Deliver (Deliver 1)

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

What the unholy fuck now? She pivoted and met the narrowed glare of a middle-aged man. Dressed head-to-toe in Baylor swag, he was probably some overzealous alumni reliving the glory days.

He waved a flabby arm. “This is a smoke-free property.”

She raised the cigarette, inhaled, and released a plume of fuck you into his scrunching face.

A dramatic cough accompanied another flap of his arm. “The university has strict guidelines—”

“Are you the smoke police?”

A fury of red bloomed from his buttoned collar to his blotted cheeks. “You can’t do that here.”

Bet his virgin ass clenched as he said that. She shifted to move past him, irritation skittering across her skin.

He stretched an arm out to block her. “What’s your name, young lady?”

Before she did something that would get her hauled off in handcuffs, she blew him a smoke-ringed kiss, pushed around his arm, and wove into the exodus of spectators.

Past the cooling charcoal grills and trash-littered tailgates, her ten minute stroll took her to the edge of the parking lot. In the farthest corner, beneath a broken street lamp, she circled a nondescript sedan. No one loitered. No witnesses to connect her to the car. She tapped on the passenger window.

The locks released and the door swung open.

“How many times did you get hit on?” Van Quiso’s timbre bordered on growly.

On a good night, calm reason eclipsed his jealousy. She struggled to remember a good night. “Wouldn’t you love to know?” She winked at him, dropped into the seat, and shut the door. Despite the consequences, she got off on tormenting him. A desperate and pathetic attempt at revenge.

A toothpick protruded from the opening of his charcoal hoodie where his mouth was, probing the air in restless circles. “You smell like sex.”

“I banged three linebackers during halftime.” She buckled her seat belt.

“Your sarcasm is juvenile.”

“So is your suspicious resentment.” The stench of his possessiveness saturated her skin and bled into her veins. The more he took her, consensual or not, the farther she followed him, down, down, down into his twisted reality. She rubbed her arms and focused on the empty lot. “The boy is here.”

He leaned back and stretched a leg along the floorboard. “The kid’s never missed a class or a practice, let alone a game.”

“It’s flu season, Van. People get sick.” At least, that was the argument she’d given him to get one last chance to see the boy play.

The toothpick bobbed and stilled. He fingered the keys where they dangled from the ignition and lowered his hand. “Look at me.”

Tension crept through her limbs. She itched to reach over and start the car. The confined space, in the dark, with him, had her crawling out of her skin with reminders of what he’d done to her, what he continued to do to her. His cock stretching her ass, his whip burning across her back, his fist in her face, the tenderness of his lips kissing her wounds.

She pushed her shoulders back, pulled out her phone, and checked the time. “The coach should be finished with his post-game speech. The boy will be showered and headed out soon. We need to go.”

“Look. At. Me.”

The heat in his command cracked her shell of bravado, tightening the muscles in her face. Only two people in her isolated world had a stronger strike than hers, and Van knew he was one. His breath sawed in and out with enough vehemence to sharpen his teeth as he watched her, poaching her air, waiting.

Avoiding his stare was a means of gaining distance, but ignoring him only delayed the inescapable. She made her face relax and looked at him straight in the eyes.

He stared right back, the toothpick jogging low in her periphery. It could’ve been the press of shadows in the car, but meeting his gaze was like straining to see into the reaches of the moonless night. Maybe something terrible lurked in there, something malicious enough to end her life in unspeakable ways. Maybe it was her imagination.

The rotating toothpick froze, caught between his molars as he spread his lips into a grin. His hooded sweatshirt hid his high-and-tight cut of brown hair and sharp features and struggled to contain his mountain of muscles. The severe angles of his face added to his dangerous beauty. An unsuspecting glance in his direction promised a double-glance, usually followed by a prayer to God that he didn’t catch the admiring look and use it to his advantage.

He seemed to embrace the mold of a convicted criminal, but he had never been convicted. And despite the prayers to ward him off, his sexy smile could coerce a virgin girl’s thighs into a spread-eagle sigh.

But that girl no longer existed.

A timeworn ache awoke in her chest. She masked it under a steady breath and let her eyelids half-droop in a display of boredom.

He slid back his hood to his hairline just behind the comma-shaped laceration that connected the outer edge of his eye to the crook of his mouth. Even in the dark, the deep red gash stood out, a threatening brand against the perfect symmetry of his features.

His hand lifted to her cheek, smoothing her hair away. She held herself immobile as he traced the scar that mirrored his. When he stared at it, did he ever regret the events that led to their matching punishments?

“You’re sleeping in my bed tonight.” The touch of his fingers and the command in his tone jabbed like a knife.

She leaned back, throat dry, and forced her eyes to remain on his. “I have a job to do. If I fail, you’ll be digging my body out of the backyard to fuck it.”

The skin around his scar strained. “He doesn’t bury bodies back there.”

“Yet.”

He plucked the toothpick from his mouth and pointed it at her. His lips parted to speak and a gust of frustration grooved his face. He knew if she didn’t meet their deadlines her threat was a dead-on promise.

Whatever he was going to say was abandoned as he dropped his brow to hers and pressed the seam of his lips to her bottom one. She fought a shiver. This bond wasn’t romantic. It was unwanted, sad, and it thrived on her fear of him.

The slide of his tongue along her inner lip hitched her breath. He wouldn’t fuck her here and sabotage the mission, but he always made time to fuck with her. To speed it along, she remained pliable in her stillness.

/>   With a disappointed sigh, he returned the toothpick to his mouth and started the car. “Let’s go get your boy.”

CHAPTER 2

Liv wanted to be anywhere but in that car, on her way to uproot another life, facing the next ten weeks behind a whip and a mask. She trained them. She delivered them. And after?

They were dead to her. They had to be. Sometimes, it was the lies she told herself that kept her going. Believing anything else made her a danger to the captives she sold.

She pressed her fingertips against the window. If only she could find the strength to end her own life.

The suburban conveniences of Waco, Texas, swept by in the form of drive-throughs, water towers, and churches of every denomination. As Van drove toward the outskirts of town, the scenery transformed. The wide-open freedom of the crop fields, cut by a swath of tarmac and hangars beneath the moonlight, haunted her vision.

Memories took shape, a tapestry of the private airport in Austin where Mom instructed skydiving courses, the adjacent corn field and its maze of childhood adventures, and the acres of paved airstrip where local teens roller-bladed until dusk.

Until one of the kids was taken.

The old sore in her chest opened. Her exhale erupted in a choke, and she feigned a cough.

Van’s hand swung into view and collided with her throat, squeezing. Oh God, her mind wasn’t on the job, and he had the unnerving ability to mark every fucking move of her body.

She tried to draw air, an empty effort against the vise of his fingers on her windpipe. His I-control-your-thoughts conditioning was a technique that once worked on her, and experience taught her the best reaction was no reaction.

Lips pinned in silence, she sought out her defense, a song, any song, and grabbed hold of “Gods and Monsters” by Lana Del Rey. Saturating her thoughts with the lamenting chorus, she sang in her head. The rippling effects numbed her heart—and her throat beneath his fingers. Singing was her tonic, the only trace of self she had left.