Lex Talionis

by Keira Michelle Telford

  Happy to have a few minutes to themselves, Silver and Ria sit side by side on a log, their body language relaxed and open, their thighs touching. As Ria fixes the last strip of tape to the new gauze on Silver’s shoulder, Silver slides a hand over her thigh, enticing her not to move away.

  Becoming moderately used to being on the receiving end of such unconcealed attention—and feeling somewhat safe in the knowledge that, despite their other prejudices, Deltas aren’t known for being homophobic—Ria kisses Silver’s bandage, leaving behind a faint trace of red lipstick.

  “I like the way you touch me.” She presses her hand over Silver’s on her thigh. “You make me feel unashamed.”

  “You’ve no reason to feel ashamed of anything.” Silver caresses her thigh. “Not for being gay, or for being Russian. Personally, I quite like both of those things about you. Particularly the former.”

  Ria doesn’t fight the rising heat in her cheeks.

  Thump!

  Mason drops a dead deer—a chubby buck—at their feet. Startled, Ria jolts and emits a little squeak.

  “Dinner,” Mason announces. “I caught it, someone else can gut it.”

  Much to Silver’s surprise, Ria volunteers for the task immediately. “Do you have a knife I can use?”

  “Ask your girlfriend,” he grunts, scratching at his crotch, sauntering off. “I need to have a greasy shit.”

  Ria wrinkles up her nose at that, then leans forward to touch the deer’s chest. “Still warm. That’s good.” She gets up and starts dragging it to the edge of their campsite, struggling with its weight.

  “Let me.” Silver grabs the deer’s antlers and lugs it effortlessly to an open space away from where they’ll be sleeping later. “You know how to prep meat?” She kneels in the dirt, passing Ria her hunting knife.

  “My mother taught me how to gut, skin and butcher my own dinner when I was a little girl.” Ria rolls up her sleeves. “Meat is so much cheaper to buy if you can prepare it yourself at home.” She takes the knife. “Do you want me to show you?”

  “I’ve butchered Chimera plenty.”

  “You eat them?” Ria looks horrified.

  “It’s all we had.” Silver shrugs. “That and fish, but your military soon saw to that.”

  Ria examines the knife, finding the black hilt inlayed with a peculiar silver emblem.

  “What does this mean?” She runs her fingers over it.

  “It’s an ella cross. An ancient Scandinavian symbol that’s even more obsolete than your necklace.”

  “What’s its significance to you?”

  Silver pulls her Hunter Division dog tags out of her shirt and dangles them.

  “You’re military?” Ria reaches for them.

  “Retired, I guess.”

  Ria inspects them:

  CROSS, ELLA

  HUNTER DIVISION

  2314.08.27

  “Your name’s Ella?” She takes it all in, pleased to learn something new. “And you are a hunter.”

  “I prefer Silver, and I was a Hunter.” Silver shoves them back inside her shirt. “Can I help you with this?” She pokes at the deer’s belly.

  “I’ll be fine.” Ria rolls the deer onto its back. “Carmen could use some friendly attention, though.”

  “Why?” Silver glances at her, still moping alone.

  “She looks lonely.” Ria slices the deer from its genitals to its ribcage. “I think she might be homesick.” She pushes the deer onto its side, preparing to remove the guts. “We’re both a very long way from London.”

  “That’s true.” Silver sighs. “You think I should go over there and flirt with her a bit? Say some highly inappropriate things and let her put her hands up my shirt?”

  “Ooh, that’s dangerous,” Ria teases. “Are you sure you want to make a Russian woman jealous?”

  “Which one of us would you kill?”

  “Both of you. Her quickly, you slowly, and I would show you no mercy.”

  “I’ll just go talk to her, then.” Silver winks. “No funny business.”

  “Be kind to her.” Ria carefully cuts away the fat holding the intestines inside the deer’s abdominal cavity. “She looks like a lost puppy.”

  Silver knows better than that. Carmen’s not a lost puppy, she’s a smoldering volcano.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Silver knows she’s unwelcome before she sits down, but she does it anyway. Carmen’s sitting beneath a beech tree, her knees tucked up to her chin, her hair flopping in front of her face. She looks sullen and pouty, and she’s tormenting a dung beetle.

  Armed with a stick, she flips the beetle over and watches it strain to get up. As soon as it manages to right itself, she flips it over again. It’s starting to get tired, its little beetle legs exhausted from all the flailing.

  “Are we okay, kid?” Silver turns the beetle upright and sets him on his way.

  “What do you think?” Carmen shifts away from her. “I’m palling around with a homicidal lunatic.”

  “Yeah, well, Ria thinks you’re brooding ‘cause you feel homesick, and she wanted me to come talk to you.” Silver plants her bum on the ground and sits cross-legged in front of her. “So we’re gonna chill together and pretend like we’re having a nice little heart-to-heart about it. Okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay,” Carmen snarls. “I don’t know who you are. Are you a soldier? A bounty hunter? A murderer?” She thinks back to the casual way in which Silver shot Trevor back in Manchester. “Or a fucking executioner?”

  “I only did that for six years.”

  Carmen’s mouth opens, and her jaw bobs up and down, but no words come out.

  “I was an Enforcer,” Silver explains voluntarily. “I enforced capital punishment upon those who evaded the law.”

  A few seconds pass, then Carmen finds her voice again. “How many people have you killed?”

  “I’m not exactly sure.” Silver decides to test a theory. “How about you?”

  “Why would you ask me that?” Carmen looks away and jabs her beetle tipping stick into the dirt, digging a small hole with it. “I haven’t killed anyone.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Silver thieves the stick. “I saw the look on your face back at the warehouse. That wasn’t the look of someone who was afraid to pull the trigger, it was the look of someone who hated wanting to.”

  “You’re so full of poo.”

  “Am I? I used to make the same face.” Silver tosses away the stick. “It’s the face of someone who enjoys it, but wishes they didn’t.”

  “You don’t know anything about me”—Carmen holds back tears—“so stop acting like we’re a pair of sodding twins. You enforced criminals—big deal. My job was to shoot people for being gay, or for falling behind on their taxes and doing a bunk to avoid debtors’ prison. You think I enjoyed that?” She looks thoroughly disgusted.

  “Firstly, criminals? Sure, if I was lucky I got the odd rapist, or a wife beater. But mostly, I enforced people for stealing meat to feed their families when they couldn’t afford to buy it. One time, I had to shoot an old lady because she got caught thieving a tube of denture paste. The only consolation I could take from it was that most of them wanted to die—they wanted it to end. Secondly, I’m not talking about the lives your bosses make you take, I’m talking about the ones you choose to take.”

  Carmen shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit. Nobody wants to kill the old lady with the denture paste, but everybody wants to kill the rapist, or the murderer, or the kiddy fiddler.”

  Carmen doesn’t deny that. “A few weeks ago, I terminated a guy who killed his wife. He’d been beating her for years, and finally hit her too hard and too much, then dumped her body in the river. That one felt like justice.”

  “See, there you go.” Silver grins. “Ever gone off payroll? Ever pulled the trigger just ‘cause it’s the right thing to do, not ‘cause somebody told you to?”

  Instead of answering that,
Carmen deflects. “Have you? I mean, before today when you shot Trevor.”

  “My first was the guy who got me arrested for treason. He had me banished, wanted me dead, and cost me six years of my life.”

  Carmen starts putting all the fragmented pieces of Silver’s life story together: was a soldier, was banished, was recruited as a bounty hunter and executioner, then … wait.

  “Treason?” One of her eyebrows reaches for the sky. “You were banished for committing treason?”

  Silver tries to downplay it. “They framed me for attempting to assassinate the Governor, that’s all.”

  “Oh, that’s comforting.” Carmen facepalms. “So this is like a theme with you? You go around offing heads of state.”

  “I was framed. Listen better.”

  “Well, now we’re on the topic …” Carmen shuffles forward and lowers her voice. “What exactly do you think you’re going to achieve by killing the King? He’s a figurehead—nothing more. He’s not even in charge of wiping his own arse.”

  “It’s symbolic. It sends a message.”

  “Yeah, it tells me that my first instinct about you was right: you’re mental.” She scooches back and leans against the tree. “Aren’t you afraid that all this extra-curricular killing is going to fuck you up? Aren’t you afraid you’ll forget where to draw the line?”

  Silver’s truthful answer to that would be: Been there, done that, regret it deeply. That’s why she was about to be executed and had to flee her homeland. However, she’s now thoroughly distracted by Ria in the background, and fails to answer. Ria’s arms are smeared with blood almost up to the elbows, and she’s peeling the hide off the deer from its neck down.

  “God, look at that gorgeous woman.” Silver ogles her. “I wanna lick her clean right now.”

  Carmen screws up her face. “Ewww! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Be real.” Silver’s eyes don’t waver. “Is she not the most perfect creature you’ve ever seen?”

  “I’m not really into that.” Carmen turns her head, feigning nonchalance.

  “Ha!” Silver calls her out. “You’re lying to me again.”

  “Says who?” Carmen’s poker face is top notch. “What makes you think I like women?”

  “Oh, please. Luka’s been trying to get in your pants all day and you’ve barely given him a second glance.”

  “So?”

  “Look at him.” Silver forces Carmen to gawk at him while he relaxes by the fire. “He’s a stud. Women fall all over themselves trying to get his dick—which is really nice, by the way—and you couldn’t give a monkey’s.”

  “How do you know what his dick looks like?”

  Silver gives her the short version. “Before there was Alex, there was Luka.”

  “I’m sure that’s not complicated at all.”

  “The point is”—Silver steers her back on track—“you have absolutely no interest whatsoever in his handsome tool.”

  Carmen shrugs. “He’s not my type.”

  “Right, because he has a penis.”

  Carmen opens her mouth to reject that, but Silver hushes her.

  “Look, I know you’ve got some fucked up laws in this country, but what do you think I’m gonna do? Rat you out? You’re gay. Embrace it. Who gives a shit?”

  “You know what you are?” Carmen wags a finger at her. “You’re a bully.”

  “You like me.”

  “You scare me.” She uses Silver’s shoulder for leverage and gets to her feet. “Now enough of this. I have to widdle.”

  While she looks for a private spot to drop trou in the bushes, Silver watches Ria butcher the deer quickly and confidently. Her jeans still damp, she makes her way back over to the fire, where she’s promptly blindsided by Alex.

  “Are you warm enough?” He hands her a blanket. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  Translation: I don’t want our baby to suffer because you jumped in a lake to kill a monster so that you could impress your Russian whore.

  Silver takes the blanket. “I’m fine, but thank you.”

  Before she can move past him, he spots some light red staining on her bandage. Pulling back her shirt to get a better look at it, he soon realizes that it’s lipstick, not blood.

  “Where else has she been putting her lips?”

  Silver nudges his hand away. “Nowhere.”

  “Watch out, coming through.” Bold barges his way between them, carrying the portioned meat to the fire for cooking.

  Food is a welcome distraction. Alex offers to help Bold, which gives Silver the opportunity to slink away and keep an eye on Ria as she washes her hands in the lake—better safe than sorry.

  Evening is well upon them by the time the meat cooks through, and the unlikely group of travelers gathers around the fire to eat.

  The usual cliques form, although, this time, Carmen frees herself from Luka’s advances. She finds a bum-sized gap next to Ria and makes it hers, stepping over Ria’s bag to get to it. In doing so, she glimpses a red silk ribbon poking out through the drawstring top.

  “Nice ribbon,” she comments dryly, settling herself in the dirt.

  Appearing shamed for some reason, Ria moves her bag and tucks the ribbon away. That would be the end of it, except that when Carmen reaches for a piece of meat, her sleeve rides up and Ria catches sight of a black silk ribbon wrapped around her left wrist.

  “Yours, too,” she fires back.

  Without saying a word, Carmen covers it with her sleeve.

  All in all, dinner is a quiet affair with little conversation to be had, and Bold calls a sharp end to it after scoffing his second portion.

  “We should get some rest.” He yawns and stretches. “We’ll start moving again at daybreak.”

  The group disperses shortly thereafter, fetching bedrolls and blankets from their saddlebags, and Ria watches from the edge of the campsite as they start to lay down their beds. It’s going to be a cold night, and she has nothing in her bag but a change of clothes and some other useless bits and pieces.

  Already feeling the chill of the encroaching night, she rubs her hands over her arms, trying to generate some warmth from the friction. On the other side of the clearing, Linx scowls at her, quick to remind her of her place.

  “We don’t have any spare.” She sounds almost happy about the fact. “You can sleep in the dirt.”

  “As if.” Silver unknowingly steps over the space cleared for her by Alex—the spot beside him—and lays her things down on the other side of the fire instead. “You can share mine,” she offers, starting to make the bed up. “There’s room enough for two, provided you don’t mind sleeping close.”

  Behind her, a frustrated Alex settles himself onto his bedroll, Linx happily nabbing the vacant spot beside him.

  Ria senses his frustration and disappointment, and it makes her feel like an intruder. She hovers near Silver, uncertain whether or not she should accept the invitation to sleep together, tempting though it is.

  “What’re you waiting for?” Silver divests herself of belt and weapons. “Get your hot Russian ass over here. You must be exhausted.”

  That’s an understatement. It’s been weeks since she’s been in an environment comfortable enough to enjoy any proper sleep, and her body aches to lie down. Not only that, but the thought of spending a night in the arms of someone who makes her feel so safe and protected is tremendously appealing.

  Still, she watches Silver set her weapons aside—placing her knife beneath a makeshift pillow made from a rolled up blanket—and approaches timidly.

  “What about your husband?” she whispers, kneeling beside the bedroll. “He’s begging for your attention. Can you not see it?” She looks sincerely pained.

  “What he’s begging for is a lie.” Silver beats the pillow into the perfect shape. “He doesn’t want me near him, he just wants people to see me near him so he can propagate the myth that everything’s all right.”

  “What about the others?” Ria doesn’t budge.
/>
  “What about them?”

  “They might think …”

  “What?” Silver pulls Ria forward onto the bedroll. “That I like you? Shock! Horror! How depraved I must be!”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “I already told you, I don’t give a fuck what they think.” Silver wriggles under the thick blanket, making sure there’s space enough for Ria to cuddle up beside her. “You need rest, and I’m not going to let you sleep in the dirt like an animal.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.” Silver flings back the corner of the blanket, urging Ria inside. “You’re human, like the rest of us. You deserve respect and consideration, and …” She hesitates to finish the thought.

  “And what?” Ria longs to know, hoping for something subtly flirtatious.

  “I want you in my bed.”

  There’s nothing subtle about that, and Ria’s chest heaves under her clothing, the waistcoat suddenly feeling tight against her ribs. Determined not to let this moment slip away from her, she silences her concerns, removes her boots, and slithers under the blanket.

  “That’s better.” Silver tugs the blanket up over her shoulders.

  Tiny shivers of excitement vibrate through Ria’s body as Silver wraps the blanket around her, and she knows she’s flooded. She can feel her abundant arousal seeping through her underwear, and she longs to be touched. She would give anything for them to be alone, and for Silver to slip a hand inside her kicksies, lovingly caressing her wet, neglected flesh …

  She’s so caught up in the fantasy that, when Silver clutches her hip and pulls her closer, presumably for warmth, she lets out a little moan.

  “Sshhh.” Silver giggles. “People will think we’re up to something.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “Not yet.” Silver keeps her hand on Ria’s hip.

  Content with that, Ria fingers the dog tags nestled in Silver’s cleavage, inspecting them again. “I should’ve known you were military.”

  “Why?” Silver rubs Ria’s hip, slowly trailing down her thigh and back up again. “Because of my attitude problem? My trigger finger?”