Crystal Mac: A prologue novella to Captive Series Book 3 HELL'S HILLTOP by J. A. Dennam Page A

retorted and pulled down her black athletic pants.
    Her small curvy ass was something he hadn’t seen before. “Crystal…”
    One foot went into the tub. “Mac, I’ve had your cock in my mouth. Get over it.” The other foot followed. Gingerly, she lowered herself into the hot water and moaned with pleasure. “God, this feels good.”
    He had a well-stacked naked woman in his tub, but at the same time she was turning the clear water a ghastly crimson color. It was the strangest thing, fighting nausea and a king-sized woody at the same time. With a cleansing breath, Mac gathered the supplies and moved them to the lid of the toilet. He sat on the edge of the tub while she hugged her knees, gave him easy access to what appeared to be a knife wound.
    Everything she’d told him made sense. He believed her, was more than relieved she’d come back. But there were still a lot of questions that needed to be answered. He focused on the washcloth as he squeezed water over the gash and cleaned the blood from her body.
    “Where exactly did you go after you ditched me?” he asked levelly.
    Crystal closed her eyes, rested her cheek against her knees. “I had to stay a little longer than planned.”
    “Why?”
    “The pills.”
    Right… assuming that’s what they were. “How did you know about them?”
    “Did you notice anything strange about the other ghosts you saw tonight?”
    Mac uncapped the peroxide and carefully aimed. “Other than the obvious? Not really.”
    “Exactly. They weren’t withdrawing.”
    Aaah, very clever. It was an important detail only Crystal noticed, because of her own addiction to Nexifen.  The entire supply was supposedly in Derek’s possession after a thorough raid on IGP’s pharmacy. No routine dose meant the ghosts should have been worse off than they were, which should have made tonight’s operation an easier task than it was.
    “You could have been straight with me,” he grumbled irritably.
    “It was hard enough getting you out of there alive, Mac. I knew you’d argue.”
    Damn straight he would have. The fact she was stabbed meant it hadn’t been the best move on her part. Just the thought of how close she’d come to dying made him more uncomfortable than he cared to admit. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
    “More important than drawing first blood,” she said in a listless tone, “is drawing the last. Rafferty taught us all not to flinch, but he targeted me most because I’m a woman. I got really good at not flinching.”
    Mac knew the stories. He’d heard Derek’s accounts of Rafferty’s abuse toward women, and how he’d nearly raped Melanie. The nausea from tending Crystal’s bloody wound disappeared just like that. With deathly calm, he asked, “Did Rafferty hurt you?”
    “All the time,” she answered as if it were a stupid question. “He never tried to fuck me, if that’s what you mean. He’s not into brunettes.”
    Her blasé attitude seemed to come naturally, emphasizing the nature of the cold world she came from. But, he knew there were emotions in there somewhere that needed to come out.
    A dry washcloth blotted the moisture from around the cut and Mac began peeling butterfly strips. “How many ghosts did you have to kill tonight?”
    Her lashes fluttered open. “Four.”
    Ah, there was the vulnerability. It was the sound of someone who’d killed for the first time. “It was either them or you, Crystal.”
    She swallowed hard. “So you say .”
    But she was struggling with it nonetheless. “Sit up,” he commanded.
    Her back straightened, closing the flaps of skin. Mac applied the first strip. “You upped information back at Lesico that had me convinced you were with them.”
    “They needed a reason not to kill you,” she explained, grimacing when the third strip went on. “I gave them one.”
    “It could explain Rafferty’s disappearance.”
    “If he was freed by other ghosts, Derek would have known. He would have had to fight.”