by Warren, Skye
Shadows flicker through his green eyes, and I have the sense that he isn’t fully in the present. Memories are dragging him back. They may even claim him for good. It’s a war I’m fighting. For the man inside him who wants to be honorable.
I believe he’s there, even if Elijah doesn’t.
He turns and leaves the basement.
My throat constricts as if to remind me how thirsty I am. The bag of water sits a couple yards away from the bars. Far enough that I can’t reach it, but I can look at it.
When I look back, Adam is looking at me with a mixture of amusement and dismay. “Hell,” he says. “You might have consulted me first.”
Guilt gnaws at my insides. “I’m so sorry. And you’re injured.”
He laughs. “It was worth it to see the shock on his face. He didn’t see that coming. And don’t worry. I’ll live. If only to spite Elijah North, I’m making it out of this cell.”
I curl up on my cot and fall into a deep sleep of exhaustion.
Dreams come in the form of an endless black ocean. I’m falling, crashing into the water. The impact leaves me breathless. Water swirls around me. Bubbles escape my lips.
When I can finally see, there are nets all around me. Beside me, beneath me.
Even above me, keeping me from the surface.
The nets pull tighter and tighter, until they trap my arms against my body. They wrap tight around my tail so I can’t swim anymore, and then I’m falling, sinking into the black abyss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Adam
Apparently I’m on a hunger strike.
It wouldn’t have been my choice, especially with the bleeding coming from my side, but I’ll stand in solidarity with Holly. Or sit, which may be my only option. Lying down also works.
Holly is sleeping so deeply that she didn’t stir even when I used the bucket in the back corner, thank God for small favors. Now she has a gentle snore that somehow sounds cute.
There’s a creak at the top of the stairs, but she doesn’t move. I stand and move between her and the stairs, ignoring the throb in my side. It’s ridiculous, really, the idea that I could protect her. A hard wind would knock me over. Now I understand why Elijah was intent on defending her in that French church.
Holly Frank has a way of bringing out the protective instinct in a man.
Elijah has shed his suit jacket upstairs. He’s wearing shirtsleeves rolled up and rumpled. That doesn’t make him look nearly as casual as his socks. Black dress socks. He’s not wearing any shoes. It’s like he got drunk on the sacramental wine and then came downstairs.
Which is a real possibility.
He stands a few feet away from the bars. Far enough that I can’t lunge for him. Smart man. Even with a bullet in my side it wouldn’t stop me from trying.
“Have you come to play more games?” I ask, my voice polite.
He nods, his eyes a dark and stormy sea.
That makes me laugh. “How far are you going to take this? Or haven’t you thought that far out? Will you make me finger fuck her? Eat her out? Are you really going to stand there and watch as I fuck the woman you love?”
“I don’t love her.” I don’t love anyone, comes the unspoken corollary.
“You’re going to lose her.”
“She’s already lost.”
“Christ.” I shake my head. “When I met you, you were just a stupid kid intent on getting himself killed. Now we meet again all these years later, and you are the same.”
“Spare me the French accent.”
“So you know my true identity.” He doesn’t just know my true identity. He lives it. Which means I need to leave this goddamn cell. I need to leave New York City. Because wherever Elijah North is, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Jefferson isn’t far behind. “And I know yours. Do you think we didn’t run a background check? The good kind. Not whatever you put on the form when you enlisted.”
“Stop.”
“Seeing your mother killed when you were three, that had to be hard.”
He takes a step closer to the bars. “I said, stop.”
“Being beat to shit by the same man who killed her, every goddamn day, that must have been hard. Watching your brothers leave, one by one. They abandoned you.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“You should. They’re not the heroes you think they are.”
“I’ve done things—”
“You killed your father.”
“You think I regret that? You think I fucking regret it? I waited years to do that. Too many years. That’s the thing, you always assumed I regretted that part, but the only thing I regretted was waiting so long. I’m a murderer, Adam. A proud one.”
“If you’re so proud of what you’ve done, why can’t you be with her?”
He glances at her. The faint light from the top of the stairs shines a halo around her dark head. The soft sounds of her snores continue. “If you did a real background check, then you know what wasn’t on the forms. Any mention of me between age fourteen and eighteen.”
My chest constricts, and I force myself to continue breathing evenly. He can hear it, he can sense it, and if he feels even an ounce of pity, he’ll leave. “A runaway.”
“Running implies someone was looking for me. No one looked.”
“No one cared.”
He gives me a sardonic glance. “Are you trying to be my therapist?”
I look up at the ceiling. “Or maybe a priest. Do you have a confession to make?”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice low and thoughtful. “I thought my brothers were heroes. I wanted to be like them. I guess some part of me still does. I thought you were a hero, too.”
“Then you met me in France, and you discovered I was just a dirty bastard.”
“Same as everyone else.”
“That why you tried to steal the diamonds?”
“I stole them for my country, because my commanding officer asked me to. It was a shitty reason, of course. Greed. The same reason your COs wanted them.”
“So does that make us corrupt or our commanding officers?”
“I think it makes the government corrupt.”
“We’re all fucking dirty.”
He glances at Holly again. “Not all of us.”
“This runaway. What did he do to survive?” I keep my voice light. There is no weight whatsoever given to sympathy. No heaviness around the idea of shame.
“The same thing everyone else had to do.” He stares at me as if willing me to understand. Or maybe he really does want me to absolve him. “I dealt drugs when I could.”
“And when you couldn’t?”
He looks away this time. “It was a long time ago.”
“It still haunts you.”
“Why shouldn’t it? I’m unclean. I never should have touched Holly Frank. You never should have made me touch her in that French prison.”
“It’s one of the few things in my life I don’t regret doing.”
He glares at me. “I should shoot you again.”
I look down at the dark stain of blood on my gray T-shirt. “A graze, really. About the same place where I shot you, almost to the inch. As if you didn’t really want me to die.”
“I could say the same about you.”
I smile. “So what’s it going to be? Should I fuck her ass? Maybe tie her up, introduce her to the pleasures of a flogger?”
“Hell.”
“How far will you go, Elijah North?”
“You want to know what line I won’t cross?”
“We both know you aren’t going to let her starve to death.”
“Do we know that?”
“I don’t even think you’d let me die. If I collapsed right now, you’d probably call an ambulance.”
He gives me a dark look. “I wouldn’t test that theory.”
“Where is the line, Elijah?”
“Way back in the distance. I passed it a long time ago.”
“Then you won’t mind if I wake h
er up right now. You won’t mind if I kiss her, if I touch her, If I fuck her. Right? You already crossed the fucking line, is that right?”
He stares at me, and for a moment I think he’s going to call my bluff.
Then he swears under his breath. “You are so determined to be my mentor.”
“When you stop needing one, I’ll stop being one.”
“Spare me the zen bullshit.” He tosses me something through the bars. I catch a single key. “You can walk yourself back to Brooklyn. Or crawl. I don’t care.”
“Shouldn’t you provide a ride?”
“I had to rough it through the goddamn French countryside. I had to catch us a couple of dormice to eat before we found shelter. You can manage the Lowest East Side.”
“Fair.” I regard the key with suspicion. I may have been willing to mouth off to the man from behind the bars. Prisoners have very little to lose. That doesn’t mean I’m taking my safety for granted. It wouldn’t make sense to turn your back on a tiger. “This is real?”
“Oh, it’ll open the door all right.” He gives a shrug. “As to whether I’ll shoot you in the back, you’ll have to find that one out the hard way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Elijah
Holly must have been exhausted. I suppose abject terror can do that.
She sleeps for another two hours while I keep watch over her.
I know when she wakes because of the stillness in the air. And because she stops that soft snore. It becomes quiet in the room, with only her stormy thoughts to fill the space.
“Do you think he’ll come back soon?” she asks without turning her head, and I realize that she thinks I’m Adam. She can probably sense my presence, but she assumes I’m him.
I don’t answer, because I want to prolong the time it takes her to discover me. She won’t be pleased to see me. That’s the irony. That I wanted to punish Adam but really I just made him a hero. I’m the villain in her story.
“When he does, I think we should accept the water and medicine,” she says. “I shouldn’t have refused like that, not when you need it more than I do.”
And still I say nothing.
Her voice comes softer this time, more reflective. “Do you think he would let you go if I promised to do what he said? That way you could see a doctor. Do you think he’d make that trade?”
“It’s a good idea,” I say. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
She scrambles up in the bed and backs up to the wall. “Elijah.”
“That’s me.”
“What are you doing here? Where’s Adam?”
A pang in my chest. “Do you miss him? You seem pretty worried about him.”
“He’s been shot. By you.”
“Well, don’t worry about him anymore, sweetheart. He’s free of this hellhole. There’s only you and me. And you didn’t even make a promise to obey me. That means you’re free to fight when I fuck you, pretend like you don’t want what I’m giving you.”
“How dare you.”
“I know you like it better when you fight.”
She could have withdrawn when I taunted her. She could have started crying. There would have been nothing left for me to do but take her back to her pretty little loft in her pretty little building. She could have brunch with mimosas and avocado toast. Yeah, I studied her staid life. The life that she thinks suits her.
Instead she lifts her chin. “Whatever I may have liked, that was in the past. Before you freaking abducted me. Off the street.”
“Would you prefer I abduct you from the terrace of the restaurant with your editor and agent looking on? Or maybe you’d like it better if I’d stolen into your loft at night, if I’d appeared in your bed with a ski mask and masking tape for your wrists?”
She tries to look furious. She really fucking tries. But the way her cheeks darken is clear to me from a few feet away. The way her eyes brighten with lust makes my cock hard.
There’s no hiding from me.
I stand and dust my hands off. This will be fun. “How about this? You can pretend you’re disgusted with me when I make you come so hard you see God. You can scream and cry and faint when I lick your pretty little pussy.”
“I won’t like it. I won’t.”
I notice that she doesn’t deny it’s going to happen. She knows that we’re going to fuck. Her body’s already preparing itself for me. Her pussy would be wet if I touched it.
She glances at the door to the cell. It’s open an inch.
“Don’t,” I warn her. “Remember what I told you in Italy. Running only makes me chase you. It only makes me pin you down and fuck even harder as punishment.”
She broadcasts her decision seconds before she actually bolts for the door. I could catch her right away, but I let her scramble to the door. It’s more fun to press her against the iron bars. More fun to push my body against her so she can feel my erection.
She goes still at the feel. “That was before.”
“Before I took you captive? Make no mistake, sweetheart. You were mine from the moment your pretty little ass landed in that French church.”
“No,” she whispers.
Carefully, very carefully, I lift her hair away. And I place a soft kiss at the back of her neck. Then I use teeth, scraping against the same place that I kissed. Gentleness and force. I’ll always be a mixture of the two where she’s concerned. “Yes.”
She bucks her hips, trying to push me off. All it does is send friction through my cock.
I push back, grinding hard enough to make her whimper.
The gentleness part of the night is over. There’s only force now. I reach around through the bars and feel her breasts pressed against iron. The contrast of soft and hard makes me groan. “You’re so pretty,” I murmur. “But I like you better in the dark.”
There’s only the two of us in the dark. The world fades away.
“I’m going to cross the line. Again and again,” I murmur against her hair. “You have to be the one to stop me. You have to make me stop, understand?”
“What if I can’t?”
“You have to draw the line. I need you to do that.” I’m forcing her, and I’m begging at the same time. I need her to draw the line because lord knows I can’t draw it myself.
“What if I won’t?”
Frustration rises in me, along with a swelling of lust. The beast inside me likes the idea of there being no line. No barriers. The man is sure that I’ll take it too far. “A person should have a line,” I tell her. “That’s your fucking job here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Holly
I’m furious at Elijah for abducting me. I’m relieved that he did.
The contradiction is tearing me apart.
“I hate you,” I say on a whisper, and that’s not a lie.
He bites my neck again, and then the junction of my shoulder, and then my back. He leaves his teeth marks all over me like a brand, and I arch my back from the pure pleasure of it.
I turn around in his arms. If I’m an animal in captivity, then I can bite back. I bite his chin, his jaw. I bite the soft flesh of his lower lip until he grunts in pain.
Something metallic drops on my tongue. Blood.
Such a small thing, but it makes me relent. Now that I’ve hurt him, I can relax in his arms. “I love you,” I say on a whisper, and that’s not a lie either.
He shoves the pleated skirt up to my waist. He pushes the placket of my panties aside, and then he’s inside me, thrusting hard into a body not quite ready. He’s too large, and I squirm to get away. The thickness feels like an invasion. It feels like something I need to fight.
But he doesn’t relent. He’s merciless as he fucks me into the bars, his arms holding me beneath my thighs, his body impelling me against the iron. There might be grid-shaped bruises on my back when we’re done, and the thought of it makes me moan.
My orgasm comes as hard and violent as the way he fucks me. It rolls over my body in clenching waves, and I sc
ream against his shoulder. He rocks through the climax, making it last until every ounce of breath has been wrung out of me. I’m gasping for air when he finally slows down. Then he lets me go and I slide bonelessly down his body.
Only when I’m kneeling at his feet does he grasp his cock.
His hand moves in a blur. He fucks his fist in front of my face, and it’s pure instinct that has me opening my mouth. He grips the base of his cock and presses the tip to my lips. I suck him, made hungry by some primal motive, pushing my face against his body, letting him invade my throat. I swallow around him, and he comes with a roar that bounces off the stone walls.
He seems to come forever, spilling salt onto my tongue, making me gasp for air.
“Clean me,” he says, his green eyes almost demonic as he looks down on me. Or maybe holy. Either way I know to obey him, and I lick the come around the crown of his cock. A person should have a line, he told me, but I run my tongue along the vein underneath.
My knees are clenched together from arousal, and he bends down and pries them apart. You have to draw the line. I need you to do that. Then his mouth is between my legs, my black pleated skirt up around my waist. His tongue strokes my clit over and over again, endless, relentless, and I beg. “No, please, wait.”
He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t wait. He only licks me until tears stream down my cheeks. I push myself backwards to get away, but the bars imprison me. Even now, in this intimate moment, he conspires to kidnap me. I’m going to cross the line. Again and again. I want him to cross it. He forces two fingers inside me, and I sob from the hard invasion. He rubs in a cruel, cruel pattern. One designed to push me over the edge. This time when I come it’s a quick flash in the dark, an explosion that leaves my ears ringing.
We both collapse onto the hard, dusty floor, panting, our breaths loud in the hollow room. Reality returns to me in cold, shocking flashes: the disarray of my clothes, the cell door open that crucial inch, the fact that Adam is no longer here.