by Angel Payne
“I think I’m going to throw up,” she whispered.
“That’s unfortunate.” He stepped away. “Please do it over there. I despise the stench.”
She stumbled back, but her empty stomach only cooperated with a painful retch. It was for the better. There wasn’t time to waste. The next minute, she watched the distant silver speck of Max’s Jag leave the parking lot of Annie’s Pizza and turn east on Cascades Highway. Mua appeared next to her again, holding a tablet that showed a GPS-style map with a red dot traveling the same route.
The man emitted a low laugh and called to the three men next to the SUV behind them, “Excellent work, Vadim.” The middle thug, who had a face as round as a pie tin, accepted the praise with a short nod. “It seems our target has acclimated well to the beacon.”
Luna scraped back her wind-whipped hair to get a better look at the screen in Mua’s grip. A shiver gripped her that had nothing to do with the day’s dropping temperature. “Th-That dot is really being transmitted from inside Zeke?”
“Indeed.”
She shook her head, wondering if her mind was going to implode. “I’m still having trouble comprehending how this happened. And why.”
One side of Mua’s mouth tilted as he brushed a stray pine needle off his wool-blend overcoat. The move was as refined as the Italian name which undoubtedly lined the garment—and gave her a supersized version of the creeps. The man spoke and dressed better than his brother, but the wolf beneath the fleece was spawned from the same disgusting gene pool. She almost hated herself for opening the door to him this morning.
Almost.
Sometimes getting someone to see the light meant you had to go to dark places for them. Really dark places.
Zeke was worth the dark places.
He was worth anything.
“It was quite a simple choice,” Mua finally answered. “As you know, darling, time is a precious commodity to me right now. Leaving the country is a paramount priority for me—though doing so with Sergeant Chestain is equally significant. I’m sure that scenario fits into your plans as well, hmmm?”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “She’s not going to get killed or anything, right? I’m not a murderer. I’m not going to be your little helping bitch for that.”
The man chuckled. It actually made him look like a handsome magazine ad. She wanted to retch again for even considering the idea.
“I assure you, lovely Luna, her well-being is of prime importance to me.” He handed the tablet to one of his men and then turned fully back to her. “As a matter of fact, our original plan was to simply slip her away in the middle of the night. We were but hours away from mobilizing on that when Sergeant Hayes arrived at her home. After he departed the next morning—”
“Wait.” She gulped against the lump that dumped in the pit of her stomach. “He left…the next morning?”
Mua looked away, blatantly false in his “sympathy” for her. “I could show you our surveillance shots of his departure, though they are a little odd. He forgot his shirt. Seemed to barely have his boots on—”
“I don’t want to see the damn pictures.” She ignored Mua’s knowing leer. “Why didn’t you just take her then?”
“Her brother was still in the house.” He sighed. “Seems she has one for every day of the week.”
She wheeled on him as irritation joined her pain. “Right, right,” she snapped. “Got that picture, okay? Snow White and her seven adoring mutants.” She glared in response to his amused smirk. “So you followed her on Saturday night. She ended up at Bastille”—and I don’t want to know the reason why—“and that’s when you moved in?”
Mua’s only confirmation of that was a little arch of his brows. “It became apparent, rather quickly, that Rayna wasn’t willing to depart peacefully with us. When Hayes appeared and interceded, Vadim displayed brilliant thinking to move us forward with this test of the tracking chips upon which we’d been working.”
She looked from him to pie tin guy. “And you just had one conveniently lying around?”
His expression didn’t change. “I brought one, yes. The intention was to use it on Rayna.” He flicked a glance at the tablet, seemingly satisfied with wherever Z was headed. “She would have been our inaugural recipient. When Vadim inserted it into Hayes instead, he saved us from risking a valuable commodity in the name of research.”
Luna shifted her gaze to the ground. Rayna Chestain was really only a name to her, but it was a better designation than commodity. But caring for the woman, even by this sliver, wasn’t part of the plan. Chestain was ruining everything again. The only person who mattered here was Zeke. She had to make him see the depth of her devotion. When he realized she’d forged a deal with a demon for him, had agreed to get this dirty for him… This would be the magic formula at last. It had to be. He had to see everything she’d done for him. After this, he just had to know how much she loved him, right?
She looked back up but directed her gaze at the tablet. “I still don’t understand where I come in,” she said. “You said you needed me to help activate the chip.” She waved at the screen. “But it’s clearly working. What is there left for me to do? Aren’t you just going to follow them, go get Rayna, and—”
When Mua clasped her arm to break her off, she wondered if his perfect handsomeness was due to him being a robot. His grip was crushing.
“Darling, if all I want now is to ‘get her,’ why would I have authorized Vadim to put the chip into Hayes?” His eyes narrowed by dangerous fractions. “Procuring Rayna again is only going to be half my pleasure. Watching her bow to my will and obey every word I say, down to the moment I watch her crawl on her knees in the chains of another, shall be the other. She’ll do all of it without ever spitting at me again, too.” He gazed out over the Cascades peaks, many shrouded now in thick mist. “Hayes is the key to her perfect compliance. Her weakness is now our strength.” A slow smile spread across his smooth lips. “In the end, Rayna will be mine and Zeke shall be yours.”
Hearing him say it aloud made her heart squeeze with elation. She turned, unable to hold back her eager smile. “So how do I help?”
Mua chuckled and returned her look, flashing movie-star-perfect teeth. “Patience, lovely girl. For seventy-two hours, we run on silent stealth. After that, Hayes’s system will have assimilated the chip in its first phase of effectiveness.”
“You mean it does more than that?” She nodded at the tablet.
Mua cocked his head with unwavering confidence. “We’ve only just begun, darling.”
Vadim pushed off the car and set his stare on her, too. He waggled his brows. “A kiss for luck and we’re on our way?”
Inwardly, she apologized to Karen Carpenter. On the outside, she gave the asswad a look that told him his balls were on the line if he took a step closer.
“Oooo,” Mua interceded. “Touchy, touchy, lovely Luna. Vadim only wants to help.”
The henchman lowered his eyelids and leered. “I’m good at helping.”
“Tell him to help from over there,” she retorted.
“That won’t make it terribly easy for you to practice for your part,” Mua answered. “Since it’s going to involve embracing Zeke, I assume you wish to get everything just right.”
Her guts did knot-tying practice again. Her chest heaved with disgust. But she forced her feet to step closer to Vadim. “If your hands go below my waist, your balls will be singing Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“Mama mia,” the guy drawled.
“Shut up.”
I’m only doing this for you, Zeke. You understand, don’t you? Of course you do. Sometimes we do shitty things for the ones we love. Because in the end, it’s worth it. In just a few days, we’ll have our happy end—and all this will be worth it.
Chapter Sixteen
Zeke was used to writing off a lot of stupid hunches to the paranoia that was sewn into his DNA the second he signed on for Special Forces. Not this time. No stupidity here. No paranoia, eit
her.
The air in the cabin had gone from weird to outright uncomfortable. He was pretty certain it had started before they even got back here—during their little dance in the pizza parlor lot to be exact. The way Rayna had stared up at him, as if seeking something but sensing she wouldn’t find it, had ripped through his gut like a shithook’s rotor. Every muscle had jerked with the longing to flatten her to the car’s hood and demand she give up every thought that darkened her eyes so much. Then he would have kissed her in gratitude for the disclosure, promising her more rewards once they got back here. Though there would be that matter of her flippant language in the gift shop to address, preferably in the form of a few good swats to her inner thighs…
One night of indulging the dynamic doesn’t make her yours to do that with. To think of doing that with.
So here they were at the crossroads of Uneasy Avenue and Tension Boulevard. Rayna’s car was clearly stalled at the light, stuffed with so many thoughts that the windows were clogged with the mounting pile. In his car? An arsenal of rifles, primed and waiting to blast those damn panes out.
Dinner was simple, boxed macaroni and cheese that she managed to inspire with spices and some packaged sundried tomatoes, though they ate it in stilted silence. Z got himself a reprieve from her taciturnity by asking about the kids with whom she volunteered once a week at the base’s Child Development Center. With Halloween days away, the excitement was high. They’d already made candy collection bags, as well as little ghosts for the classroom. Audrey was going to be Strawberry Shortcake. Rajan was pumped to dress up like Spiderman. Then there were her “creative” kids: Logan wanted to be a walking cocoa machine complete with working spigot, and Veronica had her heart set on being some creature called Derpy Hooves.
He thought he had her loosened a little again, enough to try to get inside her head once more, when the conversation fell upon the subject of the kids’ annual trip to the pumpkin patch—which was happening tomorrow.
With a tight wince, Rayna had excused herself.
With a tighter wince, Z relocated himself to the couch.
Passing the next four hours with a marathon of Ice Road Truckers didn’t ease the weight on his mind by one ounce. Or the pressure in his body. Though the mental shit was a confusion he didn’t want to untangle right now, he sure as hell knew what was going on in his nerves and muscles—especially the one between his legs.
He was getting hooked on a drug called Rayna Chestain. And damn it, he had no idea how to rehab himself out of it.
He finally dragged his ass into the downstairs bathroom for a shower. Making the temperature ice cold helped him as much as a cheap condom during wild animal sex.
“Nice, asshole,” he muttered while tucking the towel around his waist, as well as the boner that shoved against it. “Could you do any worse for mental metaphors?”
He opened the cabinet to grab a fresh towel to hang on the rack. And groaned.
Lying on top of that towel was the heart-shaped paddle Garrett had left up here. There was a smaller wood spanker, a strict leather flogger, adjustable nipple clamps on a gold chain, and a pair of soft leather handcuffs.
“Garrett Hawkins, you’re a dead man.”
He grumbled it as he held the clamps up. The chain that connected them glimmered in the light. His mind instantly filled with the fantasy of putting them on Rayna. Oh, yeah. The matching gilt tints in her skin would glow as she endured the pain for him, as her nipples went from copper to crimson for him…
He let the clamps drop into the sink as he dipped his hand to his cock. If he didn’t get release from this pressure now—
He’d gotten only halfway through his first stroke when a crash from the kitchen filled the cabin.
“Fuck.”
A thousand images filled his mind, none of them good. There was no damn way Mua could know they were here unless the cockroach had gotten to Garrett or Franz or had his minions hack into the team’s personal records. Neither scenario had a bright side of any kind. And if the din wasn’t Mua breaking in, it had to be something like a pissed-off raccoon, mountain lion, or bear.
“Fuck.” He repeated it as he skidded around the corner to the kitchen.
There were no marauding forest creatures. No armed and clumsy Mua henchmen, either. The wound in his upper back, now throbbing due to Rayna’s debridement and butterfly-bandage treatment of this morning, thanked him for that.
But suddenly, ripping open those dressings seemed a really good plan. He wondered if he could go back and pick that box as the alternative to what he did encounter.
Rayna stood next to the sink where the running water was fast filling one side with wash bubbles. She’d changed back into his Henley, though he’d gotten her a set of pajamas in town. Next to her bare feet were both their dinner plates, in pieces now, surrounded by squished macaroni and spattered cheese. Her head was dipped but not so low that he didn’t see the harsh wobble of her chin and the heaving breaths in her chest.
“They just slipped,” she stammered. “I’m so sorry.”
“They’re just dishes.” The angry blades in his retort weren’t intentional. He didn’t care about the goddamn dishes. It incensed him that she thought, even for a second, that he would. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”
She shook her head.
“Then what’s wrong?” He went to her, skirting the shattered china. As soon as he touched her shoulder, dread sliced his gut again. “Christ. You’re not okay. You’re shaking like a—” He stopped himself. Awareness blared through his brain, hot and intense. “Shit. You don’t have your medication, do you? You went to the club straight from Sally’s. You thought you’d be going home.”
“I don’t need my medication.” She squeaked the words before lifting her head a few inches. “Where are your clothes?”
He reached around her and slammed the faucet off. Since the suds were nearing the lip of the sink, a line of them stuck to the underside of his arm. “I just got out of the shower.”
“And look.” A manic giggle spurted off her lips. “Now you’re all soapy again.” Inside another second, the laughter turned to a sad moan. She sucked in a choppy breath as she stared at the bubbles dripping off his triceps. “Holy crap, Zeke. Your arms are really nice.”
“Thanks. Are you sure—”
“I should get something to clean that stuff up.” She turned away, sliding along the counter until she was clear from him.
“Uh-uh.” By instinct or by necessity, his Dom baritone broke free. He took one step to recover the three she’d taken away from him. “You’re going to scoot your ass to the other room and realign your chakras again, or whatever the hell you need to do, while I figure out a way to contact Sally and have her call in a prescription for you.”
She shoved against his chest, making his eyebrows jump. “I don’t need the damn medicine.”
He followed her stomping journey into the living room. “Really? Because you’re weaving like a goose on acid, honey.”
“I don’t need the medicine.”
He unfurled a threatening snarl. “Rayna—”
“I don’t need the medicine.”
She whirled back toward him, now raising her face fully. He stumbled back a step from the force of the sight. Huge tears welled in her gaze. Her eyebrows bunched in torment. Her lips battled each other as if disagreeing on how to hold back emotions that seemed a living beast inside her. She tore him apart with that stare. Reduced him to the same raw need with which she stared at him.
“I—don’t need—the medicine.” The whispers came out between her quaking steps back toward him. When she came close enough to touch him again, she bowed her head. “I need…”
She slid to her knees.
And dropped her forehead against his feet.
“I need this,” she rasped. “Please, Zeke. I know you’re not signing on for forever…but as long as I can have this from you, I need this.”
He was pretty damn sure he stopped breathing. But a
s long as his eyes kept working, he’d be good to go. He couldn’t get enough of this sight. He’d certainly commanded a few submissives to honor him in this way before, but none had ever offered their surrender so willingly, so openly, so perfectly.
The significance of her action pierced him like a dagger in a bull’s-eye.
Rayna Chestain was a submissive. And she was discovering it right in front of him. Discovering it, welcoming it, and honoring it with every exquisite inch of her body and every generous shred of her soul.
And then giving it. To him. A former street rat who used this dynamic as therapy for his fucked-up past and a constructive purge for his current demons. A guy with an office that was lined in jungle wallpaper and sported mud carpeting. A trained killer who could wield an M4 as well as a flogger. A Dom who didn’t deserve her—
But sure as hell wasn’t going to turn his back on her now. Just as he’d freed her from Kier all those years ago, he’d release her from the assholes who violated her mind now. And dear fuck, he’d love every minute of it.
He found his breath. Pulled it in with steady intent. Only after that did he direct, “Rayna, lift your head.” He tugged a finger under her chin. “All the way. Look at me.”
Tears tracked down her cheeks. He traced one with the pad of a thumb and spoke directly from his heart. “You move me, little bird…in so many ways. Do you know that?” When her face crumpled as if she’d cry again, he pressed on. “Are you sure this is what you want? Rayna, I’m not going to drench this in any sugar. Now that I’ve had your submission once, I’ll want more.” To emphasize that, he tunneled his fingers into her hair and pulled hard. Her head fell back, letting him see all the depths in the magical lakes that lived in her eyes. “I’ll push limits. Are you ready to let me do that?”
She swallowed. Then smiled. “If you don’t, I already have a few bratty one-liners ready to zing free.”
He didn’t try to control his responding grin. “Well, all right, honey. Let’s get started, then.”