The Hostage Bargain by Annika Martin Read Free Book Online

think?”
    I widened my eyes. Of course it was just what I’d done. “Shut up.” I grabbed them from his hand. I put my panties back on, and then my bra, back on under my shirt—no easy feat.
    “Our needs are more complex than just jacking off,” Odin said, putting his smarty-pants glasses back on.
    Thor touched my hair. “We can wait,” he said. “We don’t want to freak you out or…abuse your generosity.”
    “Yes we do,” Odin said. “That is exactly what we want to do, and that’s exactly what she wants. That is how the god pack works.”
    The god pack?
    Thor threw an arm around my shoulders and glared at Odin. “Odin’s fucking around.”
    “You will love the way we abuse your generosity,” Odin said.
    I caught Zeus’s eyes in the mirror. Gaze grave, he said, “One week, and nobody does anything they don’t want to, and then you go home while you still have plausible deniability. Got it?”
    Nobody said anything more.
    We sped through corn country.
    It had been a wet, hot August and the crops stood high and thick, like short green walls, blurring by. Judging from the angle of the sun, it was dinnertime.
    The mood of sex was still thick in the van, and I thought how frustrated these guys must be. My body still thrummed with energy; I couldn’t let go of that crazy moment when Thor was lewdly fondling me, and Odin bit my toe. I badly wanted more of that.
    Zeus said we’d stop for the night eventually. When? What would happen? I had this feeling like the whole road trip was foreplay.
    Zeus said, “I saw a sign for a filling station coming up. Area’s looking okay to me. Anyone see anything?”
    “Come here.” Thor pulled me against him, pointed at the sky. “I’m looking for cameras,” he said. “Look at the tops of the poles and anything on the wires. Describe what you see.”
    I nestled back into him. I could do that now. I was the girlfriend. We were the god pack. It was weird they’d kept using their god names. Did they use their god names 24/7?
    I described what I saw, shocked at how little I knew about the poles and webs of wires and boxes and barrels that had existed above my head for 25 years. Thor told me the names and functions for various shapes and things to watch out for, and I struggled not to wriggle in delight as his hands roamed possessively over me, or get too roamy on him. Apparently there would be no sex in the van.
    “Always know where the eyes and cameras are. It’s something you’ll develop,” he said.
    Zeus grumbled. A warning of some kind.
    That is how the god pack works , Odin had said. What did he mean? Had some other woman come before me? And if so, what had happened to her?
    The three of them discussed the surroundings and various technological and geographical features of the area we’d traveled over in a way that impressed me. This filling station bit had turned the three of them from sex maniacs to all business, with a single-mindedness and a kind of discipline that felt almost military. They’d all straightened up and put their businessman clothes back on. Except me, I was still slutty central. I asked for my jacket.
    It’ll be good to have another pair of eyes.” Thor handed me my jacket. “Being aware will be one of your jobs.”
    Again I got that sense of a ghost. A girl whose job it had been to observe things. I recalled, just then, the stutter of attention on me when I’d taken a god name. Did the last girl have a god name? What had happened to her?
    “What are those green bell things?” I asked.
    “Those are ceramic spacers. We’ll have to do a whole tutorial on phone poles with you,” Thor said. “That will be one of the few non-dirty tutorials you’ll receive.”
    Shivers rained over my skin.
    Apparently they were satisfied with this terrain, because Zeus pulled into a run-down filling station whose concrete walls had vertical brown stripes near the top, showing the path of leakage from the metal roof. Junker cars crowded the edges of