Page 64 of Unorthodox
“Max,” she says carefully, as if I’m a man that can be reasoned with, “you don’t want to do this.” As if she has any idea what I want to do.
Two weeks she’s spent in my home, and she doesn’t know me at all.
I offer her a small smile, lifting the nine millimeter, pointed toward the ceiling, so her eyes come to mine. “Get in, or I’ll drag you in.”
She swallows, looking down at her bare feet. Her pants are on, which is a stark contrast from how I caught her with Dante, and I have the sudden urge to rip them off and finish what he better not have started.
But I don’t, because she isn’t worth it. And the past five days I’ve been reminded of exactly why.
Flying down to Culiacan wasn’t on my agenda, but when a man offering for one girl what you’d give your own fucking life for, you get on the plane.
Turns out though, I didn’t meethim.
I met his second, Elliot. I was given nauseating reminders of why this girl in front of me is nothing but property. Something to be bought and sold, in order to save someone that means more to me than anyone else ever could.
If Addison’s future owner is anything likeElliot, she is truly fucked.
I had to hold myself in check, meeting with him. I had to reign in my temper, force myself not to think about Ollie. About the things he could’ve endured the past eighteen years. About what Addison will endure in his stead.
I hadn’t planned to tell her any of that. I hadn’t planned to worry her about things that are outside of both of our control. Instead, I’d planned to treat her well. Maybe even move her into my room until I fly her out to her new home.
Her owner lives in Texas, but as Elliot told me, transferring ownership will be best done in Culiacan. No one will blink at a slave’s screams there.
I had planned to shield her from that truth, and she’d learn nothing of it until I was on a flight back to the States with my brother in tow.
But she’s lost herself the privilege of ignorance.
As she stares at me, defying me all over again, I slip my hand into my pocket, squeeze the king of spades, the hearts replaced since I ripped it up.
For a brief second, I think of those cards.
I think of the system with my family.
Of the way my nightmares would come in waves. Some nights, there’d be none. I’d sleep soundly, slipping into blackness every night.
But some nights, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing my father’s men.
Feelingthem.
Withouthearingmy own screams. How it made them harder. How my father laughed. He watched.
He fucking watched.
“This is how bitches get treated, Maximus. Is that what you are?”
In my dream, as it’d happened in reality, I could feel someone’s hand closing around my throat. Pain like I’ve never known since seemed to rip me apart from the inside out, even during sleep.
“Are you a little bitch, Max?”
And the dreams always ended the same. With my stomach churning, my entire body hot, I’d wake up in the gurney, my father looming over me:“You had to be stitched up. And for what, Maximus?”He leaned down close, his eyes alight with amusement. Before he’d told me about Ollie, he’d said,“You’restilla little bitch.”
The next morning, after the nightmares that kept playing in my head even after I woke up started to fade, I’d be sitting up in the bed I shared with Ollie, staring into nothing. Saying nothing.
I didn’t have the words.
Just like Ollie.
My mother cried for me when she found me catatonic. Pleaded with me. Screamed at me. Shook me. Slapped me. Then, after a few times of the same pattern repeating, she brought home a deck of cards.
