Authors: Lily Harlem
DangeroustoKnow (5 page)
Constricted.
He pulled back from our one-sided kiss. His black gaze
sought mine as he locked his long fingers around my neck.
“Going somewhere?” he asked with a sneer.
He was gripping me too tight. Airflow was not efficient. I
opened my mouth to tell him to let go.
He squeezed even harder.
Airflow was now impossible.
Bucking, I grasped his wrists, dug in my nails and lifted my
knee to bang into his groin.
Nothing.
Not even a wince.
Panic, horror and dread bombarded my system. I couldn’t
breathe. He was strangling me.
I grappled for his face, intent on scratching out his eyes.
He tipped his head back and a cruel smile curled his lips.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
My brain was chugging, my cheeks on fire, and my diaphragm
tugged violently, desperate for oxygen. My eyes widened and bulged as a million
regrets zipped through my mind.
Why?
His grip was viselike. Hard and intense. A ring of iron
around my tender flesh. Black dots invaded my vision. Like ants they marched in
from the periphery. I was going to die. He was murdering me. Jovica was killing
me, here, in this grimy, stinking room.
My time had come.
And it was all my own fault. I’d sought out the danger,
hadn’t paid heed to the recklessness of my actions even though I knew it could
come to this. So intent was I on being a whore I’d risked everything and now
would pay the highest price.
In a last-ditch bid for escape, I stamped on his feet. But
my muscles weren’t working properly. It was a flailing, watery drip of a
counterattack. My body was no longer my own. It belonged to Jovica, my
executioner. No one would ever find me, not up here.
A detached sensation came over me. Strangulation was quick
and it was doing its job. I gave in to the lethargy, the acceptance of death.
Closed my eyes, wishing my last sight hadn’t been my murderer’s face.
As suddenly as he’d grabbed me he released me. My neck at
least.
“Breathe,” he snapped, cupping my chin and tilting my head
up with a rough jerk.
My chest heaved and I sucked in a deep, croaking breath.
Filled my lungs to the max and gripped his forearms for support.
“Breathe, whore.”
I gulped and gasped. The black ants receded. My throat was
on fire; it had been crushed and screamed its agony through every nerve of my
being.
“Oh God, let me go, please,” I begged in a dry voice.
“Do you have any idea what the fuck you are doing?” he
snarled with his teeth bared.
“Please.” My eyes brimmed with stinging tears. “Please, I
want to go home.”
He dropped his head, pressed the tip of his nose against
mine. “I’m not a nice guy,” he said in a low monotone. “Not by any fucking
stretch of the imagination.”
“Please, Jovica, let me go.” I’d read somewhere about using
names. Was it good or bad? I couldn’t be sure.
“But out there are guys who are really fucking horrible.
Evil, depraved men who can think of things to do to you that defy imagination.”
Flattening my hands on his bare chest, I tried once again to
push him away. He didn’t even falter despite my hardest shove.
“These guys would fuck you then tear you up, mutilate you
and make you wish you were dead before eventually, finally, they would put you
out of your misery. Leaving this earth would be a relief. Do you get what I’m
saying?”
Tears streamed down my face. “Please, please, I want to go.”
He tilted his head. “Do you get what I’m saying?” he
snapped.
“Yes, yes.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Then go, but remember this fear. Hold
it in your dumb fucking blonde head. ‘Cause if you don’t the next thing that
happens will be a small ad saying you’re missing.” He stepped back, releasing
me. “You’ve had your fantasy, now go find one of the good guys to play with.”
A sob hiccupped up from my chest and I spun and grasped the
door latch.
I started to open it but he shoved into my back. He spanned
his broad palm over the seam of the door and held it shut. “Do what I say,
‘cause your body would never be found. You’ll have been used and abused and
destroyed like all the other poor fucking whores out there then dumped into the
Hudson.”
Goo from my nose ran into my mouth. Slimy saline coated my
tongue. “Please,” I whimpered, staring at the ashy cigarette mark on the door.
“Please, let me go.”
With a flourish, he released the door and stepped back. “Go.
Get the fuck out of here.”
Chapter Five
My stagger home was fretful and undignified. I could barely
see for the tears in my eyes, and pain sliced through my ankle with each
limping step. But adrenaline sparked me on, past a blur of faces scurrying on
the dark sidewalk. Everyone stared straight ahead, uninterested in a messed-up
whore.
Before I knew it I was stumbling into my building, heart
thudding, and riding the fortunately empty elevator. I fell into my apartment
and froze for several long seconds, expecting someone to jump out of the
darkness and wrap their hands around my throat.
They didn’t.
Quickly I kicked off my heels and hobbled around, pulling
curtains and turning on lights. Four times I checked the front door was
securely bolted and locked. I chased a neat gin with another neat gin then
wrenched on the shower.
Standing beneath the piping-hot water, I let it rain down on
my face. A medley of images from the evening bombarded me. I was stripping in
his grubby room and having my tits sucked. I was gorging on his cock then
rubbing cum into the word WHORE on my chest.
I sponged between my legs and realized how bruised and hot
my pussy was. I could still feel his huge cock shunting in and dragging me to a
sublimely carnal orgasm. An image of the porn film flooded my mind; a tight,
wrinkled rosebud of an anus being breached by a glossy black dick. Hesitantly I
touched my own hole—it too was tender and stung like a bee when I clenched it.
The remembered sensation of fullness had my knees weakening and my breath
coming short. I reached for the shower gel, soaped up a washcloth and wiped it
over my chest, scrubbing and scratching at the ink. The “W” faded quickly, the
other letters more stubborn. I didn’t rub energetically for my skin was
scratched and red, the deep purple hickies evidence of Jovica’s lascivious
claim on me for the hour that I was his whore.
Except it wasn’t just that hour. He’d left a mark on my body
that would last for days.
He’d left a mark in my mind forever.
* * * * *
After a night of little sleep, I eventually drifted into a
fitful slumber and woke at noon. It was Sunday. I had no plans, so after taking
medication for my twisted ankle, slipped into a pale-cream pair of sweats and a
gray cashmere sweater. I tied my hair back and applied a sweep of moisturizer
to my cheeks and a slick of balm to my lips. I wrapped an exquisite silk scarf
from India around my neck, enjoying the sheerness of the soft material on skin
mottled with bruises.
Glancing in the mirror, I paused. Apart from the circles
beneath my eyes I looked like an all-American girl—pretty and wholesome. Who
would have guessed that my chest still read HORE and was bitten black and blue,
or that my two intimate orifices were swollen and delicate and my throat ached
from my brush with strangulation?
I drank coffee and sifted through my emotions. My evening as
a sexual object had been as wonderful as it had been terrifying, as satisfying
as it was distressing. The pendulum of acute excitement and breakneck terror
was a dizzying ride every time I thought of it.
I moved to the window and glanced down at the park. Habit.
My heart picked up, my breath caught. There he was, sitting
on the bench reading a paper and smoking a roll-up.
Gripping my mug, I shifted the net curtain so I could get a
better view. He looked like he had every other time I’d seen him. Dark, shifty,
dangerous. Except now things were very different. Now I also knew his smell,
his taste, the feel of his cock inside my mouth and cunt and ass. I also had
firsthand experience of his volatile strength and the terror he could induce
when he decided to.
Movement in the window opposite caught my attention.
The old lady was looking down at the park too, her gray hair
in curlers, and she still wore her dressing gown.
I gulped on my coffee and wondered if it was too early for a
gin. Probably. I looked back down at the park.
Someone was approaching him. Another man. He wore a short
black leather jacket and a baseball cap. Jovica looked up, flicked away his
cigarette then stood, feet wide, back tense, head ducked slightly.
The man moved in close and Jovica glanced over his
shoulders. Something was passed between them. Jovica shoved whatever it was
into the front pocket of his jacket.
I’d seen this type of exchange before. They were quick, and
Jovica’s body language fizzed with tension.
I sipped my coffee again. Soon Jovica would leave the park.
He usually did after he’d met someone.
Suddenly the shorter guy stepped back, pulled a gun from his
inside pocket and aimed it at Jovica’s chest.
I stared down unblinking. Oh my God. What the hell was
happening?
Jovica reached inside his own jacket.
Out of the bushes, several more men appeared, all holding
guns and dressed from head-to-foot in black. Other park users scattered as the
new men circled and closed in on Jovica.
I’d lived in New York long enough to know they were cops.
Jovica was being arrested.
Several frantic shouts filtered up through the warm air to
my apartment. Jovica was raising his hands and falling to his knees. Elbows
outstretched, head hanging low.
He was outnumbered. He surrendered quickly.
One cop, directly behind Jovica, kicked him in the center of
his back. Jovica’s body snapped forward, instinct causing him to place his
hands out in front as he fell. Quickly the man in the baseball cap leapt over
him. Dragged his arms behind his back and slapped on a pair of handcuffs.
Jovica’s face was twisted to the side on the ground, his big boots spread
sideways at odd angles.
After a few seconds, Jovica was dragged to his feet and
pulled beneath the canopy of trees and out of view.
The other cops followed, weapons reholstered.
It had all happened so fast. One minute he was there, the
next he was gone. My head spun with this new development and I looked at the
old lady. She too was staring down, her eyes wide as she touched a cross
hanging at her neck.
It was over. He was gone.
* * * * *
Jovica’s arrest was a strange finish to my time as a whore,
and I now knew that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I would never do it
again. Fabulously exciting as it had been to fulfill my fantasy, the terror of
being strangled in the pursuit of kink had brought me to my senses.
It just wasn’t worth it.
Even so, over the next few days I scanned the papers,
looking for information on Jovica’s arrest. Any snippet would help find a box
to lock away those erotic and reckless few days of my life.
I’d given up on finding anything when I came across a small,
pictureless column three-quarters of the way through the
New York Evening
Standard
.
Serbian-born Dimitri Slavodob, also known as Jovica Trent
and Borko Dejan, was detained by the NYPD in Lower East Side on Sunday.
Detective Carl Rutter gave this statement, “We’d been watching Slavodob for
some time and gathering evidence. Not only is he an illegal immigrant he was
also a pivotal link in the trade of prohibited arms. His arrest has taken not
just a dangerous criminal off the streets but also a stash of deadly weaponry
favored by mercenaries.”
Dangerous criminal. Prohibited arms. My mind whirred with
these new facts. So that was what he’d meant when he said he liked that name.
He had others.
I thought of the metal boxes in his room, headed to the
kitchen and poured myself a gin. Was that what they’d held, deadly weapons?
Knocking back the sharp drink and pouring another, I
suppressed a shudder. Jovica had told me he was not a nice guy. He’d been
right. Trading illegal guns to the underworld was a noxious profession. I
didn’t dare think of the connections he had, or who some of the other men were
that he’d met.
I touched my throat and slid my hand down my sternum. The
letters he’d marked me with were completely gone. The bruises and hickies had
faded and were barely visible. Tomorrow I wouldn’t need to wear a neck scarf to
work.
With a sigh, I dropped the paper in the trash and drew my
curtains. I didn’t glance down at the park. I didn’t need to. My obsession was
in the past now, my curiosity satisfied, my carnal needs met.
Thank goodness.
Suddenly my cell trilled to life and I glanced at the
screen. It was Richard from work. He was one of three new ophthalmic surgeons
at Bellevue. He was good-looking, charming and always paused to chat. Yesterday
he’d asked for my number, said something about a swanky new uptown restaurant
and asked if I’d like to go.
Jovica’s words rang in my ears.
Go find yourself one of
the good guys to play with.
Perhaps I would take his advice.
About Lily Harlem
Lily Harlem is a multi-published, award winning author of contemporary
erotic romance. She lives in the UK with her husband and a bunch of animals,
all rescued, and loves to spend her days immersed in imagination.
Her books are a mixture of full length novels and short
stories, some are one offs, some are sequels or part of a series (all can be
enjoyed as stand-alone reads). What they each have in common are colourful
characters travelling on everyone’s favourite journey — falling in love. If the
story isn’t deliciously romantic and down and dirty sexy, it won’t be written,
at least not by Lily. So with the bedroom door left well and truly open you are
warned to hang on for a steamy, sensual ride - or rides as the case might be!
Lily welcomes comments from readers. You can find her
website and email addresses on her
author
bio page
at
www.ellorascave.com
.
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Print Books by Lily Harlem
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
Dangerous to Know
ISBN 9781419941368
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Dangerous to Know Copyright © 2013 Lily Harlem
Edited by Jillian Bell
Cover design by Syneca
Photo: Vishstudios/Shutterstock.com
Electronic book publication February 2013
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