“Soren!” She gasps my name and reaches her hand back in a helpless attempt to keep me from spanking her ass. I catch her open palm instead, and she snatches it away quickly. This is not going to be over anytime soon. This is going to be long. This is going to get through to her.
I give her a little break for a moment, smoothing my palm over her bright red ass. I can hear her sniffling, and I know she’s probably crying, but what she’s not doing is confessing.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“No,” she whimpers.
I start spanking her again, enjoying the way her ass bounces. She has a particular jiggle to her delicious little rear, a perfect roundness that I could smack all day and night long.
“That’s a pity, because it means I’m going to have to keep spanking you.”
“I’m not telling you anything!” She’s getting defiant again.
“That’s fine. You don’t need to tell me anything. It’s all going to come out in New York, isn’t it.”
“No! It’s not! You don’t need to come. You can just let me go!” She bursts into helpless tears. I don’t know how much more she can take, and so I slow a little, and then a little more, until I’m holding her in place over my thighs.
“We’re going to New York, little girl,” I tell her as she sobs in my lap. “And we’re going to make this all better.”
11
Aslin
Sitting on the tarmac at Kathmandu airport, waiting to depart, I am not a fucking happy camper. Soren has a superman complex. He thinks he can fix everything. He can’t fix this. He shouldn’t be trying. I think Jason agrees with me on that, but Jason’s not talking to me. He’s turned into a big male sulk.
This is not a trip I want to be taking. I planned to leave the US and never return. That was the whole point of the plan. Now I am being dragged back by the men who I half-trust, half-love, and maybe even half-loathe, though those percentages do not add up. I hate that I am being treated like an object, or a criminal; something for them to move about, a problem to be fixed. My reasons for doing what I did are still unknown to them besides the most superficial. They think I’m just a spoiled little monster with no sense. They think I’m something to be controlled. That’s how men are.
I could tell them everything, explain myself, lay my history bare. But why should I? I do not owe anybody an explanation. Not even these two hunks of prime military beef. And knowledge is power. As a woman, it’s the only power I have. I’ve learned to keep secrets over the years. A lot of them. Giving them up is not going to be easy.
They’ve put me between them. Soren has the window seat. I’m in the middle. Jason bookends me on the other side. We’re going to be traveling for almost twenty-four straight hours, stopping in Dubai. Not really the place a wayward woman like me wants to make a dash for it. I think they chose that route on purpose. We could have connected through New Delhi, or Istanbul and London, or Paris. But all of those places represent an easy skip route. They booked through the one country where an unattended woman is going to have a hard time getting very far.
“Sit the fuck down,” Jason snaps at me.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“No,” he growls.
“No? You want me to pee my pants?”
He’s angry. I wonder if that’s because he thinks I’m a cheater, or if it’s because he just hates how much of an inconvenience I’ve become. He’s been snippy and short since we packed up camp in the wee hours of the morning and sneaked through the village while Luca’s little militia was still sleeping.
And here they are. The same group of mercenaries. I wonder how much Luca wasted on them. I guess it wasn’t really a waste, though. He’s getting what he wants. I’m coming back to New York, and he knows it.
“Oh! Hi boys!” I give a little finger wave as most of those men come filing onto the plane, boarding economy class. There aren’t that many flights out of Nepal. Figures we’d all end up on the same one. Most of them ignore me. Big Dick gives me the kind of brutal stare that should scare me, but it just makes me laugh and flip him off. He’s not a mercenary. He’s one of Luca’s men, and we’ve crossed paths before.
I’ve annoyed a lot of people over the last few months and years. I don’t care. If they knew what I was doing, and why, they might feel sorry for me. And I don’t need that. Sympathy from men is toxic. I’d rather they hated me than felt sorry for me. That’s true even for Soren, who is the only person managing to keep the hard hate out of his eyes when he looks at me.