King’s (The King Trilogy #1)(25)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Oh my god. Who else? It was more than a coincidence that there had been four other people that day, aside from Agent Guzman, who’d assisted him.

So King was a ruthless killer? To be honest, I didn’t feel much sympathy for those thugs. Not after they’d threatened to violate me. What bothered me was that King was the sort of person who would and apparently had murdered people. It took a special breed of person to kill. I was working for him.

Shit. Mack wasn’t joking when he’d said that King was dangerous, but what should I have expected? Normal, nice people didn’t go around asking other nice people to be their slaves or brand them like cattle.

Normal, nice people didn’t go around seeing dead people, either. So what did that make me?

Over my head and scared shitless. But I didn’t know what to do. It’s not like I could run away. This dodgy part of town would gobble me up in a heartbeat.

Arno hurried me to the overhang of a small convenience store we’d parked in front of. King was already there, holding open the door.

I stopped and looked up at him. “I think I’ll wait in the car. I’m not feeling well.”

King gripped my wrist, right where he’d tattooed me, and the pressure sent mind-numbing bolts of pain through my system.

“Get inside,” he commanded.

Suddenly, I wanted to do just that. What is happening to me? But that question faded away along with my resolve to escape.

I stepped inside like an obedient dog. The place was cramped, and the shelves crammed with junk food. The floors were grubby, and the plastic panels covering the overhead lights were cracked or missing. What did Vaughn collect? Dirt?

The clerk jerked his head toward us and went back to whatever he was watching on his phone.

Still holding my wrist, King dragged me toward the back of the store through a set of double doors. It was dark, with boxes and garbage piled against the walls so high it reached the mold-covered ceiling.

At the very back of the room was a door with peeling white paint. King opened it, not bothering to knock. “Vaughn,” I heard King say.

I tried to see around King, but he was pretty damned big compared to me.

“King, always a pleasure. And I see you’ve brought me the girl.”

“What?” I miraculously tugged my arm free from King and took a step back but was blocked by several large men holding tire irons. Where had they come from?

They pushed me past King, inside the dank-smelling office with wood-paneled walls and a rotten old couch, which one of the men made me sit on.

“What the hell, King?” I hissed.

“Shut the f**k up,” he said to me and then glanced at the scraggly looking man with salt-and-pepper hair in his sixties, wearing a ratty, old brown cardigan, sitting behind the desk, where tall stacks of disheveled papers leaned precariously toward the floor.

“Do you have what I want?” King asked him.

The man instructed his two thugs to wait outside, then jostled his lips from side to side. “I believe I have located it, yes. And now that I see you have the girl, I will proceed in acquiring it.”

I couldn’t believe this. King was going to barter me away? This must have been his plan all along.

Vaughn made a loud hacking sound and then cleared a ball of sticky phlegm from his throat. “I don’t suppose you’d like to leave her here with me?” He planted his elbows on the desk and opened his pruney, pallid hands. His beady eyes and leathery, yellowish skin reminded me of a snake. “As a gesture of goodwill,” Vaughn added.

King laughed. “I don’t do credit, and I want the Artifact by tomorrow.”

Vaughn laughed and then scraped the edges of his mouth. “I need a week.”

“Two days,” King replied, “or I sell the girl to another bidder.”

That’s when it clicked. Vaughn was a human trafficker. That’s what King had meant by “a collector of sorts.”

The room turned into a mess of red lights swirling over the walls, the desk, the floor, and…my eyes floated down, horrified to see the couch bathed in red. Was that because people had been murdered in this place?

Oh my god, you’re next. I wanted to vomit. Cold sweat broke out on my brow. I leaned forward and braced myself on the edge of Vaughn’s desk.

“She’s sick,” Vaughn said, as if I were tainted meat.

“She’ll be fine. It is just a cold.” King glared down at me with those steely eyes. “Isn’t that right, Veronica?”

Veronica? He’d lied to Vaughn about my name. Was King trading me away to this decrepit monster of a man or was King playing him? I didn’t know.

I looked around the room again. The wood paneling dripped with syrupy red blood that wasn’t really there.

Holy crap. I quickly had to choose between trusting King or calling his bluff with an apparent serial killer who wanted me as a sex slave. I decided against becoming the Bride of Chucky.

I nodded dumbly and then faked a sneeze. “Just a cold.”

Vaughn smiled. “Then I should get a discount. For what it’s costing me to acquire your stupid little trinket, I could buy five just like her.”

“But they won’t have that ass, those tits, and they won’t be virgins.” King gripped my wrist and pulled me up from the couch. “Let’s go.”

Ass. Tits. Virgin. Were those my selling points? For the record, I was no virgin.

We were just outside Vaughn’s office door when his two thugs blocked us. I hadn’t really noticed on the way in, but the two brawny-looking dudes with flabby arms and thick bellies were more mass than brawn.

“Move,” King commanded, his voice pure menace.

I know it sounds strange, but I understood that death was a part of life, and I’d gladly take someone down with my own two hands if it meant saving myself from being murdered or raped. Short of that, I didn’t want to watch anyone die. Yet, as the tattoo on my arm began to tingle, I knew I was about to see it happen anyway.

“Vaughn,” King said, his eyes sharply pinned to one of the men, “are you sure you want this? Because I’m not leaving without the girl, and you’ll have one hell of a mess to clean up.”

Vaughn hadn’t moved from his desk. “I have another proposal. You leave the girl, and we let you walk with only one of your arms missing.”

King quickly glanced at me. “Close your eyes.”

I didn’t want to, but like before, I couldn’t stop myself from obeying him. My lids reluctantly slid over my pupils. The door to Vaughn’s office slammed shut, leaving him inside, I presumed, and leaving us in the dark, disgusting storeroom alone with Vaughn’s two thugs. I didn’t hear screams or any sounds of a struggle. I simply heard a whoosh of air and then two sad little gurgles.