Prisoner (Criminals & Captives, #1)

by Annika Martin

“Here’s the class schedule. You’ve missed two assignments, but it’s no more than a few paragraphs of writing.” I explain the assignments—the meaningful event and the non-meaningful event. “We’ll be doing exercises for a few weeks and then choose one exercise to polish. Toward the end we’ll create a journal to be published online and in print, full of our vignettes.”

She stands there behind her fortress of a briefcase. Books, briefcases, glasses—it all just makes me think about exposing her, stripping her, making her helpless. She’d hate it and love it—I know that for a fact. It’s like I know her even though I never saw her before this week. My mind goes to the glasses. How well can she see without them? I’m hoping not well at all, because it would be hot if I took them away. Hot for me and also for her. And then there are blindfolds. Snap out of it. I’m here to be the perfect student. I should be focusing on her silly assignment, listing objects.

That was one of the things I would daydream about after they took me away. I start my list: Water bottle next to a chain-link fence. A piece of glass that is perfectly sharp on two corners, but with soft ridges on the other corner. Flattened Taco Bell cup full of ants. Right-handed mitt. Mike’s hat for first base. My shoe for second base. Scrubby dandelion in the dust.

“All right.” There’s no censure in her voice. I want there to be censure. “He’s disruptive?” “Not really. Even though he’s sitting in my chair. He took over my chair.” I stifle a smile. He really is kind of brazen. “And your class? Has he taken that over too?” “Not really.” Not the class. More like my mind. Even my body. He keeps popping into my thoughts in a sexual way, and I’m not really a sexual person. Don’t have time for that sort of thing, anyway. “The prisoner… Grayson…he’s a good student. He’s magnetic, persuasive, and clearly very intelligent. A bullshitter, though. But even his bullshit is…haunting.” “How so?” “With the other students, their stories were boastful. Lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

The sound of my name from her lips makes me tense, just like always. I never get tired of those pencil skirts. Does she know how the fabric hugs her? She couldn’t look hotter in a goddamned bikini. I want to run my hands over her hips, tracing her shape through the fabric. Wouldn’t even need to undress her. I could come just from that.

She heads to the side of the room. “Today we’re going to journal with a prompt,” she says, adjusting her glasses. It didn’t take me long to figure out they’re her protection, the way she pushes them up on her nose when she’s nervous, shifts them while she thinks. “Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you’re falling. Is there a parachute? Where are you falling from? What do you see on the ground? How does it feel?” I close my eyes and imagine my hand sliding underneath her tight skirt, between her legs. Two fingers working the fabric of her panties over her clit. It’s become an obsession of mine, all the ways I could make her come without really touching her.

“I’m done helping you.” I look away, scanning the area for guards, anyone. He sighs as if I’m making his life difficult. I want to punch him. Something hard presses against my ribs. Fear clenches my throat. I glance down, already knowing what I’ll see. He’s pressing the gun right into me. A shot at close range from a weapon that large? I’m no expert, but I know that means death. He’s going to kill me. Tears spring to my eyes—tears of humiliation and horror. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” he growls in a tone that chills me to my toes. “I said drive.”

“See, here’s something for you to ponder,” I say to her as the fields flash by. “You’re smart, so you need to be thinking what you are to me right now. Do you know what you are to me, Ms. Winslow?” Fear lights the fine, sharp features of her face. Her thoughts have gone dirty. Like I might rape her. The rims of her big, brown, frightened eyes are smudged with makeup. It’s a good look for her. I wonder if Ms. Winslow understands that to the outside observer, fear and arousal look like very much the same thing.

Just a little something I picked up back in the days of basements and rats—that it’s best not to show any fear when guys older and stronger than you are thinking about having a little fun, because when really sick motherfuckers see any kind of life there—fear, anger, happiness, anything—they want to fuck or beat it out of you. Then again, when you act dead, they want to get you lively, and that’s never good, either. Tidbits that didn’t go into the vignette. The rat’s name wasn’t Manuel, of course. The rat had no name, and he never came back, either. I told myself he found a better gig, and I really did believe it. I still believe he got away. But if I’m real honest, I know I need to believe it. I need to believe at least one of us came out of there okay, and it sure as hell wasn’t me or Stone or any of us.

Oh God. Nicely. Correcting my grammar even at gunpoint. I’m so fucking hot for her, I think I might burst into flames.

He breathes again, as if to demonstrate. On the next breath I match him. Soon we’re breathing together. It’s strangely intimate, like we’re two wounded creatures under the forest canopy. It’s almost like dancing. Almost like having sex.

I can’t run now, even though it’s what I want to do more than anything. But I already found out what happens when I run, and it’s not pretty. He’d catch me. He’d punish me. Or maybe he’d just make me come again. Plus, he really might kill that kid. I have to be smart and not let fear take me over. Wait for my chance. I won’t get many of them. Later, when he’s sleeping, that’s when he’ll be vulnerable. He comes back and gets in. His smirk makes me itch to hurt him. “Good girl,” he says. Oh, I definitely want to hurt him.

“Take me out. Do it nice.” She squeezes her eyes shut. And it’s like that electric line from class is still connecting us because I can feel her caving in to me, now—I recognize it with a rush of emotions I can’t define. She moves her hands down to my pants. I watch as her nimble fingers undo my button, and then my zipper. “Nicely,” she says. “What?” I ask, heart pounding. “Do it nicely. The word is nicely, motherfucker.” Oh, Jesus. She’s pulling me out and I almost come right there.

She’s on her stomach, head resting on one arm, hair a dark halo around her pillow. I tuck her in tighter, but it’s too much, too tight, and she stirs. “Grayson,” she whispers. Then she fights her way out of her cocoon and finds me, nestling her head into my chest. My arm goes around her, and she snuggles into me. “Don’t let go,” she whispers, and my heart surges. “I won’t,” I whisper, pulling her in and kissing her forehead. She presses her body alongside mine, and I drink her in, cock like steel. “Grayson,” she says, and she kisses my neck. She doesn’t really want this. It’s the drugs making her soft and desperate. But when I look at it in a certain way, it’s as if she does want me.

I wake up with a pounding headache…and a light tugging on my ankle. With effort, I keep my body relaxed but not unnaturally still; that’s the trick to pretending to sleep. I learned it early on as a kid, not that it did me much good. The bed shifts slightly as Abby sits up. She pushes the covers aside. The slightest tug and a whisper of air tell me she’s trying to untie the string. I stay very still and let her do it. The string tickles my skin as her end of it falls to the bed. She makes it to the door before I spring up and push her from behind, pressing her into the wall with my body—not hard enough to hurt her. Just hard enough to send a message. I clench my fist in her hair and pull back. I wrap my free hand around her neck and squeeze gently, to get her attention. “Good morning,” I whisper in her ear.

Will you live that long? I can’t ask the question. He seems to hear it anyway. “Whatever happens, don’t stop. Just drop me there and leave.” “A hotel is your safe house? Grayson?” He goes limp. I think if he dies, I might just keep driving forever. North past their hotel. Past the Canadian border. I’ll drive right off into the Arctic Ocean because I can’t deal with another dead body beside me.

“You want me to kill you, Mr. Fifteen Minutes? You go ahead and give me an excuse.” That speeds him up. It’s all coming back to me, like it was in my bones the whole time—the fuck you attitude. The confident command, just an edge of bravado to keep them off balance. It’s the way my mom faced down a big dealer one time. The way muggers talk when they’ve got you far from help. He gets on the ground, right on my X like I told him, staring at me, eyes full of hate through those thick lenses. Is he just waiting for his chance too? “Give me your glasses,” I say.

These guys can’t stay awake forever. I still have money from the robbery. I can get away. I’ve survived too much already; I can survive this too. But God, I’m so tired. I curl up next to Grayson and start to drift off. I feel a light blanket over me before I fall asleep.

Not my Abby. She has to speak in library words as she gives me the hottest, dirtiest, smartest blowjob on the planet.

And so I do the only thing for her I can: I force myself to stop following her. I do what I promised I never would: I let her go.

You said you were strong enough. I am strong enough. Strong enough to motherfucking love you.

To touch him. But I know that’s what the Feds want—for me to contact Grayson and lead them to him. They can rot in hell waiting.

Then the floodgates open. I have too much to say, about my mother. About all the times I waited for her and she never came for me. About the forgotten birthdays, but there was also the soggy mush of a birthday cake she made me when I was six. Or the five-dollar bill she would leave on the counter every time she left for a bender because, even when she abandoned me for the drugs, she wanted me to eat. About the way she looked when my stepfather lay dying on the floor, both pleading and resigned.

If I was a good man, I’d let her hide. I’d let her look out the window while I fucked her, the view pretty and vacant. Her skirt is flipped up, exposing her bare ass. I could jack myself off inside her cunt and then let her get back to her journal. But I’m not a good man, and I’m not going to let her hide.

My balls draw up. I’m seconds away from coming. I won’t be able to hold back, so I make the most of it. I grasp her hips and she wraps her legs around me. Then I lift and rock her hips in both my hands, jacking myself off with her cunt in the coldest, rudest way possible.

It’s scary sometimes, how deep I feel that. “Remember what you said? When a person tells their story, it helps to heal them. To make them whole.” She raises her eyebrows. “And right after, you said that some people can never be healed,” she teases. “Can never be whole.”

She shifts around and snuggles against my chest. I wrap my arms around her like a wall against the world.