Scouts: A Dark Romance Anthology Read online

  Contents

  Cutthroat

  Natasha Preston

  Tamed

  Measha Stone

  Asphyxiate

  Ally Vance

  History X

  Ellie Meadows

  Sanctum

  Claire C Riley

  Exposure

  Vicki James

  Ash City

  Penelope Douglas

  Terrene

  Yolanda Olson

  Corruption

  Andi Jaxon

  Carnal Value

  Shane Starrett

  Malefactor

  Abigail Davies

  Axed

  Samantha Towle

  Fertile Ground

  Jennifer Bene

  Caged

  Cole Denton

  Corrupt Us

  J.M. Walker

  Archer’s Release

  Kamisa Cole

  Scouts

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  This book is a piece of fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, places or events are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, events or locations is purely coincidental.

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  Cover Design: Pink Elephant Designs

  Formatting: Pink Elephant Designs

  Cutthroat

  SILVER SCORPIONS

  Natasha Preston

  Chapter One

  Days missing: 11

  Death toll: 1

  Days to party: 8

  I stand on my board in the packed snow and watch Nora flirt with a guy I’m dangerously close to making my second victim.

  Her musical laugh is whisked my way on a gust of wind. It slices into my gut like a jagged blade.

  The last five minutes have been spent trying to convince myself that I’m going to walk away and leave them to it, but this wouldn’t be the first time that she’s fucked another man because I refuse to touch her.

  I couldn’t talk myself out of it then, so I don’t know why I think I can spare this one.

  It’s day five hundred and sixty-two since I should have left Vanderbilt Peak Resort. In that time, I’ve become a killer.

  Eleven days ago, I took the blade from an old ice skate and slit a man’s throat ten minutes after he pinned Nora to a tree. She’d been flirting with him for about thirty minutes while I’d been in my cabin, fixing up a couple snowboards.

  Of course, she knew I was watching, I’ve been watching her flirt for the last eighteen months. She planned it. Why else would she take him off-piste and not stick to one of the runs? Having sex with another man was my punishment.

  It killed me. I saw red, murdered a man, and buried him in the forest near my cabin. Then, I took his phone down the mountain, smashed it, and dumped it in a canal close to a bus stop.

  For days after, everything was calm, and then he was reported missing. The cops have appealed for people to come forward who remembered seeing him. I thought I was in the clear because no one came forward.

  But now the cops are saying the last sighting of him was eleven days ago—the same day I killed him—when he used the ATM in the town near our mountain.

  He must have used that cash to pay for a day on our slopes.

  My mom always said there was something wrong with me, something dark that needed exorcising. In her drug-induced mind, she thought I was a demon. That was probably why she overdosed.

  I’m yanked back to reality when Nora laughs and rakes her blood red nails along the dead guy’s arm. She looks up at him through her long eyelashes.

  My teeth grind together, and I rub the rough, dark stubble over my jaw.

  That fucking girl knows exactly what she’s doing.

  This is all my fault, and that’s what pisses me off the most. I shouldn’t even be here. If I’d left for the States one day sooner, I never would have met her. The morning I was going to hand my notice in and find a snowboarding job back home, she turned up. Bright, glossy green eyes, pink cheeks, and auburn hair down to her ass. She looked innocent, and at sixteen, she should have been.

  But I know Nora Vanderbilt better than she knows herself. Now a feisty almost eighteen-year-old with a blinding smile, she has everyone falling for her. Her grandad Stanley thinks she’s an angel.

  She’s my personal devil, and she knows it.

  The snowboarding resort is a small, independently owned, off the beaten track resort in Italy. It’s an indulgence for a filthy rich man who loves snow and adrenaline. It makes money, despite the difficulty to get up here, because it’s dangerous.

  We mostly see hardcore boarders. Cocky assholes in their early twenties who fear nothing… not even death. There’s one road in and out halfway up the mountain, then a gondola the rest of the way. If you miss the last gondola in the evening and don’t want to hike in the cold and dark, you’re here until morning.

  Nora finally leaves the asshole and jogs toward the hotel. She pushes her hood off her head and ruffles her long hair before she disappears inside.

  The lanky bastard turns and heads up the slope with his board. I don’t remember seeing him last night or this morning, so he probably isn’t staying at the hotel. I lean forward and zigzag across the mountain, feeling the chilly air whipping at my face.

  At the bottom, I dismount the board and lean it against the wall.

  Sylvia is on reception, staring off at nothing because she’s so bored. This is an unusually slow week. The hotel is at forty percent capacity, and I’m barely booked boarding. It’s how I like it, but it doesn’t happen often. It means I’ll get more time where it’s just me and my board out there. The only thing that has ever given me any joy is snowboarding. My mother made sure of that. If I hadn’t joined the Scouts and found snow sports, I would either be a junkie or dead by now.

  “Thank God,” Sylvia mutters. “Lunchtime.” She leaves the desk as if it’s on fire and heads straight to the staff room with a box of salad under her arm.

  “Later,” I say, and she gives me a wave over her head. She doesn’t look back. If she did, she would see me creep up to her desk.

  I sit on her chair and rifle through the messy stack of paperwork. Today we have two people who have turned up, and both have paid cash. One is a female and the other is Mickey Bates. That must be him.

  No one has checked in or paid online, and the gondola has been cash only for the past six months, despite the card machine getting fixed ‘this week’. I’m not complaining; it’s working for me. The signal drops before you reach the bottom of the mountain, but GPS will screw you over.

  Mickey hasn’t left an electronic trace to show he was here. Idiot.

  He doesn’t look like the type to post selfies online, so hopefully he’s not that active on social media. The last thing I need is dozens of comments asking where he is.

  It won’t be hard to find him. He was walking up to the
chair lift by the first slope when I left. Most of them work their way along the three slopes and pretend there isn’t a fourth because they’re pussies.

  “Hi, Zeke,” Nora says, leaning on the desk. Her voice sinks into my skin and slithers down my spine.

  I raise my eyes and take a breath to prepare myself. Eye contact with Nora is a punch in the gut—a constant reminder of not being able to have what I ache for. I should be used to it after eighteen months, but she does things to me that I can’t describe and barely understand.

  I swallow through a dry throat and try to ignore my heart drilling in my chest. It’s beating at a rate that could put me in the hospital.

  Time to make sure I’m paying attention. We do this effortlessly, as if we’ve rehearsed it a hundred times when in reality, we’ve never spoken about what we do.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  Leafy green eyes, full lips, pert breasts, and long legs taunt me daily. “I didn’t know you were working the desk today.”

  The smirk on her face tells me she knows that I would never do that. I’m here to board and that’s it. She takes the usual scan of my body, drinking me in from head to toe, and her chest falls heavier.

  “What do you want?” I repeat, trying to sound uninterested. Impossible. I could have her every night for a hundred years and still crave more.

  She leans closer and smiles, her eyes clearly full of filthy thoughts. I can almost see the erotic images of us that she’s conjuring. “There’s nothing to do. Fancy riding the slopes with me?”

  Her grin is wide, mischievous, and fucking evil. She’s not quite an adult but there is nothing childlike about her. If I was her grandad, I would lock her up somewhere. I don’t know why he didn’t send her back to England after that first summer.

  Instead, she stayed in Italy, occasionally helping around the hotel and ruining my life.

  “No,” I reply. There’s no way I want her at the top of the mountain with the bachelor fuckers we have booked in over the weekend.

  “Oh, come on, Zeke, don’t be so bloody boring. I know that somewhere deep, deep down, you’re actually a fun person. You could definitely show me a good time.”

  My pulse thuds. Yes, I could definitely show her a good time.

  “Go away, Nora.”

  “I’ll ask my grandad.”

  “You sound about five.”

  She laughs and twirls a lock of auburn hair around her finger. My eyes flash to the action. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do to wrap my fist in that hair while I fuck her.

  “Please, Zeke.”

  “No.”

  “You do this all the time but we both know this ‘Nora’s annoying’ act is just an act. But go ahead… keep telling yourself whatever you need to to get through the next eight days.”

  In eight days’ time, she turns eighteen.

  There’s an unspoken rule that we’re going to get naked the second the clock ticks past midnight. At least it had been unspoken until she just ruined it.

  “Go and find something to do.”

  Her hands clench by her sides. “You’re such a wanker. I don’t know why you do this. It literally makes no sense. But, whatever. I know someone else who will play with me.”

  She spins around dramatically and stomps across the lobby and out of the hotel.

  My lips curl as I watch her go.

  Game on, little devil.

  She’s about to go and do something—someone—very stupid. It will be the second time it’s happened, and I’m still not sure what she hopes to achieve or what she thinks I do after she leaves. Will she have sex with him like she did with Filip or will she just flirt like with the hundred men before?

  I flex my fingers as excitement bursts in my chest and saliva fills my mouth. I shouldn’t want to kill again, but it was better than sex.

  I can’t wait to see if it rivals sex with Nora. I close the signing in book and shut down the booking page to cover my tracks. Not that I believe anyone would even question me if they saw. Nora didn’t.

  Mentally ticking off another day closer to having her, I rise from my seat and walk out of the hotel to meet my second victim.

  She could wait for me now that we’re so close to her birthday, but we both know this is going to become a sick habit that we’re powerless to stop.

  Someone’s going to die today.

  Chapter Two

  Days missing: 11

  Death toll: 1

  Days to party: 8

  I cross the snow and go to my cabin. At least I’m about to but Nora catches my eye. She and Mickey are heading up and across the mountain. She turns her head slightly and looks at me though her hair.

  No, that wasn’t subtle, and this is quick work even for you.

  I thought I would have time to prepare first; to collect the things I need to hide a body.

  Throwing her hair back, she laughs and slaps Mickey’s arm playfully.

  Motherfucker.

  I guess we’re doing this right now.

  She won’t acknowledge that I’m following, but she knows I will be. I always am.

  As much as I’m ready for murder—it’s been on my mind since the first time—I wish she would wait until dark. The clean-up will be easier when no one is around, and I can move him without the stress of being caught.

  Filip is soon going to have a grave mate. I’ll be better this time. No hesitation, no nausea, no second guessing myself.

  My stomach turns over at the memory of carrying Filip’s body to the small woods and burying him. The kill was quick, but the smell, the mess, and the clean-up were more than I imagined. I spent the rest of the night feeling nauseous, overwhelmed, and exhilarated.

  I waited for guilt to arrive, but it never came. Filip was a thirty-three-year-old man who fucked a seventeen-year-old girl against a tree.

  I won’t ever feel bad for that one.

  She takes Mickey across the trail toward the chair lift, but before she reaches it, she makes a left, cutting towards the wooded area by my cabin. The other two instructors stay in the hotel because they can’t cope without the ‘luxuries’ it offers, apparently. Pussies.

  Grabbing my board, I walk the off-track route, my boots sinking into the thick snow that laid overnight.

  Nora briefly glances at my cabin before she disappears behind trees. How often does she pay me a visit when she knows I’m not there? I’m not supposed to know that she’s ever been in my cabin, but I smell her perfume on my pillow most nights. Setting up a camera seems a step too far, even for me.

  I can’t see them at all now, only the light dusting of snow that falls from the sky and trees in the distance. Jogging up to my porch, I tug the blade free from my skates hanging by the back door of my cabin, and my stomach clenches in anticipation of using it again.

  What are you doing?

  I could turn around right now and go inside, make a coffee, and pretend that Nora isn’t about to have sex with someone else.

  I used to work so hard on doing the right thing. All through my time with the Scouts back in the States, I was determined to make something of my life. To be someone others could look up to.

  Now I’m murdering men over a seventeen-year-old I’m crazy obsessed with.

  And I like it.

  Stalking off toward the woods, I try to reason with myself.

  Mickey will be the last one. Nora is almost eighteen.

  Maybe I could keep her out of the way for a few days. Long enough for her to become an adult before she lays eyes on any other fucking men.

  It wouldn’t work. That little devil would find a way out.

  The cold bites at my face, but inside I’m burning as I make my way through the snow.

  Jealousy curls inside my gut at what I’m about to witness. I wonder if she’s thinking about him and what is about to happen. Does she feel guilt? I’m not so sure. She has to know that I will kill him because of her, so she can’t care that I have blood on my hands.

  Would she care that I en
joy it?

  Sometimes I think she would run screaming straight down the mountain, and others I think she would embrace my darkness with open arms.

  I stand my board in the snow and disappear into the triangle of trees, a central point between the hotel, my cabin, and a makeshift trail that I use to get from the shadows and down into town without the gondola.

  The first thing I see when I reach the top point of the triangle are Nora’s legs wrapped around the bastard Mickey’s waist as he fucks her against the bark.

  Anger explodes, and my teeth snap together so hard, they almost break. Fucking bitch didn’t waste any time. Neither of them seems to give a fuck that she’s not eighteen yet.

  I shove my free fist into a trunk beside me and growl. Pain radiates through my wrist, but I don’t care. I should walk over there right now, slit his throat, and fuck her while he bleeds out.

  Or I should strangle the life out of her and make all of this stop.

  But, no matter how much I know it should stop, I’m hooked, addicted, and powerless to end this fucked-up routine that could finish us both. We’re screwed in the head. That’s the only way to describe what we’re doing.

  Junkies addicted to sex, blood, and snow.

  With fire in my veins, I watch them go at it through the snow-capped trees. God, they must have shoved their pants down the second they stopped walking. I was only a heartbeat behind them.

  It’s hard to tell if she’s enjoying it as much as he is because she refuses to make eye contact with me. That doesn’t matter. She knows I’m here. Where else would I be?

  Nora lets her head fall back against the rough bark, and she clings onto his shoulders.

  She’s acting, pretending to be into it, pretending that she’s consumed by him to inflict the most pain on me. She wants me ready to explode. It’s my punishment for making her wait.