Locked Out (No Way Out Series Book 2)

by Shari J. Ryan

  I grab a bottle of water out of the fridge and head back outside to continue chopping wood—not exactly my career aspiration, but it keeps me in shape. Although, the work seems endless since there’s a never-ending need for wood considering the sheds are always going up for the new prisoners. When I got here, there were only a couple dozen, but now there are at least fifty.

  I get through almost a half cord of wood before a tap on the shoulder pulls me out of my focus. I drop the ax and wipe the sweat from my head. “Hey, man. How’s it going today?”

  “Good, good. I got two more sheds to build this week. These folks are pouring in by the dozen this month, huh?” JJ says.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on,” I tell him. “I can get you another quarter before I call it quits for the day.”

  “That works. Your ma home?”

  “Yeah, she’s cooking dinner.”

  “Anything good tonight?” JJ eats over a couple nights a week. I’m pretty sure JJ sleeps over a couple nights a week too. We do the whole “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing because I don’t want to know. I want Mom to be happy, but it’s still weird to see her with anyone besides Dad.

  She and JJ became close soon after we got here. I’m guessing it was the comradeship of being two of the dozen caretakers here. Maybe it was more, though. “Yeah, she’s cooking up a roast.”

  JJ rubs his hands together and pats me on the head before jogging off toward the house.

  I finish chopping up the last quarter and stack all the wood against the basement wall. I’m starving. I walk in through the back door and I hear Mom and JJ having a quiet conversation. Walking up to the far wall in the kitchen—the one adjacent to the living room, I place my ear against the wall, listening to what they’re saying.

  “He’s going to come here,” she tells him.

  “There’s no way he can get here,” JJ tells her.

  “You don’t know this man.”

  “I’ll protect you and Sinon,” he says quietly to her.

  I don’t need to be protected. I can take care of the two of us. I walk around the corner, finding them in an embrace and kissing. Awesome.

  “Dinner almost ready?” I ask, knowingly interrupting them.

  Mom pulls away from JJ with a look of shock. She straightens her shirt and fidgets with her hair. “Sinon, I thought—”

  “You said two hours,” I remind her.

  “This isn’t what you might think…”

  “No judgment,” I say, turning away and walking back into the kitchen.

  I grab the oven mitts and take the roast out of the oven, placing it down heavily on the stovetop. I then take the loaf of bread from above the fridge and begin to slice it up as Mom comes around the corner. Her hands are on my shoulders. “Sinon, we need to talk.”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “Look at me,” she says.

  I place the knife down and turn to face her—the worry in her eyes. Then there’s JJ standing behind her with his hands in his pockets, unable to make eye contact with me. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I thought it might be too much for you to deal with,” she says despondently. “I didn’t want to make things harder for you.”

  “I want you to be happy,” I tell her. The look on my face might not confirm that, but I do. I’m just not sure how I feel about JJ. He’s a nice guy and all, but—I don’t know. There’s something about him that bothers me.

  “And I am. We are.” JJ steps to the side of Mom and places his arm around her waist. “Are you okay with this?”

  “Does it matter if I am?” They give each other a look, a look that annoys me, making me feel like I’m on the outside of this situation…which, I am. I’m irritated because I’m stuck here, miserable, with no friends and here she is, enjoying her time in this goddamned, confined town. She said this eighteen-month stint was for research to further her career. She said she had no choice. JJ isn’t research, though. And if anyone was left without choices, it was me.

  “Yes, it does,” JJ says. “We want you to be okay with this.”

  “I want to leave,” I tell them. I want out of here. “Tell me how to leave. Do I have to call someone to make this happen?”

  “It’s not that easy, son.” He did not just call me “son”. Hell, no. “What can we do to make this easier for you?”

  I take a slice of bread and barge out the back door. “Sinon!” Mom yells from the back door. “It’s almost dark. You shouldn’t leave the area right now.” Screw them. Screw this damn town.

  Darkness falls over me within the hour after I left. I’ve been walking aimlessly into the opaqueness of the dark canvas ahead of me. There’s got to be a way out.

  It must be hours by the time something appears in view, but since it’s dark, I can’t make out what it is until I’m in the shadow of the overwhelmingly large wall. It has to be at least ten feet high and surrounded by water. I didn’t think there was running water anywhere on this compound. Good to know there is.

  I approach the water, and step into the shallow end, keeping my focus on the wall I intend to climb over. As my foot makes contact with the water, every part of me begins to burn viciously, and I can’t figure out how to make it stop. My body falls to the ground, and through incredible pain, I struggle to pull myself out of the water just as my muscles lock up completely. Groaning and writhing along the now damp dirt, I try to piece together what just happened. My mind is blurry, and it takes me minutes to realize the water must be poisoned or some shit. I pull myself up to my knees, but I feel too weak to stand completely.

  “That’ll kill you,” a voice says. “Your body can only handle so much of that before it hits your bloodstream.”

  I look up, finding Dad standing over me. He offers me a hand, but it’s still hard to move, so he yanks me up to my feet, grabbing me by the collar of my shirt. “Where is your mother?”

  “How did you get here? How did you find me?”

  “That’s not important.” With my arm pinched within his grip, he pulls me back toward the house.

  “It’s not this way,” I tell him. Regardless of distaste for Mom’s newfound relationship, and the fact that I’m stuck here against my will, I will still do everything to protect her from him. I will never watch this man hurt her again.

  “Which means it is,” he says.

  “I’ll kill you if you try to hurt her again,” I grunt.

  “Sin, Sin, Sin. Are you too stupid to realize who hurt who here? I bet you aren’t threatening death upon your mother if she hurts me again, are you?”

  “You deserve to feel pain. You deserve to suffer. You’re a shitty excuse of a father and a shittier excuse of a husband.” I spit at him and pull myself out of his grip, thankful to have my strength restored.

  “I will kill you if you touch her. That’s a promise,” I say again.

  He laughs at me as he continues walking forward. “You’re too scared to step on an ant, son. Please.”

  I want to prove this asshole wrong in every way possible.

  3

  Chapter Three

  REESE

  “Are you getting tired?” Sin asks.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. I’m exhausted. We haven’t slept in what feels like days and I don’t even know what we’re walking toward, other than the sounds that are starting to freak me out. The bits of food we both ate yesterday have been replaced with an emptiness gnawing at my insides. At least as a prisoner, I was being fed once a day. My energy has depleted but I don’t want to complain. I know what it’ll get me with him. I feel like I’m walking in dizzying circles when I’ve done nothing but walk in a straight line for the past several hours. The sun is flirting with the horizon line and I hope that means we’ll stop soon.

  “We’re almost there.” Wherever there is. At least the sounds of cries and static have stopped over the past hour.

  “We’ve walked all this way so you can teach me how to shoot a gun?”

  “No, we’ve
walked all this way so you can see what those noises are. And so we can possibly find something to eat.” While the thought of food should be making me drool, I’ve learned well enough to know food does not just appear and that we will likely have to fight for it. “I haven’t been down this far in a while. Years, actually.”

  I pick up my speed as I try to make out what I’m looking at—could be a mirage at this point. Is that—oh my God. It’s water. Water! I’ve dreamt of submerging myself in a pool of warm water. I’ve dreamt of it for so long. Feeling the coolness cover my skin and my hair turn to silk against my back, is something I never thought I would experience again. Sin is on my heels and as I approach the edge of the water, my focus locks onto something else. A wall. A wall short enough to climb. Is this the way out? Please, God. Let this be my way out. I begin to take my boots off, but Sin’s hand grips around my arm. “No,” he says quietly.

  “No? Are you kidding me? Get away from me. I’m going in whether you like it or not.” Sin grips my arm a little tighter and yanks me away from the water this time. He pulls me down alongside the water to the other side where he points at the water. “What? It’s water. I need water, Sin.”

  His hands cup around my head and he adjusts the angle in which I was looking. “Look through the water.” It’s murky and swirling around, but I concentrate on looking beyond the surface, and I can’t make out what I’m looking at.

  Unintentionally, I gasp when I come to the unfortunate conclusion of what I’m seeing. I force my focus down the length of the water, seeing more and more. Breathing heavily, I turn around and look at Sin. His eyes are straining and his forehead has wrinkles I’ve never seen before. “Those are bodies, Reese.”

  “I know.” I turn back and look again at what must have been a massacre at some point. “Who did this to them?”

  Without skipping a beat, he says, “They all did this to themselves. I was dumb enough to almost become one of them once.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He squats down in from of the water and pulls me down with him. “Give me your finger.”

  “What? Why?” He takes my hand in his and bends all of my fingers down except for my pointer finger. “What are you doing, Sin?” He tugs my hand toward the water, forcing the tip of my finger to touch the water. A deep burn runs through my finger hand, causing all of my muscles to twitch. I jerk my hand away from him, falling backward onto my butt. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I slap his arm with force, but he laughs.

  “The water is poisoned with a cocktail of deadly flesh eating bacteria,” he says.

  “And you couldn’t just tell me that? You had to infect me with it just to get your point across? Why do you have to be such a goddamn—”

  “Say it for me, baby.”

  I groan loudly and pull myself up from the ground. Turning in circles for a brief moment, I feel like a crazed lunatic right now. I have nowhere to run and I feel like imploding from the amount of anger building up within me. “I can’t stand you,” I grit. “You dragged us all the way down here so you could burn me?”

  “I think we’ve already been over this. Yes.”

  “Screw you, Sin!”

  “We’ve been over that, too,” he smirks. That smirk I want to slap. He reaches into his back pocket and retrieves a gun. “Here you go.”

  “You’re handing me a gun when you know how pissed off I am?” I return his little snide smirk.

  “Yeah, because I know you’re not dumb. Being alone here is way worse than having a hot stud tagging along. And by the way, touching the tip of your finger to the water won’t do any permanent damage, so quit freaking out.”

  “You like to tempt your fate, don’t you?” I ask. No, I wouldn’t shoot him. Being alone here would be worse than falling into the pits of Hell. Although there’s no reason he needs to know I feel like that. I take the gun from his hand and point it in the opposite direction, looking through the sights, pinching one eye closed. “What’cha gonna shoot over there, princess?”

  Keeping my fingers off the trigger, I turn around, pointing the gun at Sin’s head. “Call me princess again, and you’ll see.”

  “Hey now,” he says, walking toward me. “Joking or not, we don’t point weapons at people’s heads unless we intend to kill. And we both know you don’t want to kill me.” He presses my hand down so the gun rests against the side of my leg. “Hold on one second,” he says, walking ahead of me over to a nearby tree and pulls a branch down, snapping it so it dangles lower than the rest of the branches. He points at the one single leaf hanging from the end and looks back at me. “You’re going to shoot this.”

  He walks away from the leaf and moves around behind me as I lift the gun back up and aim it toward the leaf. “I got it.”

  “Make sure you use your sights. Look for the leaf within the sights.” Holding onto the gun tightly, I straighten my arms and hold my focus between the sights. “Hold on,” he says softly. His hands slide down the length of my arms and he repositions the way I’m holding the gun. “Keep this arm bent and move your hand…here.” His touch is making it hard to focus. Maybe he knows this because he removes his hands but doesn’t move away. I try again to focus and I finally position myself so the leaf is in my sights. “Go ahead.”

  I release the trigger and jerk backward into Sin’s chest, feeling a rush of energy press through my veins. My heart is pounding and my breaths are short—I feel amazing.

  Sin walks ahead of me toward the leaf and I lower the gun back to my side. He snatches the leaf off of the branch and brings it over to me. “How did I do?”

  “Not bad,” he grins. “Actually, that was pretty epic.” He shows me the leaf and the bullet hole in the exact center of the leaf. “You might just be a natural.”

  I hate the way he’s smiling at me—the crooked grin that only shows part of his teeth. I hate the way he’s looking at me—the way his lids are half closed from looking down at me. I hate that he just took the gun out of my hand and placed it down on the ground. I hate that his hands are around me. And I hate—I hate that I don’t hate the way he’s touching me and the way his lips taste—the way his tongue tastes. The way my body aches for more. I hate what he’s doing to me because I love it way too much.

  His hands are cupped around my face and they’re far gentler than they’ve been any time he has touched me in the past couple of days. His kisses soften and he pulls away just enough to look into my eyes, and I swear to God my knees literally just went weak. I try not to blink because I’m trying to read his every thought, but it isn’t the thoughts I’m reading, it’s the pain I can see instead. Pain that mirrors my own.

  The pain disappears as his lips close back over mine. I forget about anything I’m feeling—the hunger, the aches, the thirst—it’s all replaced by everything he’s giving me. He lifts me up, allowing my legs to tangle around his waist. “Do you still want to screw me?” he growls.

  “I never said I wanted to screw you,” I mutter.

  “It was assumed when you said, ‘Screw you.’ So, what’s it going to be?” His mouth is peppering kisses from behind my ear down my neck, making it hard for me to conjure up a sarcastic response.

  Giving up the battle, I let out a weak, “Yes.”

  He walks us over to the tree and falls against the trunk heavily; his hands skating up the bare skin on my back. My body shudders at the contact of his skin against mine, and I squeeze my arms around his neck tightly, needing whatever comes next. Slowly, he squats down against the tree until we’re both seated on the ground. My shirt is torn off quickly and his hands are everywhere I want them to be. His lips follow the path of his hands and I’m losing my will to remain upright.

  My breaths are out of rhythm and his are harsh against the sensitive skin over my stomach. With his hand around my back, he lowers me backwards until I’m lying flat. He’s hovering over me as I press his shirt up, pulling it over his head as he loosens his belt, allowing his pants to fall to his ankles. “Sin,” I
breathe.

  He stops mid-kiss and looks down into my eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “Protection? We have none.”

  “I do,” he whispers into my ear. “Regardless of being held hostage here like you, I’m still a man and I still had hopes. It was one of the things I needed from my bedroom yesterday.”

  For some reason this makes me feel even crazier inside, just thinking about the turmoil he was going through yesterday, and yet, he was still thinking about this—us. My questioning for his hate toward me is slowly diminishing. Anger is ugly and hard to see through, but it will always be present here in this situation we’re confined to. I feel it too, but I can see through it. I can see him. Who he really is. I wiggle out of my pants and panties, feeling the strange sensation of the cool dirt soothe my backside. With the sunlight bright and acting as a spotlight, I take note of the faint freckles over his nose and the dull scar in the center of his chin.

  He tears open the wrapper of the condom and unrolls it over his—wow. I missed a lot being locked up, and this is more than what I imagined. He lowers his body carefully over mine, keeping his knees planted into the ground as his hand travels down the center of my stomach and lower. Much lower. My eyes jerk open as I feel his finger slip inside of me. Unlike the person Sin has proven to be, the gentleness of his touch is appreciated and incredible. His finger moves in and out of me slowly, causing a melting sensation to ooze through every one of my limbs. The pressure building within is causing noises to escape from my throat, sounds I’ve never felt the need to make before. “I think you’re ready now,” he says into my ear.

  His lips press against my cheek, then the corner of my lips and as his lips make contact with mine, he presses himself inside of me. It’s painful at first, but not painful enough that I’d dare to ask him to stop. The soft touch of his hand feathering over my breast creates a growing desire that can’t be tamed without more than what he’s already giving me. I grip my hands tightly around his hips, feeling my body arch away from the ground, using him to move faster and a little harder. I don’t know how much experience he has, or hasn’t had, but my God, this man knows exactly what he’s doing. The pain is long gone and has been replaced by a numbingly beautiful ache. I feel as though my body is moving toward the edge of a cliff and I’m not sure where my last step will be before I fall.