Page 4 of Lock Up the Darkness

Asher: Your desperation is showing.

Jonah: You’re fucking right. Need you to bring it.

Asher: And I will. Now be a good boy and strip for me. Lock the door too, I don’t want Kill there playing voyeur this time.

He wouldn’t be able to handle what I had planned. He wasn’t exactly vanilla—despite the image he projected to the outside world—but once in a blue moon when I gave Jonah what he wanted from me, it went beyond most people’s tolerance.

Jonah: Gonna go all out?

I could almost feel him salivating through the text.

Asher: Obey and I’ll give you what you need.

Jonah: Yes, Sire.

Sire. Not Sir.

That was the way I liked it.

I wasn’t just some mere boss, the leader of the Hexwood faction of the Infidels.

I was the fucking king.

Taking another drag of my cigarette, I savored the sensation of the smoke hitting the back of my throat as I watched the girl disappear inside the house.

Welcome to Hexwood, little lamb.

Soon she’d kneel to us like all the rest.

2

~Aurora~

Bright pink hair flitted across my vision again.

And then its owner was right in my face as I worked to scrub the tables clean now that the run-off-our-feet portion of the evening was over and done with.

Liza Adams. The most talkative person I’d ever encountered.

Granted I was a stickler for keeping to myself and pretty much being an anti-social shit, but even I recognized that this was excessive.

Since I’d managed to land this server-slash-hostess gig at Fusion, I’d gotten to know way too much about her. It had started off with her informing me of her favorite color, her love of chick flicks, that she was a year younger than my twenty-one years, the fact that she was a fashion design student at Hexwood University, the college I was about to attend to finish up the last year of my business degree. Then it had moved into oversharing territory. I knew when and how she’d lost her virginity, her go-to sex lingerie, the most embarrassing two moments of her life, her greatest fear—spiders.

I had taken this job at the local college haunt for two purposes.

When I’d scouted Hexwood on my first full day here a couple of weeks ago, I’d ignored my true feelings about taking on such a social job. That was the old me, the version that wouldn’t work here, that wouldn’t be able to get the mission done. I could’ve done something online, especially with my security and networking skills I’d spent the last few years developing. But this job had killed two birds with one stone. It put me in a hotspot in Hexwood where I’d be able to gather intel from overheard conversations. And through something just like this, an overzealous chatty fellow employee bending my ear.

Tonight, through all the noise and word vomit she’d spewed my way, I’d gotten the first mention of the Infidels. In telling me about her sexual fantasy, one of them had come up. Killian Carmichael. Her fantasy had consisted of him railing her on the football field while an entire crowd watched. From there, I’d probed very casually and she’d ended up telling me of the rumors circulating about some of the reprehensible acts they’d committed, the places they tended to frequent, as well as an off-campus party that took place every year called the Blowout.

“What’s up?” I asked, as she stood there eyeing me with a shitload of surprise.

“I just can’t believe you’ve never worked this kind of job before. Out of the five of us, you’re already the star server here now and it’s only been two weeks since you came in all new and green.”

I shrugged. “I guess it’s my calling.”

Nah, the truth was that I had a natural gift for picking up processes and instructions quickly, gauging and analyzing new environments, and my spatial reasoning skills were above average. All skills required for this job. And all things I’d been lucky to inherit from my dad.

She slapped her hands down on the table I’d just finished cleaning. “It’s dead in here, wanna get the bar to fix us a drink?”

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