“I couldn’t stand it if anything bad happened to you,” Jonah whispered against Cas’s ear.
“W-What?”
“I’m serious. I can’t lose you. Do you hear me?”
Cas suddenly felt like there was an anvil on his chest. Jonah didn’t talk like that. Ever. Jonah didn’t talk about feelings. It wasn’t his thing. Cas had always known that. “I’m not going anywhere. Okay? I promise.”
Jonah exhaled a shuddery breath and buried his face against the crook of Cas’s throat. Before he could think to say anything else, Jonah’s hand wrapped around Cas’s aching cock, and any thoughts he might have had flew away with his sanity.
Jonah’s thrusts grew frantic, like he was trying to crawl inside of Cas. Fucking him hard and deep, Jonah’s hand stripped over Cas’s cock as Cas begged him not to stop. It was animalistic, feral. Jonah’s teeth sank into the back of Cas’s neck like an animal trying to pin its mate.
Pleasure wound in Cas’s belly, balls drawing tight, as Jonah tried to drag his orgasm from him, his slick, twisting grip making his blood feel like it was on fire. “Jonah…”
“Come for me. I wanna feel you come on my cock.”
“Oh, fuck,” Cas moaned, his release slamming into him, shoving him off the edge of reason until his vision went fuzzy and his whole body seemed to spasm.
Jonah thrust into him once, then again, his hips grinding against Cas as he gave a hoarse shout before collapsing onto him and resting his cheek between Cas’s shoulder blades.
They stayed as they were, Jonah’s softening cock slipping from Cas’s body along with the cum he’d left behind.
Neither of them made any move to shower. Cas crawled onto the couch, and Jonah curled around him. “Now, can I ask why that Turkish thug said your handler hired him?” Cas finally asked.
“Because he did, I guess.”
Cas frowned, reaching down to lace his fingers with Jonah’s hand on his hip. “Then why do you and Sadie seem so shook? I mean, isn’t it hard to trust people in this business?”
“Yeah. But Pritka had more than earned our loyalty.”
“Our? Yours and Sadie’s? So, you knew him from before? Before you became a hitman?”
Jonah gave a sigh, like it was clear Cas wasn’t going to let this go. “Yes. Before I discovered I had a penchant for murder, I did what most runaways did for money. I was a prostitute…”
Cas could feel Jonah’s breathing change, and it made his stomach churn. He squeezed Jonah’s fingers, hoping that was the encouragement he needed.
“One night, a man comes along in a big fancy sedan and me and my friend Benny start discussing who gets to take him, but the guy in the car chooses me.”
“Pritka?”
“No. Not Pritka. Pritka is Russian. The man in the sedan was American. Big shot type. Fancy suits, perfect hair, twenty-thousand-dollar watch. I honestly thought I’d hit the lottery. Until he got me to his house. Well, one of his houses.” Jonah’s voice had taken on a dull, hollow tone, like he’d had to put his soul in a box to get through whatever he was about to tell Cas. “The American liked pain. Ours, not his. Most of the people he picked up never made it back to the corner, but it wasn’t like I knew that at the time. He was really careful. The things he did to me…to Sadie… It’s a miracle either of us survived. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we left as different people.”
“He kept you hostage? Like sex slaves?”
“No. Not exactly. I mean, he did use our bodies any way he wanted. We didn’t get a choice. But he realized that he could use us for other things, murder, seduction, information. We were his little spies.”
Cas frowned, turning to face Jonah. “He let you leave? If you escaped, why the hell would you go back?”
“I kept going back for the same reason Sadie did. For each other. He’d only send us out one at a time, using the other one as leverage. If we fucked up—if I fucked up—it was Sadie who paid the price. Electrocution, waterboarding. One time, he broke her femur. Do you know how much force you have to exert to break a femur? The sound it made still gives me nightmares.”
“How long were you there?” Cas asked, voice barely above a whisper. He didn’t want to break whatever spell was compelling Jonah to spill his secrets.
“Seven years,” Jonah said. “All that time, Pritka was his right-hand man. We don’t know how they met or even why he stayed. He didn’t seem to abuse Pritka, so maybe his paycheck was enough to buy his loyalty. Until, one day, it wasn’t. I think maybe he just got tired of patching us up. Or maybe he realized that we’d had enough and the American had to die, even if we died trying to take him out. In the end, it was Pritka who handed us the gun. Pritka, who cleaned up the mess. Pritka, who asked if we wanted to keep killing but, this time, for money and with our freedom. It didn’t take much to convince us. We’ve been letting him line up our jobs ever since.”
Cas played with the hair on Jonah’s chest. “So, why would a man save you just to betray you all these years later?”
Jonah shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet it has to do with whatever these men on the thumb drive were doing.”
Cas shuddered, his lip curling in disgust. “Trafficking. Human trafficking. I’ve only just started to unravel the documents, but there’s enough evidence of human slavery and sexual perversion to bring down fifty of the world’s most well-known people. Politicians, celebrities. Hell, one of them is even a member of the royal family. I think I know now why they hired both me and Annie. They didn’t want either of us having enough information to figure it out. My guess is they were planning on blackmailing the people on this list for a lot of money and didn’t want us to beat them to it.”
