Colton was stronger than she was, but whatever he saw in her face must have frightened him. His eyes widened and he lay perfectly still for a moment, as though too shocked or afraid even to defend himself.
She looked down at him, suddenly acutely aware of the hot skin of his stomach pressed against her. She shifted slightly. That tingling. More than tingling. It was like an electric current. She realized she was wet.
Keeping one hand on his throat, she reached down with the other and took hold of his penis. It had softened, but the condom was still on it. And as soon as she touched it, it got hard again. Colton watched her, his mouth open, his eyes wide.
She rubbed his penis against herself. It felt good. It slipped in a little. It made her gasp.
She held it more tightly and spread her knees more, lowering herself onto him. It went in a little more. It hurt, but in a good way. She eased up, then pushed down again.
Colton tried to reach for her. Without thinking, she tightened the grip on his throat. “Don’t move!” she said. He froze, then slowly lowered his arms back to the floor.
She kept easing her knees wider, and each time she did, it went in deeper. Finally, her hips were against his and there was no more deeper to go. It didn’t hurt anymore. It felt good. Really good. Like when she touched herself, but different. More . . . all over, or something. She started moving, back and forth, up and down, riding him, finding the right spot, the right rhythm. She was panting now. She could come from this. She was going to come. He tried to move again, and she squeezed his throat hard. He stopped. She realized she was fucking him, fucking him the way she wanted to, and that he was afraid, and she moaned without meaning to and felt the explosion building, and she fucked him harder, moving exactly the way she wanted to, and then it happened, she was coming, coming so hard, and it was so much, it was so good and so different from the orgasms she gave herself.
When it was over, she slumped against him, panting, and eased the pressure on his throat.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “What the hell was that?”
She smiled and thought, The dragon, you idiot. But she only said sweetly, “Did I do something wrong?”
46—THEN
In her sophomore year, Livia decided to make forensic science the focus of her justice studies major. She had enjoyed the survey forensics course the year before, and thought there would be nothing more useful to her as a cop than expertise in the science of catching criminals. Not that the other courses she took—gangs, victimology, criminal procedure, and others—weren’t interesting. They were. But those were areas for which she felt she already had good instincts, or would quickly learn on the job. A forensics focus, on the other hand, with its related classes in chemistry, biochemistry, and microbiology, was different. She thought expertise in forensics would be like a superpower—enabling her to find clues criminals didn’t even know they had left behind.
For a while, she toyed with the notion of becoming a prosecutor. One of her course books was Sex Crimes, by a former New York prosecutor named Alice Vachss. Unlike the prosecutors Rick had told her about, Vachss didn’t want to offer plea bargains. Vachss was a warrior who fought to put rapists in prison forever. Livia read the book in a single day and night, crying at some of the horrors recounted, and relating to the woman’s passion, her cold, determined hatred of the monsters who preyed on the weak. The office cowards Vachss had to work around and outmaneuver sounded horrible, but Livia could see doing what Vachss did. Putting together the case. Arguing in court. Sending rapists to prison to rot.
Around the same time she read Sex Crimes, an assistant US attorney named Daniel Velez came to the school to guest lecture on his experience fighting human trafficking. Not long after Livia’s arrival in Llewellyn, Congress had passed a new law—the Trafficking Victims Protection Act—which turned what had previously been loosely understood as “human smuggling” into a new federal crime, with huge new resources devoted to combating it. The details Velez shared were horrifying, and Livia was moved by his passion for his work. He had prosecuted a Ukrainian gang that kidnapped women and sold them into sex slavery in the United States; agricultural interests that enslaved undocumented workers by threatening to murder their Central American families; a company that provided kitchen and cleaning laborers to dozens of restaurants, all of them beaten into working sixteen-hour days and paid next to nothing.
Although it wasn’t the focus of his talk, Velez mentioned that many of the people his office had rescued had been sexually abused, and that even in labor-trafficking cases, this was common. Livia didn’t need a lecture to know that. She knew what men did to women and children the men perceived had no power, no recourse. No ability to fight back.