Page 37 of His Sweet Torment
“I’ll never get tired of touching you, beautiful girl,” he said, and kissed her, his tongue caressing hers. She smiled up at him, her eyes alive with desire and mischief.
“Good. Now put that huge cock in me, soldier…”
Dale backed into the door of his apartment, carrying the pizza box and six-pack of beer. He needed an evening of not obsessing over Padme, a night to himself. Damn, he hadn’t even been on a real date in years. He knew some of his friends thought it was because he was in love with Padme, but the truth was, no, he wasn’t. He loved her, obviously, as his partner, his best friend, but he had never thought of her in that way.
He turned on his t.v. to watch the game, and ate his body weight in carbs. Just after eleven p.m., he was napping when he heard the door being kicked in. He reached for his weapon but was too late. The man with the tire iron made contact with Dale’s head just as his fingers touched the grip.
Padme felt a lurch in her stomach and slid from the bed. It was just before dawn and Enver was asleep beside her. The house was silent as she padded barefoot to the bathroom.
She felt another lurch as she reached it, and dashed for the toilet. She threw up, feeling a sweat break out on her skin. God, please don’t let me be sick.She dry-heaved a couple of times, but it soon passed. She brushed her teeth and splashed water on her face, then sat on the edge of the bath. Maybe she was due for her period - she always felt feverish the few days before. She tried to work it out, when she had last had her cycle and then she gasped.No. No way.
It was three weeks late. She had been here on the island for a month and she and Enver hardly ever used condoms because she was on the pill.
Except, dumbass, you’d only just started taking it again the day you found out Enver was alive and that you’d be reunited. Oh fuck.She knew in her bones that it was true.
She was pregnant.
Cold water was thrown on him, and Dale woke with a start, his head screaming with pain. He could taste blood. He opened his eyes. He was in the backroom of some sleazy club, or so he thought from what he could make out. Frederick Ingles sat in a chair, watching him.
“Good evening Agent Fortuna. I only have one question for you, and depending on how you answer it will depend on how merciful I am when it comes time to kill you.”
“Fuck you, Ingles.”
Frederick’s smile was chilly. “Where is Padme Kaur, Agent Fortuna?”
Dale spat out a mouthful of blood. “In the ground where you put her asshole.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll ask again. Where is Padme?”
“My answer is the same.”
Frederick cleared his throat, and one of his goons landed a kick to the side of Dale’s head. Dale groaned in agony but righted himself. “You murdered her, Ingles and you know it. You stuck a knife in her gut then threw her body in front of the seven a.m. to Portland.”
“Hmm.” Frederick leaned forward in his chair. “The only problem is that I know for sure the women you peeled up from the tracks wasn’t Padme Kaur. She looked like her, certainly, she was beautiful and sweet. But it wasn’t Padme. I know becauseIkilled your stand-in. The dead girl was my practice run for how I’m going to kill Padme when I find her. Slowly. Painfully. And you’re going to help me make that happen.”
“Fuck you, I’m not telling you anything. You’ll just have to kill me.”
Frederick stared at him for what seemed an age and then shrugged. “Okay.”
And Dale waited for the killer blow.
The garbage diver moved slowly through the piles of trash, trying to pick out anything he could use or sell or eat. When he saw the young man sprawled unconscious, face-down in the stinking pile, he was certain, for sure, that he must be dead. The guy was covered in blood, for one. The garbage man looked around and poked the dead guy. The dead guy moaned, and the garbage man jumped back, then sighed.
Yesterday, a sympathetic woman had given him some change, and he’d had a hot dog and burger from a street vendor. Now he had just a few cents left. He was going to have to use them to call an ambulance, wasn’t he?
Padme didn’t know how to tell Enver she was having his baby. It was such a bad time to bring a child into the world – as much as they kidded themselves, they both had targets on their back and Padme could not even think of her and Enver’s child being exposed to that kind of danger. She could only be pregnant a month, at most – maybe the best thing would be to get it taken care of before it grew into a human, but they were on an island in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t even know if abortion was legal in The Maldives, or where she could find out.
“Lisa is coming to see us,” Enver said, as they sat at breakfast. Padme was surprised.
“How do you know?”
“We have our methods of communication,” he said cagily, and Padme rolled her eyes and muttered something about ‘James Bond.’ Enver grinned.
“You know it. Anyway, she’s doing the decoy travel thing, but she’ll be here by the end of the week.”
Padme smiled. “It will be good to see her, I have to admit. I assume I’m not allowed to ask her about back home?”
Enver hesitated but then relented. “You can ask – doesn’t mean she’ll tell you.”
