Wanderlust

A large, heavy-set man came out of the back, his yellow-stained wife-beater pulling up short of covering the dark, bulbous skin of his belly.

“What’s going on in here?”

The girl shook her head, tears glistening in her eyes.

“Please, that man out there, he kidnapped me. You have to call the police.”

His eyes seemed too large for his head, not out of surprise, just naturally that way. I could see the whites even as he frowned. “I don’t have to do anything.”

I drew in a shaky breath. “He’s…he’s going to hurt me if you don’t help.”

A flash of sympathy lit his bloodshot eyes. Then it was gone.

“If I were to go calling the cops on my customers, I would be out of business in a week. Or wind up dead on my office floor.”

Desperation streaked through me. I ran away from his cold, pitying stare and pushed through the back door. There was nothing but empty fields to my right. On the other side, a short row of trucks. I needed to make a decision. Hunter was still out front. His truck was out there too. Soon he’d come looking for me. I had to make a decision.

Since the fields were wide open, he’d see me in a minute. He’d catch me and what? Punish me? I didn’t know, but there was no turning back now. I almost wished I hadn’t run now that I saw how pathetic my options were, but it was too late for regrets.

A click from the door behind me warned me that it was going to open. I didn’t know who it was, but I ran toward the row of trucks. Footsteps pounded behind me, barely audible above the rasping of my own breath. I reached the first truck and darted behind it, but I was slower than I’d hoped, weakened by days of inactivity and sparse diet. A fist tangled in my hair. I felt myself yanked back against a tall, unyielding body.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An estimated 5,000 bodies have been found at the foot of the falls since 1850.

“Lookie what I found,” the man holding me said.

Not Hunter. Suddenly my fear was a hundred times worse. I hadn’t known I trusted Hunter but faced with another trucker, I knew I did. Whether it was a sickness or some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, I believed that Hunter wouldn’t truly harm me, but this man?

No.

I fought in a wild clash of soft punches and hopelessness. I heard laughing and a curse when I caught something soft beneath my fingernail. Thick fingers grabbed my arms, wrenching them above my head as I was twisted to the ground.

“Let me go.” It felt like a whisper, low and grating the walls of my throat, but through the melee, they heard me.

“Now why would I do that when the fun’s only started?”

“He’ll make you pay,” I said, and knew then that it was true.

The men just laughed.

One of them knelt between my thighs, unbuckling his belt. I closed my eyes against the sight of his

thin, glistening erection. Rough hands yanked at my hem, pulling it up. The air felt cool against my heated skin before they grabbed my nipples and twisted.

Something slick poked around my thighs, sliding through the folds of my sex. He was trying to find his way inside. It felt like being violated with a fish. I was going to vomit, and the way they were holding me down, I would probably choke on it.

An unholy sound rent the air, sending chills along my exposed skin. It sounded like death. Was it me? But no, I was still on the ground. It was the man between my legs who had moved. Pain shot through my limbs as I curled in on myself, rolling to my side though one person still held my arm.

There was a shout, and the hand holding down my right arm was lifted. I flailed, hitting and scratching, though it didn’t move them. Dimly, I registered the sounds of flesh on flesh—not mine though.

The sound of flesh hitting flesh was punctuated by grunts. My vision cleared. Hunter was poised over one of the guys at his feet, raining down blows onto a man. As I watched in horror, the man twitched and then laid still, his face already too bloody to be recognizable.

Hunter looked like some kind of avenging angel, but an angel would never pull a knife from his shoe with a glint in his eye. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what happened next. I heard it instead, just the whisper of sound as sharp metal sliced through the air, its abrupt quieting as it met some solid object, and the thud of a body as it was dropped.

The final man was pulled off me, practically lifted into the air above me before being thrown a few feet in a spray of gravel. The man fought back, but he was no match for Hunter, who pummeled him until his head fell with a thud.

I sat there, open-mouthed with shock, my body still lewdly exposed. Hunter came to stand over me, breathing hard, his face a grotesque mask of violence. His hands were covered in blood and bruises. Not an angel—a demon, and somehow sweeter that a beast so savage had saved me.