by Helen Scott
His mouth is on mine then. I hadn't even seen him move but he's there, his lips pressing against my own as the hand that had been stroking my face now cups the back of my head. His tongue seeks entrance into my mouth and I welcome it, letting him explore and taste me as I tangle my tongue with his.
I can't get close enough as I press myself up against him, my instincts finally winning out over my head. My hands loop around his neck and slide up into his almost-shoulder-length hair. I grasp a handful of it and tug, making him groan into my mouth. I devour the sound. His hands get bolder as a result and smooth down my body before cupping my ass and lifting me up onto the counter.
My legs spread for him instinctively to get him as close as possible, and when his thick, hard ridge grinds against my core I moan softly. I realize at that moment that there is very little separating us, very little stopping us.
It’s as though water has been splashed over my face.
I realize what we are doing and break the kiss, pushing him away and moving past him even as I feel him reach for me. Just before I make it to the stairs I realize I left my drink behind. I turn, head back, and grab it, pointedly not making eye contact with Zard as I feel a blush staining my cheeks and head down the hall.
It’s only when I’m safely behind my closed bedroom door that I allow myself to fully breathe again. My body aches with need, to the point that it’s uncomfortable, and I want to curse myself for my foolish behavior.
My mind replays what happened and I know if we’d gone much further I would have ended up fucking him on the kitchen counter. I can’t be that desperate for attention, touch, love, can I? Not enough that I would turn to the men who own me? Although they do seem conflicted about it. No. I need to keep my pussy on lockdown until this is all over. No more midnight run-ins with sexy men. From now on when I leave this room I’ll be fully dressed and have a mental chastity belt in place. I hope.
11
Crax
Alexis rides in the passenger seat beside me. The windows of my crappy car are unrolled to let a breeze in, and her eyes are closed as the wind whips around her. I know I’m supposed to be watching the road, but my gaze keeps straying back to her. She wears a leather jacket that looks worn and comfortable. It’s frayed slightly at her wrists, and I see her fingers play with the strands. Her jeans are long and dark, and she wears daggers at her belt.
She’s like a ghost to me. A vision of someone from my past, but not quite them. What happened to the girl in the white sundress with a nervous smile? And who is this?
“I think we needed to turn there,” she says, suddenly alert.
How the fuck had she done that?
“Damn it,” I mutter. “I’ll have to take the next street.”
We stop at a light and my car makes a sad sound.
“Question,” she begins, her gaze straight ahead. “There was just about every nice car in that garage. Why did we take this beater?”
I stiffen. It wasn’t exactly something I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want to lie either. “Those were Rumple’s cars. This one is mine. Most of my clients can’t afford a lot… Fighting for a cause isn’t nearly as profitable as buying souls.”
She finally looks toward me. “I understand. Cutting up my parents’ credit cards and learning to live on my own was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.”
“I bet.”
Someone honks behind me.
Damn it, the light had changed. I hadn’t even noticed. I’d been too busy looking at the little blonde hairs that had escaped from her ponytail.
Maybe having her working with us wasn’t the best idea after all.
“Tell me more about this plan,” she says, as if reading my mind.
“Well, we’ve been trying to collect the debts as quickly as possible, but we realized early on that collecting them on our own wasn’t the safest option. But with four of us, we should be able to split up on the easier jobs.”
“So Zard and Hyde are collecting…?”
“A debt from a friend.”
She winces. “That doesn’t sound fun.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I don’t envy them. But then, these collections are usually pretty nasty.”
Her expression grows serious. “So what are we collecting?”
It takes me a minute to answer. We’re getting a debt I’ve been dreading getting. I hadn’t wanted to bring Hyde, because he wasn’t the most sensitive of people. I’d thought Alexis might actually be able to make it easier.
“The client owes us a ghost.”
“A ghost?”
“His… wife has been haunting him since her death. But he kind of loves having her around still.”
“So what did he ask for?”
“He wanted the ability to touch a ghost for five years in exchange for us owning his wife’s ghost after that.”
It takes her a minute to process my words but then her nose scrunches up. “There is so much wrong with that.”
I nod. “Yeah, the thought of collecting this debt has kept me up a night or two, but we’ve put it off too long. The weight on our chests gets heavier every day. Today I woke up panting.”
She shakes her head. “What the hell did Rumple want with her ghost?”
I feel my expression harden. “Probably to give her to the right buyer. You’d be amazed by the sick bastards who came into the shop looking for ghosts. Especially women who would then be trapped in their houses…”
“Sick fucks.”
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. Some of the people we were exposed to as kids were first-class psychopaths. Most of the kids in our classes were scared of the dark, but not us. We were scared of Clarance Bert, a dentist that everyone in town loved but who we knew liked to buy fairies and kept a set of tools I’d only thought lepidopterists used. At night when I closed my eyes, I pictured him using those little tools to carefully mount a screaming fairy to a board. I pictured a room filled with framed pictures of tiny living beings with pins through their limbs.
“What will you do with her?” she asks. “Another bottle?”
I shiver. “We’ll try to help her cross over. But if we can’t, then we’ll find a place for her to haunt. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to spend eternity in a dark cupboard.”
I’m surprised when her hand brushes my arm.
My gaze jerks to her, and I frown. “What?”
“Well, for a captor, you’re kind of a decent guy.”
I hate that my chest aches. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
She laughs and shoves me gently.
My heart soars.
And then I see the address we’re looking for. It’s just off of the main road through town, in a little apartment complex shoved in between shops. Or at least that’s how it looks at first glance. But as I pull up to a spot along the road, I realize that it’s an old apartment building that was updated and turned into a townhouse. From the outside, it looks perfect. Almost too perfect.
Most people think of haunted houses as dark and filled with cobwebs, but in my line of work I’d learned that any house could have a dark underbelly. And sometimes the prettier the house, the more secrets. I found that to be especially true with Alexis’s parents.
But I don’t want to think about that right now.
Killing the engine, I step out of the car, careful of the vehicles whizzing by, and join Alexis on the sidewalk. Both of us stare up at the house, and I get the feeling she’s as uncomfortable with this job as I am. But it says something about her that she isn’t turning and running the hell out of here.
“Ready?”
She nods.
We move to the door, and I ring the bell. For several long minutes we stand there together, and I start to wonder if we’re going to have to go around back and break in. But just as I’m studying the windows to decide if they’re climbable, the door opens.
A middle-aged man stands on the other side. He’s maybe five feet tall and has the look of som
eone who’s recently lost a lot of weight. His hair looks strange, almost like the vast majority of the dark strands aren’t his, and he wears skinny jeans with tears in the legs and a shiny silver shirt.
None of which looks normal on him.
“Mr. Burke?”
“Yes?”
I stiffen my shoulders, ready for whatever this asshole plans to do to us. “You made a deal with my father, Rumple Stiltskin, five and a half years ago. I’m his son, and I’m here to collect that debt.”
To my surprise, he looks irritated. “Finally! You know it was supposed to just be five years, right?”
Alexis and I exchange a confused glance, but the man sweeps open the door and gestures for us to both come in. We do, cautiously. I think we both expected this man to put up more of a fight about losing his wife.
The man heads up a set of stairs, looking behind him. “So, at first, I thought I’d never want to lose my wife. And, like most men, I thought nothing would be better than having her here at my house at my beck and call.” His eyes meet mine, and he winks. “Right? Wrong. The second I started trying to better myself, to bring dates home, the fucking bitch flipped. I mean, flipped! I figured I’d never get to enjoy my life until you guys came to collect her.”
I see Alexis reach out, and I snatch her arm before she can do whatever the hell she planned to do to him. She gives me that “let me at him” look, but drops her hand when I let go.
“And you know that whole idea of having one woman forever? Well, it becomes more than just words when she’s a ghost. You know what I mean?”
I roll my eyes, wishing for the first time I was here to collect his soul. Or his voice. Anything to stop the dick from talking.
We reach a door at the end of the hall, and he throws it open. Instantly, we see a room that has the distinct feel of a guest room. There’s nothing personal inside. No pictures. No trinkets. Just a grey bedspread over a twin-sized bed and a rocking chair.
In the rocking chair, a dark-haired ghost sits. Her eyes look dull. She wears pale jeans and a flowery blouse. And I’m thankful, for Alexis’s sake, that we can’t see any signs of what killed her. In all ways, she looks like a normal, if translucent, person.
“Bella Burke?”
Her gaze snaps up to me. I slowly remove the bottle from my jacket. “We’ve come here to collect you.”
“Collect me?” she says, and there’s confusion in her voice.
“Yeah.” Alexis nods toward her husband. “Your prince sold you in exchange for the ability to touch you.”
“Is this true?” the ghost-woman asks.
I steady myself, ready for the attack that’s sure to come. Every ghost haunts a place because they have unfinished business. They aren’t exactly willing to leave just because someone sold them.
But her husband is the one to answer. “Bella, come on, we both know this is over. You’re scaring all my dates. You’re making fun of my hair and my new clothes. You’re stuck in the past, and baby, I’m all about the future.”
The ghost woman moves to him. “Can I still touch him?”
“Until we take you…”
She walks up to her husband, and I want to look away, to give them a final moment together, even though he’s a grade-a asshole. But before I do, she slaps him across the face. Hard. “You bastard!” Then she slaps him again. “You trap me here.” She slaps him again, and that fake hair of his goes flying, leaving behind a mostly bald man who’s gaping at the ghost in shock. “You cheat on me. You talk down to me. And then you sell me?” She knocks him so hard that he hits the ground, blood spewing from his nose.
The man looks at us. “Help me!”
I take a step closer. Alexis snags my arm. “You want to enjoy some final moments with your husband, then come out when you’re ready?” she asks, her voice sickly sweet and her smile too bright.
“You bet,” the wife says, and the way she returns Alexis’s smile makes my blood run cold.
When Alexis pushes me back out of the room and closes the door, I’m torn. “Should we really not help?”
“Let him get what he deserves,” she tells me, then winks.
I hear the man screaming. I hear the sounds of a struggle. It feels as if a rock sits in my stomach as I fight my urge to go in and stop whatever carnage is unfolding, but Alexis hums beside me.
“Alexis…” I say, preparing my argument as I inch toward the door.
“Whatever she does to him, I promise you it’s better than whatever he’s been doing to her as his prisoner.”
I hate that she’s right. And that she’s got the balls I don’t to handle this so easily.
The screaming and banging continues on for a few more minutes, and then the room goes silent. A minute later, the ghost floats out of the room. I’m shocked to see her covered in blood.
“Did I forget to mention he was the one who killed me in the first place?” she asks.
I feel sick.
“He pushed me right down those stairs. And then set up traps around all the windows and doors so my soul couldn’t get free.”
Maybe he did get whatever he deserved. “Is he dead?”
Her smile widens. “And he’ll be trapped here until someone erases the symbols carved above the exits.”
Alexis pushes away from the wall. “That’s karma at its finest. So, you ready to go?”
The ghost sighs. “More than ready.”
I lift up the bottle and speak the magic words. Her ghost slowly slips into the bottle, and then I close it. Inside, a golden light illuminates the bottle.
Stuffing it into my jacket, I look away from the blood that slides under the door. “You ready to go?”
She nods. “And I have an idea.”
A half hour later, we pull up in a spot in Evergreen park. She takes me to the top of a hill where we can see the entire park around us.
“This is my favorite place,” Alexis whispers.
“I can see why.”
“I think we should let her soul go here.”
It seems like as good a place as any, so I lift the bottle to the sunlight and uncork it. Her soul slowly stretches free, and she smiles down at us. The words “Thank you” come like the whisper of the wind, and then her soul fades away.
I don’t even realize it when I take Alexis’s hand. “Where do you think she’ll end up?”
Alexis squeezes my hand. “I don’t know, but I know it’s better than here.”
We stand there for a long time, strangely comfortable together, even in silence, before I sigh and tell her we should head back. We release hands and walk back to the path leading through the park. My thoughts turn as we walk, and I debate about asking about the first time we’d tried to catch her. Whether our time together was special to her too. But just as I get up the nerve to say the words out loud, Alexis gasps beside me.
I look to see her face has gone pale.
“Alexis…”
“Mother?”
My stomach drops as I turn to face the older blonde woman who stands on the sidewalk near us. So, this was the woman who sold her daughter?
12
Alexis
I feel sick. I think I might actually vomit. I'm sure between that and letting a guy get murdered Crax would be really impressed. Not that I want to impress him, but still.
"Alexis?" my mother asks again as though she couldn't believe my answer from before. Her voice rings in my ears louder than the rushing of my blood which, at this point, has drowned everything else. She stands there waiting for a response in her pale blue dress that brings out the color of her eyes. Her cream pumps and tasteful jewelry are so predictable and boring that I want to slap her and tell her to demand more from life.
This is all she ever wanted though. Trophy wife status. To be cared for and pampered with nothing expected in return except the occasional blow job and fuck. Oh, and don't forget keeping her trim figure for public appearances. Her blonde, perfectly curled hair was fake, just like her tits, but they were both s
o well done that it wasn't obvious. My eyes scan her for a moment, looking for any hint that the woman before me is different from the one I'd left behind, the one who had sold me for her status, wealth, and probably her lithe body as well.
"Mother Dearest," I mutter but I don't bow my head as I would have before. I can't bring myself to look her in the eyes, the same piercing blue as my own, so I look past her instead, as though I don't really see her.
I’m sure she was looking at me and seeing something that was the complete opposite of the daughter that had run away years ago. The tattoos and piercings were just the visible tip of the iceberg. She would be disgusted with my clothes as well, I knew that. She had always said that leather jackets were for hooligans and hookers.
Suddenly reality seems to come rushing back to her. "What are you doing here?" she demands. "Did you follow me? I know what I did wasn't the best but if you're going to start stalking me I'll have to take action, and you won't like the consequences, young lady."
Typical of my mother; it's all about her. I hate it when she calls me young lady and I'm sure she knows it. Just another way for her to needle me.
"We were just setting a trapped soul free, Mrs. Chadwick. It had nothing to do with you," Crax says, coming to my rescue.
"It's Mrs. Chadwick-Bonham to you, whoever you are," she sneers, looking down her nose at both of us. I can practically see the questions in her eyes. Is he your pimp? Your dealer? She would take one look at Crax, even in his nice suit, and see the tough man underneath, the man I'd found oh so tempting once upon a time, and still did if I was actually honest with myself, which I'm not.
"I'm Crax, Rumple Stiltskin 's eldest son." He smiles, but there's an edge to it, one that makes my stomach tighten with need. Which, I might add, is not a sane response. I should feel dread or at the very least warning bells should be going off in my head, but instead I can't help but picture him smiling like that at me as he towers over me while he fucks me silly.
