Wolfe (5 page)

I’d had boyfriends with large cocks but nothing like this. Not one who made me orgasm from penetrating me alone.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I clawed at the carpet, hoping he’d bottom out soon. Hoping he’d come...then not. Making it last would be
nice
too. I accidentally bit my arm as his thrusts shoved me forward.

“I feel your greedy little hole grabbing at me. You want more?” He laughed and shoved in another, excruciating inch, and somehow the head of his cock touching bottom deep inside me triggered the most glorious spasms.

I spaced out into a beautiful fuzz of contentment, though I was aware of him lying down behind me on the rug, cuddling me, soothing me with crooning noises while he licked the side of my face and my neck.

What. The. Fuck? Nice but so weird.

How many minutes left? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?

My only watch was clipped to my uniform. My phone was in my bag.

I eyed along the floor and spotted it a few feet away.

When his licking subsided and he lay behind me, quietly for five minutes, I figured he might be asleep.

I put my palm to the floor and began to rise...

Only to have his fist grab a big handful of the back of my hair.

“No.”

“I need to go and –”

“No.”

The pause was long but I wasn’t courageous enough to say more. Instead I waited, propped on my elbow and aware of the stickiness between my thighs. He mightn’t have any STDs but getting pregnant wasn’t on my bucket list. Or being abducted, held prisoner, made to come when he wanted me to.

That part had my mind wandering back to the memory. I’d never forget this...if I survived.

Minutes oozed past.

“What happened? Wait. Don’t answer. I can vaguely recall.” His words were more ordered, more civilized. The drug was working? But was he more docile? The hand in my hair didn’t say that, but given more time, maybe it would come true.

I needed a genie in a bottle.

“Those men, the bad men, are coming still. Fuck.” He jumped to his feet and started yanking on clothes. “Get up. Get dressed. Questions can wait. Where are we? New York? You’re driving us out of here.”

“No shower?”

“Wipe yourself with this.” He bent and took a towel from the suitcase and threw it at me.

I bit my bottom lip. A command?

The glare he shot me said do it, though it wasn’t backed up by that power of his. Maybe it’d gone. Maybe the drug had done exactly what I needed it to do?

If I was careful, once outside, I could run.

I quickly slipped on the dress and underwear he gave me, then grabbed my handbag from the floor, though he found my phone and tossed it out.

“Go.”

When he made me exit the apartment first, with his hand between my shoulder blades, I smiled. No power. Nothing. I could run.

We went down in the elevator like any ordinary couple and all the way I was wondering if they’d be there when the doors opened at the bottom. They weren’t.

Wait, they’d said to go in via the back way so that probably meant they’d be watching the back?

When Wolfe pointed right as we exited, I shook my head. “My car’s the other way.”

“I know. If your friends are here I thought they be looking for us to get the car.”

“What?” Dumbstruck, I ventured a glance his way as he hustled me out the front. “You can’t –”

“Shhh.” Finger to his lips, suitcase dangling nonchalantly from his hand, he stopped as we reached the sidewalk, though in the shadow of an awning that shielded this entrance. There were people. People who would listen if I yelled for help. Maybe. It
was
New York.

Fascinated by his eyes on me, I nevertheless opened my mouth and tensed my vocal cords.

I could.

Wolfe put down the suitcase, as I widened my mouth. He watched me, then lowered his head. The muscles in my throat flickered. My mouth stalled. Behind my eyeballs, I felt the blossoming of...the barest hint of...his power.

“No, you can’t.” He smiled from under his brow. “See. I remembered, just in time. You were going to be naughty, weren’t you?”

Stunned, I licked my lips and didn’t bother denying it.

“Yes, I remember.” He turned away and beckoned to a woman passing us, shopping bags in hand, sunglasses propped on her forehead. Her frown died, slowly, then she simply waited before Wolfe.

“Are you single? Do you have a car close by?”

It took seven tries before he got a young woman who nodded an affirmative to all his questions. The others had gone back to doing whatever they’d been doing when he dismissed them, except for two who’d refused to even stop. Normal behavior. He wasn’t infallible.

This was the Stepford wives on crack.

“Good,” he said to the last one, a young woman in her twenties. “Walk us to it.”

That was it. She led us to her car, in a multistory parking garage. It was a perfectly polished, black, BMW SUV. She gave him the keys and some cash when he asked for that too, then walked away, her blond hair swishing on her shoulders. Her smile said nothing on this earth was bugging her on this fine day.

Crap.

“In.” Wolfe walked to the driver’s seat and I slid into the passenger side.

“She’ll tell the cops, once she wakes up.”

The car’s engine fired up like a smooth shot of whisky going down.

“You don’t understand. She won’t. She never will. Ever.”

Scary. True or false though? I’d almost spoken, back there, until he shut me down. What would I have been able to say?

I think we went ten blocks before I summoned up some intelligence. “Where are we going?”

“A nearby place I stayed once. I need somewhere I can think. Somewhere quiet.”

“Oh.” That didn’t tell me much.

Though what could I do with such details? Throw a note out the window and hope someone found it? Scrawl it on a bathroom stall door? Now that wasn’t a bad idea.

We’d stopped at some traffic lights and he glanced across.

“Somewhere I can ask you questions too.”

What?
I froze.

While he drove, my mind whirled with the terrible possibilities.

“Only this time I intend to remember all the details.”

Such an emotionless, if polite, tone of voice, and his words sent shivers up and down my spine.

I thought I’d had Andy back again, for a while there, then that perhaps I had the improved, but still nice, version of Wolfe – the one who did drawings and smiled and made conversation. Instead I had something new. This one smiled and made threats.

Where were my rescuers?

He put his hand on my thigh and I flinched. “Don’t worry about it. Go to sleep while I drive. I’ll wake you.”

As if...but a sea stormed in and overtook all my spiraling thoughts as they dived into a maelstrom and drowned...

Damian

While Guera ran out to get the car, Damian followed slowly so he could communicate with the drone. The programming would make it follow their vehicle, but finding Wolfe and Kiara would be difficult, unless they got lucky. Where had they gone? While going down in the elevator, he took a chance and swept the streets nearby. The laptop kept the signal despite the closed elevator doors – a miracle if they ever needed one.

Jackpot. He found them walking into a parking garage. The drone climbed and found the story their car was on. How had they stored a second car? Why did Kiara have one?

Then he realized the woman with them was walking away. Had it been hers? Incredible, if so.

He kept the shots of her and the registration of the car, though it drove off before Guera arrived before him in the street.

He ducked into their Ford sedan, slammed the door, checked the drone was now targeted on this vehicle and staying up in the air about a hundred meters. If it ran into anything, their best chance at finding Wolfe was shot. The programming was good but not perfect, even so, it’d been proven to work better than human command during fast pursuit in the complex environment of a city.

“Where?” Guera snapped.

“East. I’ll send the drone on a sweep and see if we can get them again.”

“Got the registration?” she asked as the car surged forward.

“Yes.” He rattled off the description and registration.

“Send it to Arbie?”

Arbie was an agent with access to traffic records. CCTV footage of the main roads could be harvested and run through programs to check for registration numbers. If the plate were visible, if Wolfe didn’t take some small road with no footage, they’d at least know the direction.

“Sure.” He took out his cellphone and started the text message. Arbie could find out the details of the true owner of the SUV too. If Wolfe or Kiara didn’t know her at all, that would be so strange.

“What set him off? Do you think she warned him?”

He thought a few seconds, found he was frowning. “Why would she? After coming all this way with this project... Ohhh. Of course.”

“Yes. You keep forgetting she might be on his side now.”

It did complicate things.

“We’ll catch them. We always do.”

“If the CIA doesn’t find out what he is first.”

“Yes.” He settled into the upholstery then mirrored the laptop drone screen onto the TV screen in the dashboard. “Mind control...does anyone need this?”

“Not our job to think that,” Guera interjected, before he said more.

She was right. This still felt wrong.

* * * * *

With Arbie’s help, he and Guera found them leaving New York, heading south. After the messing around and going in circles inside the city, they were low on gas.

“We’ll have to stop soon, an hour at most left in the tank.” Guera added.

“I have a plan.”

The drone was doing its job but if they stopped for too long, their car would go outside the drone’s range and they’d lose control of the drone, or track of the car, and Wolfe.

“Care to elaborate?” She tilted that elegant brow of hers. After all the screwing he’d almost seen – a pity Wolfe was out of sight for most of it – it took a lot of effort to not look at her mouth and think of kissing her. Okay, he was thinking it. She had lips Michelangelo would want to paint.

He wrenched his attention back to the job. “Stop here. We get the drone down, load it with the sticky bug, and let it loose again.”

“Then?”

“Pray they stay on this road while we’re loading the drone. Pray they have to stop for gas too, eventually. The drone can go faster than their car. We can catch up and plant it.”

She nodded. “As long as we can find them again to plant it. Then, when we get gas, we can scan for the transmission.”

“Yes.”

“We should’ve thought of this earlier.”

“Yes.”

The tiny battery in the surveillance bug wouldn’t last forever and the bug had a short range, but it gave them a better chance. They weren’t going to ram them off the road or get involved in a public shooting war. Wolfe was possibly one of the most dangerous men they’d tried to apprehend and they were on foreign soil. Softly, softly, and sneak up on him when he was off guard would still be the aim.

If they lost him, they’d find him again.

He crossed his fingers.

Kiara

I doubt I’d slept for long, but when I woke, we were stopped at a gas station though parked away from the main refueling area.

“Stay put.” Wolfe climbed out.

He ambled to a grassy picnic spot with benches and tables, though nobody seemed inclined to use them this late in the day. This wasn’t the biggest highway gas station ever, or the smallest, but I was sure it’d have CCTV and that Wolfe was staying out of range.

Was it our car registration or his face he worried about, I wondered, watching him, as he watched the cars pulling in to get gas.

My hand itched to open the door and run. My rear end stayed planted on the seat. Sometimes, I’d felt his...aura weaken – I couldn’t think of a better word than aura for that control he had over me. So far, I hadn’t found a way out of being made to do what he said.

But, he had chinks in his armor. I bit off a ragged piece of my thumbnail then let my head sink back onto the headrest. It was just the right firmness under my head. The interior was beautiful and of understated design. Everything in a BMW seemed to work exactly
so
, as intended by its German manufacturers.

Didn’t change my predicament. I sighed. I would survive this.

Even if he was the nicest man on Earth, I’d deliver him to my superiors, because I had to.

I
had
to. If I kept saying that enough times, it might make me feel better about my resolve.

My family’s welfare versus that of a man I didn’t know half as well as I’d thought I did?

What had happened to him in the past to make him this aggressive and able to do what he did to me and other women? More drugs? Brainwashing?

Had to be more than that.

Next time he weakened, I’d try to run. No, I
would
run. I blinked, recalling the strength in his arms. Okay. Maybe...maybe, I should wait for him to sleep too.

The drug seemed all that kept him somewhat normal and time was forever ticking down on the levels of it in his bloodstream. BID dosage – twice daily. If I could get even once-daily dosages into him, would that be enough?

I could tell him about the drug? That idea made my stomach cramp. It might be suicide to give him that information.

The kidnapper abducted... Poetic justice some might think. I was just a nurse. By now I’d be on a wanted poster, alert, whatever they called them.

Fuck.

I swore a few more times in my head and blinked back tears.

When would this end?

The stickiness remaining on my thighs and the echoes of what he’d done returned to mock me. He had me wearing an old, plain black, summer dress with a curved neckline that revealed cleavage galore, barely minus my nipples, if I had no bra. I’d found my boobs didn’t suit the style and that was why it’d been sent to the back of the closet.

A whirr, a shadow passing over the dashboard, and a faint
thunk
from behind made me gasp and swivel in my seat.

A UAV drone was buzzing away, climbing skyward.

In the side mirror, I could see a black spot on the SUV that didn’t quite blend in.

Well now. I was pretty sure I knew who was steering that drone. And what was stuck to the paintwork. If an opportunity came up, I should see if I could relocate that thing to somewhere under the car, maybe? Somewhere less obvious, definitely.

We had followers. I smiled, feeling light enough to float.

Some woman from one of the line of cars had parked her Winnebago next to Wolfe and was standing beside him. I knew that attitude, that posture – attentive. What was he getting her to do?

I sat up and noticed her handing something to him, money, I guessed, then a bunch of things she’d removed from her vehicle. He turned and stalked toward me while she headed for the building.

Wolfe had camping gear – two sleeping bags, plus another sack, and a backpack filled with god knows what.

“You
stole
from her?” I accused as he slipped behind the driver’s wheel. I felt the need to be outraged.

His only answer was a pointed look.

“You did,” I muttered. As if he hadn’t stolen the BMW. This was the least bad of his actions for the day.

We drove over and filled up with gas, with Wolfe wearing a new, face-hiding baseball cap while he was outside the car. It didn’t surprise me when the same woman exited the building and gave Wolfe a thumb’s up. She’d paid for us.

Then, to my amazement, she came over with an icebox and put it in the trunk of our BMW.

Why plan for trips when you could take from random women? The man was smart when he needed to be, even if he was thrifty with his words. From the size of her Winnebago, she wasn’t poor, and that made me feel better. Take from the rich, etcetera, etcetera.

It suddenly occurred to me that his ability might be better than winning the lottery, if you were him...

We drove for another hour before we went past a sign that stated we were headed into the Pine Barrens. I remembered hearing about this. An isolated yet huge nature reserve. Millions of square miles of poorly inhabited territory.

He wanted somewhere quiet to think...and to question me.

Crap. My toes curled and I let them dig into my shoes.

I wanted to click the heels together and go home and over the rainbow.

I wanted to be anywhere but with him, in the dark, in the middle of some god-forsaken forest that, I also recalled, was featured in a murder in
The Sopranos
.

That thing stuck to the car had better be a tracking device. If I pretended, hard, I could almost hear it ticking.

There was a rest area beside a lake and a sign that indicated camping facilities and showers. Wolfe eyed me. “We both need a shower. I’m going to let you go in. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t like. Come back in fifteen minutes.”

Towel in hand I approached the toilet block. The showers turned out to be freezing cold but the water felt good on my body. Surely, I was getting a fever. I felt so hot around Wolfe, like he gave off some sizzling energy that leached into my muscles. I stood under the shower and contemplated drawing a
help
message over the wash basins.
Don’t do anything I wouldn’t like.
Those words crawled around inside me but I brushed away the memory.
Test it out
. I raised my hand to write among the water dribbling down the tiled wall and couldn’t even make my shaking finger do the first stroke of the H.

Crap.
I almost cried, but I washed my face again, turned off the water, and picked up the towel. I’d find a way. I would.

Fifteen minutes later, we turned onto some paltry side road made of one part dirt and one part prayer. An owl drifted past overhead, then some shadows – witches probably, given my damn luck.

* * * * *

Night fell quickly. If the sunset was pretty and purply orange, I barely noticed it for the surrounding trees, and for being more concerned with Wolfe’s slowly increasing wariness. I wouldn’t say feral, he wasn’t that bad, but I could see the change. How many hours had it been? Five? At most. He hadn’t swallowed the whole dose at my apartment.

We’d cooked sausages over the campfire, had a beer each, and were sitting on two logs that made an
L
shape before the fire, and
still
I hadn’t found a way to sneak a top-up dose of Keppra into his food or drink.

If I were too obvious, he’d know. A tight pain grew in my chest. Tell him the truth – that the drug seemed to inhibit his crazier self. He might just go,
hey, yes! Give me some.
He might throw it all in that lake that glinted through the trees, when the moon deigned to come out from behind the clouds.

“Lucky it’s early fall.” As the coolness had swept in, I’d added yoga pants under my dress and a light sweater. He’d been so quiet and I needed words, even from him. I took the last swig from my beer and set it aside.

We probably weren’t supposed to camp here, or park here, or make a campfire, but I’d let him deal with the angry park rangers.

“I’ve been thinking,” he began, voice all gravelly – a man’s voice added natural gravitas to anything he said. He could get a philosophy gig, if he spoke low and serious...and scary, like he just had.

His words had made my next breath stick in my throat, and all he was doing was thinking.

We were lost, metaphorically, in this immense forest, lit by the flickers of a campfire, only darkness around us, and here I was talking to a beast of a man who might do anything if I didn’t get more drug into him.

I swallowed my unease. “What have you been thinking?”

He brought his gaze down from the stars and looked at me. His hands were clasped in his lap, though I noticed them tensing then relaxing. Maybe he was nervous too? “A lot.”

“Really?” Flippant, but I figured lightness was my only defense. Make this seem normal and I might get him to lower his guard.

“Are you mostly innocent, Kiara? Or are you to blame?”

For what? I shrank back.

Something rustled in the bushes over to the right. The remains of a crumbled building lay forty or so yards away in that direction. Was it a beaver? A bear? A bear trundling in might be preferable to his questions.

“I feel like I’ve woken from a dream or a bad fairy tale.” He opened his hands. “I don’t know who to trust or where to go.”

“Sleeping Beauty?” I chuckled. I understood, though. This was a bit sleeping beauty, except he was no Disney princess.

“Who am I? Who are you? Why did you take me from the village?”

I wanted that beer bottle back in my hands, so I had something to clutch. “I don’t know everything. Pick one.”

I heard him inhale.

“Who are these bad guys?”

“That wasn’t one of the –”

“Just answer.”

I tried not to say – I was ashamed, scared, afraid for my family if I failed – but the answer popped into my throat and spilled.

“Russian intelligence.”

“Fuck. The GRU?”

First swear word I’d heard from him in ages. I knew the abbreviation but couldn’t help him.

“I don’t know. I was contacted, when I went to leave Russia to come here, but not told which branch they were. They threatened my family – if I disobeyed, things would happen in Russia.”

“Okay. Next one. Why?”

“Why do they want you? They never said, but I can guess.”

He kept watching me and I knew he’d make me say it, but I’d stalled. Saying the next bit out loud seemed odd, wrong, humiliating.

“Guess then.”

“This.” I grimaced. “You being able to do mind games. Stuff like that. Months ago, I wondered what you’d done to attract attention. I thought it must be to do with your military service, but now I’m not even sure if you’re a soldier. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why aren’t you more worried about this? Most people with a foreign country’s spies chasing them would be worried.”

And here I’d flipped things and was interrogating him. His eyes narrowed in realization and he gestured to me.

“Come here.”

“Why?”

Though I twisted my mouth, I’d been standing even as I’d said
why
. I walked over to wait before him. My heart thudded in my ears and I watched him raise his hands, then he rested those big hands on my hips. The contact jarred me with the most delicious sensation. When he pulled me to him, I barely dragged my feet.

“I can feel how terrified you are.”

Well, I was...and I wasn’t. That effect of his screwed with my perceptions. I was no longer certain which was my real emotion and which was not.

Sitting on his lap, with his arms around me and his mouth on my neck or in my hair...I wriggled into a better position and let out a sigh...it was heaven, with just a smidgen of hell.