Chained

by Celia Crown

  I want to make this the most delicious meal in his life, but I only had limited ingredients because all the big-chain markets have closed, and it leaves the small mom-and-pop stores that carry ingredients that are canned.

  I’ll make do with whatever I can find.

  Turning off the stove, I scoop the food into a carry-out container that has his favorite restaurant’s logo on it.

  The smell is great, but I might have put a dash too much of Worcestershire sauce. I hope the garlic covers the taste because he does have a thing for garlic, and he loves it so much that he has his own garden of it for the optimal flavors since he has high-grade fertilizers.

  I pull out a Q-tip in a sealed tube. A wicked smile plays on my lips as I pop it open. Rimming the container with the Q-tip, I make sure to get the sides of the rim too as a precautionary measure.

  Getting this poison made took some time because that chemistry likes perfection too much, but it’s because the cultivation of the DNA I stole from Abel takes a while. I know I got a little impatient by the second week that I gave the chemistry the DNA from when I cut Abel’s ankles, but come on, I want to get this game rolling.

  Snapping the lid shut, I package it the same way that the restaurant would and put it in a cardboard box with the other food that I have made.

  All those types of dishes took me hours to make, and the night is already bleeding into the early morning.

  Well, my timing is going to be good when he receives it as his breakfast. Abel is predictable with his schedule; he wakes up at seven in the morning to workout, eats his breakfast at eight before going through whatever is on his agenda that day.

  His morning routine doesn’t change unless something dramatic happens, and I have had him under surveillance to know that the Callahan crime family doesn’t involve him in important meetings unless it is a matter of a member in danger.

  Once the plan I set with the Moretti’s family is ready to go, it’s only the matter of time that my little demon would find his way to me.

  Well, he’s not little. That man is built from a titan’s mold; nothing about him should be looked down upon if I want to be cautious around him. Damon Maverick is a man that attacks first, and then questions come later if he hasn’t snapped the neck that’s in his hand.

  “Hmm,” I giggle softly, “Big, strong hands.”

  I’m aware that people, especially women, do not speak as I do nor do they act the way that I do. People call me a psychopath because of what I do to the people that are on my list, but they deserve it, and my family deserves the vengeance that keeps their souls from peaceful rest.

  I’m being a good daughter.

  I don’t remember a time where I’m ‘normal’.

  I hold the box in my hand and bump the backdoor open with my hip. The door leads to an alley big enough to back a truck up without scratching the paint off of it. While I wait for the truck to finish backing my way just as I have timed it to my plan; the thermal packages that I have put around the food keep it warm.

  The restaurant’s owner is out of town in this part of the city that is about two cities away from Philadelphia, but Abel is a spoiled man who only eats breakfast made from the owner’s hands. I took the initiative and used the owner’s ignorance to make the food for him.

  I do think the owner needs a break for whatever matter he has on hand, or he’s on vacation, but that doesn’t matter to me because I would have intercepted the owner’s food on the way and switched it with mine.

  There’s nothing too harmful on the rims of the containers. I would never kill off prey that early in the game. The more they fight, the more their mentality is at stake.

  It’s only to make him so sick that he has to be hospitalized with symptoms of anthrax or the black plague; it all depends on how the drug interacts with the vaccinations in his body.

  This is not a big attack. I want him to be on the edge of his seat in paranoia. It should not take too long for him to raise the protection to a new level and then I would have better entertainment than now.

  Abel is not impressive in any way. He’s so ridiculously unremarkable that it’s almost hilarious.

  I wouldn’t have marked him as a target if he wasn’t the man behind my family’s demise.

  He has to take responsibility for what he has done.

  After I have loaded the food in the back of the food delivery truck, I salute playfully at the driver who doesn’t know that he’s delivering a dangerous meal.

  Abel is a member of the Callahan mob. He would definitely have someone taste his food for poison before he eats it even if it was hand-delivered from the owner. That’s why I took the extra step to have the drug customized to attack his DNA, and I really want to see the face he makes when he realizes that he’s been infected, and the doctors diagnose him with either the black plague or anthrax.

  He’ll have to be quarantined either way while he sits and waits for his death. A death that won’t come just yet, but a little nudge towards that direction will open his eyes to the trouble that he will be in once the game gets some momentum.

  When I return inside, I can still hear Abel screaming about killing me with his bare hands with no knowledge that his phone is relaying every word he’s saying to my disposable device.

  I would have assumed that he would be in bed already since he is a man who cares for his appearance. His beauty sleep is more important than anything else, and he is the only one who wears real crocodile shoes.

  Real animal skin. The moment I found that out, he moved down another level of hate scale. I thought he couldn’t be any more despicable since he held my Damon as his slave for fighting matches, but then he has to support animal abuse.

  Oh no, animals haven’t done anything to him, and he’s wearing a crocodile on his feet as a symbolic disregard to life.

  What a bad man.

  I mute his voice because he’s so annoying at this point and dunk it in the remaining soup that I have made. The liquid will corrupt the data, and if someone tries to revive it, there won’t be much help since I only use it to see what kind of stupidity Abel is up to.

  He doesn’t have riveting stuff; all he does is complain and talks big about how he is going to take someone out because they looked at him wrong.

  Abel isn’t going to do anything. He’s going to tell his bodyguards to do the dirty work.

  A noise in the front of the soup kitchen catches my attention, and my hand is curling around the handle of the knife that I had used to cut the onions. It’s still wet with the onion juice, and the smell is equally pungent from the time it had been cut. I wrinkle my nose at the twitch in my eyes.

  Wow, those onions were pungent.

  My eyes scan the empty diner. The lights are off except in the kitchen, and I intentionally kept the front door open for an easy escape if someone were to come in through the backdoor where I was closest to.

  I would have heard the door open from the back, but I didn’t hear anything, so it means that whoever came in did it when I was loading the food into the truck.

  Clenching the knife, I blend into the darkness and follow the presence that I picked up on. The shape of shoulders outlines with the streetlights as the figure hovers over a dining table, struggling and heaving as he spins around when he senses me close to him.

  “Well hello,” I say; there is not much of a shocked tone in my voice.

  I knew it at the bottom of my heart that Damon Maverick was going to come after me. I am the one that granted him the chance to get his freedom back, but he is the one that has to fight for it.

  I wonder who he had to fight because Damon is one of the strongest men I have had the chance to see, but he’s more battered up and injured than I expected.

  The bruises on his body, the raw knuckles, and a cut on the bottom of his lip are the roughest I have seen on him.

  Granted, I haven’t witnessed more than a handful of fights that he had been in. One of the tougher opponents did manage to land a couple of blows on hi
m, but Damon didn’t look like this when he came out of the fight.

  If he is alive, that means he won against whoever Abel had chosen as Damon’s opponent.

  Damon doesn’t say anything when he looks at me, and this time, I don’t have a gas mask to block his view of my face. He takes a moment to let his black eyes scan the features of my face, but his eyes always go back to my eyes after he takes in the form of my body.

  The knife in my hand doesn’t faze him.

  “Hera.”

  His voice says my name, and my body reacted hotly. A shiver breathes down my back as I resist the urge to arch with a small moan; the way he grunted out my name is so numbing and sensual even if he didn’t have the intention of making it that way.

  “You found me, my demon,” my face splits into a grin as my heterochromia eyes come into the lights as I step forward.

  I stop there as to not make him tenser than he already is. Damon holds his side where his ribs are and sneer a warning for me to get rid of the knife.

  Tilting my head, I follow the tattoos on his arms with interest as he staggers back into the table when his eyes glaze over. Whatever injury he’s suffering, it’s clearly affecting him so much that he’s unstable right now.

  “Are you going to faint?” I ask with wide eyes and accidentally wave the knife in front of me.

  His eyes sharpen at the weapon, and his massive shoulders are rigid. Damon looks to be in so much pain that he’s running on fuel and instinct to keep him alive.

  “Put it down,” he grounds out with a snarl, eyes reflecting dangerously.

  “So demanding,” I tut him with a pout.

  He glares in response, but I shrug and put the knife down by throwing it behind me. It collided with something at the back, and it falls to the ground loudly. Damon’s reaction is quick as he takes the metal napkin in his hand while holding his other hand to his ribs.

  “Are you going to throw napkins at me?” I crackle, cocking my head to let him take the lead.

  He’s not advancing towards me, but he’s not backing away either. That man is like a cornered animal, taut and cautious as he refuses to move his eyes off me.

  “Where do you live?” it’s a demand that pours out of his gritting teeth.

  I raise a finger and wag it at him, “You can’t ask a lady that; you have to take me on a date first.”

  The unimpressed stoic stare I get makes me sigh.

  He’s boring.

  Why can’t he have rich expressions like Abel; it makes it more fun to mess with him.

  Though being stoic and cold is what attracted me to him in the first place because he uses that in a hot-blooded sport.

  Damon makes me feel tingly, and I have never felt that before. It’s new, and I want to explore it to see if it can ignite into a world of fireworks.

  His eyes are starting to glaze over again, and it’s not stopping until he’s almost toppling over the table with his clumsy body. He takes the table with him when he falls, breaking the legs with his weight and the napkin dispenser flies into the air almost comically.

  He’s out cold when he lands, and the soup kitchen settles back into silence again.

  “Well, in that case…” I muse quietly as I blink twice.

  I should be concerned over him, but I have never found myself caring for anyone about their health before. I tiptoe towards him, searching for signs that he’s still conscious and would attack me when I’m close enough.

  He’s absolutely out cold. There is no doubt about that as he doesn’t move an inch from his side where his hand lays under him to support his ribs.

  It’s mostly fractured or broken. I do hope he doesn’t have internal bleeding from being punched or have his rib puncture his lung. That would be a mess that requires hospice care, and I’m not risking being seen on security cameras carrying a man more than twice my size like a lump of an oversized potato sack.

  The safest thing to do now is to poke him and gauge his reaction, but he doesn’t move or flinch when I feel his ribs that he has landed on. All of them are protected under a solid wall of muscles, but I can feel that they are intact, and none of them are cracked.

  He probably has bleeding in the epidermal layer and in his muscles. Whoever punched him landed a well-aimed punch, and now I kind of want to meet the man who was my demon’s opponent in a deathmatch.

  That sounds so serious. Maybe it wasn’t a fight to the death, but Damon did come out more wounded than any of his previous fights.

  I wonder what happened to the other man. Abel’s fights don’t allow losers to live, but this is organized by the heads of the Moretti and Callahan family. Abel doesn’t have a say in the matter even if it’s his life on the line.

  Anyhow, I should get this hunk of a man somewhere else before the soup kitchen opens again in the morning to feed the hungry, homeless people.

  Physical strength isn’t my strongest suit, especially carrying a man who looks like he ate a whole buffalo.

  I’ll have the drag him out of the building and somehow finesse his body into the car that I had stolen.

  I turn him on his back and hook my hands under his arms, halfway through the back door has my back aching from his weight.

  I wish he would have waited until he got into my car to faint, but he just has to bring more trouble than I would have liked.

  This troublesome man, I huff quietly.

  When I finally manage to get him into the car, I had to take a breather to settle the aching in my bones. Damon has the weight to go with his intimidatingly massive body, and this is the first time I do not appreciate him having this much bulk.

  “Poor table,” I shake my head as I remember back the table that had a broken leg flying across the floor.

  The kitchen aids will come in and wonder what had happened the night before because only one table is broken. That doesn’t seem like a fight have broken out, and there is nothing in the soup kitchen to steal other than cheap knives, but people steal for a lot less.

  “Okay,” I say as I wiggle my butt down on the seat to find a comfortable spot as I peek at the unconscious man.

  “Let’s get you home, you demon boy.”

  He is not a boy. Damon is a clear example of a prime alpha male.

  “Oh man, I have to carry you into the house too,” I groan and hit my forehead on the steering wheel.

  The neighbors should not be awake at this time to witness me hauling a body into the house, so I should be safe from the police.

  I reach to Damon and poke his cheek, running my hand down his scruffy jawline and humming in appreciation of the defined bone structure.

  He is very handsome, and it’s making me question whether he was made from Aphrodite’s left eyebrow because goodness, this man is hairy.

  His arms, his face, and I can put money on his legs too. Those thick and muscular thighs, I squirm in the seat and wet the bottom of my lip.

  What a fine specimen.

  “Oh, no, no, no.” I start the car with a scowl on my face, “I can’t take advantage of an unconscious man—but oh, he’s so pretty.”

  A song runs through my vocals, “You can’t sleep, there is a big bad wolf coming. Are you awake? That won’t do, do you sense the game? I can hear you breathing.”

  Chapter Five

  Damon

  Waking up in pain is nothing new to me.

  I don’t remember even a single time when I didn’t wake up with aches all over my body, and sometimes, it’s worse than other mornings when I have had more than two fights the night before.

  However, I have never woken up with a pair of heterochromia eyes peering down at me with the fucking cutest grin I have ever seen.

  That alone has alarms going off in the back of my mind as I register that I’m not in my own room, but I’m in a woman’s place with a flash of yesterday slamming into me.

  I jerk up from the bed and crack my forehead on hers. Pain burst through my skull as black dots ripple through my vision. Groaning at the throbbing
from the headache and the pain, I hardly care about the whimper from beside me when the girl sobs dryly.

  “Good morning to you too, Mr. Sleepy-head. I never got greeted with this much enthusiasm before.”

  Her voice has a sulky tone to it, but I ignore her and push away the pain in my ribs to nurse my forehead with my hand.

  Memories flood through my brain as I close my eyes tightly from the bright room.

  I remember vividly the two weeks that I have been training nonstop to further myself in speed and power in my fist; using those skills can help me in strategic punches that will render my opponent in minutes.

  When the day of the fight came, I was ready to be out of the chains that kept me with Abel. The man I had fought was an equally big man. He had a scar on his right eye, and he couldn’t see from that side.

  He didn’t show it as a weakness or a disability; he took that disadvantage and honed it into his benefit because his left side became his dominant side.

  It was a nasty fight. We were at each other’s throats constantly as neither of us was backing down due to exhaustion. The fight became a blur of primal instincts and body muscle memories, but we were both at the ends of our wits and adrenaline could alone do so much before it caught up with one of us.

  He fell first, but I admit to myself that he would have continued because I was falling to my knees too. He would have won, and I knew it when he fell with more energy coursing through him than a defeated man.

  My opponent had let me live with the freedom that I felt cheated with.

  He and I would have been a great team if we weren’t on the opposite sides of the ring.

  It was a bittersweet victory.

  “Do you want water?”

  I open my eyes and turn my head to face the woman that I have been looking for. Her big eyes blink with thick lashes fanning like the wings of a damn butterfly, but she is too striking to be the monster that I have heard from the mouth of Moretti’s boss.

  He is also the one to tell me where I could find this girl after the fight, and I didn’t wait one second before getting out of that hellhole.

  “Hello?” her small finger pokes my cheek.