This is how it is with her. Always something she needs in payment, regardless of whatever she may already be gaining. “What do you want, Mother?” I prepare for her to ask for my first-born son. Good job I don’t plan on having any kids.

“Hector Ramirez isn’t the only problem I’ve been encountering recently. A few of my shipments have been seized out at Baker. The DEA have been ramping up their interest in my business transactions the past couple of months. It’s very—ahh!—inconvenient.”

I keep my eyes up, front and center, careful not to let myself get sidetracked. “And you want the Widowers to lean on a couple of people? Get the DEA to turn their attention elsewhere?”

She shivers again. Rico’s hand is quickening under her dress, working faster. He grins at me, though with his lower lip fastened between his teeth, the action looks more like a grimace. Maria Rosa groans, rocking her hips upward. Carnie curls his hands into fists, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he hisses.

I ignore him. “So you want us to lean on someone for you?”

“I don’t…I don’t want you to lean on anyone,” Maria Rosa gasps. “I want you to bring me the agent’s fucking head in a…fucking bag.”

So it’s murder, then. There’s no love lost between the Widowers and the DEA, that’s for sure, but murder? That will draw all the wrong kinds of attention.

“Well?” Maria Rosa demands.

“I’ll need to assess the situation first,” I tell her.

“Ha!” She grinds her hips up into Rico’s hands, her eyes closing completely now. “You’re such a fucking pussy, Rebel. Don’t go shy on me now.”

The irony of that statement isn’t lost on me. I’m hardly shy. I’m sitting here, conducting a conversation with her about murdering a member of a federal agency while she gets finger fucked by her bodyguard. “I’ll give you one day to think on it,” she says. “And if your answer’s no then you can either…agree to ship,”—she’s growing breathless now—“my fucking drugs, or you can handle your problems on your own. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“In the meantime, there’s one more…thing that I want from you.”

“Which is?”

She opens her eyes, lazily glancing from me to Carnie. “Him. I want him to come assist Rico over here.”

Carnie’s cheeks flush. Of all the Widow Makers, he’s the most highly sexed, most fucking reckless when it comes to women. He has a different woman stumbling out of his room every single goddamn morning, and yet right now it looks like Maria Rosa has caught him off guard. “You want me to…you want me to fuck you?” he asks.

“I want you to stick you dick inside my mouth while Rico fucks me,” she informs him. “Now.”

Carnie looks to me, as though I’ll be able to clarify whether this is some kind of trick or not. I simply shrug. “Better give the woman what she wants.” I hold back from pointing out there’s a strong chance she’ll bite his cock off. Carnie’s a reasonably intelligent guy. He should be able to figure out the odds of something really fucking bad happening all by himself. He shrugs back at me, breaking into grin. “This is one royally fucked-up situation,” he says under his breath, but that doesn’t stop him from getting to his feet.

The next fifteen minutes are interesting, to say the least. Carnie pulls his dick out—already hard, no surprises there—and Maria Rosa bends over, hitching up her tight red dress. Rico slides himself inside her, pulling the top of her dress down so he can palm her tits. She’s practically naked, her long, toned body on show apart from the small section of her stomach that’s obscured by her bunched-up dress. Just like she said she would, she blows Carnie while she lets Rico screw her.

Most people would find this situation very graphic. Confronting even. But I know this woman. Her head is perhaps the most twisted place on the face of the entire planet. Because while she’s bent over, letting two people penetrate her body, letting them screw her, she’s screwing with me. She didn’t ask to suck my dick. She wants me to watch. The whole time she’s getting reamed she’s staring at me—she doesn’t look away once.

So I just sit there and watch. This is my life.

Fucked-up shit like this happens to me all the time.

ALEXIS

I end up sleeping most of the day. Maybe it’s because I feel kind of safe with Cade, but I let my guard down. I can’t help it. It’s been so long since I’ve rested. Even when I have dozed, it hasn’t been proper sleep. It’s been like dipping my big toe into a vast and deep lake, too afraid to submerge myself for fear of drowning. Or in my case, being raped. So I pass out in the car and I sleep the sleep of the dead, barely waking properly to eat or stumble zombie-like to the bathroom when we stop.

All thoughts of escape fly out of the window.

Through the mugginess clouding my head, I glimpse at the clock on the dash at some point in the afternoon to find that it’s coming up on four p.m. I think that’s when I realize something’s not quite right. Or it might be later, when I wake to darkness out of the passenger window, and country music playing low on the radio.

I manage four words before I slip into unconsciousness again. “Drugged me, you fucker.” The words bleed into one another, barely audible.

I hear Cade laughing just fine, though. “Sorry, sweetheart. Easier this way all round, I’m afraid.”