Yours (12 page)

Back at home, it had seemed doable. Easy, even. Now, though, I was wondering if I would survive until then.

I woke up in the morning half hungover. I’d drunk half the bottle of whiskey I’d found in the bar cabinet in my room. The sun was blinding.

After a quick shower,
I went down to the cells with a bottle of water and the plate of breakfast that the servants had left for me. Jessica would need it. She hadn’t been able to eat much the last time I’d seen her, but she would waste away to nothing if I didn’t encourage her to eat when she could.

I would be gentle, I thought to myself. I would hold back. No training today, nothing at all. I would let her have a little bit of peace.

But when I got down there, David was standing outside of Jessica’s cell. Of all people, this guy.

“I told you to leave her alone—” I started to say.

“El Alfa is inside now,” David said, grinning at me. “He’s trying her out.”

My heart sank as I heard Jessica inside, crying. I put my hand on the door handle, but David leaned his palm against the door, blocking my way. It took every ounce of self-control not to shove him up against the wall again.

“El Alfa doesn’t want to be disturbed when he’s visiting with the girls,” David said, his evil leer glowing at me in the dim hallway. “But don’t worry. He won’t leave any permanent damage.”

There was nothing I could do but wait. I heard Jessica’s muffled cries, and anger swirled up in my body. The darkness swirled up too, unbidden, and it immediately started looking for ways to kill. I could do it now, I thought. It was early, but I could do it. Sure, there were guards at either end of the hall, but if I could overpower David—

The door opened before I could act.

El Alfa stepped out, zipping up his pants. Inside, I saw a glimpse of Jessica, her head bent, sobbing. My body wrenched at the sight, but I controlled it. Control. I had to keep in control.

El Alfa winked at me as he came out into the hallway.

“Train her to suck dick,” he said. “She is terrible.”

I found that my fists were clenched at my side. But David had a gun, and I’d stupidly come downstairs with nothing, not even the knife from my breakfast plate. Still, the thought echoed through my mind:

Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.

“Hello? You understand, American boy?”

“Yes,” I said, controlling the rage in my voice. “I understand. I’ll train her.”

“Train her today. Make her good. I’ll be back later to check.”

Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.

But El Alfa was already walking down the hall. David was at his side, his hand on his gun as he looked back over his shoulder at me. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do a single goddamn thing except for what he had ordered me to do.

First Ten, and now El Alfa. I was made to follow orders, but this was the first time I considered breaking them. Jessica was still crying when I came into the cell with a plate of breakfast that I knew she wouldn’t be able to eat.

I had to do this. So did she.

And after today, I don’t know if she would hate me more than I already hated myself.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jessica

I was crying when Vale came into my cell. I jerked back as his hand touched my shoulder.

There was vomit on my chin, a little bit of it. El Alfa had gagged me with his ugly cock. I didn’t know what to do, and it had been too much. He’d slapped me, and my cheek still ached from the slap. My jaw ached from where he had forced it open. And the rest—I didn’t want to remember it. I couldn’t.

Vale had a soft look on his face. I didn’t know why—I had heard what El Alfa had told him. But he leaned forward with a plate of food.

“Can you eat?” he asked. I shook my head, tears burning my eyes. My stomach was roiling, and even the thought of putting something in my mouth made me gag a little.

He put the plate down and turned to me. His shoulders squared back like a soldier’s.

“We’re starting new training today,” Vale said. “You understand?”

The fear inside me burst out in a flurry of words and tears alternating with each other.

“Please,” I said. “I—I can’t. I can’t do it. I tried. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t do it—”

I fell into sobs, trying to hold them back and failing. El Alfa had hit me for crying. I didn’t want to be hit again.

“It’s alright. I’ll teach you.”

He closed the door behind him and locked it. Fear seeped in through my body. Not again. Not again.

“Please, no—”

Not again.

“You have to learn,” he said firmly. “Did he hurt you?”

I nodded silently.

“Then he’ll hurt you again. He’ll kill you. Unless you learn.”

“I don’t think I can.” The tears were hot on my cheeks. But Vale didn’t look like he was going to hit me, thank God.

“I think you can.”

“No—”

“We’ll go slowly.”

I bit back a sob. This wasn’t happening to me. It couldn’t be. I felt two strong hands on my shoulders and looked up into Vale’s ice-blue eyes. Strangely enough, they had softened again. He was letting the mask slip, or pretending to. He almost seemed compassionate.

“This won’t be easy, Jessica,” he said. “But you’re brave. You can do this. I won’t hurt you.”

I didn’t believe him, although I yearned to. My whole body shook in terror. Then he stepped back and his hands were gone.

I looked up. He was unbuttoning his shirt. My heart began to pound. Why was he getting undressed?

I watched mutely as he pulled his shirt off, my breath drawn away from me by the awful sight. There was a huge scar that ran down his chest from his collarbone all the way down to his stomach. It ended just above the bellybutton.

Tiny scars, too, scars that crisscrossed his biceps and covered his sculpted pecs. Puckers of white flesh.

Vale paused for a moment before taking off his pants. More of them, white lines and seams like he’d let someone draw all over him. He stood there, with only his black briefs covering him. His scars gleamed in the morning light.

I couldn’t help but stare, aghast at the scars. How deep they were, how many of them they were.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

He smiled wryly at me.

“I got my appendix out.”

I shook my head.

“Really, what happened? You have—God, you have so many of them.”

“Are you asking so that you don’t have to train?”

I clamped my lips shut and turned my head away. Training. Right. That was why he had come down here. Panic began to rise in my throat again.

“It’s alright,” he said, and although it wasn’t alright, it was
really fucking far from alright
, I started to panic a little less. “I’ll tell you, then we can start. I know this is hard for you.”

You don’t know anything,
I wanted to say. But the scars on his chest, the healed tissue, made me question if that was really true. He looked at me like he could read the questions in my mind.

“Most of these are scars from my assignments. I do dangerous work, you know.”

I gulped. His hand was tracing the long line of the biggest scar, the one that ran down his whole chest.

“But this one… this one was from my last girlfriend.”

I eyed him in disbelief. I didn’t know what was weirder, the fact that he was telling me this, or the fact that Vale had dated a girl before. I couldn’t imagine him taking a girl out.

“Your girlfriend?”

“She wanted to kill me.”

“Why?”

Vale smiled, and it was the coldest smile I’d ever seen. Behind that mirthless expression, I saw the thing he had been hiding from me this whole time. A deep sorrow. It touched his eyes, drew the corners of his mouth down. I could see him struggling to contain the sorrow.

“She was sent to kill me,” he said.

“What was her name?”

“Jen.”

“How… how did she…”

I didn’t know how to ask it, but I didn’t have to. Vale understood what I was trying to get at.

“When you trust someone, they can do anything to you. They can hurt you. They can hurt you really bad.”

He looked up at me, his face now plainly marked with sorrow. And despite myself, I was curious… curious enough not to worry about making him upset with me. For some reason, standing here in chains in front of the man who had kidnapped me, I felt utterly safe.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Vale

I stared down at Jessica. I’d thought that she might react differently if I showed her my scars, but now I wasn’t sure if I could handle her questions. There was an innocent sincerity in her voice when she asked me what had happened. Like she really wanted to know.

Like she cared about me.

Of course, that couldn’t be it. I shook the thought away and went back in my mind to Jen, the one who was responsible for the white bolt of scar tissue going down my sternum.

“I loved her,” I said. “At least, I thought I loved her. I thought she loved me, too. She convinced me that what happened between us… was real. I let her in. I told her everything. I was trying to get out of doing—well, this kind of work. I wanted to clean up for her. Get straight, you know. Stop all the bullshit.”

I waved my hand around, as though to indicate that all this was just bullshit.

“I bought her a ring. How stupid can you get, right? I was going to propose to her. And we were together that evening, and she took off all my clothes, and slept with me. And before I could pull the ring out of my pants, she’d pulled a knife.”

Jessica’s eyes went wide.

“But… but you’re so big. How could she…”

“How could she attack me, you mean? Yeah, well, that’s the thing about trust. We were big into bondage.”

Jessica’s eyes, already wide, seemed to pop out of her head. I could see the mental image she had of me, but I had already told her part of the story. I might as well tell her all of it.

“I was—uh, a little tied up when she pulled the knife.”

“But… but you got away, though.”

“Yeah. Barely. She stabbed me in the wrong spot.” I touched the place where the scar started. “Hit my sternum. Bone stopped the tip. Dragged the knife down. Down my chest. I was so surprised, it took a few seconds before I even reacted.”

“What did you do?”

She was staring at me with a strange mix of curiosity and horror in her face. At least she wasn’t thinking about El Alfa anymore. I was good at telling stories that take your mind off of things.

“Right away I kicked out hard, broke her arm. She dropped the knife, and I snapped the chain tying me to the bed. I mean, it wasn’t a real chain, you know, not like these. It was just for fun. My hands were still cuffed when I caught up to her, though, and the cuffs were real enough. I put the cuffs around her neck, and—”

I broke off. Thinking about Jen made goosebumps stand up on my arms.

“You killed her.”

I nodded.

“I could feel her heart slowing down as I choked her. The woman I loved. The woman I wanted to spend my life with.”

As I spoke to Jessica, I felt myself slipping back into the past. I could see Jen like she was right there in front of me again. Her face had turned red, then blue. Her lips had gone pale.

I’d killed her. Killed her, killed her, killed her. That’s all I was. A killer.

I felt myself starting to lose control. I felt the darkness curling up inside of me. I blinked hard, getting away from the past. I was back in El Alfa’s hell, but at least it was a different kind of hell than the one in my mind.

“She was the only person I ever trusted. And the last.”

Jessica was quiet. She didn’t look scared anymore, only sad. And there was a mark of pity in her face that I didn’t want to see. I didn’t deserve her pity. I didn’t deserve pity from anyone. I was a murderer, and if I’d been tricked by another assassin, then it was my own damn fault.

I turned back to the matter at hand, even though I knew I’d be pushing Jessica away.

“Did El Alfa… did he fuck you?” I asked. I was almost scared to hear the answer to that question, but I had to ask.

She shook her head no, and relief flooded my system.

I went over to the chains and loosened them. Her arms dropped down to her sides. She looked defeated already. I swallowed the lump in my throat. I had to do this. As much as I was afraid to hurt her, I had to act like I was her trainer, her master.

When I pulled down my briefs, though, her eyes widened in fear. I stepped out of them, completely naked. I looked down. The scar ended only a couple of inches above my cock. I wondered if I would be able to get aroused after all that. Shit.

“Tell me what he asked you to do,” I said. If El Alfa wanted me to train her, I would train her in exactly the way he wanted.

“He t—told me to suck it. I—I tried. I can’t.”

“You have to.”

Her eyes flashed angrily up at me.

“Is that why you said all this? To get my sympathy before you do the exact same thing to me that he did?”

“No.”

“Good cop, bad cop, right?”

I shook my head. There wasn’t anything I could do to make this right. I would just have to do it, and get it done with. I only hoped—and this was a stupid hope, a desperate hope—that she wouldn’t hate me when it was over.

“No,” I said, stepping forward in front of her. “There are no good cops in here. I’m sorry.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Jessica

“Take it in your hand.”

I stared at his cock. It hung slightly to one side. Already, it seemed huge, and he wasn’t even erect. Fear bolted through my heart.

“I already told you,” I said, tears threatening to choke my throat again. “I can’t.”

“Take it,” he said. “Just hold it.”

I touched it with my hand. The skin was silky smooth. As I held it, it twitched in my palm.

“Jessica—”

I tilted my chin up. Vale was looking down at me with a look of tenderness in his face. I hated him, God knows I hated him, but there was something else in the way he looked at me that made me feel a little less scared.