Chapter 4
Izzy
Back against the wall, shoes in the dirt, I’m groaning quietly, working at myself, one hand on my breast, the other abusing my clit. My eyes are jammed shut, my breathing hoarse and desperate, and I am seconds from climaxing.
Footsteps incoming and fast. This is about to get embarrassing.
My eyes snap open, and I bring up my hands, as I pretend that I was merely doing something, anything, other than getting off. This person might want to really do me harm.
I squeak in fright. It’s him.
From high above, a room light washes down with enough illumination to see detail. Dead Guy advances with the knife open and his jaw set, his eyes bleak and empty. Scary? Scarier than before? Yes. Before was my fantasy, somehow, but not this.
I gulp and try to scramble backward, to sink my body into this wall, but there is nowhere to go.
“You. You are not normal. I need to get you out of my system.” He stands over me with my knife drooping.
I’m silent, my hand still wet and cooling from what I was doing, my heart thudding loud in my ears.
He goes to one knee, within reaching distance. I need to speak to defuse this. It just feels wrong. Well, wronger. We crossed the fuzzy line between right and wrong ages ago.
“I…that’s my knife. Can I have it back?” I almost add a please, and that’s just weird.
“Of course you can have it back.” He leans in, the knife coming at me point first. He slides me his flat smile, though his scarred mouth is twisted.
Fuck. My heart judders. I put my hand up between us, palm out, and he grabs my wrist, twists it aside. The knife eases closer.
“Noah.” A new male voice.
Dead Guy freezes. So this must be Noah. I peek over his shoulder, relief flooding me and washing away the fear.
“Hello!” I wave at my three rescuers but am ignored by all as Noah unfolds and rises. Before doing so, he placed the knife on the ground in a pool of thick shadows. He faces these men weaponless.
Noah. I turn his name over, search my memory and find nothing apart from bible stories.
He waits for our visitors to say or do more. I’ve come to see that waiting as a feature of this man, and it truly is something I do not recall him exhibiting five years ago. He has the manners of a big predator. He walks like he owns the place, even this alley, stands ready to react to whatever happens.
Certainty strikes. This…is not Dead Guy. Noah is not the name I was told five years ago.
They’re talking quietly in a huddle, and I cannot discern their words. Hand on the ground, I rise to a crouch then lever my way up the wall because I’m aiming to sprint out of here.
“Her? She is not nothing.” One of the trio nods in my direction. “That’s Izabella Fenway. You think we weren’t watching you, before? You’re both coming back with us. Montez wants her. Turn around.”
Shit.
This is worse than I could ever have imagined. From being caught masturbating in public to being taken before my enemy. Montez kills without compunction, as he did five years ago when he burned my friends. I could be minced up and fed to the sharks in the harbor before dawn.
I’m shaking, plucking my dress into place as if modesty counts before these men.
The speaker has a gun. The moment crystallizes into a taut, fragile second that could become violent and deadly.
These are Montez’s men. If I was scared before, now I’m terrified.
A second gun is aimed my way, and this time I’m the one waiting, almost praying Noah will somehow dispose of these three.
Instead he shrugs and turns so they can cuff him.
“Get her.” Two of them stalk toward me, casual like, because I’m a woman, thinking I am defenseless.
And, I am, except for…
I side-eye the knife, but I’m too late. Using a knife in a gun fight is a dumb move anyway.
I’m dragged around and cuffed with my hands before me. Someone scoops up my shoes, then drops them before me so I can slip my feet into them. This is a strangely considerate gesture. I’m wondering about it when a bag is tugged over my head before being tied about my neck. A vehicle pulls up at the head of the alley, judging from the sound, and we’re taken to it and made to enter. I’m wedged between the door and a man. The car rocks, doors slam, followed by the distinctive thunk of the locks engaging.
We pull away.
“This is fun.” I turn my head as the man beside me speaks. It’s Noah, who isn’t Noah, and he’s just being insufferable.
“I’m going to die,” I whisper.
I feel him shrug. “It happens.”
I’m incandescently angry, suddenly, and I raise my heeled foot and stamp where I guesstimate his foot must be. He grunts, swears, and I smile. May as well go out in style.
“Bitch.”
“Definitely. You, though, are a liar.”
“Comes with my hobby.”
Leaving me wondering what this man’s hobby is.
The car accelerates.
“Killing people,” he adds in a wry tone, so that I’m unsure if he’s being serious.
I swallow then dare to say, “And being an asshole.”
That makes him chuckle. Somehow, who the hell knows why, his laugh lightens the mood.
Now I remember him. The large build. The laugh. The competent but silent and deadly theme he has going. He was the other man at the bar. A fearsome man, built like a mountain troll that crawled from under an old bridge. The scars may have improved his face.
“If you are Izabella Fenway, Montez really will kill you.”
“Yes.” He knows I am. I frown. Why say that, unless he is pretending that he didn’t know? I stare into the blackness of the bag. I try to breathe normally though it’s stifling. “Dying. Now that is a problem.”
“I always plan to leave this world in the best possible way. Dignified.”
He’s spewing philosophy. I shift my rear and discover how little his body moves when I wriggle against it.
“Huh. Dignified. I’m assuming that excludes being thrown to the sharks?”
“Yes. Lacking that, I will take down as many of my enemies as possible.”
Head down, I mutter the next part to myself, “So I’m back to the bomb in Montez’s underwear then.”
From the grunt and the shift of his body, as if he is looking down at me, he heard that.
“Your name isn’t Noah.” I’m sure of it. Noah fits him like a discarded glove he pulled from a corpse. When he stiffens, I’m even surer. It’s not him. “I’m calling you Dead Guy.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
Someone else laughs at that then adds, “She’s right. You don’t look like Noah, man. You don’t even have a boat full of animals.”
The three men laugh, but Dead Guy remains silent. Have I annoyed him? If I have. Good.