Pet Read online

  Shit.

  His earlier questions didn’t mention my latest clients, so I thought he’d caught up with me through working his way up the grapevine that led me to that job in the first place. I’d already made the delivery, so I had assumed coincidentally bad timing, on my part.

  Unfortunately, I also default to a coping mechanism I tend to fall back on at the worst possible time, and that’s get snarky.

  “Everyone needs a hobby, you know.”

  Instead of him punching me, which I would expect after a smart-assed answer like that, the man actually chuckles again.

  Fuuuuuck. As hard and deep as the sound of it drills inside me, I’d almost prefer to feel his fists.

  Not to mention, I thought the Magzykidiots were joking about the nuclear material. Had I known they were serious, I wouldn’t have gone near the deal in the first place. Once I took the deposit, however, I was sort of obligated to see it through. At least to give it my best effort. These aren’t the kind of people you jerk around like that. Not when they are closely connected to the son of a Russian oligarch hooked in with officials in the highest levels of the government.

  Besides, do you honestly think I gave them radioactive material so they could make a dirty bomb? No, of course not. They ended up with chunks of iron a buddy of mine coated with some special paint that had enough trace amounts of plutonium in it to make a Geiger counter register.

  I’m apparently suicidal, but I’m not stupid.

  More soft sounds of the man working on his tablet. I don’t understand his methodology here. Unless he’s trying to knock me off-balance emotionally. If so, he’s already succeeding in that, even though he doesn’t know why.

  The silence is preferable to his voice.

  Or that chuckle.

  Maybe my mind’s now fixated on those sounds because it senses I’m close to death. Regrets flow and maudlin memories assail me.

  It’s a lot to process.

  Doesn’t mean I’ll start begging for my life or anything that melodramatic. I have standards, you know. And like hell will I offer up my nest egg in exchange for my life.

  Not worth that much, for starters.

  My life, I mean. My nest egg would likely support a small third-world country for a couple of years. Which, I suppose that is proof positive I’m a dumbass with a death wish. I already had more than enough to comfortably support me for the rest of my life, and here I went and threw it all away.

  Secondly, offering up my nest egg means he’d only keep me alive long enough to get a payday and then kill me. If he’s going to kill me anyway, like hell will I pay him to do it.

  I guess I’ve had a pretty good run throughout my years considering I started life as a throwaway kid who grew up to become a disposable soldier. Making it to fifty-one is an achievement I never dreamed possible when I left the foster care system and enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen.

  That’s after my life almost ended in my twenties in an Afghani desert, too. It was luck and His love that saved my life.

  Serves me right getting caught up in this. When a door slammed shut for good on that past chapter of my life just a few weeks ago, it’s like a switch inside me firmly flipped to “gives no fucks” mode. I’ve been living life like that ever since. Very dangerously, too, given my line of work.

  Taking risks I normally avoid, like accepting this job in the first place when I damned well knew better. But it could have made me eight million dollars. Despite the slightly sketchy circumstances I normally would have refused to fuck with, I opted to go for it.

  One lucrative final job, right? Then I could retire for real this time and decide what to do with the rest of my life and that very hefty payday.

  My line of work’s proven increasingly difficult over the past few years, which is one of the reasons for my semi-retirement. More sophisticated computer systems and CCTV cameras mean surveillance has improved. Facial recognition software and AI can catch you even when you don’t realize someone’s watching. Banks and security forces and law enforcement are linked via computer networks. Thanks to the EU, European passports are damned near impossible to forge anymore without deep connections and a whole lot of money.

  The Pentagon, CIA, and other American alphabet-soup intel services choose to go with pork-barrel contracts that benefit their cronies running “security companies” rather than use lone-wolf freelancers they themselves trained and turned loose on the world to reduce their liability. Back then, we got all the perks with none of the guarantees a formal rank provided.

  Not anymore.

  Now, even the CIA handler I dealt with for a decade won’t return my calls.

  I quit being a young man a long damned time ago, and this is a game for people far younger than me.

  I’m left without a country, without an official history, or a future. Money was the only thing left to me.

  Now, looks like that’s off the table, too.

  Maybe I ignored my instincts on purpose.

  Maybe I hoped to be liquidated.

  Maybe that’s because I wish I’d dropped to my knees on that busy sidewalk in front of that hotel a few weeks ago, wrapped my arms around His legs, and begged him to take me with Him.

  The man sets the tablet aside and lets out one of those “I’m really disappointed in you” kind of big-brother sighs.

  Just like the ones He used to use.

  Well, fuck me. This really is going to be torture.

  “Well, Eddie. Let’s get started, shall we?”

  Fuck. This man truly is a doppelgänger for His voice. I wonder in what other ways he’s like Him.

  I do wish my cock wouldn’t harden like that. He might get the wrong impression of me.

  Even worse, he might get the totally right one.

  Chapter Two

  Then

  Sometimes I’m haunted by memories of kneeling in a colonel’s office, where the air lays so still and thick with cigar smoke that it permeates the pores of every piece of furniture, while the very same colonel rams his dick down my throat and holds the back of my head with one hand, and usually smokes a cigar in the other.

  Related, I’m sometimes haunted by memories of being bent over the same colonel’s desk and holding on for dear life while he fucks me, my knuckles white where they’re wrapped around the edges, while I keep my lips clamped shut against any noises trying to escape.

  If I was lucky, the interludes happened in the evening or late at night, when I could immediately go shower off the stench coating me as thickly as my confusing mixture of shame and need. Or, if I was unlucky, it happened in the daytime and I was still on duty and had to suck it up and try not to puke every time I got a whiff of it on myself, until I could shower and change.

  To this day, the smell of a cigar makes me nauseous.

  Sometimes, the past is rife with the thick and cloying scent of roses and other flowers I can’t identify at the age of four, the starkly conflicting aroma of aftershave and perfume, the sound of soft sniffles and people murmuring to each other and blowing their noses as they file past my mother’s coffin in the tiny and stifling church while my mother’s neighbor holds me on her lap.

  To this day, the sound of an organ playing “Amazing Grace” also makes me want to puke.

  Maybe that’s the place to start, because I likely wouldn’t have ended up in the first situation if the second hadn’t occurred.

  A week following my mother’s funeral, after no living relatives could be located for me, I ended up in the foster care system because my deadbeat father apparently fled the scene when Mom was pregnant with me. I never met him, to the best of my knowledge. She’d married him, though, so she couldn’t really move on with her life without divorcing him first.

  I guess a single mom without a high school education and raising a young child, a woman who could barely keep a roof over their heads, didn’t exactly have the resources to free herself from an absent husband, much less the ability to track his worthless ass down and force chi
ld support out of him.

  She couldn’t even afford a doctor visit when she started having abdominal pain, which turned into appendicitis that killed her when it burst.

  I know little about my family history beyond what’s on my birth certificate, and what fragments I gleaned from our old next-door neighbor, who I tracked down still living in the same building my mother and I used to live in when I was in high school.

  No, I’m not bitter at alllll.

  Why would I possibly be bitter? I have no idea about my family history. I have nothing but a small photo album that I carried with me throughout all my group and foster homes, and most of the people in the pictures are strangers to me. Only a few of the pictures had names and dates written on them. Some of them are of Mom when she was younger, but I guess she had no siblings and she was orphaned when her mom died when she was seventeen. Her father had passed away several years earlier.

  The only reason I know that is because of a yellowed obituary clipping also tucked away in the photo album, but it didn’t include a full date, or any other identifying information, like what newspaper it came from.

  It’s almost like I was born under a bad-luck sign to a cursed family line.

  No, I never took the time as an adult to track anyone down. As far as I was concerned, it was ancient history, and maybe I didn’t want to know anything about them.

  Or, perhaps, they wouldn’t give a shit about me anyway, and that extra rejection wasn’t something I felt eager to pursue.

  I wonder how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t let the recruiter take me out to dinner one day after talking to him in the cafeteria at school during lunch my senior year. At that time in my life, I lived in a foster home that, while far from the worst I’d endured, certainly wasn’t a dream home. They didn’t abuse me, they made sure I had food and clothes, and that was about the extent of their involvement in my life, other than signing permission slips and report cards. If I did my assigned chores, didn’t cut school, and didn’t miss curfew, I might as well have been invisible.

  Meaning a kid like me, someone who’d never known his father, and who was eager for any kind of positive attention, was a sucker for the “kindly big brother” approach the recruiter took with me. I wonder if they’re trained to recognize kids like me, and what tactics to use to reel them in and get them to sign on the line.

  I also wonder if the recruiter laughed his ass off on his drive home after I signed on the line.

  I bounced around various foster homes in the suburbs of St. Louis while growing up. Never went on a family vacation, because—ha, ha—you sort of need a family to have one of those. I thought the Army would be perfect for me, right? Travel the world, meet interesting people.

  And kill some of them.

  Naturally, that part of the equation didn’t occur to me, at the time.

  Neither did the given counterpoint—that many of them would try to kill me, too.

  When I joined the Army, admittedly there were many things I didn’t know about myself, especially after a childhood spent in survival mode. Once I’d graduated from basic and was sent to Germany, I was a literal kid set loose in a candy shop when I wasn’t on duty. For the first time in my life, I had a room to myself, too. A small one, but for someone used to growing up in foster care and sharing a room with several other kids at any given time, it was like staying at an expensive hotel. Didn’t even care I had to share a bathroom.

  I had a door I could lock, things that belonged to me that I didn’t have to share, and money in my pocket I could spend however I wanted to. Being eighteen and on my own in a foreign country with a little pocket change?

  It’s inevitable I ended up in that German nightclub, I suppose.

  My only sexual experience up to that point in my life was fucking my fist in the shower, because I never had a room to myself where I had the privacy to jerk off in bed. I thought I was supposed to like women, and I did, I guess. I didn’t date in high school because I had trouble trusting people and forming close relationships when I didn’t even know if I’d still be in that same school the following week.

  Then there was the whole issue of I didn’t want anyone to know I was a foster kid, if I could avoid it. My experience had been I’d either get picked on, or pitied.

  I know it’s weird, but I hated the second far worse than the first. I guess I spent so much time being pitied in my life, which meant absolutely jack shit in terms of finding me a forever family, or at least a permanent foster family who wasn’t batshit crazy, that I’m deathly allergic to pity.

  Pity’s a boner-killer, too. Seriously, it is.

  How does that all relate to my sex life?

  We all have problems. It’s called “life sucks.” Move the fuck on, already.

  That’s exactly how I survived my childhood but, looking back, I can see it’s not a healthy or solid foundation on which to build an emotionally intimate and satisfying relationship.

  As an adult with some experience under my belt, I can confidently say I’m bi, although after I pushed Him away, and in the wake of the emotional carnage that woman put me through, I tended to avoid liaisons with women, unless it was necessary for an assignment to keep my cover. Especially if they were the least bit dominant.

  Fool me once, shame on you.

  But those soul-shredding events still lay in my future that night as I eagerly make my way into the club. I’m eighteen, wide-eyed, and uncertain. Scared and thrilled, all at the same time. I’d heard about this club after visiting a couple others and seeing things that both excited and stirred feelings inside me. I knew I had to explore those things, or risk self-combusting.

  Everything is new to me, and I mean everything. Hell, I’m still a virgin. Literally, I’ve never been with anyone.

  I guess huddling in a corner screams “nervous newbie” to the woman when she spots me. I’m alone, too, meaning easy pickings for her.

  The long, silky black hair flowing around her bare shoulders catches my attention first. It’s so black it shifts and picks up colors from the various neon signs lining the walls of the nightclub. Piercing, ice blue eyes meet and hold my gaze without any coquettish bullshit, either. This woman knows what she wants, and my eager cock painfully presses against the zipper of my jeans in expectation.

  The leather corset pushing her breasts up practically has me drooling. Her black leather skirt ends approximately an inch above her knees, and those long legs have no problems with the stilettos she’s wearing as she slowly and purposefully strides toward me.

  When she reaches me, she doesn’t speak, at first. She looks me up and down and I’m literally too tongue-tied to say anything. Hell, I don’t know what to say. I’m not even sure if she speaks English and I can’t speak German yet, beyond asking where’s the bathroom. The heels put her almost at my height of six-feet.

  One eyebrow arches in a sexy way that makes my cock pulse. “Sprichst du Deutsch?”

  I swallow hard and shake my head a little. “Sorry.” I already feel like a failure.

  One corner of her mouth quirks up in a smile. “English, then?” Her speech sounds clear, with just a slight accent.

  I nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She reaches out with her right hand, catches my chin with her index finger, and tips my head up, then back and forth, like she’s examining a prized hound.

  How stupid I was, back then. That’s exactly what she was doing. I feel the tip of her perfectly manicured nail dig into my flesh.

  “You will do.” She releases me.

  Yay!

  What a fucking dumb-ass kid. If only I’d known then, I would have run the other way, far and fast, and never looked back.

  Chapter Three

  Now

  The scrape of the man’s chair on the floor tells me he’s standing again. I sense him move around the end of the table, to my right, where he approaches to stand just inches from me. Heat from his body washes through my right arm and that side of my body because he stands that cl
ose.

  Thank god he doesn’t smell like cigars or I’d be puking in this fucking hood.

  There are many ways to die but I’d prefer it not be from choking on my own vomit if I can avoid that, thank you very much.

  I sit there, waiting. What this guy doesn’t know is that I was trained how to patiently wait for what comes next in ways that he likely cannot comprehend.

  Mindfucks?

  Yeah, been there, done that, too, long before I was ever trained in intelligence work, ironically. Literally trained by a master of mindfucks.

  Torture?

  Yeah, well, already been through plenty of that, too. The stupid thing is, some if it I willingly asked for and endured, well past what I should have tolerated, instead of it being forced on me.

  Because I was a clueless and affection-starved dumbass, that’s why.

  My moral compass completely burned out long ago, even before a bullet shattered my leg just moments before a car bomb damn near finished a bunch of us in our unit. Meaning between surviving that and my training both in the military and outside of it, mental tactics which work effectively on the average person tend to fall flat on me.

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m no sociopath, because I do have a conscience. Let’s just say the path my ethics follows has more curves than Stelvio Pass.

  When the man touches one finger to the top of my head through the hood I flinch despite myself, because it’s spooky how the fucker knows exactly the things to do to trip my emotional buttons.

  It’s exactly something He used to do to me, when I was on my knees in front of Him.

  I don’t mean the colonel, either.

  On my lower back, I’m well aware of the delta carved into my flesh there and feel a phantom fingernail trace it. Not accurately, but making the crossbar higher, turning it from a triangle into an A.

  Alpha.