Ghost (Boston Underworld #3) - A. Zavarelli Page 0,5
All but me.
Four angels. Seven days.
A grunt. The man behind me finishes. I collapse. Another takes his place soon after.
Flickers of my foster dad swarm my vision. This man smells like him. Like tobacco and stale sweat. The song plays through my mind again and I sing along, trying to block it out. I need another pill. I need the whole bottle.
“So very sweet.”
It isn’t this man’s voice. It’s my foster dad. Number one. He was the first. He won’t be the last.
I count the lines and time holds me captive. I don’t know time anymore. It’s distorted. Days, months, years, minutes. They are equal to me. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I never know how long it goes on for.
The only thing I know for certain, is that at some point, the sweaty pile of human garbage behind me changes. This one tries to get rough with me because he can’t get his whiskey dick to cooperate. I don’t make it any easier on him, and after throwing me against the wall, he leaves the room, unsatisfied.
The next one murmurs in my ear as he fucks me. He is gentle, fucking me like a lover would. Halfway through he reaches down and touches me, trying to get me off. It makes me want to puke and it’s completely pointless. I feel nothing. Nothing but the void.
He leaves the room and I lie in a puddle of sweat and semen, wondering where the next man is. There’s always a next one and this one is taking forever. I want it to be over so Karolina will give me another pill. The door opens again, and I wait.
But he doesn’t approach me. He watches me. I feel his eyes on me and I don’t know why. Why is he dragging this out? A prickling sensation crawls along my spine and time suspends in the long stretch of silence. There is an unfamiliar urge inside of me to cover myself. To hide my body in his presence. I don’t like his eyes on me. I don’t like anyone’s eyes on me.
Not like this.
Finally, there is movement. And my heart-rate calms as his shoes clip across the cement floor in my direction. I think he’s going to fuck me now. And then he will go, like the rest of them.
Only he doesn’t. He stops just above me. And it’s the scent that always hits me first. That’s the one thing I notice about these men I don’t look at. This one smells good. Earthy like warm oak and spicy like cloves. He is too clean to be in this filthy room. I know it right away.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse his shoes beside me. Black leather oxfords. Polished and well cared for. Knots tied with precision, peeking out from beneath gray twill trousers. Expensive.
I’m curious. And yet my eyes resist the urge to travel further. Until he commands it. It’s not the command itself, but the deep accented voice that I recognize. The voice with the hard consonants and soft melody. A contradiction.
That voice, I’m certain, is the same one I heard two nights ago. When Arman was eating dinner and the doorbell rang out. Arman never greets company in the middle of dinner. But that night, when one of his men came barging in, he did. Whoever had arrived that evening was important. This man had power over Arman, which made me curious. In this castle, Arman is King. And I’d never seen him bow to any other.
But on that evening, he did. He graciously allowed for the interruption and even offered for the stranger to dine with him while I sat on the floor. The man declined and chose to stand for the few brief moments he was there. I wanted to glance up at him even then. But that was breaking my own rules. I never look at them. So instead, I focused on his shoes. Black oxfords. And listened to the voice. Deep and melodic. Unmistakably Russian and laced with warning. A warning that Arman didn’t seem to like.
He left, and I pushed the whole incident from my mind.
But now my resolve has abandoned me. So my eyes travel up. And up, and up, and up. He’s tall, this man. Taller than most. Much larger than Arman. And that pleases me.
I wonder if he’ll kill him. I wonder if he’ll let me watch.
He looms over me, his shadow eclipsing my much smaller body