pitch blackness, naked except for my panties, and tried to at least be glad that I wasn’t going to suffocate.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Vladimir

  I kept the speedometer of the van at exactly the speed limit on the four-hour drive to the cabin.

  I never speed. I guess I would if I was being chased, but nobody ever chases me.

  Not yet, anyway.

  When you break as many big laws as I do – namely, murder – you need to obey the small laws.

  My fake ID said I was a straight citizen with no record, and if a police man stopped me, I was moving some things out to a country house for a friend.

  I had the dumb curly wig on again.

  My three guests for the evening were sealed in boxes in the back, mixed in with a variety of furniture and carpets and assorted other junk.

  The Russian billionaire, his trophy wife, and Chastity, the world-class professional escort.

  It made me smile to think about that, too.

  They were used to Bentleys and private jets.

  Now they get custom-made coffins.

  I call them coffins, but they’re disguised to look like regular packing crates. They have false tops that open and make them appear to be full of books. The compartments underneath are padded and have an air supply that lasts for six hours.

  I’ve hidden all kind of stuff in them over the years, not just people. Weapons, of course. Even myself, a few times.

  I hardly need to say that it’s not a very pleasant experience being locked in one.

  Chastity

  At first, I was senseless with terror in the dark box. I screamed and beat on the lid.

  This didn’t accomplish much other than to bruise my hands.

  I tried to relax and take some deep breaths. He hadn’t killed me immediately – maybe that meant he didn’t intend to kill me.

  The bottom of the box felt like some kind of rubber mat. It wasn’t comfortable, though I guess it could have been worse.

  But maybe it meant that he intended to do worse than kill me.

  I started screaming and banging again as I thought about that.

  A few broken fingernails later, I stopped. I wasn’t going anywhere, that was clear.

  So I just lay in the dark, waiting.

  And waiting.

  And finally, the pressure in my bladder got to be too much and I peed.

  I was wearing only string panties, so not too much got on me. It increased the general temperature in the box a little, which was almost comforting, but the smell made my eyes water in the close space.

  It seemed to drain quickly out the bottom of the box, however, and I felt some more small holes with my fingers.

  This detail particularly chilled me.

  How many people had been held in this box so long that they had had to pee?

  His face was etched in my mind as if by laser.

  His emerald eyes. I remember those eyes from when we were children.

  So sad, so kind they were then.

  But now?

  Now they were as bright and calculating and merciless as a tiger.

  And yet, the way he looked at me… had been familiar, for a moment. I recognized him immediately.

  His eyes, I mean.

  Otherwise, now, he looked very much like his brother.

  His brother, the Russian gangster.

  Who, ten years previously, I’d fucked.

  Vladimir

  She didn’t look very different.

  Even with the dyed hair, the changed name, the expensive clothes and jewelry, she was still the girl I’d loved practically from the first time I’d seen her.

  When they sent me the contract on her life, I had stared at the picture for nearly an hour.

  She’d had some plastic surgery; she’d had her nose fixed. It used to have a bump, an irregularity, from the time it had been broken.

  By her father, of course.

  She also had a scar on her chin, a small one, from the corner of her mouth, back when I knew her.

  She’d gotten that taken care of also. I saw no trace of it in pictures.

  And her eyes -- she was obviously wearing contacts, because in reality, one of her eyes was blue and the other more greenish-blue, but now they both seemed to be the same shade of deep blue-green.

  I’d loved both those things about her. Every irregularity made her beautiful face more real and human, more unique and dear.

  But a few minor changes aside, she still had a real face, a real figure.

  She looked like a living breathing beautiful young woman, not a plastic Barbie doll or a thing that only came to life with makeup and hair extensions and pushup bras.

  And her smile.

  Radiant. The beautiful smile of a child.

  Full of delight.

  I had tried not to think about her for so many years.

  I literally used to punch myself, when I first joined the Spetznatz, the Russian special forces.

  When I would think of her, while waiting in dirty trenches or on long stakeouts tracking terrorists, while sleeping in freezing mountain camps in Chechnya, Georgia, and South Ossetia, I would hit myself. I would ball my fist up and slam it into the side of my head.

  Or occasionally into my groin.

  And force myself to think about something else.

  Of course, soon there was so much death and bloodshed and suffering around me, there wasn’t much room to think of her.

  Chastity

  I remember the first time I saw him.

  He moved next door to us when I was 13.

  He was 15. He had come from Russia after his parents died, to live with his brother, who was 20 and lived with an Estonian “dancer” who was of course a stripper, although I didn’t know that so much at the time.

  I knew his brother worked at some nightclub, but I also knew he was a tough and scary-looking guy, with his shaved head and his ropy muscles. Handsome though, with cheekbones that looked carved out of rock.

  You may have guessed we didn’t live in a particularly nice neighborhood.

  He looked so sad, Vladimir, a skinny kid with dark hair hanging in his face.

  He was reading a book, and I think that might have been the first time I saw somebody do that outside of school.

  I thought it was really exotic. Nobody read books in my house. Magazines, the newspaper, occasionally. Books?

  Those were for rich people.

  Vladimir

  My parents were both dead by the time I was 13.

  A drunk driving accident. They’d gone to meet some friends and come home drunk on vodka.

  But they’d never made it.

  I lived with a grandparent for a couple years while my brother arranged for me to come to America.

  My brother Igor had gone to America to study at a university on a hockey scholarship, but he’d dropped out fairly quickly after he found he could make a lot more money breaking
heads for the local Russian mobsters.

  And skull-breakers got more pussy than hockey players, too. And no boring classes to sit through.

  I didn’t know much about that at the time, though. He just said he worked security at a couple of nightclubs.

  Which was true enough -- when he wasn’t cracking skulls, dealing drugs at the nightclubs, and extorting money from shopkeepers in the neighborhood.

  I remember I was impressed by the airport when I got to America, but that was pretty much the end of my good impressions. Igor, my athletic and boisterous brother, was now quiet and flat-eyed. He was dressed in an expensive tracksuit and a thick gold chain.

  The streets were full of the worst-looking people I’d ever seen; the people in Russia, poor as they were, at least cared about their clothes, their weight, their posture. People in America – even the immigrants, especially the immigrants -- wore sloppy, ugly clothes, were grossly obese, were loud and angry, stooped shouldered

  I remember thinking that a lot of people in America had clearly just about given up on being human.

  Igor had given up on being human, also, but it took me longer to find that out.

  Chastity

  I know, I know, it’s such a sex worker cliché: my Daddy was an asshole and he abused me.

  He was a Ukrainian immigrant, and my mother was apparently from Poland, though I was born in America and mom left Dad before I was two. I barely remember her.

  Can’t say I blame her, but I wish she’d have taken me with her.

  So I was raised by my father with help from a couple of his sisters and a variety of girlfriends.

  I can’t help but think Dad would be proud of me though, being one of the top call girls in the world.

  My clients have included billionaires, superstar athletes, ultra-famous actors and rock stars. Royalty, even.

  I can imagine him kind of thinking that was impressive.

  But then I can also imagine him saying:

  And look what it got you in the end. Locked in a fucking box.

  By the next-door neighbor!

  That, he might not have been surprised by.