Page 68 of Fearless
He shoved her hand away with a snarl. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
“Elric?” she chirped.
The scrawny man who snatched me at the market walked up with a satisfied smirk. He flipped his gun around to hold it backwards, then slammed the stock into Gunner’s stomach.
“No!” I tried to run to him, but my feet wheeled in midair. My guard held me back like I was weightless as I watched helplessly.
Gunner doubled over, choking on ragged, pained breaths. Corinne grabbed his shoulders to make him stand upright again, then ran a hand sensually over his chest and abs. This time, he didn’t push her hand away.
“You are exactly what my female clientele is looking for,” she drawled with huskiness in her voice. “Good skin. Nice muscles. A handsome face.” Her hand slid into his pants, groping unabashedly as he winced and squirmed, but her guards held him in place. “Nicely-sized dick too. Although there’s still the question of whether you know how to use it.” She looked over her shoulder at me, utterly nonplussed at my horrified face. “What do you think, sweetheart? You want to take a test drive to see if he provides a satisfying experience?” Her hand slid back up his body all the way to his neck, where she grabbed his jaw with a rough hand. “If he knows how to make a woman come, I just might have to keep him for myself.”
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded, tears springing to my eyes. Watching her grope and grab him was too fucking much. His eyes had gone vacant, his mind off somewhere else while she made her dehumanizing assessment of him.
Corinne turned back to face me, her carefully drawn eyebrows raised in smug indignation. “I do this because no one says I can’t.” A manicured hand went to her hip. “Because it’s what I’m good at. Because we all had to resort to extremes in order to survive the Collapse. And because if I didn’t,” she lifted her chin at me, “it could’ve been me chained up for sale and you lording over me, touching a man I love.”
I shook my head, the tears falling freely now and making dark spots on the ground at my feet. “I’d never subject another woman to this. I’d never treatanyonelike this.”
She tilted her head at me with a pitying, patronizing look. “That’s why you’re chained to a rock and I run an empire, sweetheart.”
Twenty-Eight
REAPER
My tires flew over the sand like I barely touched the earth at all. Hades sprinted about twenty feet ahead of me, his paws also barely on the ground. At my back, my club rode in a tight formation with Jandro just over my right shoulder and Dallas on my left. Usually an easygoing smiling pair, each of them wore solemn grimaces as we rode hard.
Dallas wasn’t in love with Mari, but they had grown close and he considered her family. Every man behind me did. We were going to war for her.
I never got eyes on the truck that had taken Mari and Gunner, and judging by Hades’ running pace, that was intentional. Seeing them meant they could see us, or worse, hear us. We could’ve caught up quickly, but since we were going in blind to our enemies, it was better to keep them unaware.
Hades veered us toward a large outcropping of sedimentary rock. He didn’t use words, never unless he told me who to kill, but I understood his meaning all the same, and signaled to my men.
We pulled up the shady side and parked the bikes, cutting off the engines quickly. I swung a leg off just before coming to a complete stop. “Where is she?” I demanded the dog who had run up to my side. “Where’s our girl, Hades?”
He looked at the rock towering over us, placed his front paws against it, and whined. I looked up the steep rock face, as tall as a three-story building, and saw nothing but…rock. I scratched his ears, looking into those deep, dark eyes.
“I don’t understand. Is she up there?”
His head fell back in a long howl that morphed into a bark. The next thing I felt was my ear getting pierced.
“Ow, fuck!”
Horus nipped at my ear again with that crazy sharp beak. Making soft chirps, he released the chunk of rock wall and set those talons into my shoulder.
“Jesus fucking Christ! How does Gunner walk around with you like this all the fucking time?”
“They want you to climb to the top, Reap,” Jandro observed, craning his neck. “I don’t think anything’s up there, but maybe you can see where they’re keeping her.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I stared up at the sheer rock face in front of me going straight up to the sky. “Maybe you two missed the memo,” I said to the animals, “but I don’t have wings, or claws, or four fucking legs.”
“There’s footholds and edges to grab.” Jandro wedged his foot into a little nook in the rock, then pulled himself up a few feet, arms and legs out to the side like a gecko.
“You coming with me then?”
“Better if only one of us fell and broke our neck than two, don’tcha think?”
“Fuck, we don’t have time for this.” I went to my saddlebags and pulled out a set of riding gloves with the fingers cut off. After pulling them over my wrists, I stretched my fingers out and got to climbing.
The first twenty feet or so wasn’t so bad. I made it about halfway up before my dumbass decided to look down.
