5. CAL

Frankie came back for me sooner than I expected. I'd just found a nice, quiet corner and started to play on my Switch. I had a couple games on there that I liked to play to keep me occupied and calm. It was especially difficult here because I overheard them talking about me a lot.

"We're going," Frankie said. Those two words filled me up with excitement. I almost raced out of the house without saying goodbye.

In the car, we waited in quiet together before he said anything. I enjoyed hearing his breath and smelling the smoke on him. I took his hand and sniffed it; the smoke clung to the fabric of his bandage. Cigars had notes to them, they weren't like cigarettes, those would usually have me telling him to clean his hands before he touched me.

"I've got a job tonight," he said.

"No," I said.

He snickered. "You don't get to say no. I'm telling you. It sounds like a suicide mission, if I'm being honest. Three sets of men have tried to collect this stuff, and they've all wound up dead."

"Then double no," I said. "I'm not letting you go and kill yourself for some drugs."

"How do you know it's drugs?" he asked.

"I might have overheard someone talk about something lost with a street value of five million," I said, blinking innocently at him. "I assumed it was drugs, or guns."

"That's—that's not the only reason I need to go," he said. He stroked at the side of my face. "For something with that much value, it's got to be good stuff. I think this might be our lead."

"You do?"

He nodded. "Yeah. My dad was telling me about what happened, and it—it reminded me of how I found you, and the set up they had. It was a professional set up. If I can get just a couple grams, I can compare it to the sample I've already got."

My stomach was always in knots, every time he had to do a job. It was scary what he did, and what was even scarier was the way he approached it. Yet, every single time he came back from a job, I'd stayed up all through the night, horny as hell waiting for the opportunity to jump into his lap and celebrate a job well done, and the fact that he came back with his life.

"What else happened up there?" I asked.

"He told us he was dying. It was a test. It's always a test. I don't think Tommy passed though," he chuckled. "He actually looked relieved, almost like he couldn't wait to take over."

Sometimes, I wondered what went on behind those closed-door meetings. Part of everything I knew was from TV shows, and everything else I knew was from what Frankie had told me. I grew up only thinking those things happened on TV as well, and sometimes Frankie laughed about the things I told him that I thought happened.

Back at the apartment we were reminded by the broken coffee table that we'd forgot to do something today.

We both stood in the doorway of the living room.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Nowhere is even open on a Sunday."

I took his word for it. "And something shiny for me. Remember. You said you would."

"I'd never forget that." He gave me a forehead kiss.

"If you're working tonight, then I am too," I told him.

He stared blankly at me. "Fine but remember the rules."

I sighed. "I know, I know."

"The rules aren't there for me to be controlling, they're there to protect you. And also, me, because I don't want to have to go around blinding everyone who has seen all of this." He cupped a hand under my chin.

He'd told me that without my face in the cam shows, I could've been absolutely anyone, but with my gorgeous face, I was vulnerable to the world, and sometimes my shows had hundreds of people in them. I didn't need him tracking every IP address just because they'd seen me.

"When do you have to leave?" I asked him.

"A couple of hours," he said. "Why? You need help getting in the mood?" He reached around and grabbed my ass, then pushed me down onto the sofa.

"I need help getting undressed," I said, weakly pulling at my shirt. "See. I can't do it by myself."

Frankie picked me up, throwing me over his arm. He carried me into the bedroom. This took me back.

* * *

One Month After Being Rescued

"What are you doing?" I shouted, whacking at his back. "Put me down. I don't want to leave. Put me down!" I screamed.

Frankie threw me back onto the bed. "Cal, you need to get better!" he shouted back.

"I can get better on my own!" I sobbed.

He climbed onto the bed and placed a hand over my mouth. "If you keep crying, and if you keep screaming, I don't know what to do to help you," he said, his face close to mine. "You want to get better?"

I nodded, sniffling under his hand. Tears burning in my eyes, trying not to blink. "Yeah," I grumbled.

"And you want to kill the bastards who did this to you?" He nodded. It was rhetorical. "But you can't do that unless you get better, unless you build a thicker skin, not an actual thick skin, you know, just a comfort and a sense of who you are," he said. There were tears in his eyes now. "Something nobody can shake from you. You need it to live in this world." He peeled his hand away from my mouth.

"This is your world," I said, sucking deep on a breath, trying not to sob again. "If it's so horrible and you need to have all this macho persona, why don't you fucking leave?"

He cracked a smile at the sadness on my face. "Family," he said. "I don't have a choice. This is my world. You can leave." His tone changed. "You can take the clothes I got for you, and you can leave. I'm not going to stop you. In fact, I'll even offer to drive you back to your shitty little, small town. But know this, you can never go back to a normal life after what you've been through."

In the quiet of my shallow breaths, I couldn't stop staring at him. I knew all the things he'd done, and I should've feared him, but there was a tender side to him. His soft touch, his care, and the way I saw how it tore him in two.

"I don't wanna leave," I said. "I'm—I'm scared." That's what all of this was about. He was trying to get me to go outside, just for a walk.

He held my hand. "Cal," he said, stroking a thumb against the markings still scabbed over on my wrist. "You never have to be scared ever again. I made a promise to you. And I keep my promises. Always."

"Always?" I sniffled.

He pulled the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it. "Always."

* * *

In a box, under the bed, I kept all the clothes I used to go on cam with. Frankie didn't like them being in my drawers because he said it meant that it was part of my life. It was the same reason he kept all his murdering objects hidden too. I didn't even argue with him about that, although I knew he kept those hidden because they'd be directly linked to unsolved murders. I guess if the body is never found, there was no case to begin with.

My on-camera persona was SweetBoy69 and as him, I took all the parts of who I was before my kidnapping and torture, and made myself look completely irresistible. There were a couple of reasons why I did this, the first one was to reclaim that part of myself, but the main reason was because the men who had taken me would always be watching those sites, and sometimes, I think they had even been filming me. That was just a theory though, there was no proof of it online, only that mechanical coin jingle of the tipping.

Frankie left the moment I started setting the bedroom up. He didn't like to be around for the show, but he did check in on the website once it was live to throw compliments and tokens at me. His username was DangerDaddy69. I thought people would've noticed how similar our names were and called it out, but nobody had noticed.

I wore a white plastic mask that covered the top half of my face. It gave me a Phantom of the Opera vibe. Alongside the mask, I had a white crop top with ‘Good Boy' across it, and a pair of denim booty shorts with briefs that I hiked up between my cheeks to look like a thong.

"Hey," I said to into the camera facing me on the bed. "I'm ready to play."

Comments came in, most of them in English, others in Spanish and Portuguese. I didn't know what they were saying, but I smiled and begged them to make my day with tips.

The goal of this wasn't money, or tips, it was scraping the IP addresses of everyone who connected to my video. I could've probably recorded myself for a little bit and kept that going on a loop, but this was a thrill.

"Where are you guys from?" I asked, licking my lips seductively, at least I hoped so from what I could see in the viewfinder.

People posted the states, cities, or countries. It wasn't what I was looking for, the interaction boosted me on the server and got more eyes on me.

"Do you like to party?" I continued, pretending to read the comments. "Mmm. You know, I'm a good boy, but sometimes, I like to party. Sometimes, I can be a little bit naughty too, with the right supplies that is." I forced a giggle.

Scanning the comments, I was looking for signs that someone might have drugs, these were usually invites and offerings of snowflake emojis. I made sure their data was scraped first, but the last time I had someone on the hook in a private conversation tab about their cocaine, they were using a private network that bounced their IP all over the globe. It was common; it didn't take a tech mastermind to have a virtual private network.

"I'm based on the east coast," I announced. "Anyone know where there's a good party?" I dipped a hand into the front of my shorts, teasing that I was tugging my soft cock. "I could use something to corrupt me."

DangerDaddy69: You don't look like someone who could be corrupted.

"Sounds like a challenge."

DangerDaddy69: *fifty tokens*

The jingle of coins played out through the speakers.

"You'll have to do better than that to get me excited," I said, turning. I flashed my ass at the camera. Spreading both my cheeks and moaning loudly. "It's so smooth and tight."

More tokens flooded through, the jingle almost overwhelming me. I'd grown from that moment in my past, I could handle that sound.

PhillySnow: Looking for a good time? I might be able to hook you up with something as pure as you.

It piqued my attention. I opened a private chat with him. Send me your information here. With the number for my burner phone. Sutton had it set up to ping and track anyone who messages it.

After a couple of minutes, a message flashed on the screen of the burner phone. It was already plugged into the USB port of the laptop.

—Hey, it's PhillySnow from the site. I just wanted to tell you that I think you're hot as hell. And I saw you were in Philly. You wanna meet up for some fun?

The only fun I would be having would be when his insides were painted on his outside.

Through a program on my laptop, the phone number was being traced, pinging across cell towers and honing in. This only worked while his phone was active, if he turned it off now, I'd be left looking at a map with no real location.

It came through.

The final ping was his exact location, followed by the information connected to that number.

He was Patrick McVey, twenty-two years old.

But it wasn't him.

I went back to the direct messages on the site.

SweetBoy69: Do you have the *snowflake emoji*?

It took a moment, and then his username dropped out of the room.

Frankie had told me to stop acting like a narc. This could've been a real lead.

Looking at his location in Chestnut Hill, he was probably just some boy home from school living at his parents' house. It wasn't exactly the neighborhood people went to for drugs, which might've been why he was a good lead.

The tokens from the site jingled once more, pulling me back in.

I moaned for them and touched myself. "Just like that," I said. "You're gonna make me be naughty." At least they were trying to make me be naughtier than I already was.

Frankie's username was still on the site. I wondered when he was going to finish up with his job and get back here so I didn't have to get myself hard for these perverts on the internet.