“Because a couple months afterward, I was assigned a new guard. And when I inquired about the previous one, Miss B told me someone reported that he was the one who took out Mr. D, so he was being held and interrogated through torture.”
I looked down at my hands and sighed, feeling sick. Miss B had told me the reason The Big Man in Black had had a change of heart about me and my situation: his girlfriend had given birth to a bouncing baby girl. Enough said.
“When he finally confessed, they chopped his head off for breaking the rules.”
With a knowing twist of his lips, Chad nodded as if he was overly familiar with such consequences. Of course he was. “Who’s Miss B?”
“She was the trainer who replaced Mr. D.” I smiled as I said this. “My beautiful Sunday.”
Chad’s brows rose in question.
I answered, “Yes, the payment was the same. My captor insisted on it. But Miss B, she made me enjoy it. She taught me about my body and orgasms—”
“You do understand she was taking advantage of you just as much as the other sick, perverted fuck, right?” He was justifiably irate, visibly disappointed in my speaking favorably of Miss B.
“Yeah, but if I’m going to be forced to do something, I might as well enjoy it. And Idid notenjoy having a cock rammed into me from behind over and over! So excuse me if I gave in to getting my cunt sucked, and loved it!”
Nothing.
“Look,” I went on, “I knew I was still a victim with Miss B, but she never made me feel like one. She made me learn to accept and make the best of my situation. That was what my life had become, and for the time being, there was no way out. She made me like everything about training that I loathed when it was Mr. D teaching. Learning different tongues, etiquette, cunning, the art of lying and seduction, busting guns and kicking the shit out of people. She made meenjoyfucking her.
The woman was nice to me, okay? You see me now, holding my shit together? It’s because of her. If she hadn’t taken over at the time she did, I would’ve been damaged for good, and the first mission they sent me on, I would’ve offed myself instead of the target to end my pathetic life. But she taught me better, that this wouldn’t last forever. That the light at the end of the tunnel might seem unreachable but it was stillthere, and as long as I could see it, I could reach it. So she’s why I’m still here, Chad. She’s why I’m still alive.”
“I’m sorry,” was all he said. That’s all he’d been saying. But then, what else could he say when all these years he’d been completely oblivious to what was going on?
“I hated men. All men have ever done to me washurtme,” I told him. “Miss B, she made me feel exquisite, so naturally I gravitated towards women. I never knew…” My voice dropped to a whisper. “I never knew a man could make me feel better than a woman could…until you. With you the pull is intense and unable to resist, like this is the way it was meant to be.”
Clearing his throat, he leaped off the topic, having none of it. “When were you given your first assignment?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen,” he repeated.
I glanced over at him. He was eighteen when he eliminated my family… Holy hell. My family had been a fucking assignment. “Oh my God.”
Chad got up and moved across the floor, stopping in front of me and dropping to his knees, his doleful eyes peering up at me. “He gave me his word that he would send you back to the States and see to it that you received your family’s inheritance. You were supposed to die, but I refused to carry out the assignment unless you were excluded. For a whole week, I was beaten down and tortured for being defiant, starved and threatened with death, but I didn’t break:you had to live. Eventually, he agreed. He had to. Your mother was agile, clever, near-impossible to kill, which meant he had to use someone she trusted. Me. Consequently, he agreed to my terms….I had no idea, Tweety Byrd.”
His head fell into my lap, face pressing into my denim-clad thighs. “If I’d known, I would’ve gone back for you. Would’ve killed every last fucking one of them. I’m so…sorry.”
After a few minutes of cumbersome silence, he raised his head from my lap, and when his eyes met mine again, they were wet, eyelashes lumped together. “You never tried to run?”
Swallowing hard, my heart twisting at his pain, pain that I’dwantedhim to feel. I nodded. “Twice. I tried to run on my second assignment, and on the fifth. Both times I got caught. The first was in Paris, and I thought ditching it to Scotland would work. In less than a day I was found. Second time was in New York; I thought what better place to get lost than in the Big City? Same. Found me within twenty-four hours.”
Chad blinked at me, one, two, three times. Then swore, “Shit.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
Jolting to his feet, he ordered, “Stand up.”
When I did as he ordered, he held me by the shoulders and spun me around. Next I felt his fingers pressing against my skin, moving here and there on my back, searching for something.
“What is it, Chad?” I asked again.
Giving no response, he kept searching until his fingers paused on the upper left of my back, near to my shoulder blade. His fingers applied pressure, feeling, ascertaining.
Another explosive expletive left him before he spun me back around and spared, “The fucker embedded a tracker in you.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “How?”
