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  CAPTIVE

  Trevion Burns

  CAPTIVE

  Copyright 2017 © by Trevion Burns

  Edited by: Bare Naked Words

  Website: www.trevionburns.com

  Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/bAz7oj

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

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  Also by Trevion:

  The Revenge Series:

  Quiver: Number One

  Tingle: Number Two

  Purr: Number Three

  Yearn: Number Four

  Pulse: Number Five

  Raw: Number Six

  Rouse: Number Seven

  Captive: Lincoln Hill’s Story

  Stereo Hearts Series:

  Stereo

  Encore

  The Romanovsky Brother’s Series:

  Taming Val

  Claiming Roman

  Loving Leo

  Finding Gary

  The Almeida Brother’s Trilogy:

  Lila's Thunder

  Thunder Rolls

  Lightning Strikes

  Stand Alone Novels:

  Captive

  Dead or Alive

  To Jase

  1

  Lincoln Hill never imagined himself the kind of man capable of kidnapping an innocent woman, but after watching his beloved wife draw her last breath in his arms, all bets were off.

  A sob left his lips as he sank into the street with Lisa in his arms, teeth chattering as he frantically tried to cover the bullet wounds gushing blood all over her white dress. Every wound he covered, it seemed, caused another to bleed more profusely, making a new piece of his heart shatter to a million pieces. For five years he’d dreamed of the day when he’d finally hold her in his arms again, but he’d never imagined it would be like this.

  Searing heat crept up his chiseled cheeks at the memory, invading his tan skin and painting his face beet red. He forced his heated green eyes closed, hoping the black world behind his lids would erase the vision of her bleeding to death. Of her skin growing paler with every strangled breath. Of the rasping coughs that had given rise to a geyser of blood gushing from her lips, staining her pale skin. Of the final, violent shudder of her body in his arms as the last wisps of life finally left her.

  He drew in a sharp breath that burned his chest, eyes blinking back open, accepting that there was no escape from the images of that horrific day, playing on a loop in his mind. Tightening his callused fingers around the binoculars in one trembling hand, he cracked each knuckle on the other. Each crack rose to the vaulted ceilings of the gutted mansion and echoed off its empty walls. He shifted to the very edge of a beige metal folding chair he’d placed in front of the tall domed window in the corner.

  Wires sprouted from power outlets at every turn in the desolate room lined with exposed wooden beams and topped by a halfway demolished ceiling. Piles of dirt and debris covered the mangled floors, and a historical, British-style tufted sofa sat abandoned in the middle of the room, alerting Linc to the fact that this had once been someone’s opulent living room before the foreclosure that had left it all disarray, making it look like a bomb had gone off.

  A lacerated hole in the ceiling now served as a makeshift skylight. Moonlight petered in from the night sky overhead as well as the tall window he sat in front of, causing the natural highlights in his wavy brown hair, falling well past his collarbones, to amplify. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward on his jean-clad knees, chest heaving under his black t-shirt in anticipation, the way it always did at this time of night, when the end of the hour was near.

  He checked the watch on his wrist before bringing the binoculars back up to his eyes. Through the dirty window before him—with a hole smashed into it, causing a ripple effect along the glass that he always felt resembled the shattered state of his heart—was a perfect view of the sprawling white mansion that sat across the street. His binoculars amplified the estate that sat nearly an acre away, bringing his field of vision so close to the hundred million dollar residence—which always reminded him of an eighteenth-century castle—he felt like he was standing at the front door.

  He squinted into the binocular’s eyecups, the objective lenses blurring and then re-focusing as he moved them along the armed guards that manned the twenty-foot concrete gate surrounding the property. Several snipers manned the rooftop, and a guard was stationed no less than every ten feet on the ground. All stone-faced, they scanned their surroundings without relent. They were scattered strategically all over the home’s one-hundred-and-thirty-foot garden and along every peak and valley of the luscious green land that seemed to stretch on for miles.

  Linc took them all in, the way he did every night. A new shot of fury blasting through his body, the way it did every night. He’d learned, months earlier, that there was no way inside that house without engaging in a deadly altercation with the hundreds of goons that protected it like Alcatraz.

  Nostrils flaring, he shifted the binoculars to London’s largest mansion and lifted them up slowly. Stopping at the second story, he lingered on the unveiled window of a massive walk-in closet. A long, lean ebony goddess greeted him beyond the window in the closet that had been decorated in all white, its brightness amplified by glaring white lights that made the room glow. She glowed, too, all five feet eleven inches of her, and bore the face of an angel. She was standing patiently atop a small podium—her long ballerina arms stretched wide like an eagle, moments from taking flight. A tailor kneeled at her feet with a sewing needle trapped between his teeth, fitting her into a glimmering gold evening gown that hugged her curves to perfection.

  The very gown, Linc assumed, she’d be wearing at the gala that evening.

  His stomach tightened.

  He abandoned the closet, knowing the most important time of the night was coming any second. And it did. Mere moments after he’d settled the binoculars on the top floor of the mansion, where a small window sat in a lone room at its peak. A window, that, to him, shone brighter than all the rest. Right on schedule, a flash of curly blonde hair breezed past the window, so quickly a single blink of his eye would’ve caused him to miss it.

  But Linc never missed it.

  The pulse in his wrist picked up speed and surged quickly throughout his body, causing his breath to come up short and his palms to grow damp with sweat. That curly blonde hair was there and gone in a flash, but its residual effects lingered much longer inside him. Every muscle in his six-foot-five, twenty-two-pound body clenched to the point of breaking, and a slow quiver crawled up his every bone as well. He lowered the binoculars from his eyes, seconds from shattering them under the violent squeeze of his fingers. Instead, he let them thud to the floor. Their heavy aluminum body caused dirt and dust to rise up from the floor and float through the air.

  Just as the binoculars hit the floor, he seized the yellow stuffed bear that had been resting between his legs. A bear he’d found in a toy shop on Oxford Street, months earlier. His big hands nearly swallowed it whole, clenching the bear so tightly that the stuffing inside was in real danger of popping out of
the bear’s smiling lips and beady eyes. He closed his own eyes—another foolish attempt to escape the memory of his wife’s beautiful face, and the deep love that had always shone in her gray-blue eyes whenever she’d been looking at him. The same love that had petered out of her slowly, like a clogged drain whose plug had been pulled, until no life had remained.

  His heart caught fire as his eyes flew open, glistening under the strike of the moonlight.

  No.

  There was still no escape behind the closed lids of his eyes. No salvation. No peace. He would never feel peace again. Not until he’d fulfilled Lisa’s final request. Her last, desperate plea before she’d drawn her last breath.

  “The last time I saw Emma, she was in London…” Lisa fell into a fit of coughs again—but no blood came that time—driving her to choose her words wisely. “Find her. Save her. No police. Just you. You have to… get inside… and do it on your own.” She heaved softly. “Do you understand?”

  The skin between his eyebrows bunched together as Linc clenched his teeth and tightened his hands into fists—putting the yellow bear in grave danger once more—his squinted eyes never moving from the house across the street.

  He did understand.

  Completely.

  He intended to fulfill the unspoken promise he’d made to his wife, nearly a year ago, moments before she’d drawn her last breath in his arms.

  And he intended to fulfill it tonight.

  2

  Across the street, below the flash of curly blonde hair on the mansion’s highest floor and the expansive walk-in closet where the lady of the house prepared for the gala, sat a mammoth cellar. Stretching from one end of the palatial estate to the other, the basement hadn’t been decorated in all the finest trimmings like the rest of the house had, left instead in the exact state it had been when the home had first been built, hundreds of years earlier. The stairs against the farthest wall boasted its original dull oak wood, its body crying out against the white porcelain tiles that lined every wall. Black floors gave the feel of a cold, empty warehouse and stretched the entire length of the basement. Exposed metal air conditioning tubes lined the walls, their vents sending a steady stream of cool air gushing into the humid space.

  In the middle of the basement, so far removed from the only entry it would take five minutes of walking for any entrant to come upon them, sat two tall, black steel cages. The kind used to transport lions and elephants traveling with the circus. A dull light overhead hummed down onto the cages, casting a yellow spotlight around them in the otherwise pitch-black cellar. The steel enclosures sat side by side, connected by a latch at their bases.

  Inside one of the cages, a naked man had curled his trembling body into the farthest corner of the confinement—his knees pulled deep into his chest. The chatter of his teeth filled the quiet basement, and his damp black hair was glued to his gleaming forehead. The light shining overhead made his pale sweat-slicked skin appear almost see-through. With unblinking gray eyes, so wide they seemed to be glued permanently open, he looked upon the cage directly beside his, where a python sat in wait.

  The snake had curled its twenty-three-foot body into a cone-shaped pile in the middle of its cage, the tip of its snout barely visible from where its head poked out from the top. Its forked pink tongue darted out to lick the air, hissing intermittently. Though its vision was notoriously poor, the snake seemed to look dead at the naked man in the cage beside his. As if it could smell his fear. Its head and neck slithered, almost in delight, causing a ripple effect along the smooth dorsal scales that covered its entire body. The geometric black and gold pattern rolled as the muscles moved slowly under its skin, making its body sway as smoothly as a belly dancer’s, distorting the diamond shapes of the scales that pitted its frame.

  Between the two cages was a hatch—a small metal door—just big enough for the python to fit through in the event it was ever opened.

  The man’s wide eyes flew away from the snake and landed on the three men standing outside the cage.

  “Mr. Mayor, please. Malik,” he cried, making a last-ditch attempt at congeniality by using his captor’s given name. “Please. It wasn’t me. I would never rat. You have to know that.” Nothing but blank faces looked back at him, and his pleas moved to sobs—every word more indecipherable than the last. “You have to know that…”

  Outside the cage, Malik Ali blinked slowly, running the beds of his slim fingers along his plush pink lips. Silence dominated the basement as he moved his touch along the baby-smooth skin of his chiseled jaw, over his high cheekbones, and along the bridge of his nose. He took the time to sweep his steady fingers over both of his thick eyebrows, the same jet-black color of his perfectly styled hair. Unlike the quivering man before him, Malik’s dark brown eyes were wide by nature—not out of blind fear—making him look perpetually excited or surprised. Sometimes his eyes bulged at random, making them expand almost cartoonishly, an involuntarily flinch that he hadn’t been able to control since childhood.

  Malik’s eyes bulged right then as he smoothed the black tie of his suit, the silver band on his ring finger gleaming under the dull overhead light. Two men, twice his size, stood behind him as the hiss of the python continued to waft into the air. Malik lifted his hand, the overhead light flashing across his silver wedding band as he did, and gave a swift snap of his finger.

  The snap prompted the man on his left, dressed in all black, to step forward, approaching the cages and seizing the long black stick leaned up against them. Stick in hand, he approached the area where the two cages were latched together, bent down, and stuck the stick inside the metal bars, pulling open the small hatch that separated the cages.

  “No!” Tears spilled from the man’s beet red eyes. “Malik, please don’t do this. I didn’t rat. I didn’t rat…” He pushed himself deeper into the rails as the python began to unravel its tightly coiled body, but he was already as far into the corner as he could get.

  Malik’s voice came, conversationally, his British accent a stark contrast to the weeping American before him. “Did you know that most snakes who use constriction to kill their prey are non-venomous? I always found that quite interesting.”

  The caged man didn’t seem interested, too busy sniveling as the python uncurled itself, the weight of its body hitting the floor so heavily it made the pen rattle, and began slithering toward the small open door that separated them.

  “This one here…” Malik continued speaking as if nothing was out of the ordinary as he motioned to the snake gliding toward the open door. “She’s called Princess.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” the man wheezed, clawing his nails into the concrete floor of the cage, still kicking his long legs as if that would somehow help him climb out.

  The python’s head jutted inside his cage, and he leaped to his feet with a wail, taking the railing behind him in a grip so tight his knuckles whitened.

  A slow smile grew on Malik’s lips, giving his face a charming glow that made him look decades younger. “Princess is the second largest snake in the world. Did you know that? Twenty-three feet. Three-hundred-pounds. We captured her with a fully-grown antelope in her belly. A right monster.”

  As if co-signing Malik’s story, almost taunting the man before her, “Princess” lifted her head from where she’d paused on the opposite side of the cage. Long after she’d slid her entire body inside, her head continued to rise until it was at a forty-five-degree angle, until it appeared she was looking the man dead in the eye. Her head recoiled back, slowly, sending a domino effect down her neck and the rest of her body until she was curled into several S shapes, warning of a strike.

  The man seemed to heed that warning because he raced from one end of the cage to the other, appearing shaken when Princess’s eyes calmly followed his every move, her body winding across the floor to follow him, all the while moving closer. He sidestepped her and raced across the cage again, his flaccid penis bopping through the air as he jumped over her body, his bare feet narrowly mis
sing her tail.

  Malik clicked his teeth. “Now, now, try not to get too excited, or you might accidentally step on her. Princess is known to bite when she’s bothered.”

  “Oh God…” the man collapsed onto the corner of the cage, sinking to the floor as tears spilled down his rosy cheeks.

  Malik clicked his teeth again. “I’m afraid calming down won’t help much either, seeing as she’s got sensors on her snout that detect the slightest movement. All the way down to every pathetic pulse of your beating heart.”

  “I didn’t rat. I swear I didn’t rat. Please…” A stream of drool dripped from the man’s downturned lips as Princess swirled to face him once more, her writhing body closing in.

  “Did you know pythons can go up to two years without food?” Malik motioned to Princess. “I’ve only starved Princess here for a little over six months. Didn’t want to risk killing her. Just readying her for a special occasion, is all. Ensuring she was hungry enough to eat another antelope once the time came to put her to good use.”

  The man pleaded again, but this time, his lips, shining with his saliva, didn’t make a sound. Nothing but a hoarse gasp left him as his wide eyes remained locked on Princess, who’d reared her head back once more.

  Then, without warning, Princess struck, leaving him not even a second to scream before her razor sharp teeth were locked around his neck. His screams moved to howls as two heavy streams of blood dripped down the pale skin where Princess had bitten in deep, his body writhing under what was undoubtedly a breathtakingly painful bite.

  “Most people make the mistake of believing a snake’s greatest weapon is their fangs, but nothing could be further from the truth. Pythons don’t have fangs, actually…” Malik drew in a sharp breath, eyes bulging as Princess began to wind her body around the screaming man, beginning an ominous loop, not relenting until she’d wrapped every inch of her extensive body around him, leaving only his pale feet and dark hair visible once she was done.