“Just need to see your paperwork.”
“I’m afraid I was robbed a couple of days ago. The sons of bitches took everything.”
The police officer raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Can you step out of the car, sir?” He looked to Catalina. “You, too, miss.”
She shot me a look, and I nodded. I had the gun wedged into the waistband of my pants, and the minute he tried to pat me down, we’d be in trouble.
I climbed out, and Catalina did the same.
“Come around here,” he told Catalina, and she traversed the front of the car to join me at the driver’s side. “Both of you, turn around and place your hands on the car.”
I knew Catalina was waiting for me to make my move, but I was terrified of getting either of us shot. We were in too close proximity for me to try to go for my gun. The moment he saw me reaching for it, he’d pull his own. He was a young guy, and bigger than I was, physically.
With a sigh, I placed my hands on the roof. He would pat me down now, and when he moved lower on my body, I’d make my move, elbowing him in the face and hoping that was enough to take him down.
The cop stepped up behind me, but instead of patting me down, he grabbed both my hands and yanked them around my back.
“Hey!”
Before I knew what was happening, metal rings tightened around both my wrists.
“No, please, wait!” Catalina cried.
“Angelo Cassidy, you’re under arrest for aggravated motor vehicle theft.”
Shit. He knew who I was. This wasn’t a random stop.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the cop continued, “but anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to a lawyer, and if you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you.”
Even as he was reading me my rights, he was pushing me toward the back of the police car. I couldn’t let him put me inside. Catalina would be all on her own. The gun was still in my belt. He’d handcuffed me before he’d patted me down.
With a yell, I spun around, jerking my head forward to headbutt him. But he was surprisingly quick and sidestepped me. My momentum carried me forward, and I crashed to the ground.
Catalina rushed toward me. “Angel!”
“The gun!” I urged her, jerking my chin down at my belt. She understood what I was saying and reached for the weapon, yanking it out from the waistband of my jeans.
“Freeze!” The yell came from above, and I saw the officer pointing a gun at us both. “Drop the weapon!”
The gun dangled from Catalina’s fingers. We’d missed our chance. It fell from her hand and hit the ground.
The cop looked to Catalina. “You? What’s your name?”
“Don’t say a word.” I told her.
“Shut up.”
“Throw the gun over to me,” he demanded.
She had no choice. “Do it,” I told her.
She bent and threw the gun across the ground.
The cop bent and scooped it up. “Now get in the car.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Present Day
I GLANCED OVER AT ANGELO. What were we supposed to do? The cop had a gun pointed in our direction, and we were now unarmed. I had no doubt he’d have backup here at any moment. I didn’t want Angelo to try to do anything crazy and get himself shot.
“Just do as he says,” Angelo said. “We don’t have any choice.”
I bit my lower lip and nodded, holding back the tears. He was right. We’d run out of luck.
The cop opened the rear door of the police car. “The girl first.”
He knew what he was doing. The moment I was incarcerated in the back of the vehicle, Angelo wouldn’t try to run.
Feeling helpless, I slid into the back seat, and then the cop gave Angelo a shove from behind, pushing him in after me. He slammed the door shut behind us, encasing us in the metal shell of the car. There was what I assumed to be a bulletproof screen between us and the front of the vehicle, so there was no chance of me climbing to the front and attempting to steal the police car. I knew without checking that the rear doors would automatically lock.
Ahead of us, the police officer stood in the road.
“He’s on his cell phone,” Angelo said.
I frowned. “So?”
“If he was calling for backup, he’d be using his radio, wouldn’t he? I don’t know much about police procedure, but I’m pretty sure he’s not following it.”
I knew what that meant. If he wasn’t calling other cops, he was most likely calling Angelo’s father.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
Panic filled me, and I battered at the windows with my fists and kicked at the doors. The interior of the car was warm, and growing hotter by the second.
“Hey! Let us out of here,” I yelled. “Let us out!”
The cop stood facing away from the car, still on the phone. He was nodding and ignoring the raucous I was making. I didn’t like this at all.
“This isn’t right,” Angelo said. “We need to do something.”
Angelo’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but he lifted his leg—the one that hadn’t been caught in the bear trap—and kicked at the glass dividing us from the front. But the glass had been designed to keep exactly this situation from breaking through, and so nothing happened. I’d already tried the windows and door handles, but they were all locked.
We were trapped.
It was hopeless. There was nothing more we could do, but wait.
“It’ll be okay,” Angel told me, though I knew the words were empty. There was no way he could predict that.
I moved closer to Angelo, slipping my arms around his waist and pressing my face against the side of his neck. I wished his hands were uncuffed so he could hold me, too, but they weren’t, and there was nothing I could do about that. I was fully aware that these were most likely our final few moments together, and though I tried not to cry, the thought broke my heart.
It turned out we had longer than minutes. An hour or more passed, and we remained huddled together in the back of the cop car, just waiting. It was hot, and we were already dehydrated. A headache started, thumping beneath my skull as though my entire brain was pulsing in distress.
Finally, two black cars pulled in behind the cop car. Though we hadn’t said as much out loud, we both knew this was what we’d been waiting for. The arrival of Silas Cassidy and Elliot Torres.
“They’re here,” Angelo said.
I nodded. “I know.”
He fixed me with his deep, dark gaze. “No matter what happens, Catalina, remember I love you. I will always love you. There’s nothing you can ever do to change that, okay? Torres will take you now, and you’ll have to go with him. Don’t fight him. Don’t make him angry. I know it’s going to be horrific for you, and that breaks my heart, but don’t ever feel that I’ll think of what he does to you as a betrayal of your love for me, because it won’t be. It’ll just be you doing what you need to in order to stay safe.”
Tears filled my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Angel.”
“Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry. None of this is your fault. You never asked to be born into this life. You never chose this.”
Men were climbing out of the cars now, surrounding the police car. I spotted both the master and Torres among them.
“You can get them out now,” Silas Cassidy called to the cop. “We can take it from here.”
The police officer marched back to the car. He opened the rear door then stepped back to allow Torres’s men access. The doors on both sides of the car opened, and rough hands reached in to tear us apart, yanking us both in different directions.
I was thrown to the ground, and I stayed there, on my knees, with Silas Cassidy and Elliot Torres standing over me. Two other men had grabbed Angelo and were holding him between them. Angelo was still cuffed, and there wasn’t much he could do to fight back.
“Hello, Catalina,” the master said.
I clamped my mo
uth shut. I wasn’t going to be nice to him.
“You lost this,” he continued, a thin silver chain dangling from his fingers. It was the bracelet he’d given me for my birthday.
I scowled. “Where did you find it?”
“In the forest, a few hundred meters from the compound. I must thank you for leaving it for us. It would have been a lot harder to track you down had you not done so. Finding the bracelet gave us a good idea as to what direction you were heading in, and since you were on foot, we knew you’d need to reach a town. That narrowed things down for us. Admittedly, it took us a while to link you with the car theft that happened in that same town, but then the same car was found just over a hundred miles away, abandoned on the side of the road. We didn’t know if you’d found another car, or if you’d stopped, but of course the first place we checked was the motel, and the guy behind the counter recognized your photographs.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “We did struggle at that point, and we thought we were going to lose you, but then Angelo’s name popped up in the police data base as being wanted for a car theft outside of a hospital.”
Guilt and regret twisted my gut. Angelo had never wanted to go to the hospital. He’d known something like this would happen, but I hadn’t listened. I’d been too pigheaded and had forced him to go, and that led the master and Torres here.
Though I figured the master was no longer my master any more. I belonged to Torres now.
“I’m sorry,” I told Angel, glancing over at him.
But he shook his head, his lips pressed together. To my horror, he looked like he was going to cry. I couldn’t handle that.
“What are you going to do to him?” I asked his father.
“I haven’t decided yet. I guess that depends on whether I decide he lost his head momentarily over a girl, or if his betrayal is a permanent one.”
“You know what I think, Silas,” Torres said. “He may be your son, but he took what was mine. If he wasn’t your son, he’d be dead right now.”
“I’m aware of that, and I understand your feelings on the issue. I would feel the same way, but these are exceptional circumstances, and I think I need to take some responsibility for this mess. I pushed Angelo into Catalina’s arms. We all know the powers a woman has over a man when her pussy is involved.” He looked to Torres. “And you’re sure you still want her, even though he defiled her?”
“Yes, I can still make use of her, though you understand that I’ll expect the majority of what I paid to be returned.”
“Of course.” Silas looked toward me. “Hand her over.”
The two men who’d been standing near me reached down and dragged me up off the ground. I thought they were going to keep hold of me, but instead they shoved me toward Torres. He caught me and twisted both my arms behind my back, pulling me so the front of his body was pressed against the back of mine. He was frighteningly strong, and I gasped with pain.
Silas turned to Angelo. “That will be a debt you owe. I hope you understand that. Two hundred thousand dollars. I hope she was worth it.”
Angelo looked to me, his gaze fixed on mine. “She was worth every cent, and I’d do the same thing again in a second.”
His father lifted the butt of his gun and swung it to connect with Angel’s face. It struck him near his left eye, on the spot between his eyebrow and temple, and he flew backward from the impact, hitting the ground. He groaned and sat up, his eyebrow split, blood dripping into his eye.
“No!” I cried, lunging forward. But a pair of strong hands held me back, yanking me back against him.
“If one of you tries something,” Silas warned, “the other one will be made to suffer. Is that understood? The only way you’ll be helping each other is by behaving yourselves.”
Torres growled against my ear. “I think Angelo needs a lesson in accepting that this woman isn’t his.”
Torres’s free hand roamed across the front of my body. Over the top of my shirt, he palmed my breast. He squeezed and then pinched my nipple, hard enough to make me cry out in pain. I squirmed in his grasp, but knew there was nothing I could do. Men pointed guns at Angel’s head, and I was terrified they’d shoot him. Besides, we’d done well to get as far as we had. I’d been Elliot Torres’s property since the age of ten, and he was only claiming what belonged to him. Maybe I should be thankful I wasn’t experiencing this as an innocent virgin, as I would once have been, but at least a slightly more experienced woman of the world.
Angel let out a roar of fury and lunged for me, but a foot planted in the middle of his chest sent him flying backward again.
“It’s okay.” I told him, desperately praying he wouldn’t do something stupid. I could handle whatever Torres threw at me, but if Angel was shot in front of me, I would give up. What would be the point in living if he was dead?
His eyes were tortured as he stared at me. “Kitty...”
Tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything.”
I gritted my teeth as Torres shoved his hand down the front of my jeans.
Angelo let out a roar of pain, as though Torres was doing this to him instead of me. A part of me wished he wasn’t there, knowing this would be easier if he wasn’t watching Torres do this to me. It was harder watching his reaction than it was feeling Torres’s touch on my skin.
His hand slid between my pussy and the material of my jeans. I wriggled and squirmed, but I knew there was nothing I could do. I had felt this man’s touch on my body before, had allowed him to bring me pleasure. It felt wrong now, but mainly because I knew his touch was causing Angelo pain. Torres hadn’t repulsed me back at the compound, even though I’d been virtually untouched then. But the thing that had changed was I’d felt then that I’d belonged to Torres, where now it was Angelo who owned me—body, heart, and soul—no matter what money had changed hands.
His fingers hooked beneath my body and thrust inside. I didn’t want to have a reaction, but my body bucked. My pussy gushed, soaking his hand, and a wave of shame at my reaction washed through me.
“She’s wet for me, Angelo,” Torres said. “How does that make you feel? You’re nothing special to her.”
“Don’t listen to—” I tried.
I was rewarded with a crack around my face, my cheek and ear burning from where Silas Cassidy had slapped me.
“It’s okay, Catalina,” Angel said, though his eyes brimmed with tears. “Remember what I told you in the car. Do whatever you need to do. None of this is your fault.”
Torres’s fingers jabbed inside me, harder and faster. I was hugely conscious of all the men around me, the salacious looks on their faces as they watched Torres work my body. I wished I could stop myself reacting, but that familiar tightness began to build in my core.
I stared at Angel, hating what this must be doing to him. But he locked eyes on me, and his mouth moved in silent words. It’s okay. It’s okay. Give in to him.
The orgasm shattered through my body, filling me with waves of shame and disgust. I didn’t want Angel to see this, but I had no choice.
“I think that confirms that she’s mine,” Torres said. He slipped his fingers from inside my jeans and then gripped my chin with his hand. I could smell myself on his fingers. “Say ‘thank you, sir’.”
I let out a sob, and he gave my face a shake. “Say it!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good girl. Now, let’s get you home.”
He twisted me around and pushed me toward one of the waiting cars. I turned my head to see Angelo sitting in the dirt, his face bloodied.
I love you, I mouthed at him, desperately wanting him to know that, but I was shoved forward before I could see his reply. Torres pushed on the back of my head, ducking me down and shoving me into the back seat of the vehicle. The door slammed shut behind me, and with it a coldness settled in my soul.
I’d given up running and fighting. There was nothing more I could do.
I belonged to Tor
res now.
TO BE CONTINUED...
DAMAGED FOR HIM
For Him: Book Three
Marissa Farrar
Chapter One
I couldn’t get the image of Angelo’s face out of my head. His expression of utter helplessness, fury, and anguish when I’d been taken broke my heart in two.
I didn’t want to forget him. How could I? He was the boy I’d been in love with since my childhood, and yet deep down, I knew I needed to at least try. I was no longer Kitty—the girl on the run with Angelo Cassidy, and who was dreaming of a future with him. Now I was Catalina again, the girl who’d been sold at the age of ten, and who now belonged to Elliot Torres.
I stared at the back of Torres’s head in the passenger seat as we drove. His shiny, thick, black hair was dead straight, unlike Angelo’s messy waves. He was physically bigger, too, his shoulders broader, and was at least a couple of inches taller. Plus, he had more than ten years age difference on Angelo.
One of his men drove the car, while another sat beside me in the rear seat. I held my body rigid, not wanting any part of my anatomy to brush against the arm or thigh of this stranger beside me. He kept the button of his jacket undone and flipped back slightly at the hip, exposing the butt of the gun in its holster.
I was hugely aware that each of these men had just witnessed what Torres had done to me, how he’d held me with his arm around my throat, while his other hand pushed into my pants. They’d all watched as he shoved his fingers inside me and forced an orgasm from me, despite me trying to stop my body from reacting. I hated that. I hated that he could eke a sickening kind of pleasure from me, even when I didn’t want it. I hated that all these men had watched me unravel, had seen me at my most vulnerable. And more than anything, I hated how Torres held that power over me, and that he’d used it to hurt Angelo. To teach him a lesson in what was his.
Where Angelo had set me free, now I forced myself to close off my emotions for him, like rolling a boulder back over the entrance of a cave. It was the only way I was going to get through this. Torres fingering me in front of Angelo was only the start. I knew I had far worse ahead, and if I allowed myself to mourn and grieve for Angelo, it would only make things harder. I needed to follow Yolanda’s lead and accept my fate with some kind of dignity.
For Him: The Complete Series Page 32
