by Dannika Dark
“What’s wrong with Wheeler?”
Jericho shrugged. “He had to dig a trench.”
She laughed her silly laugh and slipped on her shoes. “Poor guy. My mom would be out there digging it if it weren’t for him, and she’s in no condition to do that kind of work. See you later!”
“Stay out of trouble,” Jericho said, following her outside. He leaned on the railing and watched her jog to Naya’s car. The sun sizzled against his skin, and Jericho couldn’t shake that bad vibe he’d been feeling all day.
Something felt wrong, and all he could think about was Isabelle.
Chapter 10
A hard slap to my ass startled me awake, and I lunged forward, grunting out an unintelligible word. Hawk laughed, and I realized I’d somehow turned my body over on its side.
“Take these off, Hawk. I can’t feel my arms,” I begged. I dug my heels into the mattress, trying to push myself into a sitting position, but my valiant efforts were in vain. The cords had pulled against my wrists in my sleep, causing the skin to swell and bruise.
My vision was a little blurry, and while I was unable to rub my eyes, I could see Hawk swinging a pair of handcuffs in a circle around his index finger.
“We’re going to do this nice and easy, Iz.”
“Can I at least stretch out my muscles before you put them on?”
He tucked the cuffs in his back pocket. “Fine. But if you try to bolt on me, then I’m not going to play nice. I’m going to hog-tie you. If you shift, then I’ll pen your wolf in a crate so you can’t shift back.”
A flutter of anger pricked at my skin as my wolf began to prowl. Hawk loosened the cord on my right hand, and my arm immediately dropped. I shouted out and moaned at every rotation of my shoulder. Dull tingles made me nauseous, and instead of lying there and waiting for a slow return of blood to my limb, I began squeezing my fist and bending my arm. Hawk crossed to the left side of the bed and did the same with the other cord.
“Can we talk like civilized adults now?” I hissed through my teeth as I sat up.
“Civilized?” Hawk grunted as he sat on the bed.
He’d shaved and had on a pair of ironed jeans and a fresh blue Polo shirt. Meanwhile, I was tied to his bed and looked like I’d crawled out of a dungeon. It made me want to shave that mustache right off his face and rip every chest hair out, one by one.
“You can’t keep me here like this.”
“Yes I can, Izzy. You’ve been living in the human world too long.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Shifters don’t hold hostages!” I rubbed my shoulder and grimaced when I bent my legs and felt a twinge of pain. On top of that, my right cheek was swelling my eye shut.
“Really?” he said. “Some Shifters hold to the old ways.”
“You mean slaves? Come on, Hawk. That’s not the kind of thing you want to get mixed up in. People who do that only prove how weak they are.”
“Do you think you’re the first bitch I’ve tied up?” he said coolly.
Chills swept over my arms.
A lecherous smile tugged at his lips. “Yeah, that’s right. If a bitch isn’t behaving, then I make her behave. If she still wants to be disobedient, then there are consequences. I’ve given you plenty of chances to show me you’re a good girl. It’s not too late to tame that wolf of yours. All you have to do is show me a little respect and do as you’re told.”
My voice softened. “Where are the other girls?”
He watched me for a beat and then asked, “Do you want breakfast?”
I was gobsmacked. “What happened to the other girls, Hawk? Did you hurt them?”
He scratched the back of his head and lowered his eyes. “I only killed the first one. I didn’t care for cleaning up that mess and won’t do it again. The other two I sold off when they didn’t want to behave. I didn’t realize how much you could get on the black market for a good bitch.”
But our relationship had seemed so normal! Maybe he was only trying to frighten me as some sort of payback. I couldn’t imagine Hawk doing something like that. Not the man who would sit next to me cracking pistachio shells while watching golf on Sunday afternoons. This couldn’t be happening.
He clapped his hands together so loud I jumped. “So! Cereal or waffles?”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
Hawk grabbed one of the cords and looped it around my neck. My fingers gripped the end, and he tugged. “Come on, sweetie. I’ll walk you.”
Jerk!
I scooted off the bed, feeling the itch to verbally thrash him as he led me to the bathroom like a dog on a leash.
“Can I take a shower?”
“That’s fine. But you come out when I say.”
The bathroom was right outside the bedroom door to the left. The shower curtain had seashells and starfish. After he shut the door, I quietly opened the cabinets and discovered he’d emptied everything except two towels. Even the towel rack had been removed from the wall, leaving unpainted holes were the screws had once been. I examined the plastic curtain rod but didn’t stand a chance against him wielding a flimsy pole. Breaking the mirror would defeat the purpose of a surprise attack and injure me in the process.
And no windows.
I stripped out of the nightgown and stepped into a stream of warm water. Tiny grains of dirt were embedded in one of my knees. As my skin soaked up the water, my joints began to throb all over again.
Why had I given him a second chance? Never for one second could I have imagined that Hawk possessed the black heart of a psychopath. Nothing I’d known about him would have ever led me to believe he was capable something so abominable. Then again, what did I really know about him? We’d only been living together for a month. I’d trusted my instincts, deciding the things I didn’t like about him were tolerable. Like his tendency to call me his bitch. The way he used it was possessive, and we weren’t in a pack.
I quelled the anger rising within and stepped out of the shower to dry off. I needed to keep a cool head. I had nowhere to run this time, and even worse, I couldn’t fight. Shifting would only exacerbate the situation, and my wolf could end up crated.
The reflection staring back at me was that of a stranger. Isabelle Monroe looked weary and beaten. The skin beneath my eye had bruised, and as much as I wanted to shift to heal, I couldn’t be sure my wolf would change back. Once in animal form, I had no control over my animal. I could feel her tempestuous pacing, so I fought against the urge. My palms were scraped from the sidewalk incident, but nothing looked as shocking as my wrists. They were horribly discolored and raw—some of the skin surrounding the deep cuts had swollen. I rinsed my hands in warm water and patted them with a dry towel. Was this what it felt like to be human? I swept my wet hair away from my face and wondered if I should trim it someday soon.
Someday.
Please let there be a someday. Hawk couldn’t have selected a better girlfriend to kidnap, because I wouldn’t be missed. I’m sure Howlers had waitresses walk out on them all the time. Hawk was a wealthy man. What was he doing at a Laundromat when we met? Why hadn’t I ever found that suspicious? Maybe that’s where he’d found all his previous victims, because women with money and family didn’t go to places like that.
Then I remembered the stories I’d heard about girls who went missing. Their captors had held them for decades. Men were kept for different purposes, like cage fights. It was illegal among Shifters, but everyone knew it still went on in the dark corners of the underworld. Packs that followed barbaric customs, and some Shifters were collectors. I’d once heard a story about a leopard who had his own zoo of women. He kept them locked in cages he’d built on his property—each of them a different animal. One woman had been with him for over two hundred years.
“Stop scaring yourself,” I whispered, turning off the water.
A fist pounded on the door. “Time’s up, Izzy.”
“Did you bring my jeans?” I yelled out in a normal voice. Maybe if I played this out
like I didn’t mind being here, he wouldn’t go to the extreme measures of roping me up.
He pounded harder, and I slipped into the nightgown and swung open the door.
“No, I didn’t pick up your fucking jeans. That would mean going back to the house and Delgado’s men finding my ass.”
“Why are you afraid of a bunch of humans?” I kept my voice calm, but stepped back when his face tightened. “You’re not a wolf… are you?”
If his animal was something meek like a deer, then he’d have no choice but to fight my wolf in human form, because my wolf would kill his animal. Maybe Hawk had been bluffing about being a wolf and wanted to find a submissive bitch for his own perverse need to dominate an animal more powerful than himself. I suddenly felt a surge of superiority, one that told me my wolf might be able to take him down.
Until he grabbed my arm and spun me around, cuffing my wrists behind my back.
“Think I don’t know what’s going through your mind? You’re transparent.”
“You can’t stay in hiding forever,” I said. “What happens when you want to go gambling or out to grab some tacos?”
He tried to wrap the cord around my neck, and I ducked to the right.
“Come on, girl. Let’s go for a walk.”
Hell’s bells, Evil Izzy was about to show her face and this was not the time. I bit down on my contempt for him and kept a level head. “I’ll walk on my own.”
“Then walk.”
I compliantly moved past him into the bedroom and had difficulty getting on the bed. When I crawled on my knees, it tugged my nightgown and I fell on my right side.
“Maybe you can just cuff one arm to the bed. That way I can at least move around,” I suggested. “Maybe if you show me you can be nice, I’ll be nice back.”
Without a word, he unlocked the cuffs and pulled my left wrist to the post. The rails on either side were wrought iron, and he cuffed me below the horizontal bar so I couldn’t escape.
“Where are your parents?” I asked. “Do you have any family? I don’t remember you talking about them.”
“Now you’re interested?”
I shrugged. “I have no secrets to hide. You’re the one who’s been evasive about his past. I’ve told you all about my family.”
“Oh yeah. The family you bailed on. You seem to like running out on your problems. You’ve spent years running from city to city, constantly searching for something better.”
“Movement is life. You should be flexible to the ebb and flow of change.”
Hawk chuckled. “Izzy Monroe, always the philosophical one.”
“It’s what attracted you to me, remember? I gave you a little food for thought, comparing laundry with life.”
“Your ass and red hair attracted me to you. I don’t remember what the hell you said to me in the Laundromat. I just noticed your basket of sexy panties and knew you’d be hot in the sack. I was right,” he said, inching closer to the bed. Then he got that lustful look in his eyes.
“I think I want waffles,” I quickly said. “Do you have any of those frozen ones? Also, a glass of milk with a little chocolate sauce would be great. Low-fat milk. But if you don’t have any of that, then maybe some grapefruit juice. But only the kind in those little cans; you know I don’t like the cocktail juice. What kind of cereal do you have?”
He waved his hand and left the room. I always knew the one way to turn that man off was to start running my mouth. Hawk wasn’t a big talker. Even in the bedroom, the only sounds he made were a few grunts. He’d never been an aggressive lover, but now that I was tied up, I began to notice a change in his personality. He leered more, seemingly aroused by his new dominant role.
I squeezed my fingers together and tried twisting my hand in different ways to pull it through the cuff. He had tightened the link, and with my swollen wrists, it was a waste of time. I sat on the edge of the bed and quietly opened the drawer on the bedside table.
He hadn’t cleared everything out of the bedroom. I noticed a ballpoint pen and a few notepads. I tried squatting on the floor to look beneath the bed, but I couldn’t. So I extended my left leg underneath and slowly ran it to the right, trying to feel around. My toe touched a cord, but I couldn’t get a grip with the nightstand in my way. I also felt a lightweight box, but my mind focused on the cord. He might have a phone hidden under there, which would have made him a certifiable idiot, but that’s what I was counting on.
I stood up and rubbed my good eye, looking around. A picture hung on the wall above the bed, secured by a nail. Could I use a nail as a weapon?
So I had a nail, a pen, a lamp, and notepads to take down a man who weighed twice as much as me. I also possibly had a phone, or at the very least, a cord.
“Hell’s bells, Izzy. What have you gotten yourself into now?” I whispered.
Discouraged, I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about Jericho. After all these years, he could still merely breathe on my skin and make me squirm like a virgin. Sometimes a woman has experienced too much life to have any blush left in her cheeks, but the man who puts it there is someone not easily forgotten.
Second chances. There was that phrase again. I’d been so eager to give that opportunity to Hawk, but unwilling to give it to the one person who really meant something to me. I knew why. Hawk was safe and easy. If it didn’t work out, no tears on my pillow. But Jericho still held a piece of my heart. The last piece. The one that wasn’t broken. If I took the chance of letting him back in, only to be cast aside again, I’d have no heart left to give.
I also didn’t know what a second chance even meant with Jericho. Friendship? Forgiveness? Or maybe just a romp in the sack and I’d be over all that sex appeal? Though I highly doubted it. Jericho had a reputation for being a greedy lover, and his women became as addicted to him as he had once been to drugs.
Then I laughed. Was I actually sitting handcuffed to my ex-lover’s bed, contemplating sex with Jericho? What made me think he’d even care? That’s when it dawned on me that I still loved him. Jericho was my best friend and the man who made me believe I could be more than just an ornament in life. He’d taught me how to be spontaneous and experience the world with passion. Because of him, I’d traveled and met so many fascinating people. Goals, money, or even finding a mate didn’t matter. He’d taught me the most valuable lesson in life: how to live in the moment.
A tear trailed down my cheek and lingered on my chin. I still loved him. The man I knew before he slipped over to the dark side was everything I could have wanted in a friend, a lover, and maybe a mate. I’d suppressed those feelings because neither of us had wanted that kind of commitment; we’d been too young, and I had valued our friendship too much to risk losing it to something that could never be.
Those tender feelings began to shift to resentment. I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t get the pain out of my head of seeing him with another woman. Decades later, it burned my heart like a raw wound. You’re never more exposed than when your heart is in your hand. I’d returned to our hotel room to have a serious talk with Jericho. I wanted to help him get clean, and I wanted us to do it together. I naively thought I would be enough for him to turn his life around, but I never got that chance.
Our relationship had become self-destructive, and if I’d stayed with him, I would have eventually been lost to myself. I needed to break free and figure out who I was. I needed to be able to love someone and have that love returned to only me.
As the pain in my body became a tolerable ache, I began to question myself. Was it wrong to bail when things got tough? It had saved me from the dysfunctional home I grew up in—raised by apathetic parents and treated as an outcast by my siblings. My father had been a lone wolf for too many years before marriage and had hardened as a man. Maybe that would slowly happen to me, and God, what a frightening thought.
“I hate you, Hawk,” I whispered. I felt more than cuffed to a bed; I felt bound to the miseries of my past and forced to confront them in the silence of the
room.
My survival instincts were beginning to kick in. I wasn’t a frail girl who shut down when things got tough. The bed didn’t seem too heavy. If I moved it a little to the left, I just might be able to reach what was on the other end of that cord.
***
Evening rolled around and Jericho hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. He’d tried to crash that afternoon but couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that kept him pacing most of the day. Lexi told him it was probably the change in weather, but Jericho didn’t even want to smoke. He tucked a cigarette behind his ear and occasionally would bite on the filter, but the urge to light up had completely left him.
He snatched the keys to the blue truck and headed over to Howlers with Wheeler. He needed to swallow his pride and apologize to Isabelle for the night before. Denver had the night off and had gone to play laser tag with Reno and Austin. Ben, Wheeler’s twin, hadn’t been around much lately. He’d been away for sometimes up to a week, playing card tournaments to earn money.
Wheeler crossed his left leg over his knee and wiped at a scuff on his black boot with his thumb. “You wanna spit it out? You’ve had a bug up your ass all day.”
Jericho pulled the truck into a parking space and it jumped the curb. He threw it in reverse, and they bounced in the cab as he backed out. “I don’t know. I’ve never had this feeling this strong before. Bad vibes—like a premonition or something. You believe in that stuff?”
“Maybe all that shit you did in your past is finally catching up with you.”
Jericho shut off the engine and twisted the giant ring on his left index finger. “I can’t stop thinking about Isabelle.”
“Sounds like an addiction.”
“We’ve got this… connection.”
“Maybe you need to sever that cord,” Wheeler suggested, popping open his door.
As they walked toward the building, Jericho glanced at Isabelle’s blue car and wondered if she knew her taillight was busted.
