I know I said that this story was gonna have two parts but I kinda got more into it than I thought I would. At first it was just to work out my writer's block but it's knid of evolved….got a life of it's own. Sorry that the second part is so much shorter than the first but hope its okay. Part 3 won't be far behind.

Thankies to all of you lovely comments! I was really surprised that so many people liked it. Thank you! This one is dedicated to all you lovely people who commented!

Happy Reading!

Gem

xxx

The Job (part 2).

"Talk to me, Jack." Riddick insisted again, with a little more force in his tone than previously, dragging Jack from her memories. She desperately swallowed the lump of emotion that had risen chokingly in her throat, attempting to replace her sudden feelings of sorrow with the fury she had known before. Her steely gaze focused back onto Riddick as he silently implored her to speak, to say anything. Finally, he spoke again, sensing that he wasn't likely to get a reply to his demand without further persuasion.

"I won't know what I did wrong 'til you tell me or at least give me a clue. I ain't a mind-reader, Jack." He said watching her intently for a flicker of sentiment or understanding in her pale, smooth, deceivingly innocent face. He found none.

Jack drew her lips back in a sneer at his words, relaxing into her hard-backed chair, draping her arms over the backboard and drumming out a rhythm on the hardwood with her fingertips.

"You want me to talk to you, huh, Riddick?" she queried with a cocky half-smirk and an arch of a shapely yet scarred eyebrow. "What do you want me to say?" she shrugged as she spoke, her quicksilver eyes holding onto his.

Riddick snorted, tiring of her games and riddles.

"How the fuck you ended up here would be a good start." He growled, folding his arms behind his head and resting his feet upon the table as Jack had done moments before.

Jack regarded him for a long time before giving a single, scornful grunt, drumming harder on the back of her chair until her fingertips ached. "You want me to talk to you…" she replied, repeating her earlier statement. Her voice was quiet, controlled, icy, so unlike the chatty, bubbly girl that Riddick had know five years past. She had changed. A lot. And Riddick still had to determine whether that change was likely to be permanent. Sure, some of the changes were good. Very good if her body was anything to go by. Slim, streamlined, lithe. What fun he could have with those long legs wrapped around him…Even her feral demeanour had it's allure. But there was something dangerous lurking in the depths of her deceptively small figure, something that was likely to be unleashed very soon if what his instincts were telling him were accurate and they always were.

Suddenly he was aware that she was speaking again, in a steady, deep throated growl that set his afore mentioned instincts blazing with warning.

"You want me to tell you how I came to be here? In Butcher's Bay?" she laughed and ran a hand over her jaw with a disbelieving shake of her head. "What a doozy…" she muttered almost to herself before looking back up at the man in front of her. "You want me to tell you how after you left five years ago that the mercs you mentioned came anyway even though you'd gone? You want me to tell you that they decided that since you weren't there that they'd take me instead? Try and get the information outta me, try and get me to spill where you went?" she paused ever so briefly, clenching her fists so tightly that her knuckles shone brilliant white through her scarred skin. "You said that you wanted me to tell you why I was angry about you saving me." she stopped again her voice having raised several notches in volume and tone. Emotions too numerous for Riddick to identify flashed like lightening from behind her mercury irises, a storm clashed within their metallic pits. "I'm angry because I owed you! I owed you big time! And because of that little…detail, I couldn't, wouldn't, tell them where you were!" she broke to claw air into her lungs, narrowing her eyes that were so like his own as she did so, her chest heaving with lack of breath and rage. Finally, she sat forwards and leaned her elbow back onto the table top her arrogant manner slowly rebuilding itself. "Because you save my, 'lily-ass', as you so eloquently put it, back on that fucking planet, I couldn't turn you in even when they beat up my 14 year old ass! Not when they tortured me! Not even when they…" her throat constricted involuntarily but Jack pushed the nearly foreign emotion back down before resuming her rant. "…when they took my innocence from me! The only thing that was ever truly mine and they stole it, ripped it from me without a second thought!"

Riddick watched her intently as she fell silent, burning a hole through the table with her platinum gaze. Her hands trembled uncontrollably as she clawed at her jacket pocket to retrieve another cigarette and her lighter, holding the toxic stick to her lips and lighting it with a flash of fire that stung Riddick's retinas. She took a deep, desperate breath of smoke that quelled her shaking immensely, returning her to the cold, calculating girl she had been moments before her revelation. She closed her eyes to enjoy the smoke rolling about her lungs.

"What about Imam?" Riddick commented in a deep, rumbling voice evoking a twitch upwards of Jack's lips, her eyes still closed as if she was basking in the warm rays of the sun.

"Imam?" she repeated as if she didn't know the man he spoke of. "Imam, Imam, Imam?" she paused for another smoky drag. "Mercs threatened his wife and kid. Threatened to take them instead of me." She shrugged as if it was merely a minor detail, something trivial. "Blood is thicker than water, don't they say, Rid?" she slitted one glinting eye open to glance at him through her hazy smoke and smiled again at his suddenly furious face before closing her eye again. "Oh come on, Riddick!" she scolded. "Did you really think that Imam would have given up his family for me? A scrawny little stow-away who just happened to be dumped on him?" she shook her head and mumbled to herself. "And everyone thought I was naïve!"

Riddick growled at that, slamming his fist down onto the table, making the wooden legs splinter and crack in protest of the attack. "He should have done something!" he snarled. "He should have gotten you off world or contacted me!" frustration filled his mind, threatened to release the beast within him that was whispering all the ways that he would be able to kill those who had harmed, who had laid a finger, who had even breathed on his little Jack! He clenched his teeth, bone-against-bone, causing a squealing noise as he ground them together.

Jack snorted, letting it spiral out in the darkness of her cell into a fully fledged laugh as if she had sensed his thoughts. "Don't get your pretty little head all worked up about it, Riddick." She sneered, blowing her mouthful of smoke out into an expert, carefully practiced smoke-ring. It floated out across the table, hitting Riddick square in his livid face. "I dealt with it."

"That the reason you're here, in Butcher's bay?" he wondered aloud, breathing in deeply and filling his lungs with the second-hand smoke that Jack had blown out, savouring the nicotine that her body had discarded. She elevated an amused eyebrow at his actions and held out the remains of her cigarette to him with a lopsided grin. He took it without hesitation, their fingers meeting in a brief unintentional caress, brushing calluses against calluses. He took a much needed gasp of it, stilling his breath inside him for several seconds before then rejecting the smoke in two hot jets through his nostrils.

"You could say that." Jack replied enigmatically, drawing invisible shapes onto the wood with a lazy finger, her other hand cupping her chin in a child-like gesture as she leaned her weight forwards onto the table. Her eyes followed his movements intently, storing them in her shiv sharp mind, cataloguing him almost.

Riddick chuckled and blew a smoke ring of his own that rivalled Jack's in skill. "C'mon, Jack. This is me you're talkin' to. Big Bad Evil. I ain't squeamish." He laughed again and she rewarded him with a small, nearly genuine smile.

"Alright." She replied. "There was five of 'em. Five of the sick bastards, not countin' the ones they slaved me out to. There were about 20, 30 of them, give or take." She paused and her eyes flashed down to the table between them as if she was suddenly ashamed of what had happened to her for a split second. Then she regained her steely façade and raised her stare back to Riddick's. "Took the first one out easy. Didn't plan it really, just spur of the moment shit." She took a breath before continuing with a wicked smile. "Dental floss round the throat. Quiet. No mess. Second was a bit of a struggle." A bitter chuckle escaped her tight lips. "Took a cheese knife to bed with me that night. He didn't like it." She smirked again revelling in the memory of the pain she had inflicted upon her tormentors. "Cut off his prized appendage, though it weren't nothin' to write home about." She held up her free hand and curled her little finger downwards while fisting the rest of her fingers into her palm causing Riddick to laugh. "Made him eat it and then I slit his throat." She sighed and gave a half-hearted shrug. "The third and fourth. Well," she shrugged again. "Not much to say really. Just got a bit 'slap-happy' with a spanner from the tool box they conveniently left open for me. Then there's number five. The head honcho." She smiled thinly and shook her head in mock-regret. "Gutted him like a fish and strangled him with his own entrails." She finished sitting back in her chair, resting her elbow on the back and twisting slightly to cross her legs in a more feminine pose.

Riddick gave her a mocking round of applause, a grin twisting his mouth to one side. His hands came together in slow, loud claps that shook the air about the tiny cell, echoing off the walls and pounding in Jack's eardrums.

"Jack, Jack, Jackie-Jack." His voice sang out as she sat motionless, fury boiling anew in her blood. "You're a fuckin' Greenhorn!" he laughed, loud and derogatory. "So why the hell did they stick you in triple-max? You shoulda been down in single with the small-fry."

Jack didn't lay into him like he had thought she would at his ridicule. Half of him had hope that she would. He like the feisty, furious side of her. It was something akin to his own inner demons and he would have gladly sat there all night and day locking horns with that side of her. But he knew that they didn't have all night.

Jack smirked her thin, provocative smile and moved the hand of the arm that draped across the back of her chair to curl and uncurl a strand of her wavy, shoulder length hair about her finger. If they had been in any other circumstances Riddick would have taken the gesture as flirting but he was starting to get to know this new Jack well and she wasn't about to flirt with him…just yet anyway.

"See, Riddick, that is where my little story gets interesting." She purred, uncoiling the hair from her scarred and scratched finger for a final time before blowing it out of her face with a puff from the side of her mouth. "I was heading down to single-max 'til the twisted little shits thought it would be fun to have nice, relaxin' little gang-bang." An irrational giggle escaped from her lips like the smoke she had breathed out earlier. She kicked one foot up to rest on the table and tugged until her bootlace slid unhindered from where it was securing her boot to her foot. She took an end in either hand, pulling it taut with a sharp crack and a grin. "Took all seven out with this little beauty. Not as easy as dental floss, not as clean or swift but it served it's purpose I suppose." She shrugged dispassionately, lifting her foot to rest on the edge of her seat, knee drawn up hard against her chest as she re-laced her boot. "I was in single-max for less than a day. Then they shoved me into double before I could get comfy." She gave a mockingly regretful sigh and folded her arms atop her raise knee. "Double was easy. Like bein' on a nice little holiday compared to bein' with those mercs. At least if you earn the respect there, they let you be." She paused as Riddick agreed with a curt nod and she cocked her head to one side. "Saw your name on the wall." She snorted, her luminous eyes thinning in jeering mirth. "How the hell did they ever get you to fight against someone called 'Bam'?" she sniggered, shaking her head slightly. "Sounds like he'd have rather done you up the ass than fight!"

Riddick swallowed the anger that tingled in his chest at her comments. He could see it in her eyes that she wanted to provoke him. Perhaps so that he would lose his temper and initiate their impending fight or perhaps it was to pay him back for making her enraged. Perhaps it was a bit of both but Riddick wasn't entirely sure. Instead he laughed with her, evoking another of her curious stares.

"Given half the chance, he probably would've." He conceded, absentmindedly rubbing at the scar on his forearm where Bam had sliced him with an illegal shiv during their bout. "Took care of him before he had the chance though."

"Oh, so glad to hear it." Jack muttered sarcastically before sobering and nodding in acceptance of his words.

Riddick took another, much needed breath on the cigarette that she had given him. Smoke curled between the two for slow, silent minutes until he succeeded in sucking the cigarette of all it's potency and stubbed it out on the table as Jack had done previously.

"So…" he said scrubbing the ash into the grain of the wood, then flicking a finger up to indicate her face. "See you met the doc…"

-00000-

To be continued…

Sorry it's a cliff hanger but I wanted to get at least some of the next part out before I go to work. Hope you liked it.