by A. Zavarelli
This was why I didn’t allow myself to get wrapped up in other people. With the exception of Lucian, everyone else in my life was expendable. It usually wasn’t difficult for me to maintain the status quo, but Birdie was testing my limits. I needed to distance myself from her, but I couldn’t leave her here alone. Not yet.
“So what happens now?” she asked, her voice tinged with frustration. “You just keep me locked up here all day and tell me what to do? Is that the plan?”
“Pretty much.” I shrugged.
Razor blue eyes cut right through me, and she looked even prettier when she was on fire like that. My dick throbbed, adding to the discomfort I’d felt all day. Our confrontation in the truck left her scent all over me. It was difficult to refuse the drug that was right in front of me. My palms remembered the feeling of her flawless, satiny skin and the way I’d marked her with my handprints. I wanted to bury my fingers into those honeyed locks of hair and tilt her head back, demanding that she open her lips and her legs for me. That poison spread through my veins every time I saw her in a new light. There was no such thing as modesty when it came to Birdie. Every square inch of her felt obscene.
“You can’t just keep me here,” she barked after me as I stood and began to clear the table.
“What other choice do you have?” I asked. “You can’t be trusted to look after yourself and stay out of trouble. Not when Detective Taylor is looking for you.”
Her face blanched, and all the bravado she’d shown only moments before evaporated. “You know about that?”
“He’s asked me about you twice,” I informed her.
She fell uncharacteristically quiet as I loaded the dishwasher and wiped off the counter. The wheels were turning in her mind, and if I had to venture a guess, she was probably wondering what I knew about her past. Part of me hoped she would verbalize the question. I wanted to challenge her, but mostly, I wanted to hear confirmation of what I already knew in her own words. But she never said anything else about it, and neither did I. Instead, she hobbled back over to the sofa and reached for the remote, only to find that it no longer worked.
“What’s wrong with this thing?”
“Nothing.” I nodded to the bookcase in the living room. “Television is off-limits before bed. There are plenty of books you can read.”
“It’s eight o’clock,” she huffed. “I’m not tired, and I don’t want to read.”
“We have an early day tomorrow.” I grabbed the earmarked copy of Walden by Henry David Thoreau from the coffee table. In prison, I’d read to occupy my time, and I still maintained the habit as part of my nightly routine. Birdie wasn’t going to disrupt it.
She didn’t cave. Instead, she opted to sit on the couch, glaring at me while I read. What she couldn’t realize was that it didn’t faze me one way or the other. I’d seen worse things from men far more vicious than she could ever dream of being.
Twenty whole minutes of blissful silence passed before she jumped from the couch and started pacing the floor. “This is bullshit. You can’t keep me here.”
“I can, and I will,” I said without glancing up from my book.
“What would you do if I just walked out the door right now?” she challenged. “Are you going to chase me down the road too?”
“You wouldn’t get very far.” I turned the page. “But you can try if you want to.”
I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t look up until she started for the door. Amused, I slid my hand between the pages and watched as she tried to turn the knob. It took about three seconds for her to realize there was a pin code on the lock panel. Her shoulders stiffened, and she turned around. Birdie was in for a lot of surprises as far as I was concerned. We took our security on the compound seriously, considering we had a lot of valuable merchandise on the property.
“All the locks in the house are electronic,” I informed her. “The dead bolt too.”
“You’re insane.” The vein in her throat pulsed as her hands clenched into fists at her side. “You know that, right?”
“I live on a compound. What did you expect?”
Her eyes darted around, and I assumed she was looking for other ways she could wreak havoc tonight, but I was tired, and it was time for bed.
“All your toiletries are in the bathroom attached to your room. Go brush your teeth and get ready for bed.”
I kicked off my boots, but she didn’t move, and I sensed this was going to be another battle. She confirmed my suspicions when I stood, and she still refused to budge. With a sigh, I stalked toward her, and she attempted to sidestep me. My arm hooked around her waist and hauled her back against me before I forced her body into motion. I didn’t want to hurt her, so when she started to fight, I hoisted her up into my arms and carried her.
“Would you stop doing that?” she screeched.
Her bedroom door was open, and I made it inside without incident. All the fighting from earlier today must have drained her because she wasn’t nearly as combative as I anticipated. Plunking her down onto the bed, I nodded to the adjoining bathroom.
“You’ve got five minutes to brush your teeth and do your business.”
When she looked up at me, her eyes had morphed from sky blue to gray. “Ace,” she choked out. “Please don’t do this.”
The hair on my arms prickled as I considered her tone. Did she think I was going to hurt her?
Irritated, I headed for the door. She called out to me again, and the fear in her voice choked the air from my lungs. I couldn’t figure her out. No matter how much information I’d gathered on her over the past year, it was never enough. Birdie was a fucking mystery to me. And right now, I needed to get as far away as I could before I fell into this trap.
Ignoring her, I shut the door behind me and locked it with the pin code before I wandered down the hall to my own room. I’d give her a few minutes, and then I’d turn out the lights. In the interim, I used that time to roll a joint. Nightly smoking was the only way I could get to sleep, and if I didn’t get my sleep, I was a cranky motherfucker. Before I lit up, I checked the time on my phone and confirmed it had been long enough for Birdie to do her business. I opened the app on my phone again and turned off the lights in her room as I settled back onto my bed and reached for my lighter. That was when I heard the ear-piercing scream.
I CLAWED AT THE SHEETS, desperate to ground myself in reality as I attempted to drag a breath of air into my lungs. Heat singed me from the inside out. Shapes danced in the corners of my vision, moving and distorting around me, ripping me back into the past. Notes of black licorice flooded my senses, and I could practically feel his hands on me again. The hands of the person I thought was my savior, but in the end, he’d turned out to be a monster just like the rest of them.
“I brought you another doll,” he whispered into the darkness.
“I don’t want any more dolls. When are you going to take me away from here like you promised?”
“Soon, princess. Someday soon.”
His hand began to creep up my thigh, and betrayal sliced through me as I curled into myself and pleaded with him not to do this. He promised to save me. He promised to take me away. Gypsy had been right all along. We couldn’t trust anybody…
I squeezed my eyes shut and whispered over and over that it wasn’t real. I wasn’t there anymore. But the voice from my past pierced right through my protective veil, whispering how much he liked it. How much he liked me.
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” I curled into a ball and rocked violently while I tried to drag myself out of the memory. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I was twenty years old, and I was perfectly fine.
Only I wasn’t. Garbled words flew from my lips and moisture clung to my skin as my breath came hard and fast. Vertigo stole my balance, and my body swayed to the left, nearly toppling over. The space in my throat felt like a pinhole, growing narrower by the second.
I needed air.
Window. There had to be a window. I launched off the bed, scra
mbling for the wall so I could feel around for the cool air. But in my frantic pursuit, I stumbled into something else—one of my suitcases—and flipped right over it. The resulting crash sent me plummeting onto the tile floor for a second time that day. Tears coated my cheeks, and then light blinded my eyes as the door swung open.
“What the fuck?” The voice penetrated my tomb of silence.
A hand took hold of my arm, and on instinct, I swung at him, lashing out at the demons who continued to haunt me. My fist collided with a solid part of his body, and I swung again. This time, there was no connection. He wrenched my arm back, and I tried to scramble away, but I couldn’t. He was so fucking heavy. So much stronger than I was.
“Birdie, open your eyes.”
“No!” I screamed. “Get off me!”
“Birdie.” His fingers grazed over my face. My stomach churned, and I tried to kick him, but my legs had turned to jelly.
“Please.” I shook my head. “Don’t do this.”
“Goddammit.” The voice was full of agony. Helpless. And it didn’t fit the voices from my nightmares. It was the reality check I needed to snap me out of it.
“It’s me,” he said. “Ace. Remember?”
Ace. My mind painted details of his features long before I opened my eyes. The behemoth of a man with the beard and tattoos. The one that should probably terrify me. But instead, my heart started to slow, and I found myself drawing in a steady breath, followed by another. He wasn’t Ricky or any of the others, and I wasn’t in that house.
“I’m in Las Vegas.” The voice that slipped from my lips sounded distant and childlike.
“You’re just outside of it.” Ace used his thumb to wipe away my tears in a way that seemed awkward for him. “But you’re safe here, Birdie. I need you to understand that.”
My eyes clashed with the whiskey gold in his. They were transcendent, unrivaled by any other color I’d ever seen in this world, and right then, I could have stared into them for eternity. Outwardly, he was jagged and guarded, but his eyes were the passage to a fragile soul. A secret kingdom hidden away in his mind and heart.
“Come here.” He tugged me up into a sitting position and then propped me beside him against the wall. It took me a second to realize what he’d pulled from his pocket. I wanted to ask him about it, but verbalizing the question required too much energy. The crash was real, and I doubted I’d even be able to move from the floor.
Ace held his lighter to the rolled paper, and I watched in fascination as he took a couple of tokes and blew the smoke from his lips in a long sigh. When he held it to my lips, I didn’t fight him.
“This will help you,” he murmured. “Just take a little puff into your mouth.”
While he instructed me, his fingers settled at the base of my neck, rubbing away the tension that had gathered there. “Now take a deep breath. Good girl. Let it go.”
My head lolled against his sturdy shoulder as wisps of smoke slipped from my lips in intoxicating patterns. I had never smoked before. Never even considered it. But as the minutes passed with the reverberation of his voice guiding me, a divine quietude bled into my bones. I’d never felt so relaxed. My mind had never felt such peace. Everything was slower, sharper, intensified. The waning joint passed from his lips to mine, an intimacy that lit a fire in my imagination. A lucid dream in which his calloused fingers twisted in my hair while I drank the smoke from his lips and tasted the fire in his lungs.
Warmth expanded from my belly down into the space between my thighs. A paradise created for pleasure—a pleasure I’d never given freely—yet at that moment, I wanted to give it to him. But my bones were heavy, and exhaustion seeped into every cell. Logic felt distant, but I could still hear the whispers of truth. He wasn’t mine. He would never be mine.
Eventually, the joint vanished, and only silence remained. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to. My body slumped against Ace, absorbing his warmth and the drumbeat of his heart.
“This will help you sleep.”
They were the last words I heard him rumble.
When I opened my eyes, the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling greeted me. Somehow, I’d been relocated to the bed Ace had prepared for me, my body cloaked in a tangled mess of covers. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. My memory was fuzzy, and I didn’t like that feeling. I usually crashed hard after a panic attack, but this was something else. The weed I smoked had lulled me into a sleep unlike any other I’d ever experienced. It was a difficult concept to grasp when insomnia had always been my constant companion.
I sat up and scrubbed the sleep from my eyes. Today was Friday. The second day of my imprisonment. The second of an unknown number. Ace hadn’t mentioned how long he intended to keep me here. There was no set time I was dictated to serve, and I think that scared me the most. But beneath the fear, the current circumstances also had another surprising effect. For months, I’d been juggling one mess after another. Every day was the same. Wake up, panic, stress, con, repeat. It was a vicious ride I couldn’t get off. But today, there would be no cons. There would be no dealings with Joe. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, it felt like I could actually breathe again.
Logically, I knew that feeling couldn’t last. Joe still needed to be dealt with, regardless of whether I was here or not. I could only hope that when that time came, he’d be willing to hand over the evidence that could condemn me in exchange for his dirty little secrets.
I dragged myself into the bathroom and gulped down a few handfuls of water before brushing my teeth. It felt like the afternoon already, but I couldn’t be sure. Regardless, Ace hadn’t come to wake me up, so I took my time showering and getting dressed.
I had no intentions of unpacking my suitcases or making myself comfortable here, so I left everything as it was. The first outfit I could piece together was an ivory crochet tank with a plunging neckline and a burnt orange maxi skirt. I found my favorite gold gladiator sandals and paired them with matching bangles.
Gypsy women took pride in their appearance, and it was a value my mother instilled in me. She took extra care to make herself look beautiful every day, though it really wasn’t necessary. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew, even if it was only for a little while. I couldn’t remember how old I was when she disappeared from our lives, but the memories I had lived on. This ritual was my way of feeling close to her. The hag stone she wrapped was the only possession of hers I had left, and I carried it with me always.
When I walked down the hall into the living area, I expected to find Ace. The house was quiet, but I assumed he was still lurking somewhere inside. Only, it wasn’t him I found sitting on the couch. My feet hit the brakes before my mind could process what I was seeing. The familiar face of a friend peered back up at me, and my initial reaction was panic. Had Ace taken her too?
“What are you doing here?” I blurted.
Trouble smiled back at me, but it wasn’t a smile I’d ever seen before. It was laced with guilt. “Ace asked me to come keep an eye on you. He was needed at the shop.”
She said the words so casually as if she didn’t just hit me with a fucking wrecking ball.
“You know him?” My entire body trembled as I forced the words from my lips.
She nodded. That was it. No other explanation. But did I really need one? The girl sitting on the sofa wasn’t who I thought I knew at all. The typical baggy jeans and ugly T-shirts she often wore were absent, and in their place was a pair of black shorts and a tank top. Even her hair was almost unrecognizable, pulled back into a smooth high ponytail to highlight the deception on her face.
“How do you know him?” I demanded, seeking out some other possible explanation.
“You’re looking for answers that will make this sting less.” Trouble adjusted the bracelet on her wrist. A bracelet I’d given her. “But if you really want me to say it—”
“I do.” My head throbbed with the agony of her duplicity, but I needed to hear the words from her mouth.
“But you’ve been in Vegas this whole time,” I argued.
“Yeah.” She snapped the gum in her mouth. “Because he asked me to keep an eye on you and report back to him. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”
I shook my head, unable to accept her explanation. “I saw you first. I was the one who found you. What you’re saying—”
“It was a trick,” Trouble answered, a sliver of regret coloring her voice. “I just did what I was told.”
I didn’t want to believe I’d been played so easily, but I could no longer deny it. Somehow, Ace knew I would want to help this broken mess of a girl. It was the sort of knowledge buried deep down in my soul, and it terrified me that he understood me this way. How could he possibly know that?
“You told him everything?” I choked out. “The casinos, the cons, and… oh, God.” My head dipped as it occurred to me. “You took those photos of me, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer, and that was answer enough. I turned on my heel, desperate for space, when she called after me.
“Birdie, wait.”
I didn’t want to look at her. I wanted nothing else to do with her. But I couldn’t help it. For an entire year, I had invested myself into this girl I considered a friend. I worried about her constantly, showering her with gifts and checking in on her as often as I could. She’d found the sliver of vulnerability in my armor and tore at the seams until she’d ripped it wide open, spilling out secrets I shared with nobody. And now the stupid part of me that hurt inside wanted to hear what she had to say for herself.
“For what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you tried to do for me,” she said. “I never wanted to hurt you. I understand you’ll probably hate me now, and I am sorry for that. Maybe one day, you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
