by S. Ann Cole
Daringly, I grinned. “Sounds like a really hot way to die. Better than a bullet.”
Emitting a frustrated groan, he pressed his forearm harder against my chest. “Why are you so infuriatingly defiant?”
“Because…rules are not for us.”
Almost imperceptibly, his head jerked back.
Rules are not for us. It’s what he used to say to me when we were younger. I held my breath and waited, waited for him to see that it was me. Jhay.
His Tweety Byrd.
Disappointingly, he didn’t.
He backed off, picked up his tablet from where it had fallen on the thick carpeted floor and sat back down.
“Seeing that the threat of death turns you on instead of scares you, I’m gonna have to ask you kindly to chill the fuck out. You’re giving me a goddamn headache,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Someone’s after you, and I need to find out who it is so I can stop them before it’s too late.”
Oh God. My time has run out. “What do you mean someone’s after me?”
“Well, two different sets of people,” he spared. “But before we get into that, I need you to tell me something first.” He set his iPad face-down on his lap, then interlaced his fingers on top of it. “Who sent you to kill me?”
An answer I wish I knew. “I don’t know.”
Chad frowned at me. “This room is soundproofed, Blood. It’s why I called you in here. So if you’re worried about being heard, don’t be.”
In the assassin world, assignments were never discussed with anyone but the one who gave it. It was a rule: if broken, one would suffer painfully, most of the time in death. So naturally, Chad thought I was being spurious to protect myself. But really, I would tell him anything he wanted to know at this point. This one thing, however, I didn’t know.
“I don’t know who sent me, Chad.”
Losing his patience, Chad rubbed his hands down his face, asking, “Wha-What do you mean you don’t know? You do realize I’m trying to protect you here, right?”
Leaning over my chair handle to his, I took one of his hands in mine so he could look at me and mark the veracity of my words, spoken in our second tongue, Russian. “Chadrick Ivanovich Niiveux, I do not know who sent me to kill you. I am a prisoner. I do as I am told because it is either that or death. For twelve years I have been imprisoned. I have been beaten, raped, and forced to kill. You did this. You let me live. Why didn’t you kill me? Why did you leave me to suffer?”
Face white as a ghost’s, lips parting in absolute horror, Chad froze up, still as a statue.
“I do not know who is behind all this,” I went on. “But I think the real answer to your question is…you. You sent me to kill you, Blood. You.”
TWELVE
His word my hope secures…
“Imprisoned?” Chad whispered, his voice hollow, ghostlike. “You didn’t train willingly?”
“No. I was forced.”
With a hard bob of his Adam’s apple, he nodded. “Like me.”
Holy. Shit. My mouth hung agape at his words. This wasn’t true. “You were…what?”
Ignoring my question, he said with that same hollowness, “He swore to me. He swore he would take care of you.”
I jumped out of my skin when he let out a sudden roar, his rage like a scorching blow of fire…he was the dragon on his back.
He punched the chair in front of him, then kicked it. The chair was screwed into the ground so it didn’t budge, of course, but Chad continued to kick at it, kicked and kicked at it, trying to uproot it. Abruptly, he leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands. “All this time I thought you were well-off. I thought you’d gotten your parents’ inheritance and were living your life, missing them, and hating me. When I saw you in my club, I thought you were back for revenge. I had no idea…I had no…idea.”
I sat erect, alert, staring at his broken profile. Confused. “So you know who sent me, then?”
Several seconds passed before he answered, “Yes.”
“Who?” I asked eagerly. Because damn, this was something I desperately needed some insight into.
Raising his head from his hands, he looked over at me. His face was an agonizing art of pain and regret with blue streaks of wordless apologies. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what they did to you.”
We stared at each other for several long minutes. Just asking me to tread down memory lane was unbearable. I’m pretty sure he knew it would be a painful excursion for me, but was being temporarily selfish.
And to be honest, I wanted him to know, too. To know just how much he’d fucked my life. The number of choices I’d had in my life for the past twelve years. Zero. How my youth, my virtue, and innocence were yanked from me. That I never had the option to live. Only to serve, and obey.
He needed to know all of it. And he needed to hurt.
So I started out from the moment I regained consciousness in a dark and lonely room. Didn’t know how I got there, or who took me there. I’d only remembered being tied up and left in the closet in my bedroom, and where I’d cried and wailed into the duct tape until I fainted.
I told him about being starved, beaten and ill-treated, being punished for sins I never committed. I told him how I’d had to earn my rewards to survive, had to behave, obey. I told him of being forced to train.
When I got to telling him how I had to pay for my training, Chad got restless. He stood and then he sat back down and then he stood and sat back down, until he started pacing, as though the information was launching him into a whirl of insanity.
Over and over, he kept repeating, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Although I didn’t have to, I continued talking, just to hurt him, telling him all the details of my payment sessions—the rape, the abuse, the name-calling.
Pat on the back, I managed to tell it all without shedding a single tear. Guess I was stronger than I thought.
By the time the nightmare tale was over, Chad was on the other side of the room, sitting on the floor, back against the wall with his feet drawn up and his head lowered. The update had pronouncedly done one over on him.
For fifteen tortuously long minutes, neither of us spoke, giving words and sighs a rest, the air thick with grief, stiff with the unchangeable, and suffocating with the inevitable. Regrets and apologies unspoken, but potently palpable.
“Is that…” Chad’s voice broke through the silence. No longer cool and confident, but diffidently brittle. “Is that why you became a dike?”
I thought about it. “More yes than no.”
When he looked at me nonplussed, I explained. “The guard assigned to me never approved of the whole sex-for-payment arrangement. I mean, I was only eleven when it all began. And Saturday after Saturday he’d had to stand outside the door and listen to all of it. So at fourteen, when I realized I was never going to get immune to the abuse, I begged him to get rid of Mr. D. And surprisingly, but thankfully, he did.”
“He killed him?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because a couple months afterward, I was assigned a new guard. And when I inquired about the previous one, Miss B told me someone reported that he was the one who took out Mr. D, so he was being held and interrogated through torture.”
I looked down at my hands and sighed, feeling sick. Miss B had told me the reason The Big Man in Black had had a change of heart about me and my situation: his girlfriend had given birth to a bouncing baby girl. Enough said.
“When he finally confessed, they chopped his head off for breaking the rules.”
With a knowing twist of his lips, Chad nodded as if he was overly familiar with such consequences. Of course he was. “Who’s Miss B?”
“She was the trainer who replaced Mr. D.” I smiled as I said this. “My beautiful Sunday.”
Chad’s brows rose in question.
I answered, “Yes, the payment was the same. My captor insisted on it. But Miss B, she made me enjoy it. She
taught me about my body and orgasms—”
“You do understand she was taking advantage of you just as much as the other sick, perverted fuck, right?” He was justifiably irate, visibly disappointed in my speaking favorably of Miss B.
“Yeah, but if I’m going to be forced to do something, I might as well enjoy it. And I did not enjoy having a cock rammed into me from behind over and over! So excuse me if I gave in to getting my cunt sucked, and loved it!”
Nothing.
“Look,” I went on, “I knew I was still a victim with Miss B, but she never made me feel like one. She made me learn to accept and make the best of my situation. That was what my life had become, and for the time being, there was no way out. She made me like everything about training that I loathed when it was Mr. D teaching. Learning different tongues, etiquette, cunning, the art of lying and seduction, busting guns and kicking the shit out of people. She made me enjoy fucking her.
The woman was nice to me, okay? You see me now, holding my shit together? It’s because of her. If she hadn’t taken over at the time she did, I would’ve been damaged for good, and the first mission they sent me on, I would’ve offed myself instead of the target to end my pathetic life. But she taught me better, that this wouldn’t last forever. That the light at the end of the tunnel might seem unreachable but it was still there, and as long as I could see it, I could reach it. So she’s why I’m still here, Chad. She’s why I’m still alive.”
“I’m sorry,” was all he said. That’s all he’d been saying. But then, what else could he say when all these years he’d been completely oblivious to what was going on?
“I hated men. All men have ever done to me was hurt me,” I told him. “Miss B, she made me feel exquisite, so naturally I gravitated towards women. I never knew…” My voice dropped to a whisper. “I never knew a man could make me feel better than a woman could…until you. With you the pull is intense and unable to resist, like this is the way it was meant to be.”
Clearing his throat, he leaped off the topic, having none of it. “When were you given your first assignment?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen,” he repeated.
I glanced over at him. He was eighteen when he eliminated my family… Holy hell. My family had been a fucking assignment. “Oh my God.”
Chad got up and moved across the floor, stopping in front of me and dropping to his knees, his doleful eyes peering up at me. “He gave me his word that he would send you back to the States and see to it that you received your family’s inheritance. You were supposed to die, but I refused to carry out the assignment unless you were excluded. For a whole week, I was beaten down and tortured for being defiant, starved and threatened with death, but I didn’t break: you had to live. Eventually, he agreed. He had to. Your mother was agile, clever, near-impossible to kill, which meant he had to use someone she trusted. Me. Consequently, he agreed to my terms….I had no idea, Tweety Byrd.”
His head fell into my lap, face pressing into my denim-clad thighs. “If I’d known, I would’ve gone back for you. Would’ve killed every last fucking one of them. I’m so…sorry.”
After a few minutes of cumbersome silence, he raised his head from my lap, and when his eyes met mine again, they were wet, eyelashes lumped together. “You never tried to run?”
Swallowing hard, my heart twisting at his pain, pain that I’d wanted him to feel. I nodded. “Twice. I tried to run on my second assignment, and on the fifth. Both times I got caught. The first was in Paris, and I thought ditching it to Scotland would work. In less than a day I was found. Second time was in New York; I thought what better place to get lost than in the Big City? Same. Found me within twenty-four hours.”
Chad blinked at me, one, two, three times. Then swore, “Shit.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
Jolting to his feet, he ordered, “Stand up.”
When I did as he ordered, he held me by the shoulders and spun me around. Next I felt his fingers pressing against my skin, moving here and there on my back, searching for something.
“What is it, Chad?” I asked again.
Giving no response, he kept searching until his fingers paused on the upper left of my back, near to my shoulder blade. His fingers applied pressure, feeling, ascertaining.
Another explosive expletive left him before he spun me back around and spared, “The fucker embedded a tracker in you.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “How?”
Surely I would’ve remembered someone planting a device inside me. Unless it was done when I was unconscious.
Grabbing my wrist, he started marching out of the room. “We need to get that out of you. Now.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But you’ve yet to tell me the who behind all this, Blood. Who turned us into these people?”
Still pulling me along, without stopping or looking back, he took an audibly deep breath, before answering, “My father.”
“…plant it under a cab or something. Anything that’s constantly moving…”
Consciousness kissed my eyelids, and I woke to the rumbles of male voices above my head. Chad was issuing a bunch of orders to two of his men, while a sophisticatedly dressed brunette standing beside him smoothed her hand down her neat, charcoal-pencil skirt, all but brushing up against him. When it seemed as though he was taking too long to give her his attention, she walked over to the coffee table and picked up a black doctor’s bag that was on it.
Taking out a pad and a pen, she scribbled something down, then ripped out the paper and handed it to Chad, telling him, “Seven days’ time, I’ll be back to remove the stitches.” As if she was more than familiar with the apartment, she walked off with a slight pout.
“Sophia, wait,” Chad called after her.
Catching up with the doc, he mumbled words not meant for anyone else to hear, but the woman was full-on attitude, clearly upset about something. And with a stiff spine, she left.
With a confused expression, Chad stared after her, then shook his head and came back to the sofa, where I was lying on my stomach.
Whatever drugs that woman shot me up with had left me temporarily paralyzed, because I couldn’t move at all. Only see and hear.
Chad caught me watching him as he approached, but quickly averted his attention to his men, shooing them with the order to leave the tracking chip on a moving inanimate object.
Audience gone, leaving only us, Chad knelt down by the couch, clasping his hands beside the cushion my head was on, then resting his chin on top of his clasped hands, leveling his face with mine.
“Was drugging me this much really necessary to remove a simple tracking chip from my back?”
“Sorry. We had to get it out.”
“You could’ve given me a goddamn leather belt to bite on and dig it out yourself.”
“No. You’re not an animal. I wanted this to be clean and painless.”
“Yeah, well, I think that stupid doctor bitch overdrugged me. On purpose.”
Something cold flickered in his eyes, as though he hadn’t considered that. He tried to cover his fury at the realization with a chuckle, but I could smell the evil emanating off his thoughts. “Yeah, I think she did.”
I tried to move my hand again, but there was no point. I’d have to wait at least an hour or two before my limbs started working again. Chad must’ve really pissed her off or something.
“You two have a ‘sex with meaning’ thing going on?”
He leaned in and kissed my cheek, and amazing grace, I felt it. “Used to.”
“If it’s in the past, why the hell is she still mad? Taking her shit out on innocent little me?”
A brow arched as he laughed out, “Innocent?”
“Of course I’m innocent,” I defended. “What did I ever do to her?”
Chad made a disgruntled sound, clearly unhappy about this. “Women are strange creatures I’ll never understand.”
Humming in agreement, I closed my eyes and smiled.
; “You’ve grown to be so achingly beautiful, Jhay. You leave me impeded at times.” Pause. “In other words, I’m fucked with you. So completely fucked.”
Keeping my eyes closed, so he wouldn’t see how deeply his words affected me, I whispered, “You’ve known it was me all along, and you said nothing.”
“I was waiting for you to stop hiding,” he whispered back, his hot breath touching my skin, as if he’d drawn closer to me. “Did you really think I would see you again and not recognize you, Tweety Byrd?” He laughed, but the laugh was at me. “I thought about you every single day for the past twelve years. I thought you were in college somewhere, crushing on some greasy-haired drummer in a rock band or something. Having fun and living recklessly like girls your age do. Never in a million years did I think…” He trailed off, holding back.
I opened my eyes and found his eyes boring into mine with such raw emotion, I wished I could reach out and touch him.
“I guess I knew all along that you knew, but I preferred to believe you didn’t, because I liked being with you. I thought if you knew it was me, you wouldn’t kiss me the way you did, touch me, or take me. And I thought maybe you were thinking the same thing: as long as we didn’t say it out loud, it wasn’t real. I wasn’t me and you weren’t you.”
Chad let out a quiet laugh, as if that was the most ludicrous thing. “The second I saw you on that stage, I knew it was you. And I knew I wanted you. I didn’t see Tweety Byrd, so I never thought of you as Tweety Byrd. I saw Jhay. So mature, mind-numbingly beautiful and physically flawless, you booted all rational thoughts right out of me. Only two things made sense to me: I needed to steal you, and I needed to keep you. Even if I died in the process—because, I mean, you were trying to kill me.”
At the latter, I laughed. “Yeah…um, sorry about that.”
After a moment of contented silence, I asked, “Along with your father, who else is after me?”
This was nice. Being with Chad was nice. However, there was still a ton of unfinished business. With the unverified revelation that my old captor, The Voice, was Chad’s father, I couldn’t understand how the guy was sitting so calm and unperturbed right now. While I was there still struggling to wrap my head around the whole thing, wondering why on earth would his own father want him dead.