Page 160 of Pleasure & Prey: Vol. 2

“I don’t need to drag you anywhere,” Larkin tells me sweetly, transferring his grip to my throat. “Not anymore, at least. Modern technology makes up for that. Now…” He walks me backward until my legs bump into something, and when I twist around, I see the gaping maw of a trunk.

A fucking trunk.

“You can scream, cry, or try to McGuiver your way out of this,” Larkin invites cruelly.

“Don’t you dare⁠—”

“But you’ll just tire yourself out before the main event, Tova.”

“No, I don’t⁠—”

But he doesn’t care about my words. With a strength that surprises me, Larkin lifts me up and sweeps my legs out from under me. I barely get the chance to cry out, and my hands uselessly jerk toward him before he’s slammed the trunk, plunging me into absolute darkness.

12

Being kidnapped certainly isn’t on my bucket list. I scream and slam my hands into the surface above me, just as I hear the engine rev to life. “Fuck!” I snarl, my heart racing with a mix of anger and fear. “What the fuck?!” Fury radiates through me, causing my blood to freeze like ice in my veins.

This is ridiculous.

This is terrifying.

But I clamp down on that thought, refusing to cater to it. No. I’ve been through worse than this, and I’m not going to let some asshole with a pretty face and a knack for murder be the end of me.

Is that what he wants?

To kill me?

Fear twists in my gut for the first time in years. I haven’t been truly afraid since the night I killed my mother. Something inside me had just turned off back then, but now it resurrects inside of me, picking a terrible time to make my hands shake and my heart try to find a new home in my throat.

“Let me out!” I know he probably can’t hear me. Not over the engine and the thump of the bass in the loud music he’s got on. Is that to prevent anyone else from hearing me? Or is it just his normal thing?

I grope around in my pockets for my phone, pulling it out and hitting the button for the flashlight to peer around the trunk. It’s…a trunk. There’s nothing special about it, and the space isn’t big enough for me to stretch my legs out. Instead, I have to keep them curled up and to the side, slightly uncomfortable, to fit in here at all. Petulantly I kick the roof of the trunk, though I can’t even hear it over the noise from the engine.

Larkin turns a corner, and my uncontrolled tumbling in the trunk is disconcerting enough that I drop my phone with a curse. My hand slaps against the carpet and I grab for it, hands shaking.

I don’t want to die.

Fuck, I really don’t want to die here in a trunk or wherever the hell he’s taking me.

The woods?

The bay?

Will he throw me over the cliff like I did Alan, just to prove a point? Is it some kind of karmic retribution on his end to make me pay for trying to use him as a scapegoat in case Alan was found?

My heart does a strange little hop in my chest and I catch my breath, hand pressed just under my sternum. It’s a new feeling, something different from the familiar cold of my fury or the numbness that takes over me when I’ve done something awful.

Am I afraid?

“Fuck,” I whisper. This is new, this is wrong, and I don’t think I like it whatsoever. The car jolts a little, making me jerk up a hand to press against the inside of the trunk above me. My ribs constrict, my heart searching for a way out of the cage they make, and I can feel that if I let this feeling go on, my rationality will go right along with it.

I’ll panic.

God, that’s pathetic of me. I’ve never panicked in my life, and I’ve surely been through worse than this. I force myself to remember my childhood; making my brain walk through the day my mother threw me down a well, to think about the horses screaming under my little cold loft in the barn.

I remember that man’s hands on me, the way he tilted my face up, telling me how he’d make everything okay and that I just needed to trust him. The feeling of his smooth palms on my arms when he pushed my jacket off and his eyes had betrayed what he wanted from me.

Too bad for him, he picked the wrong kid on the wrong night. I’ll never know why he didn’t pause at the blood on my face and hands, or why he didn’t think something might actually be wrong with me.