Page 24 of Poisoned Pawn
“How was I meant to…at the club…he told me the guy is the best there is…of course I know how serious this is…well maybe if your guy…killed…we wouldn’t be…mess.” I catch snippets of his conversation as he moves about making it harder for me to hear him. “What the hell—” The rest of his words cut off sharply and are replaced with a grunt followed by a loud exhalation of breath before a dull thud carries to me.
Footsteps and the sound of something being dragged across the ground filter in under the door. It stops and there’s the audible click of the boot being opened and groaning and rustling of clothes before the resounding clunk as the boot is slammed shut.
I wait with bated breath yet desperate to look and see what is going on. I slowly slide down the wall into a crouching position then lean forward to peek around the boxes and under the door.
From this angle and with the door bent as it is, I can only see the bottom half of the car wheels. Then a pair of trainers come into view, white Nikes with a black tick. There’s nothing special about them and given the number of people who wear them, they don’t help me at all. That is until he turns showing me the right trainer, and I notice that half the black tick is missing, leaving behind a jagged line. He walks round the front of the car and gets in, then reverses back down the road out of sight.
I drop to the floor as the sound of the engine fades, bringing my knees up and resting my elbows on them. I’ve had enough of this day. I’ve had enough of this week to be honest.
Here I am sitting in a dirty old garage surrounded by boxes of god knows what and looking for a man whose identity I still don’t know while running from my family, who I pray to fucking god aren’t dead, instead of to them while someone hunts me. Someone who doesn’t care who they hurt in the process.
I take a couple of minutes and let everything wash over me, then I suck in a deep breath, letting it out slowly and expelling all my negative thoughts and emotions. I have a lot to unpick later but now I need to get the hell out of here and somewhere safe.
I lean forward onto my hands and knees and look under the door, letting my eyes scan as far as they can. Seeing nothing, I push up to a crouching position and creep forward. I do one last scan of the area before edging out.
The sun has begun to set casting an amber glow over the area, which is empty again. I keep close to the garages as I slowly walk back the way I entered.
When I reach the industrial estate, I stop and pull out the GPS tracker to search for another address, one close by because something tells me my mystery man lives close by. Although it is strange that the garage address is the one that shows up the most yet there is nothing there.
Maybe I should just find somewhere quiet and wait for him to find me, which is invariably what will happen. He told me so.
And as if I conjured the arsehole myself just by thinking of him, he’s here.
Behind me.
I feel him.
“Clever girl.” His words roll over the shell of my ear, sending a shiver over my body and pooling low in my belly.
I spin around, raising a fist ready to smack the fucker, but he’s too fast. My back slams against the side of the building as he wraps his thick fingers around my wrist, locking it above my head, and pinning me with his body. My mind instantly fills with a memory of him over the top of me like this as he slid his cock inside me.
“Are you remembering me stretching your tight little pussy as I filled you with my cock?”
“You wish. It wasn’t worth locking in my memory vault. I scrubbed that from my brain the same way I washed you from every inch of my body that night.” I spit the words at him like I mean them. He doesn’t need to know that scrubbing my skin would have done nothing to rid me of the night we shared. Scrubbing my skin after sex is par for the course, but not withhim.
“Says the girl wearing my hoodie like a second fucking skin.” He chuckles darkly. “Besides, I can smell your sweet cunt from here. It’s remembering exactly how much it liked my cock.” His eyes drop to my lips, and I know what he’s going to do. And I can do nothing to stop it.
He leans in, lips grazing mine for a second, and I can taste him, taste his anticipation, his want. It is mirrored by my own. Yet it seems his restraint is greater because I’m the one who closes the gap. I’m the one who takes his lips. I’m the one who slips my tongue inside the hot heat of his mouth, meeting his tongue in a battle with only one winner.
And it ain’t me.
He stops the kiss and grasps my chin. “How sweet you taste. Fear and desire are thee fucking best combination. But we don’t have time for you to run right now my scared little bunny. We need to get the fuck out of sight for a while. Come on.” He releases my chin but maintains his hold on my wrist, towing me along behind him as he sets off at a quick pace toward the housing estate I passed earlier.
“Hey, let me go. You don’t need to drag me down the street.” I tug at his hold, digging my heels into the ground to no avail.
“I’m afraid I really do. Right now, your body is ready to flee. And while I’d love to hunt you myself, we have a much bigger fucking wolf looking for us both.”
“What do you mean? You know who’s after me?”
“No. If I knew that, they’d be dead and you’d be living your best fucking life far away from me,” he says as we reach a car, this one at least made in the same decade I was born.
The car beeps as he unlocks it, releasing me at the passenger door and walking round to the driver’s side.
“Get in,” he tells me, opening his own door and climbing in.
I do and slam the door shut with a loud thud causing him to look my way with a scowl of displeasure. Good. His words a moment ago have pissed me off more than I’d like to admit, so slamming the door is the safer alternative to pulling the gun from the pocket of the hoodie—his hoodie and his gun—and shooting him.
“Where are we going?” I ask as he spins the car around and heads off down the road in the opposite direction to the garages. He doesn’t answer. His focus is entirely on the road and the rearview mirror. I look behind us as he’s clearly worried someone could be following us, but I don’t see anyone. “Is everyone at the restaurant okay? My sister and A—my brother”