“We must watch it later,” he says with a devious smile. “But it’s time for the favor. Get on your knees.”
My mouth quirks up into a half-smile. “Right now?”
He nods, his expression growing both lustful and stern. Something about the amount of fire in his eyes has me doing what he says immediately.
I get down on my knees, ignoring the hardness of the tiles, and focus on the hardness of his cock as it bobs in front of me, water rolling off the broad tip. I wrap my fingers around the thick base of his shaft, tentative at first. I’ve gone down on Vicente before, but only once. He’s been overly generous with me and it’s about time I returned the favor.
But this time it’s different. It’s different because the dynamic has changed. It’s not just that there is a camera filming me—I glance up to the side and see my reflection, the erotically hot image of his cock in my hand—it’s because I finally feel like I’m taking a walk on the wild side.
I don’t feel like a girl anymore.
I’m his woman.
I take in a deep breath, trying not to choke on the water, and slowly, carefully slide his tip past my lips. I let my eyes fall closed at the sound of his moan as it reverberates through the shower. The taste of him, mild in the water but still one hundred percent man, hits my tongue and spurs something deep inside of me, making me crave him even more.
“Fuck,” he murmurs, voice breaking into a groan. I look up to see him place one hand against the wall to keep himself upright, those abs of his straining, the other hand still filming us though now it’s a bit sideways and out of focus. He’s being careful not to get the phone wet and I can only hope he keeps that up.
At the same time, I want every part of him to unravel.
“I’m going to come so hard down the back of your throat,” he says thickly, his hand now moving to my hair where he makes a wet fist.
Hell.
I slide my lips to the end of his cock then stroke along the underside of his shaft with my tongue, feeling how hot his skin is, even more so in the steamy water, smoothing over every vein and rock-hard ridge.
“Look at me,” he whispers. “Look at the camera.”
Boldly, I look up and our eyes meet in fireworks until I put him in my mouth again, adding more suction to my lips.
It’s too much for him. He pinches his eyes shut, forehead wrinkled, mouth dropping open as he sucks in air and lets out a string of Spanish that sounds too jumbled and breathless for anyone to understand.
I want to take my time, watching him slowly succumb to me. He’s brought me to my knees so many times. I also want to watch myself on my phone, to live out any secret dreams I’ve ever had of being a porn star. Not that I’ve had many, but to see myself on camera, sucking Vicente’s cock, is beyond erotic.
In fact, it’s empowering as fuck.
There’s so much power in my hands and nothing more intoxicating than knowing you’re bringing a man to the edge, especially this man. With all his dark and deadly secrets, his passion and cunning.
The moans that come out of his mouth now as I work him steadily with my hands, lips, and tongue, are becoming lower, like they’re rising from a deeper, more animalistic side of him. The place where the tiger lives. The place where he keeps his inner beast in a cage, taunting him mercilessly.
I want to let that beast out.
His legs stiffen and his body becomes strained, the tension building inside him. I glance up and our eyes meet briefly, and his glazed expression tells me that he’s awestruck, that at least for now he’s mine and at my mercy.
I should be gentle with him.
But I’m not.
Gentle Violet is gone.
She rattles the cage. She throws herself at it.
Come and get me.
My fist moves faster, slick and wet over his hot length, and my free hand moves up his legs until they find his perfect balls. I tug lightly, testing him.
“Fuck!” he cries out hoarsely, followed by what I’m sure are more Spanish expletives. “I’m coming.”
My eyes dart slyly to the camera as his cock becomes hotter, his skin stretched under my lips, and I keep going as I feel him change in my grasp.
Every muscle in his body stills, frozen, as the orgasm hits him, then suddenly he’s panting, his breath rough and ragged, and his cum is shooting into my mouth, almost to the back of my throat. Just as he warned.
I swallow almost immediately, even though being in a shower is the perfect excuse to spit. But fuck it, he has no problem ingesting me, and when I’m all in, I’m all in. I want all of him.
“Oh fuck, fuck,” he rasps, leaning against the shower wall, the water still spraying on us. He slowly turns to look at me, his eyes sated, his hair wet and flattened over his head, looking so goddamn beautiful.
“You,” he whispers, sounding amazed. “You set me free.”
And then he drops the phone.
It happens as if in slow motion. As he grins lazily at me, his other hand comes down instinctively to touch me.
His hand opens.
The phone falls.
Splash.
Right onto the hard tiles, into the water, sliding to the drain.
I let out a cry, quickly scooping it up. The case I have does nothing to protect it from damage, especially water damage. I’ve ruined a phone in the past when I used it in light drizzle just for a second. This thing has been submerged for a few seconds, not to mention the fall onto tiles.
“Oh shit,” Vicente says, crouching down beside me. This, of course, makes the water hitting the back of his head spray everywhere, including the phone in my hand.
I cry out and scamper out of the shower. I grab a towel from the rack and start rubbing it down before removing the case.
“I am so sorry,” Vicente says, coming behind me. “Is it okay?”
I shake my head. “I doubt it.” Once it’s dry, I try and turn it on but nothing happens. Is it wrong that I’m mostly disappointed because I actually did want to watch me giving him head later?
“Violet,” he says as I press futilely at the home button. With his fingers he pushes my chin over until I’m looking at him. “I am so sorry. I will get you another one. A better one. Today. Now, even, if there are stores open.”
I sigh, shaking my head. Luckily I had backed up my phone a few weeks ago but I’m not sure if I did after meeting Vicente. I’d taken so many pictures of him, candid ones. Ones that made my heart skip. Thank god I still have my actual camera. There are some beautiful ones of him on there.
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “Maybe it’s a sign that I should just go without until I get back home.”
He smiles at that. “There’s a positive attitude. Even so, I’m replacing it for you. It should come out of my pocket, not yours. It was my idea, my fault.”
I’m not going to argue with that, even though I tell him slyly, “Well, technically it was my blow job that made you lose all sense of motor control.”
He leans over and kisses me on the forehead, taking the phone from my hand. “You can’t pretend it wasn’t worth it.”
He takes it into the room and I quickly dry myself off before following him. He turns on a lamp, examining it. “Maybe if I can get it to the front desk, they’ll have a bag of rice or something.”
I give him a look as I rifle through the duffle bag and pull out a long red tank top and grey stretch jeans. “You think they have that?”
“It’s a hotel. They have to be prepared for anything,” he says. He quickly gets dressed in dark jeans and a crisp white dress shirt. “I’ll be right back.”
I’m struck by his determination to save the thing. You’d think I was making a bigger fuss than I am. But honestly, it was an accident and there’s no point getting worked up about it, especially if he said he would help me out and get me a new one.
“Okay,” I tell him. My heart flutters warmly in my chest as I watch him leave the room, the door closing behind him. Then I go back into the bathroom
and grab a towel, flipping my head upside down and wrapping my wet hair in it.
When I look back at my reflection, I hardly recognize the girl staring back at me.
She’s not a girl at all.
She’s a woman.
A wild one.
Chapter Two
Ellie
Ellie is eleven years old again.
She’s dreaming, of course.
The kind of fucked up, half lucid dreams that come when you’ve been knocked unconscious. It’s like the violence seeps into your brain, fighting to be heard, a defense mechanism that’s trying to wake you up.
So Ellie is surprised to see she can control her actions.
She’s also surprised to see where she is.
The night where her whole life changed.
She hasn’t dreamed this for a very, very long time.
She’s lying in the backseat of her parents’ old station wagon, a rusted pile of junk that was the perfect getaway car. No one ever suspected much when they saw it, thinking it was just another family down on their luck.
Ellie takes a moment and wonders if she can change history. Maybe this isn’t a dream at all. Maybe she’s been sent back in time and now she can prevent herself from ever becoming so damaged and dirty. Maybe she can stop all the horrible things that this night set into action.
If she can’t, at least she can get a glimpse at the person she used to be. She was only eleven. But unscarred, unscathed, other than growing up as a pawn to her parents.
She takes in a deep breath and looks down at her leg. Bare. Normal. Sticking out below her shorts without a care in the world.
That’s the only thing she can control, just being able to look at how she used to be. Being able to take it all in, before she was flawed.
Because what she really wants is to stay in the car, or perhaps get out of it and run far away, right past the swamps outside of Travis Raines’ Mississippi mansion and into the darkness.
But she doesn’t. She can’t. The dream has the reins and it’s determined to let history repeat itself.
She gets out of the car and heads around the back of the house, sneaking silently through the dark.
She doesn’t know the house at all but she knows her parents are inside, dressed to the nines. They said they wouldn’t grift anymore, that they would stop the cons and live life as a happy, normal family.
Ellie knew at the time that her parents were full of shit. That this was another lie, stacked on another lie.
But she was their child, eager to please, desperate for a normal life and she did as she was told.
She walks around the house to the back door and enters.
She hopes the nervous sweat coming out of the back of her hand doesn’t smudge the big numbers her mother wrote on there with a Sharpie.
The combination to the safe.
Take the money and run.
Ellie knows at this point that she’s picked the wrong door. She knows but she still opens it, steps in, and stumbles.
In the dream she falls forever, through the black.
Down to Hell, it seems.
Finally she lands, but unlike reality, it doesn’t hurt in the dream. She bounces, sinking into the hard basement floor like she’s jumping on a pillow.
The room is illuminated, casting long endless shadows.
Three figures come down the stairs, their details dark and grainy, like looking at an underexposed photograph.
The first is Travis Raines. The second is her mother. The third is her father.
They are babbling on, trying to explain in vain that their child was supposed to wait in the car, that they couldn’t find a babysitter.
She shouldn’t be in the house.
It goes fine until Travis grabs little Ellie and hauls her to her feet.
Sees the combination written on the back of her hand.
Ellie stares up into the eyes of Travis Raines and sees them glow red.
Then the Devil himself pours a jar of acid on her leg, scalding her skin. In the dream, the flesh falls off her bones. In reality, it left a network of scars and nerve damage that would last a lifetime.
In both cases, the pain is unbearable.
Ellie can feel it pushing through. Real pain. Coming from her head.
The dream gets fuzzy.
“My angel,” Travis says, and before her eyes he morphs into Javier. Cool, reptilian eyes and a crooked smile. He puts his hand to her cheek. “I told you I’d come looking for you on every street.”
The pain grows. Ellie wants to scream.
Javier won’t let go.
He leans in close.
She can still smell him.
“Ellie, Ellie, Ellie! Baby!” Camden’s muffled cries fill her head.
Javier starts to shake her.
Then he fades away into the grey.
There’s a loud rip and Ellie’s arms are on fire, a sharp endless sting.
She cries out, breathless and gasping, her eyes flying open.
Her husband peers at her in horror, his pupils tiny black specks in his familiar ice blue eyes. “Ellie?” he whispers roughly. “Oh my fucking god.” He looks her over and then leans down to rip the duct tape off her legs.
Duct tape.
Ellie’s head is throbbing so much that it’s hard to think, but then it all suddenly comes back to her with one terrifying wallop.
Why she’s sitting in the chair in the dining room, partially duct taped to it.
Why her head feels stuffed with nails and knives.
Why everything is spinning.
Why panic is clawing up her throat like a wild animal.
“Violet!” she screams. “Where is she?”
Camden takes a moment to understand what’s happened and then he’s running up the stairs two at a time.
Ellie, meanwhile, tries to get out of the chair but falls to the ground, her legs partially asleep, her skin stinging from the tape, her body weak with horror.
Violet, Violet, Violet.
He has her.
She struggles to her feet, leaning on the chair, looking around her. It’s dark out through the windows. The clock on the microwave reads ten at night, or maybe eleven. Her vision is wavering, her head still full of rocks.
“She’s not there,” Camden yells, clattering back down the stairs, the whole house shaking from the weight of his frame. He holds a piece of paper in front of Ellie.
“She left with Vicente,” he says. “Says she’ll be back Sunday. Did he do this to you?”
Ellie nods, trying to find her voice. “Yes. Yes. He’s him. He’s him.”
Camden frowns and takes Ellie by the arm, trying to get her to sit down on the couch but she tears out of his grasp. Her head explodes from the movement and she immediately bends over, hands pressed at her head, trying to contain the pain, to stop the world from spinning. To understand.
“We have to take you to the hospital,” Camden says.
“No,” she whispers. “No, we have to get Violet. Vicente. He’s Javier’s son. He told me so.” She manages to look up at her husband. “He did this to me. He’s here because of Violet. He’s going to take her to him. I don’t think she has any idea.”
Rage slowly assaults Camden’s face, his skin turning red, his eyes becoming hardened, the muscles in his neck becoming corded. “He’s Javier’s son,” he manages to say, each word having weight. “He was sent here.”
Ellie would nod if she could. “We have to get Violet back. We have to call the police.”
“No.”
She looks at him in shock. “No?”
He shakes his head. “No. We’ll call your dad. And we’ll call Ben. We’ll keep this between us. We don’t know what will happen if the police get involved. Violet left by her own will, Ellie. This is her handwriting. There’s no law against that.”
“He could have been forcing her to write that at gunpoint!”
“We know that’s probably not true. You saw the way she was acting earlier, what
she said, what she knows. She’s defiant. She’s angry at us. She wants him. He didn’t have to force her.”
“She has no fucking idea who he really is!” she screams. “You think she’s actually going to come back on Sunday like nothing happened? Do you think he would let that happen? No. He can’t come back. And he won’t let her come back without him.”
Camden grabs her shoulders and she can see that he’s trying to stay calm, to keep his cool. That’s always been his job. The level-headed one.
“We’re going to be okay. She’s going to be okay.”
“She’s our daughter! She’s with his son. How the fuck is any of this going to be okay?” Tears are rising up to her eyes, the horror, the guilt, the sorrow is uncontainable. She feels like an orchestra of strings is lodged in her chest, the notes rising higher and higher and higher until they might just burst out of her.
Camden pulls her to him, wrapping his big, inked arms around her shaking body. He holds her as tight as he possibly can, resting his chin on the top of her head.
“We’re going to get through this,” he whispers hoarsely. “You know this. You know what we’re both capable of. You know we’ve buried it but it’s still there. We’ve got a lot of fight left in us. This is only the beginning.” He pulls back, cupping his wife’s face in his hands, her tears streaming black trails onto his skin. “I love you, Ellie. And I will do anything for our daughter. Anything and everything.” He takes in a deep breath, his eyes searching hers. “We’ll take this one step at a time. You try her phone. She might answer. Text her. I’ll call Ben and Gus.”
“Why Ben?” Ellie whispers.
“Because we’ve kept him in the dark for so long. He needs to know what happened. You know he’d do anything for Violet. And you know he’s one of our best shots at finding her. That boy is a genius. And he’ll prove it.”
Camden immediately gets his phone out of his pocket while Ellie takes a moment to let it all sink in before she scampers to the kitchen to get hers. The last place she had it before Vicente Bernal slithered into her house like the motherfucking snake he is.
She can barely hold the phone, barely push the speed dial for Violet’s number. It rings and rings and rings and then goes to voicemail.