I watch her take me as I fuck her hard and deep. I’m hurting a little but that hurt sends her over the edge again as she calls out my name and digs her nails into my back. She’s breaking skin, tearing my back as I bury myself inside her.
My cock throbs and I fill her up and it’s different than before. Different than any other time.
All I can think is that I want my smell on her always. My seed inside her.
I want to keep her filled up with me and clinging to me and crying out my name again and again and again. Because this woman, this broken thing, I’m never going to get enough of her.
21
Hawk
The next three days pass peacefully enough with Melissa accepting a ride to work and back. I’ve become obsessed with finding the password on the flash drive. Of locating anyone who had anything to do with those videos, including Sean Boyd, who seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
If she’s realized the drive is missing, she hasn’t said anything.
She’s settling in a little better. Maybe it was our conversation from the night before. I don’t know, but she seems at least a little more at ease. She’s still secretive, but knowing what I know, it makes sense she would be.
I’m looking at her on the monitor in my office when the man who’s been checking on her house brings me the stack of her mail. She’s up at the pool on the rooftop.
I intend to just hand it to her. Most of it is junk anyway. But as I absently flip through, something catches my eye.
It’s the envelope addressed to Little Bitch Whore.
My eyes narrow.
It’s not stamped so it was hand-delivered.
I lean back against my seat and turn it over, then slip one finger beneath the flap and pop the seal. I take out the folded sheet of paper inside and open it to read the three hand-written words:
Been a while.
I look at the envelope again.
Little Bitch Whore.
I dig my cell phone out of my pocket and hit the button to call Axel. He answers on the first ring.
“Are you on property?”
“Yeah, downstairs.”
“Come up here.”
“On my way.”
I disconnect the call and leaf through the rest of the mail but there’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Then I think of something.
I open my desk drawer where I’d stored the thumb drive and plug it into the port on my laptop. The password screen comes up and, on a hunch, I type the words Little Bitch Whore.
And…I’m in.
So maybe this isn’t the first time she’s had mail like this.
I double-click on the single folder on the drive and inside are several documents, with several .jpg files. I open the first of those and a moment later, I’m looking at Melissa’s face, younger, maybe eleven or twelve, a kid. Her swollen lower lip has some dried blood on it and she has a bruise on her jaw. There’s also a bruise along her right temple.
The next one is zoomed in on her throat and the black and blue handprint. A big hand. And then her scrawny arms and concave belly with the worst mark. Someone punched her hard in the belly.
I open the next one. She’s older in this one. I look at the date of the file. She’d be sixteen, I guess. It’s not as bad as the last ones because her face isn’t as badly bruised. Her clothes are filthy like she’s been in them for days. Like she got splashed with muddy water and it dried on her days ago.
Sickened, I open the text files, but they look to be screenshots so I print everything out to be able to read them.
She didn’t go to the cops once. She went three times between the ages of twelve and seventeen.
Three times.
How many times did they hurt her, and she didn’t go?
My mind goes back to the other day when I belted her ass. How she’d gone almost still. I’d found it strange she hadn’t fought me like I expected her to.
Maybe that’s what she did then too. Went still and took it.
Because when the instinct to survive takes over, the decisions we make don’t always make sense to an outsider.
I wasn’t beaten, or worse, as a child. My uncle—the sick fuck—grabbed my ass exactly once and the instant he did, I left. He was a drunk and I still don’t know if he thought I was someone else, but I never went back to ask the pervert.
After a knock on my door, Axel enters.
I set the papers face-down on my desk and hold out the letter. “I think this was hand-delivered to Melissa’s house. It would have been sometime in the last three days.”
He opens it, reads it.
“I’ll have someone watching the house.”