Page 16 of The Boy I Loved
I snorted a laugh, covering it up with a cough. He’d be traveling alright. Running girls across the border and to other locations.
“Oh, really?” she asked, seeming interested in learning more about that. If she only knew. “What kind of traveling?”
His fingers brushed along her thigh, making her shudder in response. “Running product from location to location. Kind of like a trucker.”
“Truckers make decent money,” she surmised.
I wasn’t even surprised that was what caught her attention. She’d always been superficial like that. Hell, even the home she lived in screamed luxury. To me, it didn’t matter. But to someone like Mason, who had it rough growing up…that might hit a nerve. She gasped, his fingers tightening against her thigh in a painful grip.
Wearily, she turned to Vince. “What about you?”
Vincent grinned at her, his fingers curling into his palms. He wanted to touch her now, to force himself on her until she was writhing and screaming beneath him—and not in the pleasure-filled kind of way. He wanted to hurt her, just because he could.
“Same as Mason. We’ll be working together.”
Stacy hummed in response, oblivious to what the hell we were really talking about. She thought they were going to be truck drivers, but she was pretty far off the mark. Sure, there weresomesimilarities. But what they were transporting wasn’t something you could buy in a box.
“What about you, Dominic?” she asked at last.
I didn’t even have to think about it. My answer was always the same when asked. “Armed security.”
Her brown eyes flashed with interest, but before she could ask Nicholas anything, she took a glance at her surroundings. A dip formed between her brows when she realized we were on our way out of town.
“Um…” she trailed off, glancing around in confusion. “Where are we going? I thought we were heading to the bar.”
“We’re going to a bar outside of town. They have more options,” Mason replied smoothly. “It’s the one we always go to.”
This seemed to appease Stacy, because she settled back in her seat, posture relaxing. It was no secret that we were a group of thugs. We all had the same tattoos, wore the same leather jackets with the same emblem on them, and I was sure there were a multitude of rumors circulating about us. She had every right to be on edge, but she still agreed to come out with us tonight. Trusting us was her biggest mistake.
We invited her out under the guise of getting some drinks from the bar and then getting a hotel to fuck her. She was all too eager for it, meaning we barely had to work for it at all. She’d even suggested taking us all once she was drunk enough. Personally, I had no interest in sticking my dick in her. My mind was on Hazel the entire time, which just pissed me off more.
Silence stretched around us as we drifted onto the highway. There were a few cars out, but not many. We were headed somewhere else—to another state. As soon as we took the exit to drift off onto the intersection, she’d realize we weren’t going to any bar. Frankly, I was surprised she hadn’t already spoken up again. Either she was just that cock hungry, or she was very naïve.
Just as Hazel said:Nothing bad ever happens in Greenbriar.
I wanted to laugh in her fucking face at the stupidity of that statement. Evil lurked everywhere. Even in small no-named towns, following around small, no-named girls. We lived in the shadows, watching, observing, plotting, and calculating. My favorites were the timid ones with a feisty streak, just like Hazel. Though, in this industry, they were hard to come by. You either got a yippy bitch who wouldn’t shut the fuck up, a compliant one who did everything she was asked to as a means of survival, or you got a bitch so timid that she broke in under twenty-four hours. Where was the fun in any of that? I always crammed my cock down the yippy bitches’ throats—it was the only time they didn’t speak, didn’t run their mouth.
I wasn’t lying to Hazel when I said there had been others after her. Just not in the way she thought. I also hadn’t been lying when I told her it was complicated. My body had become a weapon. A weapon to use against women. Over time, something like that changed a person—it ate you from the inside out until you were nothing more than a black hole. I thought my heart was gone, that it couldn’t possibly feel anymore, but one look at Hazel had it doing all sorts of foreign shit. Things I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
That was why I called her. Against my better judgment, I called her. I made her bare herself to me. Stroked myself to the sweet noises she made, to the expert fingers plunging in and out of that tight pussy—mypussy. To her shallow breathing, her whimpers, her moans, and finally, her convulsions that told me it was over.
And then I told her I loved her. Three words that had been stuck in my throat since the moment I realized I meant them, that those feelings were there. I didn’t give her the chance to say it back, knowing I couldn’t stomach hearing it. It would unravel me, and ruin everything my uncle had worked to shape me into over the last year.
Women are a weakness men like us cannot afford. They only want one thing. Security. That may come in the form of babies, an expensive house, jewelry, or even arm candy. Their one use is always the same. To fuck. Might as well profit off it.
That might as well have been his slogan with how frequently he drilled it into us. For a moment, I even started to believe it. But then I remembered Alice. My sweet, innocent sister. If a man degraded her the way we degraded women, I’d kill him. Slowly. Alice wasn’t like that, which meant Clay was wrong.
Stacy’s voice cut through my thoughts, a hint of unease threading through her tone. “Guys?” she asked skeptically. “Seriously, where are we going?”
None of us said anything, we didn’t need to. There was no pointin pretending anymore. It wasn’t like she could get past Vincent and Mason, and even if she could, she’d die jumping out of the car—assuming she made it that far. Clay wouldn’t send us out on missions if women were able to get the drop on us. He’d think of us as weak and make us do grunt work instead.
“Mason?” she tried again, a weariness to her tone that wasn’t there before. When he didn’t answer her, frantic breathing filled the air. “Dom?”
“Relax,” Mason urged, patting her thigh with his hand. His charming demeanor was gone, replaced with something cold and malicious. He had a talent—the ability to shut it off just as fast as he could turn it on.
Stacy released a nervous laugh, torn between freaking out and wondering if this was all some kind of joke. Unfortunately for her, this was no joke. “Guys?” she tried again. “O-on second thought, I’m not feeling so well.” She placed a hand to her stomach, shifting between the two guys uncomfortably. “I might have food poisoning.”
A for effort. But we’ve heard it all before. There was nothing she could say to get out of this.
