Rogue (Real #4)(26)
My breath leaves me from the shock as they shut the doors. I feel one of the men tighten the bag lightly around my throat, securing it. My panting breaths echo in my ears, blackness engulfing me as the reality of my situation begins to sink in and my eyes begin to sting. Hands start cupping my breasts and kneading while another jams a hand to feel me up under my lovely summer dress, and I start fighting with renewed vigor, screaming and hearing the lonely, muffled sounds of my own screams dying inside the hood covering my face. I can’t hear things they’re saying, whispering, as I start to flail with my arms and legs, gritting my teeth as I try hitting them, hitting anything I can.
“. . . little feisty one . . . let’s have our fun with her before we deliver . . .”
My dress is pulled high and I kick and squirm as they start the car, whimpering when a pair of hands grabs my thighs and forces them open.
“Just drive, we’ll stop on the way there and take turns with her.”
The car seems to jerk forward and, just as immediately, it stops.
“SHIT.”
I hear this word clearly.
“What?”
I also hear the alarm in that question very, very clearly.
“FUCK, MAN.”
The hands stop touching me, and for some reason I fall still, sensing that something is happening.
“Who the f*ck is he? One of Slaughter’s men?”
“There’s two.”
Before anyone can answer that, there’s the sound of a tire popping, then another tire wheezing out air. I hear three clean shots, then another to my right, which seems to pop open the door handle. Hinges creak as the door seems to be wrenched off. The only hand that remained on my breast, frozen from the shock, is yanked away and I hear a scared yelp and a crunching sound, like bone breaking.
“Hoooooly shit, it’s really you!”
I hear a crack, a howl, then the sound of a body hitting the ground.
“I’ll take him somewhere nice and cozy so we can have a little chat,” a Texan voice drawls from farther away.
Panicked, I’m feeling around with my hands and just as I find something hard and metallic in the jeans of the dead weight next to me, a pair of hands reaches out for me. As I feel new hands start curling around me, a bolt of adrenaline kicks through me. The hilt of a knife—I seize it and swing, and, miracle of miracles, I manage to plunge it into hard male flesh with a sickening jerk on my end. He growls over the top of my head and as he lets go of me to remove it, I push and stumble out of the car, finding my footing on the ground. The knife clatters to the ground the second I start running, trying to pull off the ties on my hood, hoping I’m running in the opposite direction from the new arrivals.
“You got a live one all right, Z,” the Texan drawls.
I squeak when I realize I’m heading straight for him and swing around when I’m swept up in a pair of strong male arms. My fight starts instantly but this guy won’t have it. He grunts when I kick his nuts, then starts to secure my hands and my legs with some sort of rope material, swiftly, so that I can’t escape. I kick in the air but he’s strong and fast, and what several men couldn’t do to subdue me, this one does in less than a minute.
Binding my ankles and wrists, then binding my knees together and my elbows together, he holds me against a chest that feels muscular and broad as he carries me somewhere. Adrenaline rushes through my body with nowhere to go and I’m seized with tremors when I realize I’m so f*cked and I have no way to get free.
I think I cut the man, and his blood is dripping on me. I squirm in my last futile effort to get free but I’m crying too, the sound of my own sniffles echoing inside the hood.
And suddenly I know what this is. It’s that debt.
It’s so real now, these men are so real. They wanted their money. But supposedly I have a month and a half left. Did they grow impatient? Did they plan to kill me or just use me? Were they delivering me to that one-eyed guy and the skinny one who offered to give me an “extension” of their dicks when I asked for more time to pay?
“I’m . . . I’m getting the money,” I say, catching a sob in my throat.
I must be going into shock because I can’t seem to fight him, to fight for my life, am trembling uncontrollably. I feel a new soreness in my thighs and calves when I feel a leather glove against the bare skin of my back. I whimper and I am so shocked when I remember Greyson and my Brazilian wax and my spa day, now I smell like pig, and like blood, and other men, and I start choking back sobs that all this could really be happening to me.
“M-my car is . . .”
He keeps walking, and I can’t talk well, am panting for air and sniveling.
“My-my dress . . .”
He stops, then I hear plastic shuffling and I realize he picked it up in lord-knows-what condition from wherever it fell.
“Thank you,” I snivel. Then I realize, he’s not a good guy, he doesn’t want to help me! If he did, he’d have let me go.
An uncontrollable shaking takes over my body, making my teeth chatter. He straps me into the backseat of a car that smells remarkably like the lavender sachet I put in my car after it almost became a boat and the tires screech as we leave.
We end up parking somewhere, and once again, we’re in movement, pauses, movement, stealthy, as though he moves and stops, not to be seen. We climb some stairs, and I hear a crack of a window. We keep walking. Then I hear running water.