Captor (Dark Corruption Series Book 3)

Chapter 1

They told us to watch and learn. To do what they taught us. If we worked hard, we would achieve what they had. What they didn’t realize was the world was going to change. It isn’t their fault that the economy has crumbled. Nor that even though they taught us properly, most of us can’t make enough money to rub two bills together. No. We’re the product of parents who tried their hardest to prepare us for a world that is no more. A world that is currently chewing us like its last meal before it spits our remains out because we’re indigestible.

Past due. Overdue. Late charge. Last notice. The bills sit scattered across the table. My head rests heavily on my hands as tears burn my eyes. I refuse to let them fall. I can figure this out. I know I can because it’s what they raised me to be; resilient.

“What are you going to do?” Alyssa asks softly, her hand moving a paper absently. The one that says my sixty-thousand dollars in student loans is past due.

“I don’t know. Sell feet pics on OnlyFans I guess,” I joke.

She deadpans. “Brynne, be serious. For once.”

Sitting back, I huff in annoyance, my brown, wild hair lifting and dropping from the breeze.

“Alyssa, I have no plan. My mom told me to figure it out, which translates to: we made it work, why can’t you? That generation comprises of people who don’t understand how different things are now.”

She nods in agreement, fingers toying absently with the paper that says I’m losing my rental in two weeks if I don’t somehow pay the new adjusted rent bill. The one I didn’t know was going to raise six hundred extra dollars this month.

“I feel like a fish that’s drowning,” I tell her, covering my face with my hands.

She laughs. “Fish can breathe underwater, B.”

I uncover my face and pin her with a vexed glare. “Don’t use your brain. I’m trying to be emotional and irrational right now.”

She throws her hands up. “Sorry. Carry on.”

“I have to figure out a plan. I have a degree. Fuck, I have two of them. But no one’s hiring in the field. They’re no good to me, but I’ll be damned if I still don’t have loan money due each month. I’m just… sinking, Alyssa.”

Her hand comes down over mine on my lap, the chair skidding across the floor as she moves closer. “We will figure it out, alright?”

I nod. Tears are on the edge of falling when she pats me twice on the leg. It’s her telltale ‘I have an idea’ pat.

“Get dressed. I’m taking you out for a drink. Or five,” she adjusts when she eyes my scowl.

She gathers the papers, tapping the bottoms of them on the table to align them into a neat pile before discarding them in my junk drawer.

Which is not where they belong at all. But for tonight, they’re junk.

“Go, shoo. Make yourself presentable!” She rushes me from the room with a few light pushes, and I move through the living room of my apartment and into my bedroom.

Closing the door, I shut my eyes, giving myself a moment to pull it together. To rally when I feel like I’m about to break.

I shake off the negativity before it takes me to a dangerous place in my mind and drag my ass into the bathroom. I let the shower warm while I look over my appearance. The inability to feed myself properly is showing. I’m thinning out and there are bags under my eyes from working two jobs and moonlighting as a bartender when someone calls out at the pub down the street.

Still, I have to decide which bills to pay this month. I sometimes wonder if it was like this for my parents’ generation and they just didn’t talk about it.

My mom is far too proud for me to ask, though. She retired at fifty from the federal prison system. She was an accountant. Dad was a decently known survivalist in this region, leading groups into the thick of the Everglades of Florida to train them. He’d traveled over the world learning and teaching. Making money at what he loved to do. That was my goal at one time, too. When I went to school for journalism. I wanted to travel the world with him and report on what was happening, but the world has changed. The news has become something I don’t even like to watch. Breaking into that field has been so much harder than I expected.

Stepping into the shower, I let the spray beat into my flesh. The old shower head that came with my apartment is like everything else I can’t afford to fix, so it sprays every which way.

Going out with Alyssa is the last thing I need to do. The very last. Because my life is in shambles, I need to figure a way through this shit. My mom is who I’d call a hard-knock parent. Even though she lives in a massive four-bedroom, in a gated community, and lives comfortably, she doesn’t want me back home.She wants me to survive alone.

On the one hand, I get it. On the other, it makes me feel like parenting has an expiration date. What is the cap for children? What’s the age that a parent says: they’re completely on their own now? I guess I’ll understand her better when I have kids.

Not that I can afford a child.

I growl and pump shampoo into my hand, and then I make quick work of lathering and rinsing. As I’m toweling off, I hear the television droning on from the living room. Alyssa must’ve found something on TVPLus; it’s the only thing I have on that television.

I slip into a black dress after I’m dry, pairing it with black wedges with straps that cover my calves. Rounding off the look with subtle makeup, dangly gold costume earrings, and a black clutch for my phone and lipstick.

One last look over my body and a firm nod to myself that I’m losing my mind for ignoring my crisis and going out, tells me I’m ready to go.

I flick off all the lights and move out of the room. Alyssa is in one of my dresses and shoes, already ready.

She doesn’t look like she has her stress written all over her, like I do, but that’s nothing I can help.

“Ready?” I ask, coming to the arm of the couch and halting. I eye the television she’s glued to.

“Yeah, sorry.I was watching Stranded. They just posted a new episode.”

I walk in front of her, plopping down beside her on the couch and watching my dad and I’s favorite with her for a few minutes.

Dad and I were close before he went missing. Mom was the sterner of the two. The one I connected with the least. He disappeared on an expedition with a wedding party to an island near Vancouver Island when I was twelve. Mom wasn’t sure which island he landed on because he told her he, too, wasn’t sure. She had to have a wide search radius when she realized he was gone.

They found no trace of anyone in his party, and he never returned home.

“It’s set near where your dad…” Alyssa trails off. “Oh, sorry. I shouldn’t bring that up, should I? I’m such a fool sometimes.”

I pat her leg as the man on television tries to make an a-frame lean-to against a massive rock.

Tears sting, but I hold them back.

“It’s alright,” I finally choke out.

“You know, you need a cash infusion, and TVPLus is looking for contestants. The last one standing this season gets two million!” Her voice has gone up an octave. Likely she thinks she’s solved the case of my crumbling life.

Everything my dad taught me went in one ear and out the other, though, because I couldn’t understand why a man with a mansion for a home wanted me to survive alone in the wilderness.

Guess you showed me, huh, Dad?

“I don’t have those skills,” I admit to Alyssa.

She shakes her head, turning toward me. She’s got that look on her face of someone who’s about to double down on her argument. “There’s a girl on this one that runs a salon and has no skills other than the training she received from the show because they legally can’t send you out without any, so they give you the bare minimum to get you along. Probably not what your dad would equate to knowledge adequate to go out and do this shit,” she realizes, looking back at the television and then snapping her eyes back at me. “Forget I said anything. It was just me being an idiot.”

She laughs, and I chuckle along with her. I fake shrugging it off as she stands and shuts off the television. “Come on, let’s go dance! It’ll make you feel so much better!”

I nod and stand to follow, but even as we’re driving to the club, my mind is on that two million.

How much do I remember from what Dad taught me?

* * *

“One down, many more to go!”Alyssa giggles as we take a shot—not our first. She often loses count of her alcohol.

I giggle as the brown liquid courage slides down my throat into my belly, no longer burning like the first few had.

The night is nearing a finish. Sweat clings to the back of my neck and climbs down my spine. The main room of the club is packed, the DJ is bobbing his head from the stand above us as Astronaut in the Ocean plays loudly from the speaker system, the thumping of the bass bouncing off each of my bones. Forgetting the world is thrilling. Drowning it in a haze of booze and dancing.

Alyssa plops into the lap of the man she’s claimed as hers for the night, and his friend eyes me as he tips his glass against his lips.

Not happening, buddy.

It’s not that I don’t date. But tonight isn’t the night because when I get home, everything is going to come clambering back to me, ruining the buzz in my veins and the high in my soul.

“My friend is going to be on Stranded!” Alyssa shouts to the men. The one with his arm around her has blond hair and light blue eyes. He’s the kind of man who’s too pretty for his own good, and therefore, no woman should ever trust him. Alyssa knows that. She’ll throw him back into the ocean tomorrow morning. After she’s had her way with him.

The other man pipes up, “Oh, the show on TVPLus? Sick!”

Sick? How old are these two?

Alyssa winces at the term, also. Clearly, we’ve not had enough to drink, even if we lost count along the way.

“I said I was thinking about it!” I tell her, narrowing my gaze threateningly.

She rolls her eyes. “What other choice do you have?”

The other man is tall, choosing to stand at the table rather than take a seat. He eyes me. He’s got brown hair that’s damp with sweat from the humidity in the club’s cigarette-scented air, and brown eyes that seem a little too dead for my liking.

“Doesn’t the winner get a shit ton of money?” His eyes find mine as I swivel my bar stool in his direction to my right.

“Yes, they do.”

He nods. “Hard up then, huh?” His smirk is one that I know all too well from a man. One that says an inappropriate proposition is about to come out of his mouth. One that’s akin to: I know how you can make a quick buck.

I pin him with an answering glare that tells him to keep it to himself, and he clears his throat loud enough for all of us to hear over the music.

“It’s that time, folks! Last call. Tip your bartenders and close your tabs, and thanks for partying with us here at the Gator Tail! And as always, a reminder, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!”

A few regulars echo the DJ’s sentiments along with him, and Alyssa laughs. The club is the biggest around, but it’s just a hole in the wall. One where locals and tourists can both meld together in a night of revelry. Meyers Grove, Florida, isn’t big, but it’s home.

“Down your last drink,” I tell Alyssa, feeling the last of my drink flutter against the visceral walls of my veins. I hoped my buzz would last long enough to get home and pass out in bed, leaving me to face the music in the morning with a massive hangover and tons of regrets. But here I am, and it’s fading already.

The blond whispers something in her ear, but she eyes me and sucks down her drink.

“If it was any other night, maybe. But tonight, it’s us against the world,” Alyssa tells him, and I’m thankful.

The walk home would’ve been lonely.

“Come, friend,” she says, holding out her arm as I hop off the stool and link mine with hers.

I look back at the deflated men, who probably wish they’d invested their time elsewhere this evening. “Later, boys.”

Alyssa giggles as we push out into the humid night, but the air is a lot cleaner than inside the Gator Tail. The salt soothes our souls and clears our sinuses of cigarette smoke as we walk a block in silence. My ears ring from the club’s music, and when they finally stop, I sigh.

“It’s not stupid, you know? I think you should try. What’s the harm?” Alyssa says when we stop in front of my small apartment. It’s only a couple of blocks from the beach, close enough to dip my toes into the ocean in the morning before most of the world even wakes.

“I don’t know a thing about survival, Lyss. My dad was who he was, sure. But it’s not like I listened.”

She rolls her eyes. “We’ve watched every season of the show! We know shit, okay? We watch TVPLus, and we know things!”

I chuckle at her poorly executed Game of Thrones reference, shaking my head.

“Thank you for tonight, Lyss. It helped.”

She leans in and kisses my cheek, hugging me tightly. “Call me when the hangover fades?”

I nod. “Love you bunches.”

“And bunches,” she adds, turning and singing as she heads toward the awaiting car she’d likely texted before we even left the club for a ride.

She’s been my best friend since middle school, and even though we came from two different worlds, we fell in like two peas in a pod. Shit, we still live in two different worlds. It’s just sometimes, during some brief flashes, those worlds collide.

Tonight was one of those nights. And I’m thankful.