Page 23 of Keeping Her Under (Deranged Highway, #1)

Twenty-Three

By the time Asher rolls up in a car I’ve never seen –stolen or borrowed from a friend– I’ve entered into a state of calm fury. Controlled. Precise. In my right fucking mind.

I slip the two phones into my pocket and step out.

“Who is he?” I ask as I look at the man in the backseat of Asher’s car. He’s not tied up or knocked out, but I know he isn’t an ally. He’s covered in sweat, and there’s a shock collar around his neck.

“Oh, just some asshole wanting to report me for the choices he made,” Asher says cheerfully as he looks up at me from the driver’s seat. His left hand is on the steering wheel. His right is holding up a small remote.

My jaw tightens as I glare at our hostage.

If the fucker wants to hurt my cousin, then that shock collar is the least of what he deserves.

As I slide into the passenger seat, I nudge the black backpack in the footwell.

It’s filled with whatever supplies Asher thinks we’ll need.

I put my seatbelt on, and he takes off, heading further out of town.

“He’s in Mobile,” he explains. “Are we killing or napping?”

“Napping.” The piece of shit doesn’t deserve to die so quickly. So we’ll kidnap him and take him to my house. The basement isn’t soundproof, but my neighbors aren’t close by, and I can leave the TV or stereo on until I can figure out a better plan.

My eyes dart to the man in the backseat. He’s sweating like crazy, leaving enough DNA to be traced by the police. Given my cousin isn’t wearing gloves though, I know this car will either be wiped down completely or set on fire.

“What did he choose to do?” I ask.

“He sucked his stepson off to keep him out of jail. It would’ve been this third strike if I’d arrested him for the meth I found in his car.”

“His stepson like it?”

“Yep.”

I turn around. “So what’s the problem? You’re not related.”

He quivers but doesn’t say anything. I laugh as I understand him anyway. “You liked sucking dick. Now you’re questioning everything about yourself.”

His eyes fill with disgust and arousal.

I raise an eyebrow, easily reading all his signs.

“A traditional Christian who thinks homosexuality is a sin. How original. But yet, you still agreed to suck your stepson’s cock.

” I smile as I see right through him. “I bet you were fantasizing about it for a while, and my friend here” –I keep our relationship secret, not knowing if Asher’s planning on killing him– “just gave you the excuse you needed to act on that desire. And now you want to take your self-disgust out on him? It’s not very Christian of you to pass the blame. ”

“I would never insult the Good Lord with suck sinful thoughts!”

“You said suck,” Asher snickers.

He lunges forward. “I said su–” His teeth snap together as his spine jerks ramrod straight. Spit falls out of his mouth as he shakes hard from the sharp shocks of his collar.

“Fucking hell,” I say as the man slumps in his seat. “Please tell me that’s not an off-the-shelf collar people use on their dogs.”

“It has different settings, and dogs have fur.” He tilts his head briefly to the side. “Not that that will stop them from being traumatized.” He shakes his head. “Some people really shouldn’t have pets.”

I think about the dogs mentioned in Lance’s text. My lips tighten as I face forward again. “Did you run a background check on my guy.”

“Yep.”

“He have any dogs?”

He glances at me suspiciously. “I don’t know. Why?”

“Take a fucking guess.”

He curses, then glances in the rearview mirror. I now know the man in the backseat is dying tonight. Asher was too quick to think about feeding him to the dogs as a distraction.

Hopefully, it won’t come to that though – not because I care about what happens to the man but because those dogs don’t deserve a final meal. They were going to fuck and eat my girl. For that, I’d rather castrate them and leave them to starve.

“He’s the guy with the ball,” Asher says as he parks on the street a block down from a basketball court. The sun doesn’t set for another hour, but the sky is too overcast for me to see his features. My cousin pulls out his phone, taps it a couple of times, then passes it to me.

A white man’s mugshot fills the screen. He has a series of tattoos running down from his left eye, but none of them are gang symbols. He’s nothing but a wannabe tough guy, trying to trick the public into fearing him by making them think he’s all about that gang life.

In reality, if he stepped into either Blood Fangs or Shadow Domain territory with that shit on his face, he would be killed for the disrespect.

No wonder he’s living all the way out here instead of at Summer’s house, which is well within Blood Fangs territory.

She might’ve picked a neighborhood that is full of monsters, but her monster couldn’t reach her.

Or he couldn’t have until she got on the road.

“He was picked up for armed robbery, released on a technicality,” Asher says. “A real gem to –”

Our hostage lunges for the door handle, hoping to get out while we’re distracted. Asher zaps him without even turning around. “I’ve got child lock on, idiot.

“– society, and they say we’re the ones making America bad.”

I don’t point out that we’re about to commit a kidnapping and a murder.

Despite having been born in the US, the two of us were constantly attacked by “real Americans” when we were teens living on the streets.

Asher took all those “scum,” “worthless,” and “go back to where you came from” comments pretty hard.

He’d been hurt at home. Then hurt by his homeland too.

Perhaps that is when I lost the drive to make the world a better place – when I saw it curb stomp the only person I ever loved. Why should I want to help anyone when not one of them had helped him?

“Do you have an idea of what you want to do?” Asher asks as we watch the group of guys play ball.

I glance in the rearview mirror. Our hostage is panting hard as he lies slumped against the seat. My original idea was to just grab Lance, but now I’ll need to think of a way to get rid of this asshole too.

No one fucks with my family.

Passing the phone back to my cousin, I ask, “You know where he lives?” True scum like Lance won’t have his own place. He’ll have found another victim to leach off and ruin. A fucking parasite through and through.

“Yep. His girlfriend’s not far from here.”

A cruel smile spreads across my face.

As we pull onto a rundown street, Asher points at the house we’re going to. It’s nicer than Summer’s, but it could still use some fresh paint and a gardener to attend to the lawn – or at least a cleaner to pick up all the broken glasses and crumpled cans.

I twist around to face our hostage, making sure his seatbelt is on. He doesn’t have any fight left in him to even glare at me. The pain in his hazel eyes shines bright beneath his grey locks.

“We’re good,” I say through my Halloween mask. Asher and I put one on a few streets back, taken from the backpack at my feet. He’s wearing Jason; I’m wearing Michael. Both of us are wearing gloves.

He revs the car and aims straight for the mailbox at Lance’s girlfriend’s house. The crash shoves us all forward. The post cracks in half. An explosion of dog barks adds to the noise as he continues up the gravel drive. He parks in front of the door, then grabs the bag from my footwell.

As the two of us step out, multiple people on the street look over at us – only to immediately jerk their eyes away.

Mothers hurry their children along the sidewalks.

Doors open as parents shout at their kids to get inside.

Even the men walking around pick up their pace and disappear.

You keep your head down in this part of town.

You see nothing, and you sure as fuck don’t say nothing.

As we walk to the front door, the dogs’ barking turns into snarls. The hostage stops behind me, but Asher shoves him forward. His feet drags through the gravel.

“They’re out back,” my cousin assures him. The barking is too sharp to be coming from inside, and I can hear multiple chains rattling across the ground.

“Hello?” I call out as I rap on the door. “We hit your mailbox on accident and want to pay –”

The door is yanked open by a skinny blonde in a red bra. “What the fuck –”

I shove her back hard enough to trip her over. She hits the ground on a scream, and I move in quickly so the other two can come in behind me. Asher shuts the door. The click of the lock is barely heard over the barking dogs.

I kick her in the kidney, then reach down and grab her by the hair. Yanking her into a sitting position as she cries, I drag her towards the back of the house, to where I assume is a bedroom.

“Stop! Stop, please,” she begs, but she got in bed with the dirty fucker who hurt my girl. There will be no mercy for her.

Her feet kick the tattered lino. Her hands fight at mine, but she’s too weak to stop me.

When I reach her bedroom, I let go of her and step back. She instantly tries to climb to her feet, but I shove her again, this time toppling her onto the bed. I climb on top of her and wrestle her up the crumpled sheets.

“Please… please don’t,” she cries.

My cock grows hard as she squirms against me. Anger turns my vision red. Even though everything about this fucking bitch disgusts me, my body is still responding.

Sitting up, I punch her in the face.

She instantly stills on a whimper.

But I hit her again.

And again.

And again.

Taking out all my self-fury on her until Asher pulls me off.

I breathe heavily as I turn to face him. He looks at me with too much understanding. This isn’t the first time he’s had to reign me back in. He knows the thoughts in my head. Knows the demons that seek to pull me down just as easily as those men did my pants.

“It’s okay,” he says as he squeezes my shoulder. “Let me take it from here.” He places the remote for the collar in my shaking hand. “Help me keep an eye on him, will you?”

I nod stiffly. I look down and see the blood from her busted cheek on my leather glove.

Then I look at my hard cock pushing against my pants.

Gritting my teeth, I conjure up the image of the S branded into my flesh, using it to calm the rest of me down.

Summer is here for me, protecting me just like I am protecting her.

Finding my control again, I move away from the bed and watch my cousin at work.