31. Dingo
THIRTY-ONE
DINGO
“Get his feet, Ivy,” I groaned, “this dude is heavy as shit.”
Sure enough, though the target didn’t look a pound over a hundred and eighty, he had to be easily two twenty or more. And he was bulky, which made one-person carrying hard.
And, I mean, she was right there, so why not have her help?
She didn’t hesitate like most girls would. Instead, she slipped his calves easily under her arms and lifted him from behind the knees, grinning through the obvious effort it was taking to carry this lump of dead weight.
“So, are we gonna just throw him in and hope he drowns, or are we gonna kill him first?”
I stared down at the man in question, thinking very seriously about the question being asked of me. “Well, why don’t you finish him once we get to the end of the docks, and I’ll just kick him into the water, and then boom, job done.”
“Too easy.” She unceremoniously dropped his legs and kicked him, hard enough to draw a moan from his tied-up ass. “Hey there, buddy. You wanna live, you’d better wake up.”
The man wasn’t gagged, so waking him up might not be the best idea, but it was too late to rein her back in. Sure enough, just like I worried, he woke up and immediately began drawing attention to himself, and by default, us, as well, by shouting loud enough to wake half a neighborhood.
“You have no idea who you’re messing with!”
“Sure we don’t,” she sassed back, lifting her foot pointedly above his head. “And if you’d like to keep breathing air, you’ll shut that fucking wailing up and listen carefully.”
Surprisingly, the man shut up. Must’ve seen something in Ivy’s eyes that clued him in on the seriousness. When it was apparent he planned to pay attention, she smiled down at him, sort of like a shark must look at a fish before it bites it in half .
“Good boy.”
I didn’t wanna analyze why that made my cock twitch in my pants.
“Here’s the deal. You’re gonna get one chance to pick. Either I can end you fast and shove your body in the river, or you can fight and struggle and make things difficult, and I’ll still end you, but it’ll be slow and painful and really, really messy. And then, when I dump your mangled body in the river, the crocs will likely devour you before anyone finds your body.”
God, she was brutal. She didn’t give him much of a choice; instead, she gave the illusion that she wasn’t just going to do whatever the fuck she wanted.
That was hot.
I could admire a woman who knew how to make getting her way look like giving someone a choice.
Wait—
“Please, if you let me go, I’ll double what they’re paying you to kill me. Triple it! I’ll triple it!” The mark whimpered pitifully from the ground at her feet, staring up at her with those unrepentant eyes that said the second she turned her back, he’d just as well rather shove a knife in her spine. But he knew the value of begging for his life.
For a split second, I wondered how much money was acceptable to her to let someone go who deserved to die. How much would tempt her to forego her values and what was right?
And then I remembered she was willing to sacrifice her own life and future to take revenge for someone she believed was wronged, and a slow smile crept over my face.
“Please,” he begged her, his hand extending to climb up her leg. I watched those lecherous fingers get increasingly close to her ass as he rose on his knees, pretending to beg her to cover his roaming hands. “Anything you want, it’ll be yours.”
“Anything I want?”
I didn’t like the look of the smile of pure evil that settled on her pretty lips .
Apparently, our mark wasn’t as quick on the pick-up because he raised those hands even higher, teasing the edge of her shorts, his fingers creeping around the back to sneak toward the middle of her ass.
“Anything at all?” she reiterated, her fingers dragging along his jaw, trailing up the side of his face, moving around the back of his head with a practiced smoothness.
“Anything,” he breathed, staring up at her like she was going to solve all his problems. For a moment, a white-hot jealousy burned in my veins. How dare he think he deserved to put his hands on her like she was his personal plaything. Did he not realize what she was?
His sharp yowl of pain filled the air as Ivy’s fingers knotted in his hair and yanked backward, leaving his throat exposed as she bent at the waist and leaned over him, her teeth bared like she was a beast, not a woman.
“I want you to kiss my feet, you lousy excuse for a man, and apologize for wasting my time.”
Oh fuck.
“What the hell, bitch, let me go!” He clawed at her hand, but she didn’t let up her grip, her grin widening as he backed up the closer she moved, until he was sitting on his ass again and damn near crying from the pain.
“I believe you promised me anything I wanted,” she purred, her voice so sinfully satin-like that it belonged in a bedroom, not on the side of the road in the wharf district in the middle of the night. “And I gave you my demands. So you’ve got two choices, pal. Either you put that mouth to work, or else . . . ”
She shoved him backward with a foot to the chest, laughing as he landed on his back in the dirt. He lay there, sputtering obscenities as she just stood over him, watching curiously, as if she were studying a bug on a rock in the park rather than a dangerous criminal.
I was stunned speechless when he reached out and took her foot in his hand, his fingers curling around the bottom of her Converse as he leaned down and actually kissed it.
Fucking wild.
I didn’t actually think he’d do it.
And something in me snapped, strangely enough, seeing him put his dirty mouth on her in any way.
If anyone was going to kiss those feet, it shouldn’t be the likes of him.
I landed a boot to the side of his face, shoving him sideways despite his protest. I took pleasure in the sound his head made when it bounced off the concrete from his lack of preparation for the fall.
A sick, unhealthy amount of pleasure.
“What the hell?” he shouted, just as Ivy turned and looked at me with a curious gaze. She didn’t look angry, rather, more on the side of intrigued.
I didn’t know if that was better, somehow, or worse.
Those lips curled again in a slow grin, and a chill ran down my spine this time. That wasn’t a playful smile. That wasn’t even an I’m about to have some fun smirk. No, this was a full-on psychotic break, you don’t want to know what I’m about to do to you baring of her fangs, as if she were a predator in the wild.
Now I understood what Coyote saw in her.
“What was that for, Dingo?” she asked in a saccharine sweet voice that set my teeth on edge. “You’d deny him the chance to beg for a quick death?”
I had two choices here. Either I backed up and said some smartass shit about wanting to get things over with or not having time to play games, or?—
I could be honest.
Which was infinitely more dangerous.
But then again, what was living if you only lived halfway?
Fuck it .
“Scum like him doesn’t deserve to lick the ground you walk on.”
Her brows rose substantially as she surveyed me, like she was seeing me for the first time in a new light. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, but she wasn’t giving any hints away.
Instead, she turned to where she’d leaned her bat against the tire of the dude’s car, wrapped her hand around the handle, and swung it half-assedly in my direction.
Musta been the wrong choice.
I ducked just in time to narrowly miss it as it whizzed by and connected with the side of our target’s head, knocking him out cold in one hit. He slowly roused, enough for him to register the pain and start screaming.
She silenced him with her second and third swings of that bat.
I watched the damn blood arc off her bat and paint the concrete, her shoes, even the side of her face as she brought the damn thing down on him two or three more times for good measure. When she finally stopped swinging, her shoulders heaved, the familiar sound of someone in the throes of a breakdown sucking wind to stay alive, to stay conscious.
So I made my first mistake of the night and reached for her, grabbing hold of her wrist and tugging her toward me, with every intention of checking to see if she was okay.
Her hands shot out automatically as she connected with me, her bat dropped and forgotten as the whole of her body landed pressed up against mine, from toe to top. I could feel the softness of her belly against my cock, which was doing its damnedest to prepare for something I knew damn well wouldn’t happen.
Not for lack of wanting, of course.
She stared up at me, this vixen in red, so dangerously pretty as she stared up at me through blood-coated lashes, that satisfied cat smile on her lips, those broken eyes so wide, so oddly vulnerable as they stared into the depths of mine.
Who hurt you, pretty girl?
Right now would be the holiday small-town romance movie moment where the hero asks the heroine who hurt her. But I already knew the answer. She’d told me with her own words.
We destroyed her.
We turned her into this, a broken doll whose shell had been glued back together, small cracks in the porcelain where slivers went missing and were never found again. Chinks in her armor that life had worn away, a draft sneaking through despite her best efforts.
It didn’t matter who hurt her, though. Whether it was us, unintentionally or otherwise, or her father, who’d built his whole empire on using her as a smokescreen to hide his underage human trafficking and sexual exploitation racket. Right now, all that mattered, the only important thing, was that she didn’t trust us to put her back together. And she likely never would, especially when she learned the truth.
She’d never trust another human after that came out. And it inevitably would. There was no hiding it forever. Not from a smart girl like Ivy.
I reached down and threaded my fingers through her hair, her wrist still gripped in my other hand between us, smashed between her tits and my sternum. As I lowered my head to hers, her eyes turned heated, and she leaned up to meet my lips as they devoured hers.
There was no better word to describe the way that kiss, so dangerous, so foreign, so unexpected and irrational, consumed us. I dropped her wrist and wrapped that hand around her back, splaying my fingers across her tiny waist, tugging her against me in case she didn’t realize how much she affected me.
I wasn’t like Coyote or Jackal. I couldn’t stand here and pretend this woman wasn’t attractive. I didn’t outright hate her, despite what she’d done. Maybe some part of me could understand better than the others the small bit of humanity she’d buried to do what she had to, even if a part of her didn’t like it. I wasn’t quiet or shy, and I wasn’t absolutely psycho and fighting her mere existence every step of the way. When she bent over in the kitchen to pull something out of a cabinet or off a bottom shelf, I stared. My cock twitched. Saliva pooled in my mouth, like any red-blooded man.
When she fought Jackal, I took her side even when I tried not to. I found myself wanting to keep her, even though I knew this would eventually end in a fiery, blazing swan-dive straight into the pits of hell. When Coyote looked at her like she hung the moon, and she gave him those soft and sweet sad girl eyes, I got jealous.
But for me, she held nothing. There was no extreme when we were together.
And I wanted to change that.
Starting right now.
“Fuck,” I whispered against her lips as her hands wound around my waist, crawling up my back to dig those claws into the sensitive skin of my shoulder blades. Her soft moans, I swallowed, covering her noises with my own to save her embarrassment later, should she regret this.
I, however, never would.
“You’re crazy,” I mumbled, kissing along the side of her jaw, nibbling on her ear even as she arched into my embrace, her nails clawing higher, hips rocking against me as I slipped a leg between her knees and gave her something to grind on.
“You made me this way,” she whispered back, walking backward as I caged her in against the side of the car.
“I’m not sorry,” I snarled in response, my hand feeling across the door of the car for the damn handle. “Fuck, Ivy, you?—”
Her hands left my shoulders and back, and panic rose in my chest at the thought that she might duck out and leave me here wanting. That she might take that bat to me next.
Instead, as I kissed the side of her throat, nipping and sucking at her tender skin, she used her hips to maneuver us to the edge of the door and her hands found the handle, yanking it open with a quickness.
We fell into the backseat of the car, her hands on my shirt, ripping it in half with her bare hands. There was no time to lament the loss of a good flannel, though, because as the buttons popped off the front of it, she snaked her hands in the sides, her soft touch teasing my sides as I growled into her shoulder, needing more than what she was giving me, but afraid to be too greedy.
The last thing I wanted her to do was stop.