Authors: Courtney Lane
The glint in his eyes confused me. It was either shock or pity. I couldn’t fault him. The motel charged by the hour and had a vending machine that dispensed condoms in the main office. The attendant remained behind bulletproof glass.
It wasn’t a place for anyone who valued their life to take up residence.
-3-
R
UBE
G
OLDBERG
Mr. VIP pulled into the drive leading to my motel room. As he drove past my room, I spied my door, hanging off the hinges.
“Is that your room?” He pulled up into a space not far from the entry.
I couldn’t do much else other than give him a nod of acknowledgement.
“Stay in the car,” he ordered and slipped out of the driver’s seat.
My attention was split between the keys in the ignition and where Mr. VIP had disappeared. Wondering what Temple and his men could’ve stolen from me and what they might’ve done to the room, I chewed on my nails in a nervous fit.
Deciding to face the damage instead of fret over it, I exited the car and entered my room.
My clothes were shredded and thrown haphazardly around. The drawers were cleaned out, and the mattress was flipped over. The money I hid in the springs of the mattress was no longer there.
Smoke caught in my throat and elicited strained coughs. I followed where the scent of the smoke was the strongest—the sink. The porcelain bowl contained ashes and small pieces of photographs. Temple hit me where it hurt the most emotionally. I turned on the faucet, looking forlornly at all I’d lost; memories of my childhood.
Scanning around the bathroom in a harried fashion, I went in search of the one thing, if stolen, that would’ve affected me the most.
Placing the lid down on the toilet, I secured it and jumped on top of it. I felt around the metal frame of the ventilation fan and unscrewed the loose screws, taking the gate down. I checked the doorway for Mr. VIP—he wasn’t easily seen. My hand darted around the tight and dusty space, in search of a seven-year-old phone. I came up empty-handed.
I just about fell from the toilet lid in my rushed attempt to stand on solid ground. Turning my back to the door, I suppressed everything threatening to siphon my strength.
Mr. VIP cleared the obstruction from his throat, announcing his presence. He split his attention between my reflection in the mirror in front of me and the hole in the ceiling. “You can’t stay here.”
“I’ll get by.” I poked through the ashes in the sink, searching for a scrap of a photograph worth keeping. The movement in the vanity mirror above the sink called my attention.
“You can
not
stay here,” said Mr. VIP.
“Why do you care, whoever you are?” My throat felt sore and raw. “You don’t have to worry about me telling anyone about what I saw you do. You did me a favor.” I added in a mumble, “Many favors.”
“If you stay here, whoever did this to your room will find you. Don’t you care?” He fell silent waiting for an answer but didn’t receive one.
In trying to poke holes in an exterior enclosed in iron, and conversely, a misleading even-temperedness, the drill bit became stuck inside a thickening outer layer protecting Mr. VIP. “Who are you? I thought you weren’t a cop. Maybe you are. Maybe you’re a very, very dirty cop. Are you a cop or a criminal?”
“Cops kill men without due justice?”
I squinted my eyes at him. “A few of them do.”
He slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks and curved a brow. “Point taken.”
Shaking my head, I punished the thought of taking him up on what he offered me in the back room of the arena. The illusion of a kind face made it difficult to turn him down. The memory of how he coldly took another man’s life, and remained unflappable in the aftermath, made it a lot easier. “I can’t go with you. You said you wanted me to work for you, and it had nothing to do with fighting or sex. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know if I want to.” I slipped his jacket off my shoulders and handed it to him. “I can’t do this with you, and I can’t give you whatever it is you really want.”
His regard never wavered, and he made no moves to take the jacket extended to him.
I dropped the jacket to the ground and turned my back on him. Slinking against the sink, I clung tightly to the edge of the bowl. “Go. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be dead.”
I hated the way his inflection barely revealed a hint of emotion. “Your complete lack of concern is painfully fucking acknowledged.”
He took one large step forward, the heat of his form rushed at me, enveloping my body in an invisible warm blanket. “For someone so brash, you can be pretty thick-headed.”
Holding up one of my balled fists, I flipped him off.
“And immature.” Taking a large leap forward, he pressed his chest against my back. “I don’t believe in motivating people by fear. When you come with me, I think you’ll find out why I don’t need to use rudimentary tools to sway things in my direction.”
“I’m sure the pretty face that makes you look unassuming gets you lots of things.” Remembering a very cocky choice of words, my forehead contracted in amazement. “
When
?”
“You heard me correctly. I could give you a weapon to make you feel at ease, but it’d be a false sense of safety. I’m lethal with my bare hands.”
“Criminal,” I said, answering my earlier question.
“Too simple of a term.”
“Do I have to remind you, you killed someone? You were born and raised in this country, right? I pick up an accent when you say certain words, but not enough to make me think you weren’t. You know what that makes you?”
“The human equivalent of a Rube Goldberg.”
What in the hell did that mean? “Say I made a stupid move and went somewhere with a stranger who hasn’t given me his name…then what?”
“My name is Catch. And you’ll never have to worry about your safety when you’re in my care.”
“Your name is Catch?” Laughter spilled from my pursed together lips. “I meant your
real
name.”
A brow angled. “Sugar?”
“It’s really Saccharine,” I replied, screwing with him, “but it confuses people. I figured I’d keep it simple.”
His neck craned from left to right, sizing me up. The pull in his eyes stripped away my lukewarm and blasé attitude. “Your decision?”
I wiggled away, removing myself from between him and the sink. I scooped his jacket up from the ground and slid my arms into it on the way out.
-4-
C
LICHÉ
Uncontrollable apprehension wrapped me in discomfort. To calm my nerves, I paced the lobby of a hotel located in California Plaza on Bunker Hill. The guests and staff gawked at me as though they knew I didn’t belong here. Their judgmental stares were the last things on my mind. Melancholic thoughts over the loss of a phone, so outdated it was worthless to everyone but me, whirled around in dark smoke swirls inside my mind.
I rubbed my shoulders and shifted my weight back and forth. The hotel, while a much better choice over my previous stomping grounds, confused me. He claimed he didn’t want sex. I knew what I saw in his eyes when he studied my body in the car on the way to the hotel when he thought I wasn’t looking. He wanted to take his payment from me in the way I was most reluctant to give him in trade.
I supposed it could’ve been worse. He could’ve been someone completely unattractive, simple-minded, and lacking in personal hygiene. It didn’t bring me enough comfort to resign myself to the inevitable when we reached the room. There was nothing indicating just because he had a beautiful face, incredible intellect, and indications of a nice body underneath his clothes, it removed him from being a psychotic individual who would cut me up and dispose of my body in a back alley.
“Ready?” Catch asked, approaching me from the check-in counter.
Nodding at his question, I quickly breezed past him and into the elevator lobby.
The doors opened for us. With no one else around, we were the only two in the elevator car.
His skewed reflection and movements were mirrored in the closed gold doors of the elevator as he worked to punch in a number and used a key to unlock one of the top levels.
“Why take me here instead of your home?” I questioned.
“The place I would like to take you involves advanced arrangements for travel.”
The elevator pinged and opened to the level for the luxury suites. The doors slid open, giving me a way out of Catch’s need to encase me in fragile glass.
He held his hand on the doors of the elevator car, waiting for me to walk through first. I slid my feet across the divide and slowed my pace to allow him to walk alongside me.
He halted at the last door in the hall and used the passcode and keycard to open the door to the hotel suite, leaving it open for me.
I walked through, took a quick gander of the expansive room, and navigated my way toward the bedroom area.
Fending off my budding nervousness, I switched my hips, ignoring the pain in my ankle, and approached the bed. By the time I had turned around, Catch was standing at the doorway.
“The room? Did you change your mind about fucking me? Fine.” I threw my hands up on my hips, pretending to be at ease with it. “Can we get this over with? How do you want it and what do you want?”
With a curled-lip smile, he leaned against the doorframe and continued his unnerving habit.
“What?” I folded my jittery hands in front of my lap.
“I was being honest with you about what it takes to get to my home.” In a slow drift of his eyes, he regarded my hands. “Why do you think I brought you here to fuck you, when you were told it wouldn’t happen in the immediate future?”
“I think you are trying to make yourself complicated to screw with me.” I crossed my legs at the ankles, creating more curves than needed to my body and slid his jacket off, allowing it to pool around my feet on the floor. “I haven’t had a good fuck in a while. It would be really shitty of me not to take up an opportunity to get a man like you naked.”
“How long is a while?”
His question threw my confident stance off kilter. “Two months, I think,” I said, my words carefully and unnecessarily spaced.
“Think?” His jaw broadened and his straight eyebrows created a daunting shadow over his eyes.
“I was hungover,” I offered uneasily, scanning Catch for a reason why he’d suddenly become so…possessive. “Okay, I admit it. I was drunk. It comes back to me in bits and pieces.”
“We aren’t going to fuck tonight,” he reiterated with a scowl. “I think you’ve had enough men take advantage of you and mistreat you. I don’t think you want what you’re proclaiming you wouldn’t mind doing with me. Not yet.”
“Take advantage of me?” I laughed and repeated the question, my posture folding. “I’m not some weak, helpless girl who lets anyone take advantage of me. I’m not on the streets because I need to finance my drug addiction. I’ve never taken a narcotic in my life and never have I wanted to. I’m not selling my body, either. I kick people’s asses for the money and because I’m halfway decent at it, not because I enjoy the violence and have some kind of bloodlust.”
I exhaled an unsteady breath and sat on the bed. Leisurely crossing my legs, I bounced the top leg over the other. “I like to keep the things I can control in my life simple.” I fished in my pocket for a condom I began carrying shortly after my drunken one-night stand, in case of emergencies. I held it out to him.
He stepped forward, his eyelids partly shuttering his violet-hued eyes, and glared at the condom.
I tossed the condom on the floor; it landed in front of his feet. I leaned back on my elbows, sure I couldn’t hide the severe frown sinking my face. “Why are we here, Catch? What do you really want from me?”
“We’re not here so I can pay you for your temporary time and fuck you. I’m here to convince you.”
“Convince me to do what?”
His long lean legs worked to make confident strides toward me. “To accept my offer for a job that will get you out of whatever situation you are currently in.” Soft-spoken words laced with assertiveness lured me like a voice actor seducing his listener.
I sighed and showed my agitation over his lack of transparency. “You haven’t told me what you want me to do.”
“It will have to be enough that you know what I don’t want you to do.” He bowed over my position and clenched my chin between his fingers. Pushing up abruptly, he jerked my head up to stare at him.
A rolling in my gut pinched and nearly ached. It wasn’t lingering pain from my fight. It was deeper, underneath the muscle and skin.
He gently thumbed the split in my lip, examining it as though he wanted to make sure it didn’t hurt me. “This is how we’re going to begin. With a test. You’re not to talk unless I ask you a question. I’m beginning to catch on to your need to talk to deflect, and I want to make you feel.” He released me and stood upright. “Take a shower, clean yourself thoroughly, and come back to bed in only a towel.”