I raise my head, look at him, and rasp, “Get out.”

“You want me to leave? Right now?”

Red-hot rage swells up within me and I screech at him as I lunge upward from the table, my fists balled up in fury, “Get out. Get out. Get out.”

Mark jerks backward from me, his eyes round with surprise for just a moment before they harden. He reaches down, grabs his backpack off the floor, and mutters, “Crazy bitch.”

I don’t even look at him again as he walks out of my small apartment.

My hands come to my temples and pull at my hair, fisting hard and jerking. I pace back and forth in front of the TV, my eyes cutting to it periodically, but they’ve moved on to another juicy story.

Vivid flashes of scenes spark in my brain. Scenarios I’ve seen before in nightmares but thought they were nothing but nightmares.

My wrists pinned to the mattress.

Searing pain as I’m fucked in the ass.

Red phoenix on a wrist.

“Think she’ll suck my dick?”

“Swallow it.”

“All of it.”

I bend over at the waist, my stomach cramping violently, then a flood of vomit shoots out of my mouth. I hurl loudly, groaning as wave after wave of nausea and pain are expelled from my body. Beer and the turkey sandwich I’d eaten twenty minutes ago splatter loudly on my worn brown carpet. Tears flood my vision, drip in rivers onto the pile of vomit as I start to dry heave.

Dropping to my knees, I heave and gag, my hands coming to rest at the sides of the gelatinous pile of grief soaking into my carpet. My nose starts running freely now, snot adding to the vile mixture.

I suck in air, deep into my lungs, and will my heart to stop its mad beating of terror. The urge to slice into my healed scar overwhelms me, terrifies me so badly I start sobbing. That is something I cannot do again. Those days are over.

Minutes pass by as I stay on my hands and knees, hunched over the sickness on my floor. My breathing starts to calm down, my heart rate slowly falls back into the range of normal. I lift a hand, drag it over the back of it over my snotty nose, then wipe it on my jeans. Clumsily, I push myself up off the floor and consider the ramifications of what I just saw.

Of what I just remembered.

My rapist. One of them at least.

Good-looking golden boy sitting on some type of empire and vacationing in the Maldives.

Does he even remember what he did to me?

“Swallow it. All of it.”

A flash of furious indignation boils my blood and I go dizzy for a moment, realizing that while my life fell apart following that night, his only got better and better. He walked on my back…a straight path to success. Took my innocence in more ways than one, and told me he made all my fantasies come true.

Something black and oily starts to fill my chest. Permeates my entire being. A dark shadowing so viscous, it starts to cloud my vision and I think momentarily I might be going blind.

Hatred. White hot and boiling my insides painfully.

A sickly pervasive need to cut myself, which causes more shame and humiliation.

“…looks like we left some spunk in your hair.”

I swallow against the vomit rising up within me again. I had thought I was past all this shit. Figured I’d finally gotten my life together, and while I may not have made ultimate peace with what happened, because apparently I just can’t forgive myself for my part in all of it, I was moving on. I was learning to get through the nightmares and, even though I abhor intimacy, I was at least giving sex a try so I could feel somewhat normal.

And that fucker…he’s taken all of that away from me. All my little baby steps of progress and the slight amount of strength I’ve been able to muster to continue living life to some extent. All within the blink of an eye, Jonathon Townsend has taken that all away from me, and while my wrist may not be bleeding at this very moment, I feel like I’m back at square one.

How can I possibly overcome this?

What could I possibly do to make this better for me?

How in the fuck do I stop hurting?

And then it comes to me immediately.

Almost too easy.

Just one word, very simple and yet so very right.

Murder.

It flashes over and over again; sharp electrical pulses burning themselves into my brain. I know, without a doubt, there’s only one thing that will make this right for me.

I’m going to make Jonathon Townsend pay for what he did to me.

Chapter 2

Beck

I flip from screen to screen, navigating the new beta site for The Sugar Bowl. My programmers have been working nonstop for the last six months to roll out this new platform that provides a better search engine, a more robust communication interface, and the ability to video chat between the Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. Of course, we also had to program in some type of quality assurance on the video plug-in to assure that the chats are clean and nonpornographic.

That’s the problem when you own a company that pairs men and women for a relationship that’s not supposed to be based on sex but most assuredly is. Sure…there are some Sugar Daddies who are probably too old to get it up but still want the pretty girl on their arm, and I’m sure in those few circumstances, it’s purely platonic.

But for the most part, Sugar Daddies not only want the pretty girl on their arm, they want them flat on their back in their bed, or hunched over their lap in the back of their limousines sucking on their cock.

That’s really what the Sugar Daddies pay for.

I know it.

JT knows it.

The world knows it.

We just ensure no money changes hands for the expectation of sex, and we avert any trouble with the law. This was something we spent months having a legal team analyze before we even put the venture capital to use in building the business. No way was JT about to sink millions into an enterprise that could collapse with criminal indictments.

The phone on my desk chimes and my secretary’s voice comes over the speaker. “Beck…there’s a young lady here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment.”

“What’s she want?” I ask as I pull up the beta chat screen and type a test message to one of my programmers.

Fuck, but I miss doing the actual programming. This is my original baby before my eyes. Sure, it’s morphed to become better and better, but it’s all my vision. While my fingers may not actually be punching in the coding sequences anymore, I’m still actively involved in the design, theory, and testing. It’s just that now, one floor down in our San Francisco offices, that’s done by a team of fresh young programmers straight out of Stanford, MIT, or other equally prestigious schools.