Chapter Five #2
He carries me back to the motel lot without incident, footsteps quiet in the dark of the night.
We go up a staircase and into the motel complex, and after a moment, he fumbles in his pocket for a set of keys and unlocks the door.
He steps inside, me still slung over his shoulder, kicks the door shut behind him, and flicks on the lights.
The motel room isn’t too bad. I’ve stayed in worse places before.
Max dumps me on the bed, and says, “Stay.”
I glare at him. I continue glaring at him as he rummages around shitty drawers and cabinets until he finds a mini fridge, cracks open a bottle of vodka, and gulps it down in one go. He selects another bottle and glances at me. “Want some?”
Desperately, but I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in years. I long to get blackout drunk, maybe even drink myself into a coma and early grave, but I can’t. There’s too much riding on me staying sharp.
Namely, her.
When I don’t respond, Max shrugs. “Your loss.” I expect him to down all the available liquor, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he sets the bottle on the wooden dresser and starts unbuttoning his shirt, shrugging out of it.
Beneath is a secondary shirt, this one a bit thinner.
It takes me a moment to realize that the shirt is the reason my bullet didn’t kill him.
Whatever it’s made out of was strong enough to withstand a point-blank gunshot.
Then, he pulls it over his head. Something warm curls through my stomach as inch after inch of perfectly-sculpted muscle is revealed.
Dear God, my temporary, soon-to-be-dead captor takes care of himself. There’s a blooming bruise on his chest and his arm from bullets, but that can’t mask his perfection. My gaze lingers on his abs—he has an eight-pack, glistening with a fine sheen of sweat.
“Like what you see?” he asks, a grin stealing across his annoyingly perfect lips. Everything about him is infuriatingly gorgeous. While he was actively kidnapping me, I was only looking at him to catch weak spots, but now… now, I notice everything.
Sharp jawline. High cheekbones. Straight nose. His eyes are the color of boiling whiskey, littered with flecks of molten gold and hooded by thick, dark eyelashes. There’s a smattering of barely-visible freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“Careful, Flame. You’re making me hard, and if my hard-on persists, I’ll expect you to take care of it.”
I recoil, pointedly looking away. Getting kidnapped is already embarrassing enough; getting kidnapped and raped is a stain on my reputation that I’ll never rub clean. Dagon will kill the only thing in the world I care about just for sport if he finds out someone had me before he did.
“Hmm,” Max hums thoughtfully. “Alright—here’s what’s gonna happen, Flame.
” There’s that nickname again. It stirs something in the back of my mind.
“I’ll take off that gag, and then I’m going to ask you questions.
If you respond honestly, we won’t have any issues.
If you hold out on me, I’m going to add to your punishment. Got it?”
My next breath shudders out of me. Punishment. I’m intimately familiar with the concept, and I can tolerate a lot of pain, but I don’t enjoy it. I don’t look forward to it. I just… endure it whenever Dagon’s in the mood to hand it out.
These days, I prefer it when he leaves any punishment to his soldiers. I can knock those little boys out and go about my business. Dagon, however? I can’t lay a finger on him without paying a price I refuse to pay.
Max approaches me with lazy, unhurried footsteps.
His fingers hook under the fabric of the makeshift gag, then pull it down.
I continue staring at the wall to the side of me, even if glimpsing his muscles in the corner of my eyes tempts me to take another, longer look.
Max cups my chin in his hand and jerks my head to face him.
I stare at his chest, trying not to appreciate it too much.
“Look at me,” he says simply.
“Already am.” I force a yawn. “I’m not seeing anything impressive.”
He releases a low, raspy chuckle that hardens my nipples and tightens my core. The fuck?
I’ve never felt aroused before, so I barely even recognize the sensation coursing through me. But I think… I think I might be getting turned on. That’s new, and entirely unwelcome.
“Into my eyes, Flame.”
Flame. The nickname is vaguely familiar. He’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him. Still, I force myself to look in his face. Look into his eyes.
They’re beautiful.
“You really don’t remember me?” he asks quietly, sounding strangely… disappointed.
“You don’t have a memorable face,” I quip flatly.
His lips tug up into a devastating smirk. “Alright. We’ll get to that later. First question; what the fuck are you doing with Dagon?”
“Indentured servitude,” I deadpan. “I have a life-sentence, unfortunately. One I should really be getting back to.”
“Nope,” he responds lightly. “You’re never seeing that motherfucker again. He’s a dead man walking.”
I squint at him. “You’re not the first man to claim as much. I’ve been sent to kill many of the others.”
“Huh. So, Little Flame turned into a big, bad assassin.” Max grins. “We’re going to get along splendidly.”
“I’m going to kill you the first chance I get.” He might as well know that up front.
He cocks his head to the side. “Why? If you don’t know me, what’d motivate you to kill me?”
I lift a shoulder. No harm in divulging some information to a soon-to-be dead man. “Dagon will order me to kill you next time I see him. If I preemptively bring him your head, I might even avoid a beating that’ll leave me with a few broken bones. It’s nothing personal.”
Something flits across Max’s expression. It seems sad, almost… devastated. “Ember,” he says softly. “What happened to you?”
A lot of torture, a head injury, and a collection of scars. I sum it up by saying, “Life.”
He rubs his thumb over my bottom lip. I pull my head away, but in the span of a heartbeat, he fists a hand in my hair, holding me steady. Then, he rubs his thumb over my bottom lip again, slow and deliberate, all while holding my gaze.
I feel trapped. Powerless, but not in the way I’m used to. This is different. There’s a sort of care behind Max’s touch that makes it meaningful and intentional. It’s not like when Dagon touches me—it’s more… manageable.
“What happened to make you forget me?” he releases my lip but keeps a hand in my hair.
I blink slowly. “Cracked my head open, forgot a whole lot. Again, nothing personal.”
“How?”
Dagon threw me out of a fourth-story window. That’s something I wish I forgot after bleeding out on the pavement, but unfortunately, the memory stuck. Most of the memories before that were affected to some degree.
“I’m clumsy.”
“You always were,” Max says, nodding mildly. “Is there any chance you’ll ever regain your memories?”
Yes, but it’s highly unlikely. It’d take therapy, hypnosis, and a world of pain for me to even scratch the surface, and I don’t know if I want to.
I don’t remember who I was before, but I know that the detritus of that girl was weak. There’s nothing about me that’s weak anymore.
“No,” I say simply.
“That’s a lie, which brings us up to thirty.”
30. Dagon used to count every time I said something that displeased him, too. After a while and more scars than I can remember, I mostly stopped talking.
My gaze runs around the room. There are no whips, so Max is probably planning to use his belt to get me to talk, or to punish me for trying to kill him and then trying to run.
“Try to avoid my kidneys,” I say with a manufactured sigh of boredom. Any hint of arousal I was feeling flees as I realize that Max will just present me with more of the same. More pain, more torture, more harm. He’s just like every other man I’ve had the displeasure of meeting.
His brows slam down. “What?”
“When you whip me,” I clarify. “Unless you want to pay for a hospital trip to clear up some internal bleeding, that is.” A frown flits over my face. “Or you’re planning on killing me.” I meet his eyes. “Are you planning on killing me?”
Fuck, I hope not. Not for my sake—I’ve known that my life is forfeit for a long time—but my life isn’t the only one at stake.
Though, I suppose Dagon never clarified if he’d break our deal should I die in a freak accident—such as after getting kidnapped right out from under his nose. Maybe he’d show leniency.
Except that fucking demon doesn’t know the meaning of leniency, or mercy. He only knows cruelty.
“No, Ember,” Max says slowly. There’s sadness in his words. “I’m not going to kill you. I’d never kill you.”
“Then what are you planning on doing?”
His gaze hardens. “I’m going to claim you.”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“We’ll talk more about it later, once we’re to safety.”
“We?” I repeat with a shrill laugh. “There is no we. In case I haven’t made it clear, my current objective is to tear your head off your shoulders.”
“I have a thick neck. You might need a chainsaw to complete your objective.”
“A thick head, too, since you’re joking with me.” I glare up at him. “I’ve killed men twice your size.”
“Have you?” he sounds vaguely interested. “What got you into this line of work?”
I drop my gaze. “A debt.”
“Oh? What did you do to become indebted to Dagon?”
I seal my lips. This Q he’s a fool if he doesn’t heed it.
Usually, I prefer it when my marks underestimate me and don’t see me coming. It makes the kill easier, but also unsatisfying. But my job isn’t to find satisfaction in killing—it’s just to kill. Be a cold-hearted assassin.
Become Dagon’s perfect little wife.
I’ve had some intentional fuckups the last few months to prove to him I’m not ready. Because if and when I become ready, he might actually make good on his threats. And once that happens… I shudder at the thought of it.
“No answer?” Max mocks. “Come on, Flame. You’re breaking my heart. We ought to be catching up like two old friends, don’t you think?”
“I have no idea who you are,” I remind him, because apparently, the idiot needs a reminder. “We aren’t friends. We aren’t anything.”
“Maybe we aren’t anything right now, but we’re fucking about to be.
” He wraps his hand around my neck and uses the leverage to tilt up my chin.
“From this moment on, you have no tie to Dagon. Consider your debt cleared. You will not be seeing him, ever again. Instead, you can focus your newfound spare time on me.” He offers me a smile with a sinister slant.
“No.” The word comes out coated in too much fear for me to handle. “You don’t understand, I have to go back to him. I have to—”
His hand tightens. Heat curls through my body, and nausea simultaneously rises in my esophagus. “No, you do not.”
For the first time in years—years, tears prickle at my eyes.
Not for myself, but for the innocent I’m protecting.
If I fail, she pays the price, and she is the only person left alive that I love.
“Max, I don’t recall you, but if you have any regard for me, you have to send me back. ” I fight back the tears. “Please.”
This gives him pause, even as his eyes narrow. “What does Dagon have on you?” he asks suddenly.
I feel like he’s just punched me in the solar plexus. “W-what?”
“It must be something,” Max goes on. His thumb strokes over my pulse. “Your eyes flash with disgust each time you say his name or reference him, but you’re desperate to get back. So, he must have something on you. What is it?”
Pretty-boy assassin might actually be smart. That’s an unfortunate complication. The dumb ones are easier to fool and kill, and I get the sense that Max won’t be an easy target.
I don’t respond. It’s enough that Dagon has leverage on me; I won’t give it to this guy, as well. For all I know, he’ll make the same threats, and then I’ll truly have a shitstorm on my hands.
“Alright,” he says cheerfully. “Let’s get to the fun part.”
“What—” my words cut off in a gasp when he tears the front of my dress.