by Jaden Wilkes
Tired of circling, he finally kicked up towards her and tried to catch her off guard. She was ready for him though and used the opportunity to get close to his midsection and stab him in the abdomen. He cried out and held his stomach, the look of surprise on his face was almost comical if she wasn’t so ramped up on adrenaline and seeking the killing blow.
She found the spot Dimitri and Nico had taught her and sunk the knife in, hitting the heart exactly as planned. He grabbed the front of her shirt and started to sink. She didn’t have a chance to pull the blade back as he fell, taking her with him.
She looked at him as his eyes closed and the life fled his body and realized how young he was. He looked no older than twenty. She had taken the life of a man younger than she, a man with so much more to discover, to experience.
She would have wept had it not been for Dimitri and Dalton continuing their fight. Dimitri now had Dalton’s knife, but was bleeding from a wound in his side. Dalton looked worse though, his face was contorted and blood poured from a cut above his eye, seeming to blind him on that side. He had another wound on his upper arm that looked long and deep. He was losing this battle and he knew it. His desperation showed in his frantic searching for a way out.
He pulled back suddenly and Dimitri lost his grip. He ran towards Columbia, there were just a few feet between them and he covered it fast.
Before he could reach her he stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes rolled into the back of his head, blood gargled from his mouth and he collapsed. She saw a knife sticking out of his back, thrown by Dimitri.
She was impressed and disgusted at everything that had happened. She felt dirty, and not just from the blood covering her, but from the taking of lives…and for what? For Sergei to destroy Dimitri once and for all?
She always thought killing would be as easy as that first time, when she was working with the force of years of torture behind her. It wasn’t so light on her soul this time though, she didn’t know if she’d ever forget the faces of the men she’d taken down today.
She didn’t know if she wanted to. It seemed honourable to remember them and carry their deaths with her.
“Are you ok?” Dimitri asked and walked to her side. She couldn’t suppress the heat growing in her belly when she thought about her fierce warrior. He had protected her today, fought alongside her and vanquished the men who came to kill them all.
“I am,” she said, “I’m a little shaky, that’s all.” She felt like she was going to throw up and faint. She clutched his arm to stay upright. He walked her to a nearby chair and she sat down, still feeling dizzy and overwhelmed.
“That’s normal after your first few fights. Your body was running on pure adrenaline and now it’s being reabsorbed. You will probably feel sick to your stomach in a few minutes, until you’ve had time to process.”
“Did you feel this way?” she asked, “The first time you killed?” She needed to discuss something, anything, to keep her mind focused on the here and now. She couldn’t let it drift to the looks on the men’s faces when they died, the noises they made, their blood spilling.
“I did, and for many times after that. By then I was fully committed to serving Sergei’s needs so I didn’t have a choice. You have a choice, little dove,” he said softly and touched her face with his hand, “I will kill for you. You don’t ever have to pick up a blade again if you don’t want to. You can continue to train, in case you need to defend yourself, but you don’t have to kill again if it’s too much.” His voice was concerned and protective, exactly what Columbia needed to hear at that moment. The very thing it took to make her love him even more.
“I want to though,” she told him, “I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would, but I also would rather destroy those who deserve it than take it out on myself.”
“That is true,” he said, “do you feel as though this has stayed the rise of gnawing need?”
“I can’t say for certain until I’ve had time to think about it,” she replied, “but I feel as though it has quelled the savage tide that is ever present in the back of my mind.”
“I knew you were a warrior queen,” he said, his eyes full of the same pride and lust she was feeling for him, “what other woman would want to settle down with a warrior like me?”
“None,” she replied, “and you’d better never forget that or I’ll be using this knife on other parts.”
He pulled back in mock horror and said, “Message received, loud and clear. Now let’s go find Nico and arrange to have this cleaned up so we can finally find that bed of ours.”
Chapter Ten
It didn’t hit her for another day. The events of that night, the killing, the fear and finally the horrifying image of those men’s faces as they died at her hand.
She woke up from a fretful dream where Sergei was larger than life and Dimitri was dead. It was ridiculous that such a fucking monster should now haunt her nightmares when she’d never even met the man.
Dimitri had been in a great mood since the attack, she realized he needed this outlet as much as she did. His wounds had all been superficial and he recovered nicely, especially when Columbia put on his favourite leather corset and tended to his cuts and bruises. She suspected that he played up his pain to take advantage of her sympathy, but she didn’t mind doing it.
Nico had worse injuries. They’d called in a private physician who’d attended to his stab wounds and concussion, but he was still in bed two days later. Columbia had to accept a beautiful nurse who moved in to watch him round the clock. Columbia had taken to calling her Nurse Slutty, but had to admit she did seem like a competent professional. She didn’t like how jealous she was of Nico, but Dimitri found great amusement in watching her bristle every time Nurse Slutty fed Nico soup or wiped his chin for him. In a strange twist of irony, she was the one easily driven to jealousy, and no Dimitri. She apparently had a lot of growing up to do.
She listened in the darkness for Dimitri’s breathing. It always startled her when she woke up and couldn’t hear his soft snoring. She rolled over and pressed herself against his body, seeking heat and comfort.
“Are you all right?” he asked and rolled towards her, taking her in his arms.
“Did I wake you up?” she said, “and yes, I’m fine…just a bad dream.”
“I was already awake,” he said, “I was listening to you snore and cry out in your sleep.”
“I don’t snore,” she protested and slapped his chest. He winced and she was instantly ashamed, she had hit a spot just above the stab wound. “I’m sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“Forgetting that I’m mortal?” he asked and laughed.
“I do, and I don’t want to remember,” she said and hugged him tighter. “I was so scared that day, I thought I lost you.” She thought about the blood stained carpet just feet away from the end of the bed. She thought about the shard of glass, back on Dimitri’s night table. She thought about the young man dying at the end of her blade. None of it upset her per se; it just felt hard to take, to know that these things had happened at her hand.
“I was too,” he confessed, “I was terrified. I’ve never been so afraid of anything in my life.”
“You never will be again,” she said, “I will never leave you. Don’t you forget that, even if we’re separated, I will always make my way back to you.”
She started to cry, her eyes leaking fat, hot tears that she couldn’t hold back. She sniffled and Dimitri caressed her head and her body, soothing her. “It will get easier,” he said, “with each kill, it gets a little easier.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” she replied, “I don’t know if I want it to get easier. It shouldn’t be easy, taking a life. I thought it would be, but it isn’t and it shouldn’t be.”
“You are redirecting your self loathing,” he told her, “of course it will be emotional for you. But it will get easier to kill the kinds of men we are going to kill.”
“I suppose it will, and better them than m
e, right?” she said, although her voice was bitter with the realization.
“You will feel unclean, but that too shall pass,” he replied, “you can’t clean something without making another thing dirty, think of it that way. You can’t heal yourself and expunge your rage without it going somewhere.”
She thought about it for a moment, there in the dark and in his arms. She ran her hand along his bicep, the familiar bulge of muscle and bumps of scarred flesh. “You’re right, and I’m sure it will get easier on some level,” she finally said, “but I want to know, how did they find us?”
“I must have been spotted the night of the party. I see now. As much as I thought I would go and find out information on them, they set me up. They knew I wouldn’t stay away if rumours were planted and I was anywhere within a few hundred miles of Hong Kong. We were so distracted when we left, they must have followed us. Lucky for you, they are men who can’t comprehend the possibility that a woman is anything but a simple whore. They never expected to find Boudicca, my warrior queen, waiting for them.”
She could sense his smile in the darkness and added her own. “I thought I recognized the one on the rooftop, I think I saw him at the party. I’m glad he didn’t realize I lived with you,” she said. “We will have to be more careful in Malta then, stay closer to home.”
“Never,” he replied, “I saw how invigorated you were at that party, so we will no longer live in fear and hiding. You also need to realize how beautiful you are, regardless of the marks on your flesh. The world will accept and love you as much as I do, I promise.”
“But what about Sergei and his bratva? They will find out where we live,” she exclaimed, “we will never be safe.”
“Let them find out, let them come for us,” he replied and held her tight. “We will kill them, every last one of them, until we are ready to hunt down Sergei. You will be the one to push the blade into his heart, little dove, I pledge you this at last. I promise you will kill him for me.”
She smiled then, even wider than before. He finally saw her need to do this for him, to offer her knife to him and destroy the one who had almost destroyed him. “Thank you,” she said, “I will keep training and getting better. This is my pledge to you. I will kill for you and let you kill for me, together we will keep each other safe and destroy the fucking world if it gets in our way.”
“You will get better,” he said and brushed a hair from her forehead. “And we will have the room to build a gun range. You are correct, you need to learn.”
“Finally,” she said and wiggled against him, “you are learning to listen to your half-mad warrior queen.”
“I love you,” he said and pressed his hard cock against her thigh.
“I love you too,” she replied and reached for it, taking it in her hand to show him just how much. The tears were dried on her face by the time they reached their release together, writhing and entwined together in their love and their sex.
They could be any couple in any bed in any penthouse in the world. Except that they weren’t. They were fierce and hungry, loving and kind to those who mattered, and they were perfectly suited for each other in all their feral desire.
Epilogue
Ioana Lupu had been a gifted child. Growing up in a small village in Moldova, Romania’s poorest region in the North East had been difficult, but she had persevered. She learned as much as she could by teaching herself to read at a young age and sneaking into the church to soak up as much knowledge as her curious mind could hold. She made friends with Bunica Popp, a woman who had more years than anyone could count and owned the village’s only radio. She would tune into Romania’s news and information station night after night, and Ioana would sit close and listen to everything the hosts would say. Ioana would trade this time for small chores around Bunica’s house. Because of the access to the radio, she considered herself rather well learned about the state of affairs beyond their tiny town.
Thus, when a kind, older woman in fancy clothing and a long, sleek car approached her, she considered herself intelligent enough to sense a scam. She was fourteen after all, and the most sought after for marriage in her village, but had remained aloof and separate, believing herself destined for better things.
The older woman’s name had been Madelina, such a beautiful sound to roll off Ioana’s lips back then.
Nowadays she spat it with the same force one might use to spit bitter venom from one’s mouth.
Madelina had promised her work in Bucharest as a housemaid, something vague but promising. Fourteen-year-old Ioana hadn’t considered there would be anything other than cleaning toilets and folding towels.
She had been so wrong.
Madelina had been a scout, traveling the country looking for the most promising and desperately beautiful of all the girls and boys. She had paid Ioana’s parents a large sum of money and promised more, along with regular updates on Ioana’s progress in the big city. The intent had been to work for five years, then return to marry and settle down. Old for a woman of her village, but one with Ioana’s beauty and assumed riches would have no troubles.
Ioana’s mother had wept when she left, and pressed a tarnished necklace into her hand with a single bright blue cut glass pendant. Her own mother had given it to her on her wedding day, and she insisted her eldest daughter take it with her. Ioana had dressed in her best clothing, threadbare but clean and bright. She’d worn her best pair of leather men’s shoes, they weren’t stylish she knew, but they were shiny and comfortable. She had kissed each of her siblings on the cheek and promised to return to them soon. She’d gotten into the long, black car with Madelina and waved at her family until they turned a corner on the road and they were out of sight.
The first night they had stayed at a roadside hotel, a shabby one by most standards but it was beyond luxurious for Ioana. The towels had been clean and she had been given a bed all to herself. Back home she shared a small pallet with her three little sisters in a cramped back room stuffed with kids. Ioana’s cousins and siblings and sometimes a neighbor child when the parents had to work.
The next night they had arrived in the city and spent it at an even more decadent hotel. Ioana had spent hours in the tub, soaking and refilling it as the water grew cold. She’d emerged; pink fleshed and flushed cheeked and spent the most incredible night of her life rolling around the great, fluffy bed.
That would be her last comfortable night. The next day Madelina had taken her to her new workplace, a crumbling townhouse in the centre of Bucharest’s Ferentari district. Ioana was uncomfortable the moment they entered and Madelina had locked the heavy metal doors behind them.
The townhouse was full of girls and woman of all ages, shapes and races. They possessed varying degrees of mental awareness, some hanging about in filthy rags looking like the aftermath of a battle, others with sharp faces drawn in permanent shifty grins.
Each one looked Ioana up and down and immediately found her lacking. She was just another stupid country girl coming to the city looking for riches and finding forced servitude in one of Bucharest’s many brothels.
For a country so impoverished, it was simply amazing how many men could afford to use such places. There was a seemingly never ending parade of them, all pinching and probing and eventually fucking the girls any way they wanted, any place and any time.
Ioana had spent that first night balled up in a corner on a dirty floor in a back bedroom that doubled as a wardrobe and impromptu change room. It was full of clothing, all of it resembling her own threadbare outfit. She soon deduced it had been taken from the girls when they arrived and was cycled around the prostitutes, as they needed.
The next day had been her first introduction to the type of work she’d been bought for. A fat, old Czech business traveler had shown interest in her, as much for her beauty as her virginity. The housemother had dragged her to a back bedroom, she had been a great hulking woman from a village near Ioana’s, but Ioana’s pleading had fallen on deaf ears. There was no commu
nity among whores. The housemother had forced Ioana into a headlock under her stinking, flabby arm and wrestled her to the client.
He had not even spoken to her when he tore the clothes from her body, forced her face down on a filthy mattress and fucked her hard until she lost all sense of time or reality. It all seemed more like a nightmare than anything she could have imagined for her life. Nothing on her body was sacred to him and nothing was left untouched that day; she was broken in until she was left a weeping mess of girl meat and sweaty man stench. The businessman paid his very high price for destroying her virgin body and left when he had satiated his needs. She never saw him again, but she saw many more like him over the next two years. She fell into a waking nightmare of the living dead, stumbling from one horrific encounter to the next. Fighting with other girls over slivers of soap and rags to stop the bleeding. Many had simply stopped eating or slit their own throats when they had the chance. The more malleable of the girls were sent to better houses, only returned if they became pregnant or too old to please higher end clientele.
Ioana thought about killing herself many times. She was a fighter though, never one to shrink in the face of a raging client or an angry housemother. She finally fought back one too many times and was kicked out of the house one night after she’d bitten the cock of one particularly vicious client. She was sent into the street naked, clutching only a thin blanket and the necklace she’d miraculously managed to hang onto.
She’d wandered for a day through the city, huddling over heat vents to escape the frigid nights, and begging for anything to keep her alive. She contemplated walking home, back to her parents, no matter how long it took. She couldn’t though; she couldn’t bring shame upon them. She would be useless to them now that she was a disgraced former whore, how could she support herself in their tiny village if word got out what she was?