by J. A. Huss
A Dark Suspense
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Young Adult
Losing Francesca
He’s empty, inhuman, dishonest, and cruel.
She’s never wanted anyone more.
Sydney has lived in fear for eight years after freelance assassin, Merc, failed to rescue her from a cult-like militia group. Left in the hands of a sadistic man, she did whatever it took to survive. But Merc’s last words gave her hope. Hope he’d be back to finish the job.
After Merc is betrayed by her father, Sydney becomes his target. He wields sex, drugs, lies, and love like weapons. Merc knows just what to do with a fearful girl like Sydney. He’s in control. He’s always in control.
But Sydney Channing is not what she appears. And Merc’s only redeeming act—the very one that made Sydney’s life a living hell—might just be his worst mistake yet.
WARNING: Meet Me In The Dark is a STANDALONE non-traditional DARK CAPTIVE ROMANTIC SUSPENSE. It is not intended for sensitive readers.
Christmas Eve
Eight Years Ago
Somewhere between Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming
“Fear is not your enemy. Fear keeps you alive.”
– Sydney
The darkness is my friend. How many times have I said this to myself over the years?
I see the shadows off in the distance as they make their approach. Two men. Two? Really? Who do they think we are?
“Anyone, Sydney?” Garrett is right behind me, his hands on my waist. But that’s not where they stay.
I don’t turn when I answer, “Nope, nothing as far as I can see.”
He pinches the skin over my ribs. I’m not fat, so this hurts. But I know better than to react.
He leans into my ear and breathes out his words. “Your dad will never keep us apart.”
I turn into him, smiling. “Never.” And then I rise up on my tiptoes, even though I will never be able to reach his lips unless he bows down, and offer him a kiss.
“I’ve got a plan to keep you with me forever. All you have to do is trust me. Do you trust me, Sydney?” He stares down at me with those green eyes. It’s like they can see me in ways I cannot even see myself.
“Yes,” I whisper up to him, willing him to believe the lie so bad. I wait patiently for the kiss, for a response, but his eyes hold back. They are mysterious and dark, even though the green is bright. That’s what attracted me to him in the first place. Those green eyes. They sparkle. They sparkled that night I first met him too, but tonight it is with the promise of violence and back then it was with lies.
My calves begin to burn from standing on my tiptoes, but he never gives away what’s in his mind. He never does. If I am transparent, he is opaque.
“Turn around and keep an eye out,” he says, walking away.
I do as I’m told, not letting out the long breath of relief that I feel from his shunning me, but I picture it in my head as I spot the two shadows on the move again.
I don’t know who the bad guys are here. Hell, I’m not even sure there are any other people in this world but bad guys. But I’m pretty sure Garrett is the worst of them all.
Twenty-four years old to my sixteen, he is a man and I am a girl. He is tall and I am small. He is angry and I am desperate.
Isn’t that what they say those men look for? Men who prey on young girls? They like us angry. They like us defiant and wild. They like us desperate for a way out of the fucked-up world some other man put us in.
And I am all those things. Or at least I was.
Two years on and off under Garrett’s influence and I’m beginning to think all the fight has been beaten out of me. He never wanted a partner in this shit he’s got going here. He wanted someone to fuck and control. And when I refused—told him I was a virgin—he held me down and—
A dog barking outside pulls me from my thoughts. Then there are more dogs barking. We have a lot of dogs here at the compound. They scare the shit out of me.
“You see them?” Garrett calls out from the other room, where the men are loading weapons.
“No,” I say back. And I don’t. I just know they’re there. So it’s not a lie.
The door opens and Garrett’s friend Jared comes in, pulling his coat tight around his body using his fingertips. “Just a coyote. He ran off.” The wind blows in some snow and a gust of cold air flashes past my face, making me blink as I take a deep breath.
It wakes me up.
This is really happening, Sydney. Your one chance is here. Don’t fuck it up.
I don’t hear any more from the next room over, aside from the sound of weapons loading, and I turn my thoughts back to the dark. The moon rises as the time passes, but the shadows are gone now. Maybe the report Garrett got was wrong? Maybe it was only a recon mission tonight?
The attack comes just as I finish that thought. The window shatters in front of me and a gas canister comes flying through.
But I’m ready. We’re all ready. Because these guys who came tonight have a traitor in their gang and Garrett was warned. I’m not sure how that makes sense, but my head is foggy from the drugs he makes me take every night.
I pull my gas mask up from the floor and put it on, then point my gun through the broken glass, nervously looking behind me for Garrett. He’s yelling orders to Jared and Clide, so I know this is it. My escape is imminent. I break the window with my elbow, feeling a shard slice right through my thick canvas jacket, and then look behind me again. Jared is still in the other room and they are shooting.
I sling my rifle up onto my shoulder and then brace my hands on the window sill and jump up.
Hands close around my waist, pulling me back. “What the fuck are you doing, Sydney?”
I gulp some air as I turn to Garrett, the gas mask making him seem like something out of a fucked-up war movie. “I saw them!” My voice comes out nasally through my own mask. “I saw them in the trees. I’m—”
He smacks me down onto the ground and then rips my mask off. The chemicals immediately begin to penetrate my mouth and nose. My throat starts to constrict, and then I take a boot to the stomach. “Did you let them in, Sydney? Are you trying to leave me?”
I shake my head frantically, and I look up in his direction, but I can no longer see anything but the cloud of gas that surrounds me.
Shooting starts from outside. Bullets are flying through the window I was going to climb out of. Garrett’s boots thud across the wood cabin floor and I reach for my mask once again. It takes me several seconds to get it fastened, but the damage has already been done. My eyes are burning.
I stand up, trying to get above the cloud, but I’m not very tall, so I have no h
ope. I feel for the walls and find the window again. I hold up my hands and keep my rifle slung around my shoulder in case those guys outside are still watching this window, but no calls to drop my weapon come. I blindly press my hands on the sill again, and this time when I draw myself up, the cruel hands never stop me. I fling myself out and onto the hard-packed snow. It’s wet and cold and feels wonderful on the exposed parts of my face.
I crawl a few paces and then get to my feet and run wildly towards the trees. An explosion erupts behind me, but there is no heat and no flying shards of wood from the cabin, so I know it’s one of ours. A distraction. They are making for the trucks with the dogs, just as planned. They care more about those damn dogs than they do me, even though I have a gun and I could stop them.
No one calls my name, and for that I am grateful.
I trip and fall, stumbling over the thick tree trunk that marks the edge of the flat land behind the cabin, and my rifle goes flying from my hands and I only keep it by reaching out with the tips of my fingers on the shoulder sling.
Fuck! Do not lose the gun, Syd!
I shoulder my gun, thankful I still have it, and then fling my mask off, convinced that the tear gas is trapped inside it.
I force myself to open my eyes. It seems that the moon has become brighter in my moments of darkness, but I know that’s not true. I’m just fucked up.
I squint them down, so I’m almost blind, just a sliver of ground visible as I look down at my feet. I stumble forward and reach a tall pine tree and fling myself behind it.
“Sydney!” Garrett calls my name and then I hear the crunching of snow as he heads towards me.
I panic and unsling my gun, point it in his directions and squeeze the trigger without aiming.
“You bitch,” he says, reaching me clearly intact. He grabs my rifle from my hands and pushes me face first into the snow, his muscled body straddling my back to keep me pinned. “You almost hit me, you stupid cunt. Come on,” he says, getting off me and pulling me to my feet. “Phase one is over. We gotta run to the extraction point for Plan B. If you’d done your job properly we’d be in the truck right now.” And then he grabs my face between his thumb and fingers and squeezes. “I better not find out you broke my trust, Sydney. Or else you will pay for this. I will—”
The gunfire interrupts him. Bullets spray around me, hitting the branches of the tree, flinging needles everywhere as the scent of pine invades the air. I struggle against him and get free. But only because he is busy shooting back.
My vision has cleared a little, so I open my eyes as best as I can and run.
I run.
My feet sink into the deep snow when I cross that boundary between yard and brush, and it feels a lot like those dreams I used to have where I was walking through deep mud.
But I don’t care. The only thing worse than getting away is not getting away. Either way, my life as I once knew it is over. And if this is the end, I’d rather meet the assassins out here in the dark than be kept as Garrett’s plaything at the next camp.
“Sydney,” he calls again. But I keep running. I hit a patch of ice and stumble, my knee twisting painfully as I catch myself before going down, and then I’m on hard-packed snow again. Gliding across the top like I’m a rabbit running across a frozen river.
Be the rabbit, Sydney, my mind says. Be the rabbit.
It works, because the snow holds my weight as I make a curve back towards the cabin, hoping to throw Garrett off my trail.
The few minutes of fresh air do wonders for my eyesight, and by the time I’ve circled back to the grove of short pines on the west side of the cabin, I can see a little better.
There is one truck left. The truck Garrett and I should’ve been in if things had gone according to plan.
I eye it for several seconds and in that time all the shooting stops.
He does not yell my name. No one is screaming. No bullets are flying.
Whoever is left here, we’re all in stealth mode.
My heart, which has done a fair job at taking this all in stride because of the drugs he feeds me, begins to beat so fast, I think I might have a heart attack.
I hear a helicopter off in the distance and wonder if it belongs to us or them. And then I shake my head. I’m not part of this anymore. No matter what happens, I’m not part of this anymore. There is no more us.
It’s only them.
I look for a way to get to the truck. If I can get there before Garrett, I can leave on my own. The keys are tucked under the wheel well, in a magnetic box. If I can just get over there…
I bolt towards a rock formation, my feet slipping down into the deep snow a few times, making my dash look a lot more like a slow lumbering than anything else, and then throw myself behind it.
My body slams into the ice, cutting open my face, but there’s no shooting. There’s no Garrett.
A boot stomps down on my back, pressing hard against my spine. “Don’t fucking move.”
But I do move. I turn my head and look up at the face of a killer. Not the killer I know, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll take anyone at this point.
“Don’t shoot,” I whisper.
He drops down to his knees, one on either side of my body, and then flips me over and presses a pistol against my head. “Where the fuck did they go?”
I stare up at him. His face is covered by a black cloth so that only his eyes are visible. They are the dark eyes of a man who just got fucked over. He knows. He was set up.
My silence pisses him off and he wraps his hand around my throat and squeezes. “You better start talking. Who told them we were coming?”
“Sydney!” Garrett yells. Why is he still here? Why didn’t he leave?
“Please,” I say to the guy. “Get me out of here. My father—”
“Your father set me up, bitch. You’re not going anywhere with me.”
“No, I swear. You’re here to save me! You’re here to take me back!”
“Sydney!” Garrett calls again.
My eyes dart in the direction of his voice.
“You’re afraid of him, huh?” the big man asks me. “It’s me you should be afraid of, cowgirl. Not him. But if he’s the one who scares you into talking, then so be it.” He lets go of my throat and calls out, “I’ve got her, Garrett. She turned on you! She told us where you were.”
I’m shaking my head the whole time. “No!” I scream. “No!”
The big man pulls the cloth covering his face down so I can see him. And then he smiles. “I’m gonna leave you here, Sydney. I’m gonna leave you here with Garrett. He’s gonna do things to you that only the traitors of the world have the pleasure of knowing.”
“Please,” I whisper.
“Tell me what the plan is tonight.”
I hear a helicopter off in the distance and look towards the sky. “They’re not here for you, bitch,” the dark man says. “They’re here for me.”
“Kill him,” I say. “If you kill him so he can’t get me again, I’ll tell you.”
He punches me in the face so hard I feel the pain in my neck as my head snaps to the side. The shock vibrates up into my skull, temporarily knocking me out of the game, but I can still hear. The dark man is yelling to Garrett.
They are making a deal that involves handing me over to Garrett in exchange for information.
“No,” I squeak out. “Please.” I don’t even think this guy hears me, because he never stops talking to Garrett. “I’ll tell you,” I say. “I’ll tell you who the target is, if you just keep me away from him.”
This gets his attention. “Who?”
“The little girl.”
And that’s when I see pure evil.
Garrett might be sadistic and mean, but this guy is in a whole other category of fucked up.
He leans down into my face and whispers as he talks. “I will come back for you, bitch. When you least expect it. When your life goes back to normal and all this is nothing but a nightmare. Just when you think it’s over.
I will come back for you.” And then he leans in close to my ear. “I own you.”
Present Day
Somewhere outside Jackson, Wyoming
“I call it adjusting. It’s a cross between concession and acquiescence. Not quite a surrender, not quite a win.”
– Sydney
Now I stare out the window, remembering that night back when I was sixteen. He left me there, just like he said he would. Garrett got me back, and that was how my adult life started. Terrified, alone, and helpless. Subjugated and beaten into submission. I lost myself that year. Probably even before that, now that I think about it. It was not my first encounter with Garrett, but it was my last stand. He took me in, remade me into what he wanted, and then he—like everyone else in my life—disappeared.
We’d bought a bar in Cheyenne after all the shit from the cabin incident died down and been in business about eight months when my father was killed in a freak airplane accident flying into Jackson Hole for a ski weekend. His body was never found and it was a big deal. My father was the US Senator from Wyoming for more than a decade. He was fully expected to win a third term in the next election when all this happened. I can’t say I was too broken up about it when I saw it on the news. Or surprised. He had a lot of enemies.
Enemies that included officials with powers in the most influential nations on the planet. Of course, he had friends in those positions too. But the Company—the secret shadow government he was born into—was split up a decade ago when almost a hundred members were killed in what the nation’s largest newspapers wrongly called a ‘turf war’.
Garrett is part of them somehow. I am too, since my father is. But they never wanted me for anything, so Garrett’s request for ownership was settled without much protest.
There was a party in the bar the night my father died and we celebrated my successful implantation—Garrett’s words—into his… well, what to call it? A cult? Not quite. A militia? Yeah, but they are more than that. I guess, if forced, I’d call it his family. I became his family.