He framed her delicate head with his giant, muscled arm in a strangely tender gesture. Maya held onto the blue-black tail of his hair as he kissed her mouth, his sensual lips a possessive caress against hers—a promise deeper than anything she could understand in her present state. Maya reacted to it anyway, crying out into his mouth and tightening around his impossibly large cock, which seemed to have become a part of her now, as though she’d stretched so thinly around its feverish heat that they had merged.
Somehow she managed to release him after she had come and he had followed. He held her in his arms, still jinn as she finally succumbed to her emotional and physical exhaustion. She’d been rubbed raw inside and out, and she clung to Bell, but Maya also slept the sleep of the purest kind of satisfaction.
Chapter Thirteen
Maya knew something had changed when the police caught up with Arcanium. This time, the circus was attached to another faire, the last faire of the season before they set off on their own until October.
After getting some grilled corn and a soda from the golems during a break from rehearsals, she noticed a pair of uniformed police officers entering the big top.
Her first impulse was not to run to them, but to run away entirely.
Instead she hurried around the back. She crept behind the props and peeked out through the red curtain.
The two police officers—both men, one young, the other middle-aged—were talking with the Ringmaster and Bell. Valorie, Kitty and Misha crowded around as well like curious onlookers. Maya couldn’t hear them, but she thought she lip-read the words ‘missing’, ‘faire’, ‘circus’, and ‘check’. The police took a photo out of a file and showed it to the circle of people around them.
Neither officer appeared earnest or urgent, which told her they were running down a potential lead but weren’t expecting to find her here.
However, it meant someone back at home now acknowledged Maya was missing. She supposed she should have expected it after her first wish. Because Derrick was out of commission—and let’s just leave it at that—he didn’t have the means to continue his trollish deception. It probably wouldn’t have crossed Kerry’s mind to finish what Derrick had started, what with the hours of therapy she probably needed. Without Derrick filling in the gaps that Maya’s disappearance had left, someone must have finally noticed that Maya was nowhere to be found.
But Maya was still bound to Arcanium. She didn’t know whether she was allowed to go out to the officers and tell them that she was fine, whether she was allowed to acknowledge her existence to the outside world at all aside from her performances. Her instinct told her that, under present strictures, she should stay hidden.
The people around the police officers shook their heads at the picture, pretending they hadn’t seen her—all of them very convincing.
One of the police officers shook Bell’s hand, urging them to call if Maya turned up. Then they left. No searching of the premises. No interrogation of suspicious circus folk. No rounding up of cast and crew. Just a perfunctory check. It would have been insulting if Maya hadn’t been relieved they were gone. If she left Arcanium, she didn’t want it to be in a police car.
Maya crept out from behind the curtain as soon as they’d been gone long enough for her to be confident they weren’t coming back. Bell turned to meet her. He’d known she was there all along.
“It was a routine check based on where you were last seen,” he said and kissed her forehead. “They’re already leaving.”
“Good,” Maya said, although she glanced at the laces of her leather slippers.
Bell bent down, concern in his beautiful hazel eyes. “You sure about that?” It was a question he didn’t need to ask, but he did ask, which she appreciated.
“I couldn’t have left anyway, right?” Maya said. “If they had seen me and recognized me from the picture, they would have taken me across the threshold, and I can’t do that. And you wouldn’t have let them do that, because it would call attention to Arcanium.”
“If I’d known that you were going to cross their path, I would have made you unrecognizable to them,” Bell said, tucking a stray bit of hair behind her ears. “You’d be amazed what a simple dye job does to alter your appearance. How do you feel about going blonde?”
“I’d prefer red,” Maya replied, only half-serious.
“I like the way you think,” he said. “But don’t worry, my dear. We won’t get pigs sniffing around here for a good while. I only let them come in because they don’t suspect anything. I find it’s best not to mess too much with law enforcement. We want less scrutiny, not more.”
“Sound philosophy,” Maya replied. She climbed the ladder to the high-wire platform and began her routine again.
* * * *
Where are you? Are you ok?
Maya sat on the rustic bench near the elegant gates, staring first at the phone screen, then at the gates—a molten gold in the sunset—then the screen again.
After her first wish, Maya had stopped checking her phone, although she used to check her phone every day. Knowing about her friends and family would be good, therefore she hadn’t been allowed to have it. Also, she would have found it just as much punishment as a reward to let herself check—her address book filled with colleagues who were no longer colleagues, family who didn’t know anything was wrong, friends who had abandoned her, and the ever-present temptation to contact someone to beg them to save her.
After the police had come, though, she’d taken it out of her old tie-dye purse and turned it on again.
Her mother had started texting her two weeks ago, at least sixteen times since she’d learned that her daughter was missing.
The phone messages told a more detailed story of how that had come about. A police officer had been studying the scene of Derrick’s bedroom for foul play. He’d discovered the phone and checked the texts and calls like a dutiful detective. Thus, the deception had been revealed.
Maya wasn’t a suspect for what had happened to Derrick, since it had been determined to be a freak accident by both the detectives and Derrick himself, once he’d been drugged enough to answer questions with a keyboard. He’d confessed all—about leaving her at the circus, about the tricks he had played. It was all in good fun until someone had broken all the bones in his body.
But that left everyone with a purebred asshole getting his comeuppance in the hospital and a lot of questions about what had happened to Maya after Derrick had left her. There had been no clues at her or Derrick’s apartment. No one had been able to find her phone. The faire folk had been hard to track down because faire was over.
Maya’s mother had spilled all this out in text messages and voicemail. Maya got the impression her mother didn’t believe her messages were reaching anyone. She just wanted to talk to her daughter somehow.
She dropped her hand to her lap, hung her head and swallowed against the spiked stone in her throat. Her eyes stung. She rubbed the back of her hand over them before she could start crying. It never changed anything, and she couldn’t start missing her mom now or else she wasn’t going to be able to stop. She couldn’t start to miss what she couldn’t have. That way lay madness.
Well, more madness. Deeper madness.
Where are you? I miss you. I love you.
“Honey, if you hear this, please call me back. Please, Maya. I love you so much, cariña.”
“Maya.” Bell sat on the bench, facing away from the gate, facing her. He thumbed the tear that she hadn’t caught.
“I’d like to make my third wish.”
Bell stiffened.
“Maya, I thought…” He swallowed, clenching his jaw to control himself. He swung a leg over the bench to straddle it as he directed his intense gaze on her.
She met his eyes. He deserved that much from her.
“I wish you’d set me free.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Bell asked. “What you have given me?”
“I trust you to do right by me, Bell,�
�� Maya said. “Please. I need—”
“I can give you everything you need,” Bell replied earnestly.
“Then give it to me,” Maya said. She felt numb. She wondered if he couldn’t see into her at all because of it.
Bell stared at her face as though memorizing it, his temple twitching with the clenching of his teeth. Then he stood up and went to the gate. It was closed but unlocked. He touched the latch.
The gate swung open.
Maya approached the spreading wings of the gate, clutching her phone against her thigh. The cuffs around her wrists undid themselves and silently fell onto the grass, as though they’d never been there.
“Granted,” Bell said.
His expression was unreadable. He could have done anything to her. He could have kept the threshold spells on her but shut her out of Arcanium so that she could have no respite from the biting pain. She could have walked out the gates and fallen dead of a heart attack or brain aneurysm. She could have forgotten who she was and wandered for the rest of her days. She could have disappeared like smoke in the wind. She could have become a tree or a worm or a butterfly. There were so many ways he could have interpreted setting her free.
Maya stepped across the threshold.
Nothing.
She let out a breath in a rush, but she wasn’t out of the woods yet. She ran forward a few steps past the doors of the gate and into the faire proper.
Nothing.
Her laugh sounded more like a sob, and she spun around to face Bell again. “Am I free? Just free?”
“Yes,” Bell replied evenly. “I had hoped for longer, but I cannot hurt you, Maya. Neither for revenge nor regret. I have no wish to. You have your wages in your bodice. Go in peace.”
Maya reached into her the bodice of her red leather dress and pulled out a wad of bills. Holy crap. She hadn’t known slaves got paid. She didn’t have time to count it, so she stuck it back.
Bell’s lips thinned, but he bowed and turned, walking away.
The creak of the gates stopped him.
Maya pulled the Arcanium gates closed behind her just as sunset turned to twilight and the strings of lights over the caravan switched on.
She knelt where the cuffs had fallen, set her phone down and fastened the cuffs back on.
Bell ran to her. He took her face in his hands, combed his fingers through her loose hair, caressed down her neck with his broad, warm palms. She stroked his cheeks.
“I said I wanted to be free, Bell. I never said I wanted to leave,” Maya said. “How could you not know that?”
“I was afraid to know,” Bell replied, bringing his forehead against hers. “Oh God, Maya, golam, asalam, hame donyaye mani. Don’t do that to me again. Not when I just found you.”
“I didn’t mean to trick you,” Maya said. “I thought you knew.”
Bell captured her lips with his, a simple kiss, but one that penetrated her as deeply as his truest form, needles in her back, whips on her thighs, dark, dangerous, beautiful, free, complete love.
When he let her up for air, she clung to his shoulders, gasping against the strength of the wave not just of pleasure, but the relentless flood of emotion, emotion she wasn’t accustomed to feeling with any man.
“That’s why I asked to be free and not to take back Derrick’s wish. It means I can still be a part of Arcanium, but now I can be here voluntarily, like Kitty and Valorie. I can leave, but I can always come back,” Maya said. “That’s all I wanted.”
“Yes, yes, anything you want, Maya,” Bell said. He kissed her neck, down over her breasts. He fell to his knees and kissed her stomach over the leather dress. “No more wishes, but there are still so many things I can do for you under the wishes you’ve made. Love me, Maya. Come with me and love me. I need you tonight. Now. I need you to know what this means to me.”
“Wait for me,” Maya whispered, caressing his face. “I have one thing I need to do first.”
Bell gazed up at her, seeing everything, and he smiled. “Behave, golam. I will wait for you in our bed.”
As he headed for the trailers, Maya retrieved her phone from the grass and clicked on a very familiar number.
“Hi, Mom. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Her mother kept trying to talk, but nothing very coherent managed to come out between the relieved sobs.
Maya understood her anyway.
“I love you so much, and I’m okay. I haven’t been, but now I am. No, I’m safe now. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again. Hey, Mom, you won’t believe it, but I’ve kind of joined a circus. They saved me, and now I walk the high wire. You want to come see me? Okay, I’ll ask the Ringmaster to give me a schedule.”
She’d have to make sure she was more appropriately dressed, but it still gave her a thrill to invite her mother to see what she had accomplished.
“I just got my phone back. It’s been dead for ages, and we’re kind of out of the way. I wasn’t ready to…to let people see me. But I’m ready now. I’m happy where I am. I can’t wait to see you, Mom. Is everyone okay?”
She talked with her mother until well after nightfall. But as she ended the call, her feet were light, her heart energized, her skin electric. She dropped the phone on the couch in her RV.
Then she went into the bedroom and crawled over Bell, who wrapped his strong arms tightly around her. He refused to let go until morning.
Maya had used up her wishes, but now she had all she needed.
Also available from Totally Bound Publishing:
Red Queen
Aurelia T. Evans
Excerpt
Chapter One
Her lieutenants returned to their duties, some to the streets and some to the line of computers along the wall. At least half of the new world was cyber and the best criminals were hackers these days. Eden was nothing if not flexible in her efforts to keep her business not just alive but thriving.
Callum lingered behind as she settled herself at her desks in her section of the giant warehouse room. One of them was personal, the second professional, the third to display some of her wares and new acquisitions for potential buyers. Callum stood in front of the professional desk, a simple glass table with a few clear drawers, a leather blotter, and a slim, black desktop computer.
“What’s on your mind tonight?” Eden asked.
The man was troubled. And when one of her men was troubled, she listened, especially with someone like Callum. He was one of the few members of her organization who hadn’t been in her bed and one of her few lieutenants who knew she was a vampire.
A woman didn’t broadcast that information for all and sundry, because then turmoil in the ranks brought out the crosses and holy water. Those things didn’t do a damn thing to her, but they sure got annoying after the fiftieth holy water bath, which tended to ruin her leather. Stakes and sun—those were the real dangers, but only to those who knew best how to wield them. The city had a wealth of vampire hunters, though none yet keen enough to defeat her. She even had a few on her payroll after getting her teeth into them.
“I was approached by J and Santos again,” Callum said.
Eden closed her eyes and sighed. “They approach you because they know they can sell to you and not to me,” she said.
“Santos says that with our resources, we can easily pull in an additional seven million dollars a year.”
“By smuggling in their cocaine and their women,” Eden said. “And giving them the resources to cook their meth and manufacture their heroin.”
“I’m not saying we have to stop doing what we’re doing now,” Callum said, running his hand through his blond hair. He needed to get it cut. It made him look too young and innocent when Eden knew he was neither. “I’m saying we can make that much on top of what we’re already doing. It’s not like we don’t have the manpower.”
“It’s not about the money or the manpower,” Eden said. She drummed her dark red lacquered nails on the glass, each tap like the clicking of a death beetle.
“Don’t get me wrong, Callum. I don’t hate money,” Eden added, leaning back in her ergonomic leather chair and crossing her shiny leather stiletto boots on the desk. “But you don’t seem to get that my no means no. So allow me to explain, just so it’s clear to you why I don’t deal in drugs or people. Let the greedy ones get taken down in their RICO cases for their lack of vision, their common, callous disregard for humanity.”
“You’re a thief and a smuggler yourself,” Callum said. “Sure, you’re the Red Queen, but when it comes down to it, a thief’s what you are—just as common as the rest.”
“I’m not going down for something so tawdry, so dirty, so…evil. Or didn’t you notice that I’m a woman too, the kind of woman they want to put in cages and shoot up so they’ll stay quiet?” Eden said. “Sure, I’m a thief, but at least I have standards.”
“And what about guns? You can display them right next to your knives and suck the same violent tit that gets you those corsets and those boots,” Callum snapped. “We’d make more in the guns than in the knives and stupid medieval weaponry shit.”
“You disappoint me,” Eden said. She crossed her arms under her breasts, perfectly aware that’s where Callum’s gaze was going to go. “Is that the limit of your vision? Guns, girls and drugs—always the same tune, like a Top Forty hit, and I’m getting tired of it. You have to think long-term, Callum. What do guns, girls and drugs get us? A little extra money to blow. For a little while. Then what? Twenty years in prison? Fifty? Ninety? A lifetime sentence? That’s not my long-term plan. I give you plenty of money, and you can spend it on all the coke, whores and ammo that you want. Start your own organization, build up your own infrastructure without sucking on my tit if you think that’s where you’re going to get the most bang. But be sure not to dynamite your own ass at the same time.”
Fortune Page 32