Page 14 of The Prodigy

A taser.

This girl had a gun and a taster. Apinkgun and taser.

Seriously, this family was fucked up. Jakari was a murderer, his bestie just so happened to have zip ties laying around for tying people up, and his ditzy little sister apparently had a gun at the ready to shoot me in the head if I didn’t cooperate.

Sighing, I started walking, leading Jaz to the back door.

There was no way out of this.

I was doomed.

“How’ditgo?”

Jaz looked at her brother and shrugged. That seemed to be her reaction to everything. She just plain didn’t give a fuck.

“It went fine,” she said. “Can I go now?”

“Nah.” Jakari stood and approached us in the foyer. “We got business to discuss.”

“We, who?”

“The family.”

He finally turned his attention to me. His fiancée, apparently.

His eyes raked over me like I was a page out of his favorite book. I shrank back under his gaze, afraid of what he might do. Afraid of what he might say. And, if I’m being completely honest, I was also nervous about…how I looked.

It was so ridiculous. The man was a murderer, and a kidnapper, and I was hisprisoner, but here I was, worried about my hair being out of place and if I needed to freshen my makeup.

I wondered what he was thinking as he gazed at me with those cold, dark eyes. Just like in high school, it felt like he was looking through me.

“Shit,” he said with a sigh. He looked me up and down. “What am I gonna do with you?”

It was rhetorical, but I sensed an opportunity.

“Could you show me to my room?” I said. “That way I can get put my stuff away.” And call my sister for help. My cell was tucked away in my bag, out of sight.

“Yourroom?” he chuckled. “You don’t have a room, sweetheart. You’re gonna have to bunk with me until I figure out what’s what.”

“W-with you?”

“Yeah.” He had already stopped paying attention, his eyes on the man who’d just come through the door. “Go up the stairs and hook a right. It’s the last door.”

I nodded.

“Oh. Let me get that cell phone off you.”

Damn.

I reached past the apple and water bottle I’d thrown in and pulled my phone out. Jakari smirked as he took it from me, his finger brushing my palm in the process. It was an accident, I knew, but that knowledge didn’t lessen the intensity of the tingles that shot up my spine.

---