Take Me

by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin

  She opened the lid, knowing he wouldn’t hear the squeaking hinges nor would he sense her leaning over him. The Solfeggio frequency piping through the headphones overpowered his perceptions, his ability to reason, his entire universe. So much so, he probably wouldn’t even sense the change of air.

  His lips stretched back in misery as he panted through his teeth. Perspiration wet his skin, streaking drips down his ribs with the heave of his chest. A lonely, weak moan reached from his throat and penetrated her chest.

  As his body writhed against the walls in the narrow space and a pang of guilt cramped her gut, she forced herself to evaluate his distress. His rush of breath was panicked but not unrestricted. The chains confined his flailing but didn’t cut off blood flow. As for his mind, she just needed it intact enough to be trained, to pass the introductory meeting with the buyer, the final delivery, and receipt of the client’s payment.

  After she delivered him, he would be dead to her. The same way she thought of the others.

  Her eyes caught on his sculpted pecs, traveled along the dips and juts of his abs, and lingered on the impressive length of his cock where it lay against his thigh. Her fingers burned to touch him.

  She gripped her stomach, disgusted with herself. He was even more attractive than the others, but he wasn’t like them. His matured masculinity was prominent in the thickness of his build and the determined set of his jaw. Most importantly, he had a family and community that would miss him. What a god-awful choice she’d been forced to make.

  The turmoil inside her hardened into resolve. Ten weeks, a disciplined slave, and Mom and Mattie would be safe for another few months. It was how she measured her life, wasn’t it? In ten week increments, in the trade of slaves, one body at a time.

  She checked the music player. The one-hour recording rolled through its second of twenty-four repeats. He’d only been in the box for an hour, but it would’ve felt like days to him.

  Ironically, the drone of the 528 hertz was used in meditation as harmonic healing. When Van had shoved her in the box and slapped the earphones on her head, he’d said, “That’s a load of new age bullshit. After twenty-four hours of the same goddamned electrical wave passing through your skull, you won’t be healed. You’ll be fucking manic.”

  He’d been right. She’d emerged wild-eyed, delusional, and willing to do anything he demanded to avoid another minute in that box.

  Fuck Van and his thrills. When she’d fled from him downstairs twenty minutes earlier, the desire in his eyes had been vulgar in its blatancy. Why had he let her escape so easily? He didn’t give a shit if the boy vomited in the box, and he was too damned calculating to accept that excuse.

  Always, he fucked her when he wanted her. Never did she participate with a willing heart. Yet their scrimmages didn’t involve physical force. He’d wear her down with a skilled tongue or prey on her guilt through the mistreatment of a slave. Sometimes, he’d simply threaten to alert Mr. E of her disobedience. It wasn’t until she’d met him that she’d understood the meaning of coerced consent.

  She stared at the door, terrified to open it, terrified not to.

  Surely he went to bed in his room downstairs instead of following her to the attic. If he’d followed her, he’d be out there with that poor girl, who had been asleep when Liv had dashed by in the race to her room.

  Fucking hell. Checking on the girl was the right thing to do, no matter how badly she didn’t want to open the door. Mr. E didn’t give a shit how Van treated the captives as long as they met the requirements at the end of ten weeks.

  Her stomach turned as she agonized leaving the boy alone. Goddammit, she was weakening already, and it was only his first night. Her chin trembled. He had to remain in the box. She couldn’t bend the rules and expect to mold him into an acceptable slave. But the girl was already trained and didn’t deserve Van’s needless tormenting.

  She closed the lid and jogged to the keypad. If he was waiting on the other side, she could shut it quickly. If he was messing with the girl, she’d have to distract him. Deep breath. She entered the code and cracked the door.

  Across the room, the incarnation of her fears sat on the cot, back slouched against the wall. The girl’s head dipped up and down between his spread legs, her face and his dick shrouded by her hair.

  Memories ripped in Liv’s mind, sharp and desolate. She saw her own brown hair instead of the girl’s blond. She felt his cock punching the back of her throat and his fingers digging into her scalp. Their baby moved inside her, stretching her belly, making her bent position agonizing to endure.

  Her blood pooled away from her core, leaving the frigid numbness of her year as a slave—nine of those months pregnant.

  She swallowed the apparition of her past before it consumed her. The girl sucking him still retained her virginity, yet she was adept with her lips, mouth, and tongue. As one of the buyer’s requirements, Liv had spent the prior eight weeks teaching her the skill on Van. And in two weeks, Liv would deliver her to a man whose hand was as heavy as his wallet.

  Van looked up and caught her eyes, flames of greed blazing in his. “Come out here and show her how it’s done, Liv.”

  God, she hated him when he was like this. When he watched her with such hunger as he pumped his dick in whatever hole he could command. This wasn’t a training session for the girl. It was about Liv and him, and he was using the girl to tunnel Liv’s guilt.

  She could tuck her chin, shut the door, and fall asleep in the musty familiarity of her mattress inside the safety of her room.

  And let the girl stroke and suck him until he was done with her. She’d blown him a dozen times before during practice. Did one more time really matter?

  Van pushed down on the back of her head, and her hands convulsed on the mattress.

  Compassion was lethal to Liv’s well-being, but she couldn’t stop it as it shuddered over her skin and swallowed up her heart. She opened the door, passed the cot, another keypad, another code, and down the stairs, her insides bucking and tumbling. At the end of the hall, she stopped at the only closed door and dropped her forehead against it.

  What was more horrifying? The footsteps pounding down the stairs after her or all the creepy shit waiting on the other side of his bedroom door?

  His body slammed against her back, his exhales hot on her neck, his erection stabbing her tail bone. He hadn’t bothered to put his pants back on.

  She mustered a stoic tone. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Oh, the sweet seduction of your words.” He slapped her ass, lighting fire through her jeans, and swung open the door.

  Chapter Nine

  Liv stumbled into Van’s bedroom, unable to look away from the antique gun cabinet on the back wall, with walnut crests carved around the double glass doors. One might’ve expected a dozen prized shotguns displayed on the racks within. Instead, the cabinet was crammed with a menagerie of dolls and mannequins piled atop one another. Arms and legs askew, some still attached to molded bodies. Most were not. All of them bald and nude.

  She rubbed the chill prickling her arms. “Little girls everywhere want to know, ‘Where do all the broken dollies go?’”

  “Shut up, Liv.” He sidled around her, and his foot sent a tiny headless torso careening under the bed, its jointed legs tumbling after.

  Why wasn’t that one with all the hollow-eyed faces pressed against the glass of the cabinet? Some of the heads were upside down. Others leered to the side or stared out into the room from beneath hinged eyelids. Dust-laced cobwebs drooped between the dirt-smudged body parts. If she shook the case, how many eyes would wiggle and blink back? She shivered. “You need to—” She cleared her throat, tried to put oomf in her voice “—do some housecleaning.”

  “Nah.” He threw himself on the bed, naked from the waist down. His erection hadn’t lost interest. It stood tall and unabashed between the flex of his thighs as he reclined on one elbow and watched her with his unnatural patience.

  His interest
in his collection, however, didn’t appear to be sexual. None of his plastic friends were anatomically correct nor did they look well-loved. Much the opposite, in fact. A hairless mannequin slumped in the corner of the room, grime coating its nippleless coned breasts from years of inattention. One arm lay beside it, unattached. Its face was punched away, exposing the dark cavern of its head.

  Above him, another mannequin hung from something like a meat hook jutting out of the wall. Bent at the waist, its arms and head lolled forward as if reaching for the bed, the far-away gaze on its face frighteningly reminiscent of young Pat Benatar.

  “Van…” She jerked her chin at the aberration above him. He’d never answered her years of questions about his fetishes, but he’d agreed to tuck away the ones that chilled her the most. He knew Plasti-Pat Benatar topped the list.

  He rose, unhooked it from the wall, and tossed it under the bed to join who knew how many others. Then he turned to her, gripping the base of his cock, and pulled, one long lazy stroke. “Your turn, Liv. Show the pink.”

  A shudder bunched her shoulders to her ears. God, she couldn’t do this. Her panties were bone-dry, and her throat felt like a fucking Texas drought. “I can’t do this.”

  His expression hardened, his thoughts likely sifting through his arsenal of manipulations. Of course, he could punch her or choke her, but he never had to. She wagered he’d either return to the girl or call Mr. E.

  She moved to the narrow bed and perched on the edge. “Not like this.”

  The muscles in his jaw relaxed, and he sat beside her, dragging a blanket over his lap. He didn’t touch her. They both knew he would fuck her before she left that room, and his ability to endure her dawdling was something she always used to her advantage. Which was stupid. It never helped her in the end.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the dirt-matted carpet. A wrinkle creased his brow, his tone hesitant. “You want foreplay? Seduction?”

  She wanted real. She wanted to feel an essential, basic emotion that wasn’t bound to the wounds he’d inflicted on her, the ones that wouldn’t heal. “What I want, you can’t give.”

  He swung his head toward her, eyes alight with pain. “I dried your face when you cried. I held you when you screamed. I haven’t left your side once in all these years. You have me. All of me!”

  She masked her flinch with the stillness she’d perfected. The absence of motion made her feel less visible under his constant attention. She didn’t want him ogling at her. She didn’t want him. How could she? His kisses haunted her, the grip of his voice too painfully familiar in the dark. He was the cause of those tears, those screams, her fears.

  The cup of his palm on her cheek drew her eyes to his, and the tenderness in his tone snagged her breath. “Sing to me.”

  His other hand caught her chin, preventing her from looking away. She shook her head in the cage of his fingers.

  “If you need your distraction, your defense tonight, then by all means, sing.” His timbre dipped, a sultry intrusion in her ears. “Your voice makes me so fucking hard.” He shifted his hands to curl around her neck, thumbs caressing her cheeks, her scar. “Sing to me while I’m fucking you.”

  She hated that he’d figured out her defense. There were two mournful truths about their intimacy. One, he understood why she didn’t want to fuck him. Two, he was able to convince her to do it anyway. He knew her feelings for him were as complicated as her situation. He also knew that if he led her to that dead place inside herself, she would hide there without struggling while he fucked her. It was a tactic she resented and appreciated. “Which song?”

  A happy hum vibrated in his chest, his scar a macabre extension of his smile. “Bring Me To Life.”

  His requests never strayed from Evanescence, the essence of grace in despair.

  She let the trembling dread roll off her spine, drew in a long breath, and warbled through the first verse. Slipping into steady, lilting tones, her reluctance to fuck floated away with the notes. She held his eyes and sang the words he wanted to hear as he removed her sneakers, shirt, and jeans. When he traced her c-section scar, she kept her mind on the song, on its expression of the life she couldn’t have and the broken shell she’d become.

  He touched her hip bones with reverence, kissed the lace that covered her most private parts, and stripped the material with a ragged groan.

  “I can’t wake up…” she sang, the lyrics infused with a longing he couldn’t sate.

  In the next heartbeat, she lay bare beneath him, her disloyal body lubricating his entry, programmed to respond. He fisted the sheets, panting and rocking his hips to the rhythm of her faltering vocals. Against her will, his thrusts woke her hunger, massaging sparks of pleasure along her inner walls. She lost her voice and burrowed into the remote pocket of her mind.

  He raised up, shed his shirt, and lowered the sweat-damp heat of his chest to hers. Circling his pelvis, he dipped his dick in and out and dragged his teeth over her throat. “Your pussy’s so hot, clenching around me.” He nuzzled her neck, his arms stretched above them, fingers linked with hers, his biceps contracting beside her head. “Your voice makes me want to shoot my fucking load. I’m going to come so hard inside you.” He sank and withdrew, his girth a piston of stretching, hammering power. His exertion intensified, pounding her raw. “Keep singing.”

  Beneath a different man, in another life, she might’ve sang with a passion to match the intimate connection. With Van, she was a cold voice in a warm embrace, her pussy an entity of its own. The needy slit existed objectively, disciplined to accept and serve. She sang from that carnal place of flesh and superficial appetite. The place where emotions didn’t dwell.

  His grunts deepened, the roll of his body sliding and slapping against hers. “Come now. Come all over my dick.”

  The command tore the orgasm from her well-conditioned body. She focused inward, singing in her head, safe behind the shield of her mind as the sweep of unwanted sensations overtook the rest of her. She knew it could be truly pleasurable, and it had been many times with him. But she was too jumpy that night. She didn’t trust her feelings because every damned nerve in her body irrationally pulsed for the boy in the box one floor above.

  Van arched his neck and shouted his release to the ceiling, his pelvis slamming once, twice, and done. Then his mouth covered hers, moved over her jaw, and latched onto the curve of her neck. His whisper laved her shoulder, hot and wet. “I love you.”

  It was the part she dreaded most about these unions. Those gentle words bore the strength to shatter her from the inside out. He believed what he’d said, but she only had to think of him with the girl who, less than an hour earlier, was sucking him toward the same neck-arching finale.

  So she responded the way she always did, with thick bitter silence.

  He flicked off the bedside lamp, gathered her in his arms, and trapped her hips with a leg. She lay on her back, her face angled away from his, and her cheek pressed against the edge of the mattress.

  Her gaze locked on an arm poking from beneath the bed frame.

  The night could’ve gone worse. That could’ve been a real arm, decaying into the carpet and stinking up the scenery in Van’s garden of crazy. Despite all his cruelty and creepiness, he’d never killed anyone. She couldn’t say the same for herself.

  But obsessing about her felonies was dangerous in this business. Human sex traffickers were systematic and violent. Didn’t matter that Mr. E’s three-person operation wasn’t linked to the realm of nationwide organizations. The punishment was the same. Mr. E could easily be some douche of a car salesman in nowhere Texas, but he was a douche with Mom and Mattie’s addresses. The minute she lost her focus, one fucking slip, and they were dead.

  Van’s breathing steadied into the rhythm of sleep, and the weight of his arm and leg relaxed into pliancy. She eased from beneath him and caught herself before sitting up. Following the curve of the arm beside her pillow, she found his hand entangled in her hair, each f
inger meticulously coiled through its own strand. For the love. She stifled a sigh.

  After a long-suffering endeavor to extricate her hair without waking him, she collected her clothes and crept into the hall.

  As she walked to her room, her thoughts churned around the newest threat to her arrangement. Over six years, she and Van had captured five boys and two girls. All of them from ghettos along the Mexican border. Her first slave worked side jobs for a cartel, but the girl’s business connections hadn’t seemed to care when she went missing. None of their captures had been attached to families who would miss them.

  Until Joshua Carter.

  Not only would his parents devote their lives to finding him, his community would sponsor a massive rally to search for their football star. But the buyer’s demand for chastity had given her little choice. Boys without parents lost their innocence at young ages. There were no twenty-one-year-old virgin males among the sediment of broken families.

  The boy in the box would be missed.

  She reached the top of the stairs, her fingers finding the keypad with ease in the dark as Van’s words whispered through her head.

  The job’s the same. The slave we deliver will be exactly as he ordered.

  The goddamned job. She coded herself into the attic, tiptoed to the closet beside the sleeping girl, and selected tomorrow’s costume. Time to put on the mask. One that would hide her face and the fears it might show.

  Chapter Ten

  Boy. Eyes down, boy. Strip. The haunting voice in Josh’s head penetrated the never-ending tonality blaring in his ears. The flat line of sound wouldn’t shut up. Not for hours. Not a single breach in range or volume. Hours and hours and hours.

  Your name is whatever I want it to be. Boy. Boiyyyyee. He knew he was imagining the voice, angelic in melody, cutting in its intent.

  No matter what they planned to do, no way would he become a sex slave. He would not break.