Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(140)

What chance did he have out there? How could Neal keep himself alive, keep the vial safe? His knee was ruined—he could barely drag himself across the room. His only choice is to wait. Someone will come. Someone has to come.

If someone doesn’t, he will die. He is dying. His body is eating itself. And if he dies, everything will have been a waste. His years in the lab. His daughter’s suffering. All this time entombed beneath the ground, this room like a black hole awaiting its dead. He cannot let that be true. He must live. For him to live, he must eat.

Sometimes he thinks he hears things outside the door. Whispers. Claws gently teased across the steel. But now, when he presses his ear against it, he can only hear his own stomach—gurgling, whining. Hunger is his only voice. He doubles over until the cramping passes and then he reaches for the doorknob and clamps his hand around it and says to the darkness, to the vial, “I’ll be right back. You’ll see. I’ll go and I’ll get us something to eat.”





Chapter 58



CHASE WILLIAMS tells the women to take off their clothes. There are two of them, an Asian and a blonde, both as slender waisted as wasps, and they do as they are told. The Asian wears a long red sweater with a black leather belt and knee-high boots to match. When she bends down to unzip the boots, she turns around so that her ass peeks out, the purple thong dividing it. The blonde wears a black thigh-length dress that falls around her ankles in an inky pile. She kicks it aside, along with her heels.

He tells them to touch each other. He tells them to give him a show. No music plays, but they move as though they hear something, tossing their hair and jutting their hips, as their hands roam along a thigh, a breast, the long scoop of a stomach. They snap the bands of their panties. They gaze hungrily at him through the veil of their mascara-clotted lashes.

On the walls of his suite hang two portraits—Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt—squared by gold-leaf frames. The décor changes with every president. He requested these two men specifically—the two men he often referenced on the campaign trail, not Lincoln, not Reagan, not all the old standbys. They seem to stare dispassionately at the women along with him. They were, Chase has always said, the right kind of *s. Everyone calls this place the People’s House, instead of the White House, and he likes that, likes the way the term looks past the sculptures and polished woodwork and museum-quality hush and acknowledges instead ordinariness, the possibility of weakness, dirty little secrets.

Though he does not tell the women to do so, they slowly gravitate toward the bed, knowing that this is where he will want them. They cannot simply fall back on it—they have to climb up. The bed is massive—a king-size that rises three feet off the ground—with wooden corner posts that twist upward into snakes. When the stylist asked if he would prefer a queen instead, he gave her a deadening glare and said, no, only a king would do.

He does not join them there. He sits in a wingback chair in the corner with his legs crossed. He wears one of the many navy blue suits that appear in his closet as if by magic, all perfectly tailored. A round wooden table beside him carries a brass lamp and a stack of paper-clipped documents from the briefing he attended that morning. He will never read them. The more he reads, the more he feels he doesn’t know.

The women begin to keen and writhe. They unlatch their bras and their breasts tumble out. Their mouths open and their tongues dart out to taste each other. They keep staring at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He snaps off the lamp beside him so that he falls into shadow. He wants to look—he doesn’t want them to look at him.

He heard somewhere that presidents age faster, that they go gray and wrinkle suddenly in office. That certainly seems the case. His hair is thinning away from his forehead. His skin is the spotted brown color of a dead leaf. His muscles are soft, his belly bloated. When he gets out of the shower, he doesn’t towel the steam from the mirror. His reflection disgusts him. He no longer has the energy to exercise—he only wants to eat, to sleep. It is strange to think how young he was once, a baby at his mother’s breast, a teenager with a football spiraling from his fingertips, a twenty-something with a throbbing hard-on, and that this person remains curled up inside him somewhere like a worm.

There was a time when the sight of two women rolling around in bed would have sent him into a state close to seizure. That time has passed. He feels curious, of course, but not awakened. He tries to will all the blood in his body to his groin, to pump himself into a state of arousal. Maybe today will be different. Maybe today will be a good day. Because he has two women who will do whatever he asks them. And because so far nothing bad has happened. The absence of a negative. That is a good day. How pathetic he has become. He tries his hand now, tries undoing his belt, massaging what feels like a dead slug. Nothing.

The portraits on the wall now seem to stare at him, their expressions souring, forbidding. He has let them down. One of the women—the blonde—says, “When are you going to come over here and f*ck us?” She lies on her back with her legs spread and her hands cupped between them.

“It’s been a long day,” he says.

“What?” she says.

“You can go. You can both go. I’m tired.”

The women sit up, their lipstick smeared, their hair tousled, and then the Asian slides off the bed and slinks toward him. “We want to stay. We want to make you feel good.” She reaches out a hand.