“No-one calls me Damon.No-one.”
“I know, Lacey calls you Boo and everyone else calls you Becks or Beckett, even your family. For some unknown reason, when you were four your nanny, Lucile, used to call you Sloopy. I only used Damon because I didn’t think we were on a nickname basis yet.”
“We’re not even on a fucking first name basis yet.” I instantly regret adding theyet.
“I know,” he says reasonably, “but I didn’t have a choice. Couldn’t go withMr.Beckett. There’s no way you could pull it off.”
“I was born pulling it off,” I hiss. My voice is hoarse and ugly. I sound like someone, or something, entirely different to the person I usually am.
He raises an eyebrow and hitches his mouth up at one side. “Welp, your parents fucked up by calling you Damon. That’s for damn sure. It doesn’t suit you. Pity. All they needed to do was change one letter and you’d have been Demon. Less common than Damon, and sure you’d have had to spell it out now and again, but at least it would suit you.”
Chapter 2
Asshole
It’sclearhethinksit’s too soon for jokes. He glares at me as if I’m the worst person he’s ever met.
In fairness, I probably am.
He has prominent, perfectly arched eyebrows and dark blonde hair . It's short on the sides and longer and lighter on top. Despite what he’s been through, it’s perfectly tussled. Messy in a way I happen to know cost him a fortune at an overpriced salon to achieve. It falls into his face, hitting his cheekbones at precisely the right spot to accentuate the best angles of his face. His eyes are blue-gray with dark navy rings around the edge of his irises. His lips are fuller than lips have any right being. Right now, they’re pressed together so hard they’ve gone a dark shade of pink. His head is positioned on his neck at an arrogant tilt. I believe that’s a permanent feature.
He's wearing some kind of get-up. It’s head-to-toe black. Honestly, I’m not even sure what you’d call it. If you went to a store and tried to ask a sales assistant to help you find something like it, I have no idea what you’d ask for. The bottom half is like a cross between pants and a skirt. Or maybe it’s pants with a skirt over. I can’t tell. His top is a ripped tank with excessive cut-outs for the arms. It’s baggy on him and when he moves, now and again, a nipple is exposed. I suspect that’s no accident. I suspect when he got dressed for his ill-fated night out, he twirled in front of the mirror, smirking in satisfaction when he saw the little flash of pink flesh. He’s awash in accessories. He has a thin pearl choker around his neck as well as a crucifix encrusted with diamonds and red stones. Given the size of the stones, if he were anyone else, I’d suspect they were garnets or spinels, but because it’s him, my money’s on rubies. Rubies from Myanmar. He has a black leather cuff on both wrists and an ornate, oversized ring on all five fingers of his left hand.
His eyes, which were darkly (and immaculately) lined when we took him last night, have smudged semi-circles under them. Despite the slick defiance carved into his features, I notice a track from the corner of each eye where his make-up has run down his face.
Tears, perhaps?
Not that I’d blame him. It’s a normal reaction to what’s happened to him. It’s to be expected. Still, it looks unexpected on him and brings some strange sort of balance to the whole picture. Despite the state of him, or maybe because of it, pretty doesn’t begin to describe him. He’s obscenely attractive. Attractive because that’s the way God made him. Obscene because he’s so painfully aware of it. The only thing he is more than pretty, is vain. Aside from that, he’s less interesting than he looks. We’ve had an eye on him for two months, as is standard practice. We started with on-line surveillance and built a full profile for him from there. For the past three weeks he’s been under physical surveillance too. I handled his case personally. I haven’t found any major skeletons in his closet. Best I can tell, no part of him has ever spent any significant amount of time in the closet. Sure, there’ve been the odd arrests for DUI’s, several car wrecks, and a handful of hefty donations that were made to sweep minor scandals under the rug, but for a family like his, that’s to be expected. And, yes, he has some slightly left-of-center tastes in porn, but who doesn’t have the odd kink or two these days.
For a while I thought he might have a dependence on prescription medication, but my investigation showed he likes to collect more than consume. Even though he’s richer than God, he likes to sell his wares to his friends when he’s out. Why, I couldn’t tell you. Aside from that, he’s precisely what I was expecting – a spoiled little prick with privilege and entitlement oozing out of his pores.
There’s nothing in his background to indicate that this job will be anything other than standard. It should run like clockwork. Given his profile, the pay-out is substantial. I fully expect the most difficult part of the job to be surviving being in close quarters with him for the next few days.
“So,” he says, twitching his head as he speaks, “are you going to tell me your name? It’s customary to tell people your name when you meet them. Social norms and all that. Perhaps you’ve heard of them?”
He’s getting wound up, so I hit him with, “My name’s whatever you want it to be.”
I expect that to give him pause, but he doesn’t skip a beat. “I want it to be Asshole. Does that work for you?”
“Sure. Sounds good.” I almost chuckle when I see how much my response takes the wind out of his sails. He has no idea who he’s dealing with. It would take a lot more than a little prick like him to get a rise out of me.
“So, Asshole,” he squeezes his lips together and his head twitches again, “what’s the plan here? I assume you have a plan? I assume you haven’t taken me without having some sort of broad outline of how this is all supposed to go.”
“Yeah, I have a plan. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.”
Shit.
I didn’t mean to sayprettyout loud. The last thing he needs is a boost to his ego.
He ignores it and launches into his next rant. “If it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could enlighten me as to the plan? You know, given how it affects me directly. Given how this is mylifewe’re talking about.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why did you take me?”
“Told you. Ransom.”
“I mean, why me?”
