Chapter 12
She didn’t go home.
I watched, parked a block down from her place, waiting for her to show up after her weird afternoon shift at the rink.
I waited.
And waited some more.
I knew the schedule. I’d done the math. I knew how long it took her to get home from the rink across town. Normally she’d work until midnight on Saturday night, but for some reason she switched things around and worked earlier.
Yet she still didn’t come home. Not tonight.
Tonight, she left with them.
Not one.
Both.
I went back to the rink and waited for her to leave and saw her come out a little after eleven with two men on each side of her. Not as coworkers, or friends. They sandwiched her close and possessive, like they already knew what she wore under her dress.
And from the way she leaned into them, like she was aching to be claimed, I knew exactly what was happening.
They touched her as if she were theirs. She fucking let them, too.
So, I tailed them, two stoplights behind. Headlights off.
They didn’t notice me, too wrapped up in whatever sick and perverse little game they were playing in that truck.
When they turned off onto the warehouse strip, my stomach rolled. I knew that area. No one lived there except the firefighter. I’d seen him there before, the pretty boy with the hero complex and the perfectly white teeth.
When I first found Frankie, I did research on everyone she interacted with. And I’d pegged the firefighter as a problem from the start.
I should have taken care of it then.
Instead, I was forced to sit parked across the street in my tinted truck, engine off, watching her climb him like a ladder as he picked her up out of the back seat. Her dress was half undone, her hair wild and worst of all, she laughed as he kissed her.
He pulled the top of her dress open and kissed her chest as he climbed the stairs, two at a time, while the big carpenter climbed out of the other side of the truck. The fucker adjusted his dick in his jeans as he shut the doors and gave chase.
Son of a bitch probably had her on his dick on the ride home.
Whore.
I watched them all go in.
And I waited.
And waited.
Yet she still didn’t fucking come out.
Not for hours.
Not even by sunrise.
Just after seven, she came out of the same door they all disappeared into last night. Her hair was tied up on top of her head, and she wore a baggy hoodie over a pair of sweatpants that weren’t hers.
She looked smug. Like someone who’d just had the best night of her life. The two half-wit hockey players followed her back down to the truck. One of them kissed her neck while the other one slapped her ass.
And she smiled—at both of them.
She never fucking smiled at anyone.
They all got back into the truck and pulled out like she hadn’t just shattered the last thread of dignity I’d let her keep.
That’s when I knew.
She was never going to do the right thing.
She was never going to stop being a fucking whore.
So now?
Now I had to fix it for her.
I’d been patient.
I gave her space. Time.
But she wanted to make a spectacle of herself? She wanted to be shared like a toy?
Then she’d learn what it felt like to be broken and thrown away for real.
She was mine first.
And I wasn’t going to let her forget it.