Hitched: A Dark Hitchhiker Romance (Ride or Die Romances)
Hitched: Chapter 16

Selena

I feel like we’re playing house in some alternate universe where it’s perfectly normal that Lex just came in from disposing of a body. With dirt still on his hands, he walks toward me, wraps his hands around my face, and draws me in for a hard kiss. The scents of soil and decay cling to his flesh. His hand moves behind my head, and he pulls me into him as he strokes my hair. I feel like a child against him. His strong, overbearing frame feels safe. No matter how safe he makes me feel in that moment, I still replace myself longing for stability again.

Lex’s body tenses. Heavy footsteps plod across the old wooden porch.

“Richard?” calls the voice on the other side of the door.

Very different expressions cross our faces. For me, it’s wide-eyed fear. For him, it’s narrowing anger. We freeze, and my heart races in my chest. Despite the haze of fear descending on my mind, I think of something that might work. It may just save us. Well, save whoever is out there and keep another death from weighing on my conscience.

“I have an idea. Go anywhere else,” I tell Lex.

“I don’t like this,” he says with a shake of his head, posturing toward the door with his pistol clutched in his hand. I’m tempted to let him take care of the unexpected visitor, but my guilt from the farmer’s death still lingers in my chest.

“Go,” I tell him with a firm rise in my voice.

His eyes narrow before he disappears through the kitchen. I stroke my fingers through my unbrushed hair and go to the door, where a stocky young guy waits on the other side.

“Who’re you? And where’s Richard?”

“I’m his niece. He’s gone for a little while. Told me to stay and watch the farm.”

The man raises an eyebrow. “You’re Lana? You don’t look like no farm girl from Nebraska.”

“Well, I am,” I snap. I don’t intend to, but the accusation on his face rubs me the wrong way, even if he has every reason to be suspicious.

He pulls out his phone. “I’m gonna call Richard. Something doesn’t smell right.” He’s not wrong about that, but I’m certain he can’t smell the scent of death because it’s all in my head.

I take a subtle breath, trying to remain as calm as I can. I know what happens when men sense my fear. They prey on it. Even Lex.

“If you do that, the stubborn old thing will come right back home. Do you know how hard it was to get him to leave in the first place?”

The man lowers his phone. “Yeah, I guess he needed to get away. He was going crazy all alone out here.” He leans in and peers inside, his tone shifting as much as his body. “You all by your lonesome, too? Big ol’ house for just one girl.” He rubs a thick hand through a scraggly black beard.

My tightening stomach fires a warning shot through my body. It’s a familiar feeling.

“Well, I best be going,” I tell him as I try to close the door.

He puts his hand out to keep me from closing the door, and I nearly slam it on his thick fingers. “Oh, don’t be like that. We’re just talking,” he says.

With a motion too swift for me to react to, he tugs me out by my arm and puts his big hand over my mouth. He even covers my nose, and soon my lungs beg for air. Unlike every time Lex has done something similar, there’s an instant panic that drains the pent-up oxygen and makes my body lurch with need from the start. I feel like I’m suffocating.

Dying.

“You ain’t his niece,” the man says with a snarl. “His kin don’t look like you.” He pins my chest against the house, and his hand rides up my thigh over my leggings. “Goddamn, if you were my niece, I’d be tempted to put you on my lap.”

My stomach clenches until I feel like I’m going to vomit. With his hand covering my nose and mouth, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I’m trapped in this pervert’s predatory grasp.

I should have listened to Lex.

Tears slip down my cheeks. The hand over my face moves down and lets me draw in several panicked breaths through my nose. His other hand goes down the front of my pants. More tears fall.

“Fuck,” he groans. “That’s a pussy like we ain’t have around here.” His hot tobacco-laced breath rushes over my neck.

I don’t see or hear Lex walking along the side of the house until he’s in my vision’s periphery. He crouches, holds the pistol, and aims. There’s no way he’ll miss me if he aims at the man’s head when it’s so close to mine.

He seems to realize this and lowers the barrel. Lex shoots once, and the sound of squelching flesh erupts behind me as the deafening boom makes my ears ring. The man stumbles back, clutching his side. He looks shocked as he wordlessly holds the wound, blood spreading around his fingers.

Lex takes aim once more and puts a bullet through the man’s face, taking him down in a bloody spray of brain matter along the porch. I throw my hands over my ears and fall back against the house. Lex runs to me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying over the ringing in my ears. He lifts me to my feet and drags me inside.

“Selena!” He smacks my cheek, cupping it the last time. He pulls me into his chest, but that safe feeling is gone.

Completely gone.

My ears begin to clear, the residual ringing becoming quieter until it’s nearly gone. I don’t register what’s happening, but Lex sits on the couch and places me on his lap. I turn my head to nestle into his neck, and he lets me for a moment before making me look at him. His eyes glisten with a show of concern I haven’t seen from him before. Not as Rodney tried to do what he did or when Bryce went even further.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers as he brushes back my hair. “That’s why I didn’t like your idea, rabbit. If something happened, I knew you’d be in the crossfire. I had no choice but to go around the house so I could get a shot off without hitting you, which meant he had you in his grasp longer than I would have ever allowed.”

“I just wanted to get rid of him without hurting anyone else,” I whisper.

“This is why this life isn’t meant for you. You have to put yourself first and anyone else beneath you.” He drops his forehead to mine. “Actually, I’m failing at that, too. I put you above me. Can’t even take my own fucking advice. You give me the humanity I don’t need or want.” He sighs. “But I can’t turn back now. Not with you here.”

Lex

I’m not sure what love is because I’ve never felt it. My mother never knew what it was, either. I didn’t feel a thing when I found my mother dead. I almost felt relieved that she couldn’t bring her “friends” over anymore. That I’d stop seeing her railed in front of me.

For my foster parents, love had a price. As long as they kept getting paid, they “loved” me, but only in front of the social workers who checked on me. Jack, an older kid more fucked-up than me, showed me how to survive in the foster system, and it wasn’t by feeling things. He showed me how to turn off every part of myself until I was an empty shell, capable of destruction without thought or feelings. People think more about the dirty dish they put in the sink than I do about murdering someone.

Cold. Callous. Deadly.

That’s who I was and that’s what helped me survive prison.

But Selena is changing that for me. She’s reversing conditioning that was perfected long before she was born. I have trauma older than she is.

I hold her close, listening to each ragged breath she takes. My heart breaks for her. That piece of shit violated her, and I couldn’t jump right in because I didn’t want him to fucking kill her. That’s been my fear with bringing her along. She has this look about her—a sweet innocence. When I see that in her, I want to rip her apart and brutalize her. When other men see it, I recognize that same hunger.

Even though I can control that side of me when it comes to her, others can’t, and she’ll always be at risk of having more of herself stolen away. I can’t bring her with me over the border, yet I have no clue how I’ll force her to stay back. But I have to. She isn’t safe with me, and she wouldn’t be safe around the people I would have to put myself around to survive. I’m irrevocably torn between selfishly wanting to keep her or selflessly letting her go to keep her safe.

Her lip pouts and my cock twitches beneath her. I still want to fuck that sweetness out of her and fill her with my darkness. I want to take her until she stops having a heart that beats for anyone but me, until she has no more guilt or regret about the people we kill to keep our hearts beating together.

I grab her chin and kiss her. “How far did he get?” I’ve been afraid to ask because I don’t think I can handle the answer, but I need to know if I’m chopping off the fucker’s hands before I bury him.

She shakes her head. “Just got his hand down my pants.”

That’s one hand I’ll chop off and shove in his ass before I put him in the ground for touching her like that.

Her pussy is mine.

I take a deep breath, stopping my barrage of possessive thoughts. I have to let her go. I have to push back my need to own her before we both end up dead or in prison.

“I know you’re going to fight me about it, tooth and fucking nail, but you can’t stay with me, Selena.” I touch her face. “I know you want to, and I want you to as well, but you can’t. I thought you had to fear the wolf, but there are bigger predators out there than me. I have to keep you safe. It’s the one thing I promised myself I’d do, and it’s the one thing I’m not going back on.”

She shakes her head. “Nope, I’m not accepting that bullshit excuse to get rid of me.”

“It’s not a bullshit excuse, rabbit. Bullshit excuses are what I’ve been giving myself to justify keeping you with me. None of this is a fucking game. I can’t see a scenario with a good end for you, and I don’t understand how you can’t see that.”

I ease her off my lap. Even in my anger, I don’t want to hurt her like that. I stand up and tower over her. When I rip my shirt off, I expose a mosaic of mostly prison tattoos—a timeline of violence and hate. I gesture to the bundles of scar tissue on my abdomen and back from the many times I’ve been stabbed. I’m a mess, not just inside but on the outside.

She can see the evil on my body.

“What more of me do you have to see to know you need to run? This isn’t safe. I’m not safe.” My words bite, but she refuses to recoil.

I grab her by the arm and drag her toward the bedroom. It’s old, but at least it has a bed. I sit her down and she looks up at me with those big eyes of hers.

“What do I have to do to make you hate me?”

“There’s nothing you can do, Lex,” she says in a maddeningly calm tone despite not knowing the full extent of what I’m capable of. She’s seen so much, yet she still seems to forget all she’s seen.

“You need to,” I snarl. I need her to because I can’t hate her. If I could, none of this would be so difficult. She’d be dropped off or killed like she means nothing, and I’d be alone by now.

But she means everything.

She folds her arms across her chest defiantly. “Well, I won’t.”

I climb over her and put a hand to her throat. She whimpers as I squeeze. “What if I took your pussy? What if I tear into you like I’ve wanted to since the moment I saw you?”

She shakes her head. Her lips tighten, and I know I offended her.

I squeeze her throat harder. “What if I fucked your ass and didn’t stop when it made you cry from the pain?”

“No.” She strains to get the word out.

Anger rises through me, lighting my skin on fire. She’s so fucking naïve to think she’d still enjoy being in my presence if I tore through her the way I want to. I give her a final squeeze, cutting off her air. Her cheeks redden as she reaches for my wrists. Flashes of my foster mother replace her face as I keep my hands around her throat. That anger gets out of control, nearly past the point of stopping myself. I only let go of her throat to turn her onto her stomach, and she hardly flails beneath me as I tug down her leggings.

It pisses me off.

“Hate me, rabbit!” I scream as I unzip my jeans and pull out my cock. I lie over her, pressing the heat of my dick against her bare skin. She whimpers. “Fucking. Hate. Me.”

“No,” she strains out beneath my weight.

I wrestle with control when I need it the most. I slam my fist beside her head. “Fine. I’m done trying to make it harder than it needs to be. It ends for you here. You aren’t coming with me. That’s it. There’s no arguing about it. There’s no more trying to make it easier for you to let me go. I’m taking you to a bus stop.” I feel the twist of my stomach with each word.

This is it. For her. For me. For us.

It has to be.

I crawl off her and refuse to look in her eyes. “Get ready to go, Selena.”

I wish she understood that I don’t have a choice. Neither of us does. I don’t deserve someone so stubbornly willing to stay by my side. But I can’t keep her. I could never keep her.