“I understand.”
“If what you’re proposing does not work and the people are not swayed, you’d better be prepared to face the consequences. Yes, I do owe you a great deal for what you’ve helped me achieve, but don’t forget that a great deal of my success has also come from my actions and only my actions, and I’m sincerely beginning to question whether or not there is a need for either you or The Man in Black anymore.”
“If you find a way to turn this into an opportunity rather than a setback, you will have the people eating out of your hands again, Carver. And as far as The Man in Black is concerned, I must say, I tend to agree with you. It is time that he is put to pasture, and he will be, but not before he’s given one last hurrah. A send-off unlike any our country has ever seen before.”
Chapter Seventeen
Love and Desire
I awoke to light. The smallest of rays that had somehow found their way through the slats across the only window in the small, closet-like room assigned to Ian. They had originally assigned me to share with Jill, keeping the single occupants segregated by gender, but our protests had caused them to change their plans—and raise their eyebrows. With just over twenty rooms, housing anywhere from two to three occupants, the group hiding within the walls of the nondescript bed and breakfast was one of the larger organized groups of rebels in Washington, D.C., with several smaller and larger groups scattered around the city.
When I rolled over, I wasn’t too surprised to find the other side of the bed empty. Unlike me, Ian had been too overcome by adrenaline to sleep, having tossed and turned in the bed for quite some time before getting up to pace the floor. Most likely, he was still awake somewhere.
I stood up and stretched my arms as far above my head as they could comfortably reach. In the corner of the room, my backpack still sat where I’d tossed it on my way to throwing myself onto the bed. After stretching one last time, I walked over to the backpack, picked it up and rummaged through it until I found the clothes I’d packed. It would be nice to dress in street clothes, to feel normal again, even if only for a brief while. Just as I pulled my shirt over my head, the door to the room opened, revealing a surprised Ian, whose face turned an amusing shade of red.
“Hey,” I greeted him. “You haven’t slept yet, have you?”
“No,” he answered, practically falling onto the bed, “I’ve been too nerved up to get comfortable.”
I sat down next to him, smiling as his hand rubbed my back, gentle yet firm enough to cause my muscles to submit to relaxation. It was a soothing touch, a familiar touch. One that reminded me of the shoulder rubs Chase used to give me at night. Guilt poured over me at the thought, and I shook my head to erase the encroaching memories as though my mind were nothing more than an etch-a-sketch on which past experiences could be drawn and then erased from existence just as easily.
“They have breakfast waiting for you downstairs,” Ian said. “Everyone’s pretty anxious to meet you. At least, the girls are, anyway.”
“Why? It’s not like I’m anything special. What happened to me could have happened to anyone.”
“But it didn’t. It happened to you.” I looked down, noticing the smirk on his face. A face too exhausted to fully smile. Even tired, with dark circles under his eyes and skin still flaked with soot, he was remarkably handsome. Any girl would kill to be in the position I was in right now, with Ian’s arm around my waist, his heart thoroughly in my hands. “There’s a reason it happened to you, Celaine,” he said. “Someday, I promise you I’ll make you see how special you are.”
I leaned over to be near him, partly from my own doing and partly from his arm pushing me down to meet him. “Then you’d better be prepared for one hell of a frustrating fight, Ian Grant.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he replied, inching his face closer to mine until our lips came within millimeters of brushing against each other.
“Neither would I.” I closed the small gap that remained between us, gently touching my lips to his. His grip around my waist tightened, bringing our bodies closer together. My hand found its way to his face, my fingers to his hair, thick and somewhat shaggier from uncontrolled growth.
You never fully realize how much you’ve truly missed something until after you’ve gone without it; until after your body has been deprived of it for so long that its remnants are no longer in your system. It’s as though you’ve cleansed yourself, like the feelings and desires you once felt had been nothing more than toxins with no redeeming qualities other than to cause you harm and pain. But then through some other means, they’re reintroduced to your system—through a touch, a simple kiss, a feeling you’ve been swimming against the current to suppress—and instead of rejecting them like you’ve been telling yourself to do, you embrace them for what they are. A saving grace, a light at the end of the tunnel that in this day and age are fleeting. Due to the casualties of war, they may not be there for you to embrace tomorrow and you’ll be forced to purge them from your blood all over again. But for now, they’re here for you to rediscover and allow your body the pleasure of their company.
Feeling a resurgence of everything I’d kept buried in the deepest corners of my soul, I kissed Ian more passionately and with more intensity than I had kissed anyone in a long time, allowing myself to finally feel again. And instead of pulling away in shock as I half-expected him to do, he responded as though he, too, had been starved in much the same way I had been.
Ian rolled over on the bed with me still in his arms, never loosening his grip until he positioned himself over me, his lips finding my chin, my neck, the smallest of spaces between my clavicle. His shirt, the bland red t-shirt he’d packed before leaving The Epicenter, hung loosely from his body. Before I fully grasped what I was doing, I tugged on it, shrugged it over his shoulders, and removed it from him, promptly throwing it to the floor. I’d missed the feeling of bare skin, the curvature of his muscles, and the way they danced playfully around his arms.
My fingertips slid up Ian’s back, finding his shoulders, and I kissed his neck as I allowed my nose to travel along his skin. He pressed his body closer to mine and brushed a stray strand of hair away from my face. “I was wrong,” he said to me, looking into my eyes. “When I told you how beautiful you were before, I was wrong. Beautiful isn’t an adequate descriptor; it doesn’t come even remotely close to capturing what you are. It’s too generic. What you are is breathtaking. Everything about you takes my breath away. Your strength, resilience, the way you play with your hair when you think no one is watching—”
“My stubbornness, indecisiveness, my tendency to react without thinking—”
“I didn’t say you were perfect,” he said, laughing.
“There’s only room for one of us to be perfect, Ian. And you’ve assumed that role rather nicely.” He kissed my forehead, propping himself back up on his elbows to look at me. In his eyes I could see hesitation, an answer to a question he needed, but didn’t necessarily want to know. “What is it, Ian?” I asked, concerned.
He paused for a moment as though contemplating his answer, caressing my cheek with his thumb while it played in his mind. “Do you remember telling me you loved me on the car ride back to The Epicenter after the address?”
My heart sank from the weight of the question I’d hoped to avoid answering for quite some time. “No,” I answered him, trying to soften my voice to deflect some of the blow. “I don’t remember much of anything after I was shot, except that I was in utter shock.”
“I kind of figured that as soon as I saw the deer in the headlights look you gave me when I told you I loved you in the recovery room. It probably wasn’t too far away from the look you had after realizing you’d been shot.” He rolled over next to me, closing his eyes briefly before summoning the strength to look at me again. “If you weren’t telling me that you loved me, then who did you think you were saying it to?”
“That’s not fair, Ian,” I replied incredulously, rolling over to get off
the bed. “I told you, I was in shock and had no idea what was happening, what was reality and what wasn’t. It’s not fair to hold me accountable for things I didn’t know I was saying in response to questions or statements being made in my presence when I wasn’t exactly conscious.”
“You’re right,” he answered. “It’s not fair. That’s why I avoided asking the question, and your avoidance in answering it tells me all I really need to know.”
“Ian, please, stop.”
“Celaine, you have to realize that this isn’t fair to me, either, loving you without knowing whether you feel the same way or if you ever will at all.” He rolled over to face me, pausing to gauge my reaction, but all I could do was stand there, speechless. “How do you feel about me, Celaine? About us? Am I just fooling myself by thinking that there could be something between us? Do you love me?”
There was so much I wanted to say, so much that I should have said, but the reality was that I wasn’t sure what to say because all the words going through my head muddled together until they were no longer words. Stripped of their components, only letters remained like Scrabble tiles jumbled about in my head. And instead of being what he needed me to be and saying what he wanted me to say, all I could do was stare at him with tears in my eyes, mouth unmoving.
“Well, I guess I have my answer,” Ian said, breaking the silence. The pain on his face all but destroyed me.
“Ian, I—”
“I’m tired, Celaine.” He rolled over, putting his back to me. “We’ll talk later.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Bounty
I closed the door to the room as I stepped into the hallway, bracing myself against it after it latched shut behind me. By then, tears were falling down my cheeks, collecting at my jaw line. I’d hurt him, and all because I couldn’t give him an answer to one simple question.
Yes, but the question wasn’t simple, and neither is your answer, really. The voice in my head returned to comfort me, trying in vain to help me make sense out of the jumble of nonsense floating around in my brain. I needed to be alone, wanted nothing except to be alone with my thoughts, but the footsteps coming from the other end of the hallway told me that wasn’t going to be possible. Damn. Straightening myself up, I wiped the tears away from my eyes with the back of my hand to make my emotional state less obvious and avoid any of the annoying, yet inevitable, questions. I started walking in the other direction.
“Hey,” Jill said, practically falling all over herself to catch up with me. A deep purple bruise had formed along her jaw where she had been struck the night before. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yeah. Out like a light, actually.”
“Good. You guys had a pretty rough night last night. It was probably even more taxing on you than it was on us, in a way.” She followed alongside me, step for step. Our footsteps against the hardwood floor echoed down the length of the hallway. “How about Ian? Has he finally gone to bed?”
“Yes,” I answered, turning my face away from her to shield the pain in my eyes. “At least he was working on falling asleep as I left, so he’ll be asleep soon enough.” I looked at each of the rooms we passed, and wondered whether they were all the same, small and dull. Just a place to stay in the Capitol and nothing more. “Is there anywhere to freshen up here? Even without power? I’d go back to the room, but I don’t want to disturb Ian,” I lied.
“If you really want to call it freshening up,” Jill said, laughing. “Every once in a while, the power is restored to the building, if only for minutes at a time, and usually only when Brooks is in the midst of a public statement he wants us to hear. When that happens, there’s a flood of people rushing to their bathroom showers to quickly wash their hair and use a toilet that flushes. It’s as though we’ve reverted back to living in a time gone by, the dark ages where bathing is regarded as a luxury. And don’t even get me started on the restroom accommodations.”
“I’m guessing they leave a lot to be desired.”
“And then some.”
We came to a doorway situated at the end of the hallway, which Jill opened, motioning for me to follow her inside. Like our rooms, the staff bathroom window was boarded shut, allowing little light to poke through. On the center of the sink, a lantern burned, providing the only practical source of light in the room. Behind where we stood at the sink were a row of restroom stalls—three in all.
Jill stooped down to open a set of drawers underneath the sink. “Here,” she said, plopping a package of wet wipes down on the counter. “It’s not perfect, but we make do.”
“What are those for?” I asked, nodding at the stalls.
“Oh, those,” she answered, gesturing to the buckets sitting on the floor outside each stall, “I’ll give you one guess.” She smirked.
“Gotcha’.”
“They make for quite the awkward conversation starter.”
I pulled my shirt over my head and opened the bag of wet wipes, carefully pulling them from the package one by one until I figured I’d have enough to do what I needed to accomplish. Carefully, I peeled the bandage away from my bullet wound and discarded it in the trash next to the sink. In the mirror, I saw Jill’s eyes widen at the sight of the wound.
“My God,” she said, shocked. “How long have those stitches been in there?”
“Since the night of the address,” I answered her. I rubbed a wipe over the wound and flinched from the sharp pain that radiated down my arm at the mere touch of the material against my still-traumatized skin.
“But that was a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “Here, let me take a look.” I turned away from the sink to face her, noticing her eyes widen even more; her mouth grew stern as she ran her finger along the sutures. “The stitches have grown into your skin. They should have been removed days ago at the very least. Come on.” She grabbed my hand authoritatively and pulled me toward the bathroom door. “We’re going back to my room so I can remove them for you.”
I hurriedly threw my shirt back on and followed her. “Please tell me you have some sort of medical degree.”
“O ye of little faith,” she said. “I’m a registered nurse, so, yes, you could say that I kind of know what I’m doing, although as badly as those stitches have grown into your skin, I may need to dig them out of there.” She turned her head, partly to see whether I was still following her and partly to gauge my response. “Which is probably going to hurt, so I’d brace myself if I were you.”
“Looking forward to it.” My stomach did a one-eighty, leaving the rest of my body in knots.
We walked back down the hallway until we reached her room, just five doors away from the bathroom area. “I think my new roommate is downstairs, so we should have some privacy,” she said, with an emphasis on ‘should’. “I swear, finding a moment of privacy around here is like finding buried treasure in the sand. It’s more of a fantasy than a reality. But at least the men tend to stay downstairs, so we ladies don’t feel quite so exposed.” She walked across the room, crouching down to reach the bottom drawer of her dresser. It opened with a creak that pierced my eardrums like fingernails on a chalkboard. From inside its depths, she pulled out a red pouch with FIRST AID etched on it in white lettering. She then stood up and closed the drawer shut with her foot.
“At the risk of sounding like a huge creeper,” she said, unzipping the pouch and thumbing through its contents, “I’m going to have to ask you to take your shirt off so I can have better access to the wound.”
I again pulled my t-shirt off and followed Jill as she gestured for me to sit on her bed. From the floor, she picked up a towel and draped it over a spot near the middle of the comforter. Obediently, I took a seat on the bed, leaned back onto the towel and closed my eyes, flinching at the sound of metallic objects clanging against each other in the red pouch before they were removed and placed on the bed, one by one. Small scissors, a scalpel and other sharp-looking instruments, the likes of which I hoped wouldn’t make it anywhere near my skin, sat next to me.
“Okay,” Jill assessed after inspecting the wound under slightly better lighting conditions. “The good news is it doesn’t look as bad as it did in the bathroom. The bad news is that I’m still going to have to break the skin in an area or two to retrieve the sutures.”
“Well, I suppose after being shot, how bad could that possibly be?”
“That’s the spirit.” She poured alcohol over a cotton ball she’d retrieved from the pouch and dabbed it on my wound. “Close your eyes and try to relax. Let me know if it gets too painful.”
“I don’t think that will be too hard.” I took a breath and gripped the comforter, focusing instead on the pain on the inside rather than on the outside, knowing that one would easily deflect the other.
“There’s one,” Jill said. I opened my eyes to see her placing the remnants of the stitch on the corner of the towel I was lying on.
“That wasn’t so bad.”
“Because that was the easy one. The next one’s going to be a real pisser.”
“So, how does your group function?” I asked. “Are you all assigned specific duties? I can’t imagine Marshall being the captain of anything other than a well-oiled ship.”
“We all have different jobs, tasks which we rotate out so that no one is putting themselves at risk all the time, though none of us is ever truly safe no matter what we do. We’re constantly on the run from Brooks’ men, who seem to be a step ahead of us most of the time. This is actually the longest we’ve been in one place, and we’ve not been here for more than a week.” I groaned as she gently cut into my skin to reach the stitch buried underneath. The whole process lasted no longer than ten seconds before she moved on to the next one. “This place is actually owned by a sympathizer who has some inside knowledge on the Brooks’ Administration. He’s really sticking his neck out by keeping us here.” She dabbed more alcohol on my wound, which created a burning sensation that was exponentially more painful than the actual stitch removal. “You’re bleeding a little. I’ll do my best to keep it from becoming infected, but there really isn’t much I can do with the limited supplies I have on hand.”
Redemption (Enigma Black Trilogy Book #3) Page 12