Bad Things (24 page)

Gently, even with a certain grace, Mr. 701 took Natasha’s wrap from her shoulders, and laid it over the back of an arm chair. Careful not to look like he was watching, in his peripheral vision Xavier saw the guy cup Natasha’s face between his hands, tilting it upward and peering down into it. But from that angle, Xavier couldn’t judge whether he was possessively appraising her, or making contact. A silent, pre-fuck, “How do you do?”

“It’s Natasha, right?”

“
Yes. Natasha,” she said in her thick accent.

“
Natasha. My good little girl. You call me Daddy.”

Puta pendejo
.

When she didn’t say anything, he raised his voice and said very slowly, “Daddy.”

“Daddy,” she repeated quietly, but calmly.

To Xavier, Mr. 701 said, “Help yourself to a drink or whatever you’d like from the fridge. Or order something from room service, if you’re hungry. Charge it to the room, my treat. We’ll be out in three hours.”

Xavier sat down in the armchair next to the one where 701 had left Natasha’s sweater. It occurred to him 701 might have left his wallet, his phone, other important things lying around in the suite, that he could photograph them with his phone. But it also occurred to him that Max might be monitoring the room, somehow, and any attempt to collect evidence now would mean failing Max’s test.

When the sounds started, he made himself sit still, and listen. Forced himself to endure it all. The way he’d left Carson bound and gagged, then abandoned him to the unbearable cries and pleas and screams of the blond girl in the video.

Three hours later, almost to the fucking second, Natasha emerged, her carefully crafted masks of stoicism and of innocence equally smudged and blotchy, eyes red, her throat and arms mottled. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail, but not the sleek, tidy ponytail she’d had before, but as if she’d quickly combed her fingers through wildly disarrayed hair, and wrestled it halfheartedly into its elastic band.

“
Well,” 701 said to Xavier as if he was talking to an old family friend, “you’d better get our little girl home. We’ve already kept her up long past her bedtime.”

Xavier fought the surge of adrenaline pumping through his heart, through his muscles, the chemical impulse in his brain priming him to lunge and swing. To hit 701 in the face with all the force of his rage-fueled body. To knock him down, pin him there, and hit him again. To hear him scream. To hear him beg. To hold him still and let her hit him. Kick him. Take his belt and beat him and strangle him until he was dead.

Instead, Xavier said, “I’ll take her straight home.” As if she had a home. As if she weren’t going back to a zero star prison.

Maybe she would start crying when they got out into the hallway. Or into the elevator, or into the car.

But no. Second by second, she recomposed her poised stoicism.

When the car pulled up in front of her hotel, Max and two other men were standing outside, waiting. So, that’s who the driver had texted. One of the men opened Natasha’s door and escorted her inside. The other, a brick wall of a man, maybe two inches shorter than Xavier but twice as wide, opened Xavier’s door and waved him out. When he stepped out of the car, Max put his hand on his shoulder.

“You and I will ride in back.”

Fuck. He should have killed that fucking pedophile while he had the chance. Now Max and his thugs were going to drive him into some fucking parking garage or vacant lot, or to the fucking pier, and kill him. And what? Making him deliver Natasha to that pervert had been for the sole purpose of dirtying his soul a little more before sending him to el
puta Diablo
?

“
Tell me,” Max said as the car pulled into the sparse midnight traffic “how did your first delivery go?”

“
Smoothly.”

Max grinned at him. “Succinct. I like that. Natasha gave you no trouble?”

“None.”

“
And what did you think of our client?”

“
He’s very well groomed.”

This time Max laughed. “Maybe you have some more…profound observations?”

“No.”

“
He likes them very young. He likes them to call him Daddy while he fucks them. What do you think about that?”

Xavier dug deep down through the sludge of his frustrated rage, and found that amusement—cold and stale, now—that he’d felt when Detective James Porter had talked about crossing lines. He grinned back at Max and said, “A man like me has to remember the old saying about people in glass houses not throwing stones.”

“That is a very good policy, Xavier. We all live in a glass house, don’t we?”

Xavier somehow managed to laugh. Like he had with James. “Probably. But some of our glass houses are already full of cracks, so we have to be extra careful.”

“Good!” Max laughed. “That is so true. Xavier! I am starting to like you very much. Do you know what that means?”

“
No.”

He fucking hoped that meant he wasn’t about to be fed to the sharks. But nothing that involved going for a ride with Max and two of his henchman was going to be much better.

“Xavier, my friend, where are you going to spend all the words you are saving up?”

At your trial, you
puta monstruo
.

“
I like you. You did well at the club. You did well with Natasha. You know how to mind your business. My friend, Natasha’s date at the Montage, said you were very respectful. For three whole hours you sat there in that armchair, and did not even get up to piss in his toilet.”

So, one way or another, they had been watching him. Who knew how? Who cared?

“And that means, Xavier, I’m going to give you a job. Not a shitty job standing all night in the club with those idiot bouncers, and the biggest idiot of all for a boss. I mean a real job. For real money. Does that make you happy?”

“
Absolutely.”

“
Yes. Good. There is only one small technicality to deal with first, and then you will have your promotion, and all the money and respect that comes with this kind of responsibility. Yes?”

“
Before I bring anyone new into my small circle of trusted associates, I ask him to make a kind of pledge. To show me his loyalty. And, yes, we should be honest with each other, no? To show me that he knows I am the big dog. So, like Gyorgy, there, and like Stanis, you must show a little bit your belly.”

Max leaned forward and gave Gyorgy three hearty slaps on the shoulder, then asked him something in Ukrainian. When Gyorgy answered, Max laughed.

“That is right! I had really forgotten, can you believe it? Yes. Gyorgy, I made kill his cousin, because his cousin had stolen something from me. Nothing valuable, really, just one girl, not very beautiful, already too old to get me very much money. But it was the principle of the matter, yes? So, Gyorgy killed his cousin for me, and I gave Gyorgy his dead cousin’s job. And Stanis I made kill the girl who tried to leave with Gyorgy’s cousin. I forget who Stanis replaced, why I needed two new men just at this same moment. But yes. That was it.”

Xavier forced himself to confront that gaze and the mercurial reflection of himself deep at the back of it, and waited to hear who Max wanted him to kill. He had the eviscerating feeling Max was about to say Carson’s name. And then he’d be right back to getting hacked to pieces and dumped in the ocean.

“Of course,” Max said, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes revealing how much he was enjoying himself, even though he was hardly smiling, “I don’t always need somebody killed. So for you, I have to think of a new oath of fealty.”

Puta pendejo
. He knew that look. That moment of savoring the other’s anxious suspense.

“
Xavier. Please kneel down on the floor, there,” Max said, pointing to where Xavier’s feet were.

Xavier tried to read what was hidden in that gaze, other than that mirror he could hardly bear looking into. All he found was sadistic mirth. Not exactly enlightening. In the rear view mirror, Gyorgy grinned faintly, but without looking back at him. Maybe Max just wanted him to kneel and kiss his ring. But probably not. With Gyorgy and Stanis in the front seat, kneeling also suggested a prelude to an execution, but then why the five-hour theatrical prologue?

Xavier slid onto his knees between the front and the back seat—not a fucking easy thing to do when you’re six-four, even in an Escalade. When Max started undoing his belt, Xavier looked up at him and grinned. It wasn’t even entirely fake.

“
Again, for you something is funny,” Max said, still sadistically gleeful.

“
I just don’t want to cheat you out of a proper hazing. If you wanted me to suck your cock, honestly, all you had to do was say so.”

Max grasped Xavier’s jaw in his hand and locked eyes with him. A moment later, he smiled like a man who’d just wrung a humiliating secret out of his worst enemy, or his lover.

“You see, Xavier, this is another thing I like so much about you. You’re so clever. So few people are clever. But I’m clever too. I’m not Brian. I don’t just listen to the words. And I know that just because you’re a homo, it doesn’t mean you are happy to suck any dick that gets shoved in your face.”

Max leaned in closer. Warm wet breath on Xavier’s forehead.

“You don’t like me, Xavier. Indeed, I look into your eyes, and I see you hate me. I don’t care about this. Half the men and every single woman working for me hates me. I don’t need to be liked. Your fear. Your respect, this is all I want from you.

“
So, Xavier. You’re going to suck my cock. Just like every one of the little bitches I run. And when you’ve tasted my semen and swallowed it, you and I will have a clear understanding of who is the boss.”

Even if he’d had a choice—and it was pretty fucking unlikely Max would take, “No thank you,” as an answer at this point—he would have done it. It was stupid, it didn’t mean anything, not to Max and for fucking sure not to Natasha, or the girl in the video, or any of the others in Max’s stables, but even so, it was a gesture of solidarity. Letting himself be subjected to Max’s sadistic humiliation. Making him suck him while Gyorgy and Stanis listened and watched. And, more than that, he would have done it, because maybe that would really mean he was hired for something that would let him see enough of the operation so Elena and James and their teams could bust this piece of shit once and for all.

But he fucking hated it. Never in his life had he kissed or caressed or licked or fucked someone he despised (torturing the loft stalker didn’t count). And Max, he wanted to fucking kill. To mutilate. The idea of tearing into his flesh with his teeth, even at the expense of a bullet to the back of the head from Stanis’s gun, sounded like a blood-soaked, scream-garnished taste of heaven.

But he didn’t bite. He didn’t tear his cock apart with his teeth. He sucked him off. He ate his cock like it was a fucking dream come true, gazing up into those aqua eyes, into that mirror of sadistic glee where he saw himself twice. Monster and prey.

He licked his balls. He got in there with his hands, lifted his balls, and ate his ass like he wanted to climb up inside him. And Max sank down into that unexpected pleasure, either forgetting he’d meant to humiliate him, or not realizing that by ravishing him from the tip of his cock to the pucker of his narrow ass, Xavier was vanquishing his humiliation second by second.

He waited. Waited until Max was squirming. He was pretty restrained about it, almost completely silent, steering clear of the danger that his alpha domination of the new recruit could turn him into a fag in the eyes of his goons, but he was writhing. Then, as soon as the muscles of his inner thighs began to quiver, Xavier slid two fingertips through the streams of spit dripping down his balls, and right up into Max’s asshole.

That drove a good loud fucking grunt out of the piece of shit. And maybe Max would have punched him in the face and had him executed at the next alley, except Xavier went to work on his prostate and started licking and slurping the most tender spots of his cock with extreme devotion and enthusiasm. Dragging Max straight to the edge of climax at terminal velocity, drinking down his come and the faint groan of his not quite successfully silenced surrender.

He slid his fingers out of that grasping hole before the last spurt of come hit his tongue, and wiped his fingers off on the inside of his pant leg, still nursing Max’s seeping cock head. Then, without waiting for permission, Xavier got off his knees and sank back in his seat next to Max, still panting and bleary-eyed.

Then Xavier leaned in and whispered, so only Max would hear, “I hope I didn’t take too big a liberty, banging your ass a little. I sort of guessed you wanted the full treatment.”

Max didn’t say a fucking word. He just leveled one of his cool, appraising looks. Then he zipped up and buckled his belt.

When they got back to Gomorrah, Max said, “Consider yourself on call. 24/7.”

Xavier got in his car and got on the 10 headed toward Culver City.

Carson had no idea why he hadn’t already called the cops, instead of wandering up and down the beach until the middle of the night like a crazy homeless person.

No, that wasn’t true. Carson had a handful of suspicions about why he hadn’t. And he didn’t want to think about any of them.

And no fucking way was he going to say anything to Brian. He’d just pretend he’d spent three perfectly normal nights crashed on Xavier’s couch, and that he hadn’t found anything to suggest he was anything but a tattoo artist moonlighting as a bouncer, or the other way around. Brian and his ugly smirk could go fuck themselves, let him think whatever he wanted about the photos Xavier had emailed to his supposed college buddy.

How the hell had he gotten himself stuck so far down the rabbit hole? One idiotic choice after another. Taking the bartending gig at that creepy club, because the promised tips were twice what he could make at even the trendiest bars, staying because his actual weekly take was more like triple. Ignoring half a dozen hazy suspicions that there were even skeezier things going on behind the scenes, as if the public face of the club wasn’t sketchy enough. Agreeing to run those mystery errands, which just let them corner and put their leash on him. Letting Max intimidate him into buddying up with Xavier. All lame choices, in retrospect. A hundred moments of ignoring the twinge in his belly that told him he was slipping inch by inch into a slimy hole that he knew he didn’t want to inhabit.

But the supreme stupidity of agreeing to pull that stunt, playing the homeless waif so he could spy on Xavier and hack into his computer? What the fuck had he been thinking? Totally illegal. Ridiculously immoral. And crazy dangerous. He’d always been a bit of a fuck-up. But he’d never been a complete fucking idiot. Fine, Max had scared the piss out of him. But even then he’d pretty much known that he was only sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand.

Unlocking the door to his apartment, he told himself he’d quit the club the next night. He wouldn’t even give notice. Obviously. He wouldn’t even go in. He’d just call Brian, and he’d be out. Fuck if he was going to keep tending bar for some front for a sex slave ring. And he sure as shit couldn’t go back to working with Xavier. Fuck that.

He’d be okay. Why would Brian care about him quitting? And when he quit, Xavier would take that as a promise of silence. He hoped.

Almost as soon as he closed and locked the door, his chest felt like it collapsed. Then it seemed to swell up huge. Heart huge, beating so fast he was going to puke. A sense of something moving in the dark—he didn’t even know if he’d seen something, or heard something—and he knew he was there. The smell of him, there was a hint of it in the room.

“
Carson.”

For some reason, he was too scared to try to turn the key in reverse, try to run out. He flipped on the light.

That low, guttural voice. “We need to have a conversation.”

He was afraid to open his mouth. He was afraid if he tried to talk, he’d actually vomit.

“You can’t be here.”

That fucking grin. Like he ruled the goddamned world. “Apparently, I can.”

“This is breaking and entering. It’s illegal.”

He knew it was a stupid, pointless thing to say. But that flimsy nothing was his only armor.

Xavier laughed, and Carson wished he had a gun. He wouldn’t kill him. Of course not. He wasn’t a fucking psychopath like Xavier and Brian and Max. But he would have given anything to pull the trigger, for a near miss that would wipe that smug grin off Xavier’s face, to see
him
afraid. To hear
him
ask for a reprieve.

“
You’re funny, Carson. Complaining about having your personal space violated. It’s almost like you’ve already forgotten how you ended up bound and gagged in my basement.”

Jesus fucking Christ. But what had Carson expected? Remorse?

Xavier’s smug grin faded, and suddenly his expression was shockingly earnest. Fuck, almost tender. “Besides, we’re miles past those petty conflicts of ours, aren’t we?”

When Xavier stood, Carson didn’t even think. His body didn’t wait for his brain to choose. It just turned toward the door and clutched at the key and fumbled with the knob, clumsy with fear.

Xavier slapped his hand against the door, leaning on his arm and holding it closed. Now he could really smell him. That scent of Xavier’s body that had lingered on his skin all those hours of naked solitude.

“
I’ll call the cops.”

Xavier planted his other hand on the wall, caging Carson between his arms. “No you won’t.”

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t cuffed. Caged between Xavier’s arms, between Xavier’s massive body and the door, he felt helpless and fragile as a bird in the jaws of a dog.

“
Your own fucking sister is afraid of you.”

“
No she isn’t. That’s not what that was.”

Weird how good that felt, the note of hurt in Xavier’s voice. But still, Carson could hardly breathe. “Please. I want you to leave.”

Like a disembodied voice coming out of the ceiling, Carson heard his own alarmed grunt as Xavier pressed up against him, and he felt his breath against his ear, that tickling warmth twisting his guts.

“
No you don’t.”

Why was it happening? How could he be getting hard when he was so scared he thought he’d scream or puke or faint? Why, when Xavier’s hand slipped away from the wall and curved over the stiffening bulge in his jeans, did he stay still? Even when he started to rub and squeeze?

“What are you going to do?” Carson hated how scared he sounded. The way his voice was faltering, as if he were crying. “Put your cuffs on me again and chain me to the radiator?”

“
I won’t need to.”

That disembodied voice again, an animal grunt as Xavier’s teeth raked over his neck, as his own cock lurched, like it was trying to nuzzle into his palm. Xavier’s tongue slid against his skin, and then there was a slowly swelling pain under his mouth that made Carson cry out and press himself back against Xavier’s body.

Heat flashing through his veins, flushing his face, his throat, his whole chest, making his cock rise and twitch, he let Xavier press his hips to his ass. Sighed with the shock of feeling Xavier’s hard-on nudge against him, and wanting it.

Fear—of Xavier, or something more dangerous—took his breath as Xavier wrapped one arm across his abdomen and pulled him back against him, hard, then turned him away from the door, practically swung him the few feet toward the dining table, and bent him over it. Slapped three condoms down on the table next to a bottle of cooking oil that Carson didn’t remember leaving on the table. And then Carson’s face burned, not at the realization that Xavier was working his jeans down off his hips, but that Xavier had put that bottle there. That he’d planned this. Bending him over the dining table and fucking him.

That’s what was happening. Xavier was getting ready to fuck him.

A startling thrill tore through him as both Xavier’s hands slid up under his shirt, and started working his nipples, pinching and tugging. Without relenting, then, his mouth was on his neck again, licking, sucking, biting, as if he were about to eat him, Xavier’s panting breath warm and damp in his hair.

Leaning into him with his hips, holding Carson pinned against the edge of the table, Xavier grabbed the bottle of oil. Greasy fingers slid between Carson’s cheeks. Was he really fucking letting this happen?

“
Wait.”

Xavier was still. “You’re not gagged. Say it,” he said when he’d waited long enough.

“I haven’t…”

“
Say it, Carson.”

“
I haven’t douched.”

That laugh. “I don’t give a fuck about that.”

Sudden, shocking penetration. Carson grunted and huffed and grasped the edge of the table in both hands, squirming helplessly on the finger Xavier was sliding up his ass. Shaking. Hyperventilating. How could it feel so, so good? Lying there terrified under Xavier’s massive body, getting his hole fingered?

The finger slipped free, leaving him empty. Nipping his ear, biting his neck, his shoulder, Xavier rubbed his asshole. Teasing. Torturing. Then the familiar pressure.

“Do you want me to?” Xavier asked.

A new rush of tormenting need, Carson’s cock inflated with blood, pulsing. Definitely drooling, as Xavier had teased him in the basement.

“Yes.”

“
Both fingers?”

“
Yes.”

It was so fucking much, two of Xavier’s long, thick fingers pushing him open, sliding up inside him. Pushing in deep. Xavier’s lips brushing against his ear.

“You fucking kill me, the way you wiggle around on my fingers, like you can’t get enough.”

Xavier’s fingers twisting inside, pumping in and out then slipping free, fingertips massaging the whole length of his crack, teasing the entrance to his hole, then pushing into him again.

Grunting out loud, Carson almost didn’t care that he was bending over for him, giving Xavier everything he’d been taking while Carson had been gagged and bound and helpless to say no.

But when Xavier grabbed one of the condoms, when he heard the wrapper being torn open, when the fingers up his ass went still, probably because Xavier was concentrating on getting the condom on, Carson’s surge of fear froze him. Silenced him. The fingers slid out, left him empty. The blunt pressure of Xavier’s cock at his hole.

“Tell me yes,” Xavier whispered at his ear.

Too scared. Full of need, but too scared.

Xavier whispered, “I won’t hurt you,” then ravished his ear with his mouth, making Carson squirm against the tip of his cock.
Fuck. Fuck
. “I’ll fuck the hell out of you. But I won’t hurt you.”

Throbbing, excruciating need. Bigger than his fear. Carson pushed back, tried to push himself onto Xavier’s cock, but Xavier planted his hand on his hip and held him still.

“No. Tell me yes. Say it out loud.”

Fuck, he felt humiliated. Like he was bowing down before an enemy.

“Yes.”

Xavier caught his wrist and stretched his arm overhead, pinned him down against the table top with his chest, and suddenly Carson felt his hole stretching open. Panting, he tried not to yelp his panic. So much. So much more than Xavier’s two fingers. So much more than he’d thought it would be. Because it wasn’t the first time, he’d thought it would be easier. He clenched his eyes shut, dreading the next moment, the sudden pain. Terrified he was about to tear.

Xavier licked his neck and a cascade of shivers fluttered over his skin.

“
Breathe.”

He made himself inhale. Exhale.

“Come on. Keep breathing.”

In. Out. In. Out.

“Now bear down. Like you’re reaching for the base of my cock with your anus.”

Weird thing to try to do. Weird, doing it. But then, fuck, he pushed, and Xavier pushed, and Carson felt his hole swallow the thick head of Xavier’s cock. And then he gasped and clawed at the table as Xavier drove the full length of his cock into him.

“Holy Christ, the look on your face,” Xavier growled. “I want to fucking devour you. Like parents have that urge to eat their young.”

For some reason that weird bit of randomness did almost as much to make Carson’s cock twitch and jerk as the friction of Xavier’s hard cock reversing out and drilling back into his hole.

Xavier really went to it, then. One slow but determined, deep, driving thrust. And another. Another, hitting a rhythm that took Carson’s breath and drove the ache in his balls to the wall. He reached for his cock, needing to stroke and get off, needing it more than he’d ever needed to get off before, but Xavier said, “Hands on the table.”

What the fuck. He wasn’t tied up in a fucking basement anymore. Fuck these stupid hostage and captor games. He took hold of his cock, but barely had time to feel it twitch gratefully in his grip before Xavier grabbed his wrist and wrenched it up overhead, pinning it next to the other.

Xavier’s mouth at his ear. “You need to come?”

Xavier’s body moved against him, cock moved inside him, and touched that spot, that incredible locus of nerves inside him. A shockwave hurtled through him. Carson bucked convulsively, letting out a yelp of wounded pleasure.

“Is that what you need?” Xavier huffed a second before he thrust into him again and Carson arched and cried out. “Don’t worry. I’m going to wring you dry.”

Fucking him, punching Carson’s prostate again, again, again, Xavier panted against Carson’s neck, warm breath raising goose flesh, making Carson’s nipples tingle and constrict. Suddenly Carson was shaken by a brutal spasm, coming, crying out as Xavier relentlessly prodded that spot over and over until Carson couldn’t draw a breath. Every orgasmic seizure felt like everything in him, all his life force was being suddenly, violently wrenched out of him.

Limp, hardly seeing, hardly aware, there was just the jolting force of Xavier’s body flexing against him, Xavier inside him, filling and leaving and filling him, until Xavier let out a long, savage growl and crushed his hips against Carson’s ass. Frenzied humping thrusts as he emptied inside him.