by Ada Scott
That was a fuckin’ strange thing for him to say to a little kid. Especially considering, according to our sources, he took contracts from the Picollis both before and after that year, before settling in New Mexico and working his way up the Folliero hierarchy.
Jace and him were going to have an interesting conversation once Jace had Vito’s daughter to use as leverage.
No innocents, no children, it was a rule that Vito never saw any reason to enforce on himself. It was a rule that resulted in me falling out first with the military, then with the Picollis, and the reason why I was reluctant as fuck to take this contract.
It was only after Jace gave me his word that he had no plans to harm Eliana that I accepted. He was going to use Eliana against Vito, that was all. Even then, I didn’t particularly want it. I’m a hitman, not a babysitter.
Keeping somebody alive is a lot harder than killing them, in certain circumstances. However, in this business, I discovered it’s almost impossible to find an employer with integrity like Jace, so here I was.
With one more corpse deposited in a hallway closet, curled around a vacuum cleaner like he was spooning a lover, and another in the convenient under-stair storage at the far end, I was on the second floor. Unlike the other floors, this level was darkened. Heaven forbid that light should spill under Eliana’s door and disturb the world she’d had served up to her on a silver platter.
I knew her from the background of some of her father’s speeches, the prim and proper girl-who-would-be-the-president’s-daughter, doing her best to mask her lack of interest in the speech with a stone-face better suited to a poker tournament. She probably couldn’t wait to get home and pack a little dog into a handbag.
Aside from the generous monetary compensation the contract offered, my only consolation in a job like this was that somebody who had everything, without ever having fought for it, was going to have their world shaken up.
I just hoped Jace’s obsession with Vito hadn’t pushed him over the edge, turned him into the exact kind of person he’d sought to destroy. The kind of person who would lie to me and break my one simple rule.
Something was next to Eliana’s door. A gentle snort told me it was a guard on a chair, taking advantage of the darkness for his own bit of shuteye.
Hugging the wall, I crept along as quiet as the shadows I was hiding in, and drew my knife again. After a glance in each direction as if I was about to cross the street, I stepped towards him.
His eyes fluttered open and I heard the gasp of a panicked breath drawn in. Lunging forwards, I swung the knife in an upward arc as he screamed.
“HEL-”
The point entered under his chin, straight through the bottom and top of his mouth before stabbing his brain, effectively snapping his mouth shut on his last desperate screech. Fuck. Somebody must have heard that.
I pulled my knife out of the man on the chair and put it away, then unholstered my gun. Waiting for a few seconds, I listened intently to my earpiece in case luck was on my side, and I might even be able to get Eliana halfway out of the house before anybody realized what was happening in their midst.
“Five, you hear that?”
“Nine, head up to level two, sounds like somebody stepped on a cat.”
“Wake up, seventeen, where the fuck are you?”
Fuck. Reaching into my pocket, I pressed a button on the simple little device that drowned the Folliero radio frequency in static as their verbal traffic became more agitated and I removed my earpiece.
This would add to their confusion, possibly delaying the alarm going off when somebody found a dead body and couldn’t call it in. Then, when the alarm did go off, they’d struggle to act as a cohesive unit against me.
I took a step back and then surged forward, kicking Eliana’s door hard enough to send it crashing off its hinges.
With my eyes having adjusted to the darkness as I crept along the hallway, I could see Eliana sitting upright in her bed, her hands hovering over the covers on either side as if ready to brace herself for balance. A classic “what the fuck is going on?” posture.
I rushed across her room. “Get the fuck up!”
Eliana’s long blonde hair, always so immaculately groomed to frame her angelic face when she was on television, had that just-been-fucked-and-ready-to-fuck again mess going on as she scrambled to comply. Not quickly enough for my liking.
I reached down and pulled her to her feet by a firm fistful of hair at the back of her head, and held her against the wall with my hand on her throat.
“Open your mouth. Open your fucking mouth.”
She did and I pushed the barrel of my gun in there. “You’re coming with me. If you resist, you die. You understand?”
She nodded.
“You fuckin’ believe me?”
She nodded again.
When people are suddenly plunged into a situation like this in the middle of the night, they tend to react in fairly small range of predictable ways. They can be summed up as fight, flight or freeze, depending on their experience, who they are, and what they’re capable of.
Eliana was doing a decent approximation of ‘freeze,’ not moving unless I moved her, compliant with my instructions. Her eyes were wide, but even taking into account the dim light I didn’t see fear there, much like I might expect from somebody who thought they were a badass biding their time to try to catch me off guard.
My contract, not to mention my underlying code of ethics, demanded that I deliver her alive, but the safest way for me to do that was for her to believe I could kill her. That lack of fear was dangerous. I leaned in closer, pushing my gun barrel another inch into her mouth.
“I’m faster than you, I’m stronger than you. You have no chance if you fuck around. Do not test me. Move.”
Eliana
The abduction from the only home I’d ever known was a blur of gunfire and dead men. It wasn’t until I felt the dew from the grass under my feet and noticed the ringing in my ears from the gunshots that I finally began to accept that this wasn’t a dream, this was really happening.
The first thing I heard was a faint squealing and then the very embodiment of my deepest, most closely held fantasies crashed through my door and left me in no doubt about his absolute self-belief. With my lips on his gun, and my eyes wide as I drank him in, I agreed with everything he demanded of me.
It was dark… but for that moment I had his full attention. He studied me so deeply in those seconds that it felt like he was seeing through my pajamas, laying me bare to his scrutiny. My nipples hardened with excitement, as they had been while I had my lonesome movie night before falling asleep.
Reality started to depart from where I wanted the dream to go almost immediately after that, though. Instead of taking what was his, right there, he marched me out of my room and picked off my father’s employees with a precision that was almost impossible. Most of the men hadn’t even seen us before their brains were spraying out behind them.
We were soon running across the grounds, past the occasional dead body, while the Mafiosos chased their own tails back in the house, even managing to get into a gunfight amongst themselves by the sounds of things. I was dragged through a hole in the fence, zip-tied and duct-taped in the trunk of his car before I knew it.
“This car is rigged with explosives. If we get pulled over by a cop for some reason and you make any noise, try to warn them, I promise you’ll be incinerated a fraction of a second before the rest of us, and you still won’t get rescued,” he warned me.
The lid slammed down, and we were off. He sped at first, but couldn’t have gone far before he slowed down to what I assumed must have been the legal speed limit. From my vantage point inside the trunk, I could see the indicators flashing as he conformed to the road laws and tried to not draw attention to us.
My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might be doing some damage to the inside of my chest. I tried to calm down, but all I could see was his face, his absolute control. If I’d thought
Billy wore his suit well, this guy made him look like a clown.
His suit was filled, it was a truly muscular frame under there that had pulled me up by the hair and held me by my throat against the wall. From what little I saw of him in the darkness and when he was lit by the flash from the muzzle of his gun, he was perfection in motion.
I remembered the way his eyes smoldered with fierce concentration as he rolled through the guards like a death machine. My skin would have tingled with excitement at that memory no matter what, but I was teased by the hum of the engine and every bump in the road.
He was taking me to my death; I believed him when he said that. The kind of enemies my father must have wouldn’t be the kind of people who would take me away like this for a surprise pampering day at the local spa. The joke was on them, though. You can’t kill a person who has never really lived.
Because of that, I wasn’t as scared as a “normal” girl should have been. I felt… I searched around the trunk, illuminated by the taillights as if the answer might be written on the spare tire… I felt like that first night when I found that website, when I first saw my previously-unknown and forbidden desires played out for me in vivid detail by actors. The tingle on my skin was the promise of pleasure, the kind of pleasure that you only get when your buttons are being pressed exactly the way you need them to be pressed.
No piano teacher, no low-level soldier working for my father, in my whole life had spoken to my dirty fantasies the way this unknown man did. His image wrote itself into all the leading roles in all the movies I’d made in my head starring myself. My body screamed “want!”
I had no idea where he was taking me, how far, or to whom, but I hoped it was far enough away that we had to stop somewhere. Far enough away that we had to spend some time together.
If I was going to die, I’d do it without giving them the satisfaction of being a sniveling little wreck. My father had taught me that at least, regardless of how much I hated him. I didn’t want a last meal like they give you on death row, I didn’t want to say any last words like some fucking warrior poet. No. All I wanted before I died was a chance to make this man want me. To be lusted after so hard that he lost all control and my legs would still be quivering in pleasure, and the marks of his passion would still be standing out bright and hot on my skin when my lights went out for the last time.
Of course, I didn’t have much experience in what you might call “seduction success.” Biting my bottom lip seemed to work for my piano teacher that one time, so I’d try that I supposed. Nothing else ever paid any dividends, though. What could I do to distract a man like this, a professional, from his job? I honestly had no idea.
We couldn’t have been travelling for more than an hour before the car slowed down, turned and went over a little bump that must have been the curb. He slowed down even further for a second and then I heard the crunch of loose grit under the tires and vague voices under the sound of the engine and the wheels, as he sped up a little and swung in a big arc before reversing and coming to a stop.
The lights went out, the engine turned off and I heard the end of somebody’s sentence. “-park there.”
The driver’s door opened. “What?”
“I said, don’t park there.”
“I’m parking here.”
“OK, fuck it,” said the voice with exasperation. “You got your package?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, grab it and I’ll take you to Keith. Just one of you? Keith said two.”
The trunk opened and I looked up at my captor, his face lit by a weak or distant open fire, and the faintly lighter sky in the east. He pointed into the trunk and I looked from one face to the other as somebody else peered in.
“Oh. Nice package.” The man with the Smoke Devils Motorcycle Club jacket drew out his words suggestively. “Well, follow me.”
The biker retreated out of sight, and the death machine himself produced a knife to cut the zip tie away from my ankles before pulling me out. I looked around and saw we were in, for want of a better description, the courtyard of some stronghold that looked like it had been built out of scrap metal and spare parts.
There was no rhyme or reason to the building materials or the layout. You might have ended up with something similar by turning on a powerful magnet in the middle of a hurricane, seeing what you ended up with and saying “That’ll do.”
At this time of day, there were no other bikers around, too early for the early-risers and too late for the late-sleepers, so nobody to see the barefoot blonde girl in her pajamas, with duct tape on her mouth and hands tied behind her back, get marched inside one of their buildings by the best-dressed man in a twenty-mile radius.
Inside was what must have been the President of this club, assuming their leaders were hired based on the size of their beer-gut. The biker with all the parking advice announced us with an informal “They’re here” and the President stood up behind his desk, where he was doing something with some engine component.
“This is your package?” he asked.
“Yes. Two people. We’ll stay until dark, as agreed, and then be out of your hair. There a problem?”
Keith looked me up and down, lingering on the bare skin between my pajama top and bottoms for a second before turning back to my abductor. “No, this is fine. Just fine. Your room is ready. It ain’t much, but you didn’t order a fuckin’ mint for your pillow now, did you?”
“No we didn’t. As long as it’s got two beds and we can hole up until this evening without anybody finding us, it’s exactly what we paid for.”
Keith led us down a short flight of stairs, and along a short hallway to a stark room, with two single beds in the opposite corners from the doorway and pretty much nothing else. My captor scanned the room and then walked me in front of him with his hand on my back.
“I’ll be out soon,” he said to Keith, closing the door behind us.
He led me to the bed on the right and pushed me down on to it so I fell on my stomach. I hoped he wouldn’t be out with Keith too soon, and the next sound I heard would be the metallic clinking of a belt being undone.
I heard clinking and my heart fluttered, but the next thing I felt was the zip-tie on my wrists being cut. My hands quickly prickled with pins and needles as he pulled me to a sitting position and I discovered the metallic sound had been a pair of handcuffs, which he snapped on to one wrist.
He put one hand on my throat as he pushed me flat on my back on the bed, using his other hand to raise my arm over my head. I went with him, my eyes trying to invite him to claim his prize in ways my mouth wouldn’t have known how to, even if the duct tape hadn’t been sealing it shut. That is, if biting my bottom lip didn’t work.
My breasts were heaving as I took deep breaths to supply my on-edge muscles with the oxygen fuel they were burning through like never before. My hard nipples poked clearly through the satin of my pajamas, adding to the spectacle.
Even in the stark illumination of the bare light bulb, he was music to my eyes. The harsh light revealed details of his classic dark-and-handsome looks that had previously been filled in by my imagination, and I found my imagination didn’t do him justice.
The close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face, combined with his disciplined work at my house, made me think he must have some kind of military background, special ops of some kind. That’s where he was turned into a death machine.
His tattoos peeked out tantalizingly from the collar of his shirt and the cuffs too, and I was left in no doubt that, yes, there was plenty of steel-hard muscle under that clothing. More than enough to force all the noises out of me that I so desperately wanted to hear.
Go on… you think these flimsy buttons can stop you ripping my clothes apart?
Instead, he wrapped the handcuffs around the still bar at the top of the bed and then brought my other hand up to secure it as well.
That’s OK, sir, I can work with this… some of my favorite movies start just this way…
; “I’m going to take the tape off now. You can scream if you want to, but you’re so far away from any help, that you might as well be in a different world. You’ll only end up hurting yourself if you struggle. Alright?”
I nodded and he pulled the tape off, which pulled painfully at my lips and face.
“Ow!” A flash of pleasure echoed the pain and I quivered visibly in front of him, which he seemed to mistake for fear.
“Do exactly what I say, when I say it and I promise no harm will come to you. If you don’t…” he trailed off.
His mere presence, his closeness, radiated at me with heat that I could feel. I wanted to bask in that heat, writhe in it. Was this what people meant when they said a guy was hot? I’d never felt anything like it, but of course I’d never been in a situation anything like this before.
By the sounds of things, we were sharing a room all day. My heart did a series of backflips.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m just a guy doing his job. Sit tight. I’ll find you some food. It won’t be up to the standard you’re used to, but it’ll do.”
He stood and left the room before I remembered to bite my bottom lip. I was left alone with nipples so hard they were aching, and him too far away to do anything about it.
Eric
After staying up all night to infiltrate the Mondalo mansion, driving here and getting breakfast for Eliana and myself, all I wanted to do was get some sleep. The constant revving of what sounded like every motorcycle in the city just outside our room didn’t help things.
I wished we could have stayed somewhere else. This far west was well out of Jace’s territory, though.
We didn’t have any safe-houses out here, so while we waited for the underworld battlefront to reach this far, Jace was offering the olive branch to various motorcycle clubs, since the agreement with the Ex Machina club had been so beneficial so far. The Smoke Devils was one such, the only biker gang with a significant presence here.
To add to my problems, Eliana was trying to be chatty. When I returned with her breakfast, her squirming had caused her pajamas top to ride up and expose a perfectly toned navel.