Stolen: Hell's Overlords MC (37 page)

“Do you smell that?” I say after a moment. “Is that smoke?”

Her eyes light up. “Shit!” she curses as she leaps off of me and sprints to the kitchen, where plumes of smoke are curling around the edges of the oven. She pulls on an oven mitt and yanks the tray out of the oven. From my spot on the couch, I can see the blackened husks of horribly burnt empanadas dotting the wax paper. I lumber over to her, laughing, as the smoke alarm goes off overhead.

“I’ll order a pizza” I whisper in her ear as I hold her from behind. My cock is softening, her juices glistening on my shaft and thighs.

“Dammit, Vince, I worked so hard on those.” She sighs. “Look what you did.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” I tell her. “We’ll have thirty minutes or so until the pizza gets here. I’ve got a great idea for what we can do to fill the time.”

Rose slaps my chest, giggling, as I spin her around and pull her back into my arms. Her teeth are white and perfect, surrounded by plump lips reddened from hours and days of endless use. I steal a gentle kiss.

Thirty minutes might not be enough.

Rose

I wake up with a start. The room around me is silent. Vince is breathing lightly to my right, still asleep. A mischievous idea pops into my head and I duck below the bedsheets. The soft slurp of my mouth on his member startles him awake. He raises the comforter to see my eyes shining in the dim shadows and his shaft tucked into the side of my cheek. “G’morning,” I say, muffled by his length. I take him out of my mouth with a pop. “Thought I’d wake you up with a surprise.”

He laughs and lies back as I apply my tongue everywhere, suckling his balls and using two hands to stroke his cock to full hardness. When he stands erect and quivering, I clamber on top of him and quickly tuck him inside me. The sudden warmth and wetness wakes him up. He sits up and quickly twists, tossing me onto my back without missing a beat. Pulling my legs on top of his shoulders to give himself a better angle, he starts to take long, luxurious pumps in and out of me, lingering with our hips together as I wriggle around to kindle every nerve. 

He moves faster, rocking into me with force, knocking the sleep from both our bodies. Our breath comes in brief gasps in the quiet morning air, each thump of his manhood conjuring a subdued mewl.

He pushes one of my legs over my head and rolls me onto my side. He falls next to me, slides his arm under my head, and continues to pulse his hips forward as we fuck lying sideways. I touch the side of his face and moan a bit louder.

One more flip brings me to my hands and knees, while he positions himself behind me. He reaches a hand around and underneath to vibrate my clit as he thrusts his hardest yet. I drop my face into the pillows, stifling my panting, at the same time that I stretch back between my legs to massage his balls. The second I do, he comes, roaring, and for the hundredth time this week I let him loose a torrent of cum into me.

When he’s finished coming, he falls by my side. I nuzzle against him, still feverish from all the activity. “What time is it?” he whispers blearily. Despite the commotion, I’m still half-asleep. I can feel myself ready to drift off again the moment I close my eyes.

I roll over and glance at the clock. “Nine in the morning,” I murmur. “Too early to be up. Let’s sleep some more.”

Vince bolts upright. “Nine? Shit. I told Mortar I’d meet him by the warehouse in fifteen minutes.” He tosses the comforter aside and stumbles towards the shower, cursing up a storm. I lie still in bed as he quickly rinses off and gets dressed. When he’s clothed, he strides over and plants a quick kiss on my lips. “Sorry I can’t lie around this morning. I’ll be back as soon as I’m finished.” He rushes out the door before I can say another word.

Silence takes over the house after he leaves. I don’t move for a while, though I’m still covered in sweat from our early morning romp. It’s been so easy to forget about everything these past few days and just give myself over to this new kind of life. Shockingly easy, actually. El Cruce and everything associated with it—Carlos, the strip club, the cartels—seem like a distant memory, a half-remembered dream. Part of me wonders whether it was real at all, or if I’ve been here forever.

It doesn’t strike me as such a bad thing. This is a good life. I’ve taken to fixing things up around Vince’s house while he’s at work for the day. In typical bachelor fashion, he’s got junk strewn about everywhere and corners that have gone neglected for a hideously long time. A woman’s touch is just what the place needed. It feels good to move on my own and to see myself making a difference with my hands. Such a contrast from sitting in a dark cell, buzzing on sedatives and wondering if the end of my life was rapidly approaching.

Vince keeps warning me not to go outside, though. I’ve overheard plenty of stuff to understand that the tension is on the verge of exploding. The Diablos threat hasn’t gone away. I see the stress bearing down on Vince’s shoulders, although he works hard to hide it from me. It only comes out when I mention leaving the house.

“No,” he’ll say. “That’s not an option. You have to stay here. If I’m not with you, you can’t go anywhere. Do you understand me?” I hardly recognize him when he gets that serious. His eyes turn dark, his mouth a grim slice across his face. There’s no joking with him in that state. It reminds me that, no matter how much I try to ignore it, he’s a dangerous man in a dangerous line of work.

And I’m in the middle of it all.

Not just me, either. I look down at my stomach. There’s another life being put into play, or, at least, I suspect there is. I still haven’t worked up the courage to confirm my fears. But the morning sickness has become a constant. I try to wake up before him every day so I can purge the contents of my stomach with the shower running to hide the noise. I’m scared of Vince walking in on me and asking what the hell is going on. I know I should tell him, but I can’t handle the thought of that conversation. What if he kicks me out? What if he tells me to get rid of the child? I’m not ready to face choices like that right now. My psyche is still fragile. I might break down under the pressure of an unwanted baby.

I’m tossing and turning in bed for a while before I come to a decision. I have to know. I can’t keep putting it off. The uncertainty is almost as bad as the fear of what might happen next. I have to solve one question, even if it brings a million others to the forefront.

Despite the fact that I’m betraying Vince’s confidence in a dozen different ways, I shower in a hurry and get ready to venture outside. He brought me some of Mortar’s wife’s old things to wear until we have time to go shopping for clothes of my own, so I dig through the bags until I find a broad sun hat, jeans, and a t-shirt. I dress quickly, desperate to hustle out before I lose my nerve. I tuck my hair up under the hat, pull the brim down low over my face, and obscure my eyes with a big pair of sunglasses. I check myself in the mirror just before I walk out the door. It could be anybody looking back at me. Perfect.

The sensations hitting my face as I step outside the door are overwhelming. After a week spent almost constantly inside, the air and sun and traffic noises are an assault on my senses. I take a moment to orient myself to the bustling world. To my left slopes a residential-looking street. The area off to my right looks somewhat more commercial. I figure my best bet to find a pharmacy will be in that direction, so I pivot right and bustle down the sidewalk, keeping my head low to avoid attracting attention.

It’s only a few blocks before I see a neon drug store sign flashing up ahead. I zag across the street, through the parking lot, and into the store. Inside, air conditioning vents blast cold air into my face. I start to take off my sunglasses out of instinct, but I catch myself. No risks. Vince would be furious. Leaving the house was bad enough.

I move to the back as fast as my feet will carry me, past vitamin bottles and colorful condom displays. I laugh bitterly. It’s too late for those. I think back again to that first night with Vince. Where had my head been? Would it have been so hard to stop before we got carried away with everything? Well, maybe. There was such a heat to the moment. I couldn’t imagine halting things halfway through. Perhaps this was all in the cards. Who am I to fight fate?

I turn a corner at the end of the aisle and see a sign beckoning up ahead:
Family Planning.
Plucking the first box I see from the shelf, I power walk back up front to the register. I don’t make eye contact with the cashier as I pull out a wad of bills I’d found in Vince’s junk drawer before I left. I leave without saying thank you, the pregnancy test bouncing against my thigh in a crinkly plastic bag.

The walk back home is hot but short. The second I’m back inside, I lock the door. I didn’t realize until now how long I’d been holding my breath in, barely daring to draw air. It feels good to be back to safety, but the worst is far from over. I look down at the box in my hand—“99.9% accuracy,” it reads. A smiley face indicates yes, while a red negative sign means no. I don’t know what I want. All I know is that I’m afraid.

Dropping the hat and sunglasses on the coffee table, I half-run to the bathroom, tearing open the packaging on the way. I unzip my jeans and slide them down as I squat over the toilet. I urinate on the stick,  then set it face-down on the counter without looking. I can’t yet. I need more time.

While I run my hands under the faucet, I look in the mirror. The person looking back at me is not the same Rose I would have recognized a month ago. A lifetime’s worth of shit has happened since then, most of it hardly believable. “You aren’t a princess,” I sneer at myself. “This isn’t some love story.” My face is twisted into a foul leer.

But when I stop, it falls away. In spite of all the dark things I’ve experienced since the moment I walked in on Lucila and the Diablos, there’s still a tiny coal of hope burning somewhere deep within my chest. For every million doomsday scenarios playing out in my head—Vince screaming at me and kicking me out to the curb, the Diablos swooping in and taking me back to their cages—there’s one that refuses to be ignored. In it, I’m curled up next to Vince, my stomach round and taut with his child. In his eyes is not anger but pride, not callousness but warmth and love. I’ve seen flashes of it, when he thinks I’m asleep or not looking. But there’s still some hesitation there. I know what kind of man he is, yet I know there’s another kind deeper within him—a partner, a husband, maybe even a father. I just can’t be sure whether that is for me to see or not.

I take a deep breath and flip over the stick. A smiley face beams back up.

I should have known that I would cry no matter what the result was. Tears well up at the corners of my eyes as I grip the edges of the sink, sobbing hysterically. I can’t decipher what exactly I’m feeling. It’s too rich, too deep, too twisted of a flow of emotions for me to even begin putting words to it. Maybe there aren’t any words for what I’m feeling. Happy and sad seem such pitiful labels to be putting on this. They don’t capture the depth of it. I feel broken and whole at the same time. Everything contradicts itself, leaving me tumbling in its wake like I’m caught in a wave at the beach, losing sight of what’s up and what’s down, what’s left and what’s right. Who even am I anymore? I’m not the Rose who left El Cruce. I’m not the girl who grew up there, learning to keep my eyes down and my voice low so I didn’t run afoul of men who had such little regard for human life. I’m not the woman who married Carlos, either, or the one who tried so hard to pretend that everything was normal after he vanished into thin air. I need to stop kidding myself. Nothing about my life is normal. It has been just one bizarre shitshow with a never-ending line-up of depressing acts, always starring yours truly. A childhood in a drug town, a marriage to a man who disappeared without leaving even a single word behind. Then everything that followed, at a pace I could barely comprehend. Lucila. Diablos. Vince. And now this. I’m spinning out of control and there’s no telling when I’m going to stop.

Energy surges through my body like electricity, lighting up my muscles. I need to move, to flex and run and fight back against the inertia that keeps drawing me farther down the rabbit hole. I cock my arm back, take aim through the open window above the toilet, and hurl the pregnancy test outside as hard as I can. It flies out towards the street. I don’t bother to see where it lands. Instead, I sink to a seat on the floor and give myself over to the tears. Maybe it’s not use fighting back after all. If pretending bad things didn’t exist actually fixed anything, I would be the happiest person of all time. Pretending is my specialty. But throwing that test out the window doesn’t change a thing. At the end of the day, I’m still pregnant, and still overcome with emotions that I can’t name, much less deal with. I’m a mess.

After what feels like hours, the tears slow. Nothing in the house has moved or made a peep. I rub the back of my hand across my eyes to wipe away the dried tears. Struggling to my feet, I wince as pins and needles race across my skin. The intensity of my emotions has died down, though that unnamed miasma hasn’t gone away.

I need to put words to it. If I can find a way to capture everything that I’m feeling, maybe I’ll be more ready to confront it. I stagger downstairs in search of something to write with. Finding a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen in a drawer in the kitchen, I sit down at the table and start to scribble.

Dear Vince
, I begin. I write fast, trying to stay ahead of my thoughts. This is as much a brain dump as anything else. Don’t try to filter or phrase everything perfectly. Just let it flow out, raw and untreated, onto the paper. I fill page after page with long, looping letters. Every word I write is like a pebble lifted off my shoulders. The more I put down, the lighter I feel. Into the letter goes all my uncertainty and passion. I tell him about how it felt to get so involved with him from the moment we met, about the way I can feel his eyes staring at me even when I’m not looking at him. I describe the way his lips taste and how it always amazes me that he can slide from tough to soft in an instant. I don’t leave out any of the dark pieces either. I don’t omit how scared I am of everything that’s happened and everything that’s still to come. I give voice to all the worries that are threatening to burst in my head like a kicked-over hornet’s nest. Nothing is held back. By the time I finish, I feel a certainty that has been eluding me for over a month, a year, a lifetime. When I write,
Love, Rose
, I know that I mean it.