All forgiven. All forgotten. All won over by the promise of becoming a dad.
I haven’t been in touch with her since the sentencing, not really. If anyone noted my connection to Rachel, any escape attempt would be derailed. The cops would just go to her address and wait for me to turn up.
The absence of information has turned me inside out. I want to know everything, want to be there to hear our baby’s heartbeat on the sonogram. I want to help pick out a name that’s a hell of a lot easier on the kid in the schoolyard than mine was on me.
Some information occasionally comes to me through our network of tangled acquaintances but it’s not enough.
Not when the thing that excites me most about being alive right now is going on without me.
Like I do every time the frustration surges up, I push it back down, focus on the here and now. There’s a hostage I shouldn’t still have sitting in the bedroom.
One I only kept with me after jacking her car in case I needed a shield during a police standoff. The drugs were an unexpected bonus. A payment for the change in plans her inattention forced on me.
And now…
I can’t remember ever hearing the precise rules around fucking the mother of a fellow inmate, but I’ve got to imagine it’s a firm no. To do that while she’s bound to the bed with my hand across her mouth?
A cold shard of dread stabs into my spine.
The next time Josh sees me, he’ll kill me.
I understand Nadia believes the story the Rangers fed to her, but none of it’s true. He’s not about to be killed; the drugs must be to finance a takeover. Although the quantity isn’t large, prison inflation turns the ten grand worth into at least fifty.
It’s cold to manipulate your mother into acting as your drug mule but that’s a pretty good summary of the man.
My insider knowledge could set Nadia’s fears at ease, but I’ll hold it close to my chest until I decide what to do with her.
I should tie her up again. Leave her in the bedroom where she can slowly free herself once I’m long gone.
That’s what I should do.
Then I remember her tiny body next to mine, the gasp in the back of her throat, the way she stopped trying to tear her way out of the restraints. The sensation as she came with my dick jammed deep inside her, triggering my release.
And… I’m hard again. Great. Because a bulging erection is just what I need when I talk to Razek and try to buy a new safe route across half the South Island.
I’m twenty-three. I should be chasing girls in pubs, rooting their supple bodies in car parks or the tiny bedroom of an overcrowded flat, not hungering after a woman twice my age. A woman whose vehicle I jacked and am currently holding hostage.
No wonder she stopped struggling. She’s probably scared witless.
Instead of easing the situation, my cock grows harder at the thought of her cowering in terror. Of her begging me to stop. A tingle spreads across my scalp as I imagine her sobbing no. Saying no and then feeling her enjoyment as I fuck her until she comes.
There’s a loud scraping noise from the bedroom, jolting me out of my illicit thoughts. An aural switch to turn my arousal into instant annoyance.
“What the fuck’re you doing?” I rage, releasing tension the only other way I know how, slamming open the door to catch her shoving the bed closer to the door.
“Feng Shui,” she retorts, glaring. “I’m moving the bed in front of the door so the man a convicted murderer recently described to me asdangerousdoesn’t decide to wander in here by accident.”
I stare at her, confused. Where’s the fear I just told myself she must be feeling?
“Banging about will just draw attention. He won’t know you exist unless you alert him by doing something like, oh, I don’t know, moving afucking bed.”
“Right. Because the police won’t know an escaped prisoner took a woman hostage. The media won’t be broadcasting it across the airwaves by now.”
She glares at me like she’s a schoolteacher and I’m the dunce cutting it up at the back of the class. An attitude I vastly prefer over the melancholic woman who seemed close to collapse after I’d finished with her.
You’re not finished with her. You’ve barely started.
“Keep it down,” I shout, anger at my own thoughts propelling the same emotion out at her. “Sit on the bed or the floor and stay quiet. Unless you really want Razek to come in here.”
