Stockholm Syndromance: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 4)

by Ada Scott

  On my left in the dining room and throughout the kitchen I could see the evidence of a quiet family celebration violently interrupted. The smashed remains of a cake on the table had a single candle sitting askew on top of the baked rubble in the shape of a ‘90.’

  Breathing slowly and shallowly, I carefully walked through the kitchen. Placing each foot down softly, heel to toe, I made no sound that even I could hear.

  I was just about to peek around the corner of the doorframe when a bang behind me sent a jolt of surprise through my chest. It was only the back door blowing in the wind.

  The stairs were there, as expected, and my gaze travelled up the carpeted steps one by one, mentally avoiding the third and the seventh. At the top, through the barrier, I could see the upper edge of a doorway, which would lead to the room on the left if viewing the house from the, no doubt flooded, front yard.

  Pinning everything on the woman’s knowledge of her own home, I stepped up the first two stairs and then to the fourth, treading as lightly as I ever had in my entire life. At the sixth stair, I rose up on the tips of my toes and carefully looked over the edge, at floor level, towards the middle room.

  More light came from there than any other room, probably because of the open window and the parted curtains, but the angles were too acute for me to see what was going on in there. I was going to have to sneak right up to the doorway.

  I stepped over creaky number seven and then slowly to the top of the stairway. After a quick glance through the first door, I put my back to the wall and edged towards the middle room, gun at the ready.

  With any luck he’d be facing away from me, concentrating on Peter at the café across the street with the briefcase sitting next to him. I’d shoot him in the back of the head without a hint of remorse and get the fuck out of here. I felt a kind of internal rolling of the eyes. Nothing much had been that easy lately.

  As I moved closer, some of the room came into view and the first thing I saw was some playing cards on the floor, and then some feet. They weren’t his feet, they were bare and they were unmistakably feminine.

  I forced my heartrate down, as if he might be able to hear it in the silence of the house and inched forward. More of the room, more of the woman, was revealed to me.

  She was sitting on the floor, naked except for a pair of panties, a gag, and a sheen of blood that flowed down from her shoulders. Ripped and bloodied clothes littered the floor next to her. It looked like Joseph had cut the straps to her bra to get it off her, but cut down and used her body as a chopping block for the material.

  Around her neck was a brown leather belt, which was also wrapped around the neck of a naked old man sitting with his back against her, no doubt her grandfather. The belt kept them physically close, but the blueish tinge of his lips and the utter stillness of his body told me that his ninetieth birthday had also been his last.

  I’d heard about Cosgrove doing this before, playing a stacked game of strip-poker with his hostages. It never ended well. The girl looked to be passed out, her head hanging down but moving a little with every breath she took.

  I looked a little further into the room and my breath, already shallow, caught in my throat. Sitting on a small set of drawers was a small metal briefcase. That was, officially, what I was here for.

  The bed had been moved over to the window, I could tell that wasn’t its usual spot because of the deep dents in the carpet from the bed’s legs. A rifle was resting on top of the bed, with no Joseph Cosgrove attached to it, pointing in the direction of the partly-open window.

  Sudden movement caught my eye and the girl started screaming through her gag. Wild-eyed and half-crazy, she had spotted me. It was too late to tell her to be quiet, and when her eyes darted to her left, to the one area of the room I hadn’t been able to see yet, I swung my gun around the corner and pointed it at… nothing. There was nobody there.

  I pulled back just enough to see a blur of movement out of the corner of my eye and I turned to see Cosgrove barreling down the hallway at me, with knife drawn. As fast as he was coming, I couldn’t manage to swing my gun back in his direction in time.

  With my attention divided between blocking a murderous upwards stab with his knife that would have slipped under my rib cage and taking the brunt of his charge, my elbow hit the doorframe when his weight crashed into me and my gun clattered to the floor. My right arm was singing with the pain of the impact, right on the funny bone, and with that threat out of the way, he was able to concentrate everything he had on trying to get that knife into me.

  I brought my knee up into his crotch as hard as I could and then followed it up by stamping on the arch of his foot with equal power. It was a little trick Jace’s brother, Austin, had taught me that worked a lot better when your victim wasn’t wearing shoes, but could still take a lot of the spring out of somebody’s step.

  As we continued to struggle for supremacy over the knife, to the background music of gagged screaming, it finally seemed to dawn on Joseph just who he was dealing with.

  “You fuckin’ cunt,” he grunted, and head-butted me, catching me on the cheekbone and rocking my head back against the doorframe.

  Every moment we fought was allowing my right arm to recover strength and movement, but it’d all be for nothing if I took too many shots like that. Without relinquishing control of his right wrist, I lowered my center of gravity and launched another strike with my knee to the inside of his right knee and got our momentum heading in that direction.

  I twisted us around and drove forward with everything I had, sending us out of the room, down the hallway and crashing through the railing over the stairway. Sailing through the air with splintered wood all around us, everything seemed to move in slow motion.

  Joseph’s face was twisted in surprise and hatred, while I tried to make sure that knife was as far away from my body as fucking possible and that we’d land with as much of my weight on top of him as I could manage. Preferably knee-first in the stomach.

  We hit the stairs with bone-crunching force, and numbers three and seven definitely creaked. Air whooshed out of Joseph’s lungs, his knife flew off to who-knew-where, and it was impossible to know which bones he’d broken in the fall, but I wasn’t about to take any chances with a psycho like him.

  Keeping his left arm pinned down with my right knee, I broke his right arm with a technique known as a key-lock and then did the same for his left arm while he started squealing like a stuck pig. Only then did I take my weight off him.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said.

  The smart thing to do would have been to simply kill him, but seeing his handiwork first-hand had inspired me. I moved up a few steps and then grabbed him in a rear-naked-choke, pulling him back up the stairway while choking the consciousness out of him.

  If a choke is in good and tight, you only have a few seconds before you’re taking a nap, and Joseph was completely out of it by the time I dragged his ass back into the middle room. It looked like the girl had almost choked herself trying to escape her bonds in the meantime. I dumped Joseph unceremoniously to the floor, and then broke both of his legs with a vicious twist and a snapping sound that froze the girl in her tracks.

  Once the choke is released, it doesn’t usually take very long for the person to regain consciousness. I tucked Joseph’s arms and legs under him so that when he woke up, he’d be imprisoned by broken bones and his own weight, then moved towards the girl.

  She shrunk away from me in terror when I pulled out my own knife, but she had nowhere to go and little choice but to stay still as I cut the belt that was tying her to the corpse of her grandfather, then the cable ties at her hands and feet.

  “I’m going to cut your gag off. You stay calm for me, OK?”

  She looked at me with hopeful suspicion, but didn’t make an indication either way. It was as good as I was going to get from her, I guessed, and when I cut the rag off, she didn’t make a sound.

  The old man’s body started slumping to the side and th
at seemed to spark her into action, whirling around to assist it into a lying position. Her face was a mask of horror while her body responded to a sense of duty to the dead. Joseph groaned.

  “Grandad! Grandad!” she cried and looked up at me. “Call an ambulance! I think he had a heart attack!”

  “He’s gone.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at Joseph with pure hatred as he floated up from his imposed slumber into what was going to be a short life full of pain. I straddled him, putting my weight on his stomach and grinding the ends of his broken bones together. That brought him all the way back.

  “You… fuckin’…” He was sweating from the pure agony.

  “Shhhhh.” I grabbed him by the hair, lifting his chin, and turned to the girl. “Watch.”

  I put the point of my knife against his throat and, as slowly as I could bring myself to do it, pushed the metal into his skin. He started screaming and I clamped my hand over his mouth until frothy red bubbles foamed out around the blade.

  He pushed the limits of his ability to struggle, but there’s only so much a man with effectively no arms and no legs can do against somebody who knows how to use a knife. Finally, I jerked and twisted the knife to each side and let him bleed out on the floor.

  “It’s over.” I told the girl, standing to my feet and collecting the briefcase. “Make sure the police take the bomb threat seriously, he knew what he was doing.”

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, simply.

  “No, it’s his-”

  I stopped, suddenly aware of a flowing warmth from my stomach and down my left leg. Looking down, my shirt was ripped and dark with blood that was spreading down to my pants.

  “Fuck.”

  I wasn’t sure when he’d caught me, I hadn’t felt it in the rush of the fight. Maybe that first swing was a little closer to killing me than I’d given it credit, or maybe it was something during the fall through the railing on to the stairs.

  Either way, it didn’t really matter, I had to get the fuck out of here. I collected my gun and hoped the injury was shallow enough that it would stop bleeding before we needed to get me to a hospital.

  Eliana

  It wasn’t easy to keep track of time in the trunk of the car, but we must have been almost as far out of Green Point as we had been the previous night by the time I felt the car come to a stop. When the lid opened, the afternoon sun was filtered through trees but I still had to squint at the sudden brightness.

  Eric looked like he’d been through a war, but it was Eric at least. He had come back to me. He was sporting one black eye and pressing his left hand against his shirt on the left side, which was soaked red with blood.

  I guessed that kind of explained why he’d taken so long to let me out. He was already a big enough spectacle without risking being seen taking a woman out of a trunk, but I’d begun to wonder if our new car had been stolen with me inside it while Eric was away.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  He nodded as he detached the handcuffs from the inside of the trunk and then reattached them before helping me out and to my feet. “I’ll live. It’s not bleeding too fast anymore, but the damn thing just won’t stop.”

  Reaching up, I looped the handcuffs behind his neck and pulled him down into a kiss. Halfway through, I realized I was even lifting one foot behind me like a 1950s housewife. Fuck it, I was happy to see him, I felt like I was going to burst if I didn’t get that kiss out.

  I let him go and moved out of the way as he closed the trunk again. “Now what? You know a doctor around here?”

  If there was a doctor in these parts, they wouldn’t have seen many patients. The road we’d pulled off, which I couldn’t spot from here, had felt a bit bumpy and it was trees in all directions as far as I could see.

  “No, not around here. There’s a little place called Cranstonville not too far away, it’s got a small medical center. We’ll wait here until the town goes to sleep and then it’ll be easy enough to break in and get what I need to stitch myself up until one of Jace’s doctors can look at it.”

  “You’re gonna do it yourself?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to.”

  “Well... um… I’m no doctor yet, but maybe I could do it right here.”

  “With what?”

  I gestured at the car with as much hot-rod-pin-up-girl flair as the handcuffs would let me muster. “This, good sir, is a vehicle of fine German craftsmanship. As such, it was subject to the laws of the country when it was being manufactured, and a first aid kit is required.”

  Eric looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “You’re an expert in German law now?”

  “No. I’m an expert in trunks.”

  Eric laughed and then said “Ow” and held his hand tighter against his side.

  “And I’ve taken online courses, stupidly hoping I could study medicine properly one day. I saw it in there. It’s a pretty big kit, it might have everything we need. There’s a picnic blanket we can use for an operating table. I can help.”

  Eric mulled it over for a second. “You’re full of hidden talents, Eliana. Let’s do it! It’ll save us one more instance where we could get caught.”

  I was taken aback by his enthusiasm. Over the years I’d become used to reactions somewhere between disinterest and disdain. Eric popped the trunk open again.

  “I thought it might be useful, the family business being what it was,” I said, “but everybody always thought it was stupid. Like I was stupid.”

  He found the first aid kit and the picnic blanket and stood up straight again. “Well, maybe I’m biased because I’ve been stabbed, but I think they were a bunch of dumb fucks that should have loved you more.”

  In that moment, if the next words out of his mouth were “Will you marry me?” I would have said “yes.” How come the only person who had ever shown me the slightest bit of support was my kidnapper?

  If he noticed how much his off-hand comment had affected me, he didn’t let on. He was busy spreading the picnic blanket flat on the ground. I walked over to him and knelt down by the first aid kit.

  “You’ll need to take these off if I’m going to do it properly,” I said, holding my wrists up.

  Eric paused and then visibly conceded some point to his internal monologue before taking the cuffs off me and dropping them on the picnic blanket. I turned to the first aid kit.

  Opening it, the kit unfolded like a fishing tackle box, with everything you could possibly need each in its own little compartment, including a curved needle, sealed in a hygienic package, pre-threaded and ready to go. I looked up at him with a one-sided smile.

  “Strip.”

  Eric unbuttoned his shirt, instead of ripping it off as I would have preferred, and pulled it off, trying to be careful and not stretch himself out on the side of the cut. Even so, I could see blood seeping out when he made that movement without anything covering the wound.

  I pursed my lips and pulled them to one side. His blood was smeared all over his skin, I was going to have to clean him up.

  “Wait a second.”

  I went back to the car and retrieved some water and one of my new shirts from the trunk before returning to him. Setting them on the ground next to the blanket, I knelt down again.

  “These too.”

  Sure, if I had ever become a doctor, I would have let my patients take off their own pants, but this was a special case. I reached up and undid the button and zip before carefully peeling his pants down as he kicked off his shoes.

  One side of his boxers were soaked with blood, but for the time being I was distracted by the outline of something more interesting right in the middle. The pants came off and I let my eyes roam up and down the masculine work of art in front of me for a moment, cut, bruised and battered though it was.

  My heart fluttered, remembering what this body had done to me in the hotel room, how hard it could thrust that cock into my t
ight pussy. I bit my bottom lip and looked up at him, before clearing my throat.

  “OK, lie down.”

  He did so and, using the bottled water and shirt, I washed him as well as I could before cleaning closer to the wound with anti-septic wipes and using a pair of tweezers to pull some tiny scraps of his shirt out of the cut. Hopefully I got them all.

  Eric didn’t make a sound throughout all of this, but if the twitching and flexing of his muscles was anything to go by, it must have been a close call. He maintained his silence until I was pulling the first stitch tight.

  “FUCK… ing hell,” he said. “It didn’t hurt that much when it happened.”

  “Maybe you should get the guy who did it in the first place to put the stitches in?”

  “Yeah, wish me luck with that… keep going. You’re doing fine.”

  The stitches looked just like the pictures and videos I’d seen by the time I was done. They felt tight, looked tidy, and, most importantly, they had stopped the bleeding. I gave the area around it another wipe with the supplies from the kit and covered the wound with a bandage.

  He looked clean enough to eat your dinner off of now. As if to test the theory, I bent over and ran my tongue up his abs while he propped his head up with his hands to watch me.

  “What do you want to do now?” I asked, putting my hand on the bulge in his boxers.

  Under my palm I felt his cock twitch and knew he had the same thing on his mind that I did. At least, if he didn’t before I licked his abs, he did now.

  It seemed like a lifetime since yesterday morning. I didn’t share his confidence about what Jace would do, I was still walking the plank. When your life expectancy can be measured in hours, maybe it made sense that a day was like forever.

  Forever without Eric inside me, was too long. It was too long for another chance to have my limits pushed, to find out if I had any limits.

  Whatever time I did have was with Eric. What mattered was what I did with that time. He was my one chance to connect with somebody, to give all of myself to one person and see if they still wanted me.