Page 2 of Captive Souls

“Her?” I questioned again. Women were unusual but not unheard of in my role. And the way he spoke of this woman was different. Possessive. My instincts prickled with warning bells.

His smile turned predatory. “Yes. My future wife.”

I didn’t let my surprise show. Stone liked women. He always had them around. Young, shallow, stupid, unaware of how dangerous he was, blinded by his wealth. He used them then discarded them. Alive, luckily. But a little wiser to what the world truly was.

“It’s time,” he told me, as if I’d questioned him. “For me to settle down, make a family.”

Again, I didn’t react, but the idea of this man inflicting himself on a child was vaguely sickening to me. And for me to say that meant something.

“And your wife needs…” I stare off unsure of what my role was to be in this charade, though I could take an educated guess as to why he was involving me. It did not speak of a mutually consenting courtship.

“She needs someconvincingthat marrying me is the best and safest decision for her.” He spoke carefully, reasonably, as ifwhat he was saying was completely sane. To him, it was. “I need you to break her.”

He needed me to scare the shit out of her and let her know that death was the only way to get out of this marriage.

Should I have deemed this deplorable? Absolutely. If I had morals, I’d walk out of the room, refusing such a mission.

If she had to be persuaded to say yes, this woman, hisbride, was probably not someone who had chosen this life.

That should go against my code.

Criminals had codes, fucked-up belief systems that gave justification for what they did. That helped them sleep at night, deluded themselves into thinking they were heroes of their own stories. They didn’t touch innocents, women.

No one in life was innocent.

And women could be murderers, criminals just as well, if not better, than men could.

I hadn’t killed one that wasn’t deserving, but that didn’t mean I had a code. It just meant I hadn’t happened upon an innocent woman I was ordered to kill.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking I was a hero. I knew exactly what I was.

“Don’t kill her, hurt her or fuck her.” Stone’s eyes twinkled. “Not that I have to worry about the latter with you.”

My teeth gnashed together as my blood suddenly turned to acid. I stayed placid outwardly. Stone knew me as well as anyone could, which wasn’t at all. But he did notice things, and he obviously had me followed or watched closely enough to know that I didn’t fuck. Women or men. He’d offered, plenty of times, both women and men, seemingly nonjudgmental of my sexual orientation—he just wanted me to have one. If I fucked someone, had an appetite for something, it was something he could use to control me, manipulate me. But I didn’t take anyof his offers, uninterested in the variety of people he’d either threatened or paid to throw themselves at me.

He’d eventually given up on trying to make me fuck something.

He’d considered that a weakness, my lack of sexual appetite, assuming it must mean there was something wrong with my manhood.

Probably why he chose me for this particular task. I wasn’t a threat.

Not that he thought, at least.

I was always a threat.

He watched me carefully, eyes narrowing. “Is there a problem?” There was a challenge in his question. He was daring me to refuse. Not that I’d face repercussions. It would be a show of weakness for me to refuse.

I didn’t trouble myself with archaic shows of masculinity and mind games within this world. I didn’t need either to show who I was. I could easily say no to this. Stone would likely try to punish me in some kind of way, but he wouldn’t succeed. No one could hurt me or punish me as profoundly as I did to myself.

This was the fork in the road, one that I’d been waiting for. I’d known Stone would eventually challenge the boundaries of this relationship, ask things of me that I didn’t want to do. Kill... That’s all I wanted. None of these benign tasks that made things messy.

It was time for me to part ways. This was a sign. For me to disappear into the ether and find a new path.

“No,” I said slowly. “There’s no problem.”

In a split second, I decided against walking down a different path. Disappearing at this juncture in my life would be complicated. One job outside the norm, one job to continue to delude Stone into thinking his leash was unbreakable... Then it would be back to regular scheduled programming.

I didn’t see any reason to make him stop believing I was anything but his loyal beast.

---