Page 33 of Ballistic

The very sound of his name shot another round of bile up my throat that I swallowed back.

When I frowned, Dax crossed his arms. “You mentioned him before. And when you were sleeping.”

“He’s one of the guards at the storage facility.” At a visual of a cattle prod, the chasing burn across my flesh left me flinching. I caught a glimpse of my collarbone, where the phantom pain of those prongs still lingered in invisible markings. “He was one of the crueler ones.”

“Camo pants? Portwine stain on his face?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s dead. So you can lay those nightmares to rest.”

Perhaps he was dead, but the nightmares would never sleep. Not so long as I could still feel his hands on my skin and his whispers in my ear. “You killed him?”

“Just before he tried to drive off with you. Blew a hole in his face.”

Dizziness struck again, and I stumbled back, caught by Dax’s arm clinging tight to my wrist.

“Come lie down for a bit. Maybe we can try smaller bites after you’ve had some rest.”

I let him guide me back to the bed, where I crawled over the cool sheets. Whatever it was that’d taken over my body, commandeering me, needed to leave soon. I didn’t have time to nurture my recovery, not while the men who’d murdered Eden continued to walk free.

I’d track each one of them down and end them as mercilessly as they’d ended her.

After clearing the food away, Dax flipped off the light and settled into his bed, both of us lying silent in the darkness.

A thump hit the wall. Another. Each slam against the divider took on a more rhythmic cadence, until it was clear what was going on in the next room. The faint sound of moaning confirmed it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Dax hammered his fist into the wall, which only incited louder moans.

I grunted a laugh, but something in that sound struck my body in a strange way. My skin itched, palms sweating, as I rubbed them against the cool cotton sheets. Every nerve flared with the need for touch, and my muscles steeled with the craving. The drug may have exited my system, but it’s effects, the conditioning of responding to sex the way I had, still remained present in my head.

I wished for those pink pills as if they were the very air I sucked in to hold my breath, as a new appetite snaked deep into my core, taunting something I couldn’t seem to ignore.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The woman’s heightening screams brought to mind the ones I’d so often heard from the other storage units, and the sickening way we’d become primed into cravings at the sound of them. Turned on by another’s suffering.

Only, the woman in the next room didn’t seem to be suffering, at all. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying the hell out of whatever her partner was doing to her.

I shuddered an exhale, ignoring the tingling ache between my thighs, and clamped my eyes shut. To be sleeping beside a complete stranger, unable to think about anything else, but how it’d feel to have his hands on mine, his lips searching, sucking, tongue in my mouth while he fucked me …. I hated myself. I hated every inch of what I’d become. How I’d been trained to feed off those deliciously intense sounds.

But no matter how badly I wanted to right then, I refused to have sex with Dax.

12

Dax

The sunlight filtering through the crack in the heavy drapes made for an unwelcome invasion. Had the couple in the next room not fucked until three in the morning, I might’ve gotten some much needed sleep, but I was lucky if I’d managed four.

Nicoleta’s sleeping face greeted my eyes when I opened them, her slender leg resting atop the sheet stuffed between her thighs.

Hedonic. Shit, she must’ve been twice as miserable with all that noise next door—one of the worst things about the drug. Had forgotten about that. Yeah, a person could kick the habit, but it took some time for the brain not to crave sex when one of the other senses happened to be titillated by it.

The bed squealed as I sat up, and I turned to check she hadn’t stirred. Like an old man, I hobbled into the bathroom to take a piss and brush my teeth, before nabbing my phone and sneaking out the door, leaving Nicoleta asleep.

Outside, I scrolled through my phone for a number I’d been given by a friend, in the event I needed to dig for some information. He was something of an internet celebrity, particularly amongst the hackers who’d come to idolize him. The phone number belonged to a chick named China who had a penchant for finding shit a Google search wouldn’t pull.

Shit so deep on the darknet, not even the FBI could track it down.