“I’ll find some.”
“How?”
He gives a soft snort. “There are these things called shops. They come in handy in a pinch.”
“Aren’t we—?” I break off, frowning.
On the runis how I wanted to finish that sentence but now I’m worried what we are doing exactly. My arse should have been kicked out of the vehicle by now. For each minute I spend in his company, the threat to his safety grows.
A hostage, especially a white, middle-aged, middle-income female hostage is like issuing the media a ticket to the circus. Main tent action. Front row seats.
He should have torn me from the vehicle back at the prison, before he took control of the wheel, speeding away. If not then, he definitely should have left me back at the house. With dead jigsaw-puzzle-skull for company.
Instead, I’m here, being driven along sparsely populated roads with no signs of a cop. I’m astonished I can’t yet hear the rhythmic pulse of a police helicopter overhead.
An abrupt turn leads us off the tarseal road onto a gravel track. After travelling through open fields, there’s a gate. Malakai stops the vehicle and points the gun at me. “Open it and wait till I’ve driven through, then close it and get back in the car.”
The weapon is a sharp reminder that he might have saved me from his dead acquaintance but we’re not friends. I’m a tool to be used to advance his interests, nothing more.
Then he leans across, cupping the back of my head in one of his enormous hands, and adds, “Don’t even think about running,” and that electric crackle is back in the air. I take three tries to work the door handle to get out of the car and nearly turn my ankle jumping to the ground.
I trudge to the gate, wondering if my brain is malfunctioning. Perhaps that’s what happens when too much strange shit happens in too short a time because the person who went to work last week and did a solid job teaching her bored classes of students how to conjugate verbs and resent Shakespeare is not the same woman who studies the distance to the first line of trees and wonders how far into the woods she can get before Malakai’s muscular legs catch her.
How long before the convicted murderer whose hands have only just been cleaned from his latest kill snags the back of my dress, slams my body against the nearest tree, and reacquaints me with his oversize cock?
A pulse beats between my legs. My insane, overly stimulated, little-old-lady legs.
Or I’ve mistaken his words. In which case, he’d shoot me in the back of the head as I ran because my thoughts might have somehow turned a monster into a mate but that doesn’t mean the reality fits.
Worse, I’ve already been down that road once before only to find nothing but misery at the end.
But… but… but…
Malakai’s prick might be hard, but his touch is gentle, the reverse of my husband.
And this day isn’t my real life, anyway. It might end at any moment with the police or a bullet in my brain. If I want to indulge in his games, there’s no one to stop me.
The edge of the forest isn’t that far. My shoes are terrible, more a hindrance than a help on this uneven ground, but I could make it to the treeline. I lay my hand on the gate and tug it from the overgrown grass around the base. So overgrown the track mustn’t be well utilised.
My eyes continue to judge the distance to the pines as he drives through the opening, as I fix the latch in place again and slowly, slowly, slowly walk towards the car.
I feel his tension. Him waiting for me to make a move.
My footsteps falter, turning towards the trees, watching Malakai’s silhouette through the passenger side windows, seeing him reach for the door handle.
My memory replays the fantasy he spilled into my ear. The one where I run and he chases, pursuing me through the woods. And I want that, I want to run, not to freedom but to further captivity; him chasing me, hunting me, catching me.
A true predator doing whatever he wants to his captured prey.
You know you want to, kid. Live a little. It’s later than you think.
I shift my weight from foot to foot, then bend down and remove one shoe, then the other. The long grass is wild, a million times harsher than a lawn, thicker, many blades sharp enough to cut.
But it also feels good against the soles of my feet. Even in the back garden of my home, I never let them go bare. Haven’t done so since I was a child.
And part of me feels childish, girlish. The years shredding from me as my excitement builds, as the voices inside me cry out to play his game.
Part of me aches to be trapped between the giant oak of Malakai at my back and the rough trunk of a forestry pine at my front. The simulation my brain provides is so detailed, it almost feels like it’s happening right now.
