“What are you doing?”
“You’re not getting that blood on my sheets. I only have one set.”
The corner of my lips threatened to curve into a smile, my Gracie was a complete neat freak. Never was there a speck out of place in her small home. A home she shouldn’t have been in right now. She should have been in the cave with Skye. Safe.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I sighed, and Gracie’s fingers froze for a moment, her body becoming rigid, her eyes swimming with hurt. “You should be at the cave,” I explained. “You should be away from all this shit.”
“You know me better than anyone, Ink. I couldn’t leave.” She continued to carefully wipe away the blood, taking long moments to clean the tattoo on my face. The word ‘Grace’ had been inked in an elegant script on my cheekbone, under my eye. It had confused her when I did it a year ago. She thought it a declaration of my love, and it was, but I didn’t want her to know that. At the time she’d looked on me with such adoration, then she’d kissed me. The memory of her warm, soft lips forever imprinted on my brain. But I pushed her away and it broke something in me to hurt her that way. It also broke something in her, and I hated myself even more for it. Gracie wore her emotions for everyone to see, and I’d known for a long while she harbored a crush on me. I’d done everything I could think of to dissuade her, and as my own feelings began to change into something I didn’t quite understand, I ran like a fucking coward.
Watching her as she cared for me, I couldn’t help but admire all her little nuances. The dip in the center of her brow as she concentrated, the twitch of her nose, the way her teeth grabbed at her full bottom lip. Her eyes caught mine briefly and her cheeks filled with a rosy hue. I fucking adored her bashful response to me, it was refreshing. The women I enjoyed within Liberty were anything but bashful, their bold sexual appetites feeding my own. Now, though, I found the tentative touch of this beautiful woman as something I hungered for.
The rag carefully worked through my short beard along my jawline, before moving on to my arms which were also filled with dark ink, right down to my fingertips.
“I could just take a shower,” I murmured, hoping like hell she didn’t agree and stop her ministrations.
“I want to take care of you,” she confessed after a short silence.
I liked her taking care of me too. Her eyes hovered over every inch of my exposed flesh, and I felt the heat of her stare burn through my skin, sinking deep. It took several times to clean out the rag before she was finished which was bittersweet. Her attention on me was like adding fuel to a smoldering flame, and my dick was painfully hard behind the zipper of my pants. I wanted to pull her hands back on my body and never allow her to take them away.
A knuckled rap on the door broke the rapidly building sexual tension and Gracie jumped back, putting space between us. Max had my duffle bag packed with clothes in one hand, and a heavy-duty sleeping bag in the other.
“Your room had already been checked, stuff was tossed everywhere, your hidden stash was emptied,” Max explained. My hidden stash being three handguns, two knives and ammunition. “They’re headed this way no doubt to begin checking cabins. I’ve got Axel and Charlie trying to get a head start knocking on doors and collecting any weapons we can hide.”
Gracie reluctantly handed Max a knife she had hidden away in the bottom of a drawer, and soon after he left, her cabin was methodically checked over just as Max assured us it would be. One uniformed soldier stood at the doorway pressing the barrel of his gun to my head, while another tore through Gracie’s belongings, taking his time with her underwear.
“Be seeing you around, princess,” one of the men leered as they turned their back on Gracie’s now destroyed cabin. My body reacted on auto-pilot and I swung, clipping the fucker who had called her princess on the jaw. He fell back through the door, his partner quick to start waving his gun in my face. Gracie’s hand gripped my forearm, stopping me from lashing out.
“Stop it, Ink.” The panic in her voice was crystal clear. “They want you to fuck up, they’ll take any excuse they can to kill you.”
I knew that, but it didn’t seem to lessen my need to attack.
“Be seeing you around, fresh meat,” the man with the gun seethed, his knotted beard covering his lips.
I watched them retreat before locking the cabin door. Then I helped Gracie put her home back together, refolding clothes and sweeping up the glass from a broken vase. My vision was beginning to blur, and my head felt like it was ready to split in two. I couldn’t recall ever feeling the pull of sleep like I did right this minute. I ended up taking a shower, needing to scrub the filth of the morning off my skin. The moment I collapsed onto the mattress of Gracie’s bed I knew I was going to fade. My eyes tracked her movements around the room as she reached for my dirty, bloodied clothes.
“Leave it be for now,” I quietly ordered her.
“I need to get the blood off before it dries.”
“It’s already dry. They’re ruined, Gracie. Just leave them be, we’ll dispose of them later.”
“Ink, we don’t have the luxury of throwing away clothes,” she began to chastise me, one hand sat proudly on one hip.
She was fucking beautiful.
She was everything I wasn’t—smart, humble, innocent.
Gracie laughed a lot, knew all the people of Liberty by name and played with the children as if she was still one herself. She was also known as the girl with a temper that was slow to draw out, but when it appeared, you made yourself scarce. At five-feet-five, she wasn’t tall, yet her legs seemed to go on for miles. Her breasts were a small handful. Perfect. Her waist dipped narrow before flaring to an ass which was made for worship. Her facial features were delicate, moss green eyes with dark lashes, a nose that lifted slightly at the tip, and full lips. Angelic was the word which sprung to mind when I found myself thinking about Gracie’s beauty. Her exquisiteness was only heightened by her own indifference to it. She was completely oblivious to the way men reacted to her, which at times, I found endearing and other times just plain frustrating.
Watching Jebediah and his men leer over her while being helpless to stop it broke something in me. It was if the wall I had erected around my heart when it came to this woman crumbled spectacularly to the ground. With a groan, I squirmed further onto the bed, enjoying the soft mattress beneath my aching body.
“Come lay with me,” I murmured.
“I’ve got things to do, I don’t have time to lay around all day.”
“Things have changed, Gracie. There’s nothing you need to do right now, and I want you beside me while I rest. I need to know you’re safe.”
That’s all it took for a soft sigh to leave her lips as she dumped my clothes back on the floor. Walking toward me, her eyes dropped to the bed, a light blush settling into her cheeks.
“I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never slept beside a man before, and the bed is small and you’re huge, and you’re hurting.”
Her words made me smile. I liked the fact she hadn’t slept beside another male, and I liked that she cared about my aches and pains. I’d never had anybody care about me the way Gracie did. Taking her wrist, I pulled her down, and her arms caught her weight before she pressed against my body.
“Climb on over, buttercup. I want you between me and the wall.”
Careful not to jostle my body, she did as she was told. Stretching out my arm, I watched as she laid her head on my bicep, holding herself rigid and uncertain.
“You smell good,” I said, burying my face in her messy braid. I loved her hair. It was long to her waist with thick, gentle waves in a brown so dark it was almost black. She was always playing with it, twisting it into weird styles that little girls begged her to replicate in their own hair. Personally, I dreamed of having it wrapped around my fist while I did things to her body that would make a nun blush. Those fantasies had grown over the year and had become a new kind of torture. My need for her grew as quickly as the gap between us did,
a gap of my own making.
“I smell like sweat,” she noted.
“Your sweat smells good.”
“I highly doubt that.”
My eyes were heavy, and while I wanted to enjoy this moment, having her so close, the pressing weight of fatigue was soon going to steal me away.
“I killed someone.” Her soft words came out with a tremble, and I turned to take in her features. She was frozen in a mixture of grief and horror, her bottom lip caught in her teeth. Her hands rested on her stomach, fingers linked tightly together, and I could still see the tremor in them. Casting me a nervous sideways glance she went on. “It was after Trigger ran off toward the north wall with Skye, I was alone, and he came at me so fast. I told him to stop, he didn’t.”
My eyes shut for a moment and regret shadowed my thoughts. Gracie wasn’t a killer, taking a life was going to leave a mark on her soul. But she’d protected herself, she’d survived, and done exactly as I’d taught her. Reaching over I unlaced her fingers and linked them with mine. “It was him or you, Gracie. The men who stormed our compound aren’t here for a social call. They aren’t friends. They’re our enemy, and this is war. There are always going to be casualties in war. You did the right thing. I’m proud of you.”
“It was awful,” she admitted after a short silence.
“Taking a life always is,” I conceded. “Death isn’t pretty, and if it ever gets to the stage where it doesn’t affect you, then there’s something wrong.”
“Does it still affect you?”
I’d killed several men over the years, and every one of them was a regret that burned deep, but not one of them hadn’t been justified. They’d all been enemies, whether it be enemies of the country or ruthless murderers in the Underworld. Even so, killing them marked my soul.
“Always.”
“How do you deal with it?” she murmured, her sweet voice nothing but a soft whisper in the quiet of her dimly lit cabin.
“I accept the guilt. I acknowledge it. Then, I let it go. I let them go, Gracie. Those faces. I have to let them go. Otherwise, they’d haunt me till my dying day.”
Silence fell over us and eventually all I could hear was the sporadic whistle of birds and the occasional mumbled conversation from neighboring cabins. The compound should be well and truly filled with life at this time of the day, but instead, it was as quiet as night. Remorse slammed into me hard, and my brain ran through scenarios on how I could have prevented this.
Liberty had been compromised. I had failed my one mission—keeping the people safe. I’d overseen the security here for seven years, supervising the soldiers and keeping the perimeter guarded and the peace within its walls. Even though we trained for this event, we never really thought it would happen. I needed to get back out there and sort this shit out, but I’d barely come off a night shift when Jebediah attacked. My body was running on fumes, and the pounding of head relentless. I needed to rest. Just a few hours, I promised myself, and I’d get up and go looking for Trigger and Max so we could put together a plan.
Each minute we laid in silence, Gracie relaxed until her warm body was soft and pliant against mine. Our fingers remained linked together and rested on my lower stomach, avoiding my bruised ribs. If my concussion and exhaustion weren’t pressing down like a heavy weight, I might have enjoyed how close her hand was to that part of my anatomy that always grew painfully hard in her presence.
“I’m not going to sleep. I need to wake you every hour, Trigger’s orders,” Gracie murmured, breaking the silence.
“Just stay with me,” I quietly whispered as my foggy head began to drift with impending sleep.
“I’m always with you,” were the last words I heard before I was lulled into the promise of darkness.
CHAPTER 3 – Grace
Lying beside Ink had been one of the sweetest tortures of my life. While he slept, I took the opportunity to look him over from a perspective I’d never had the chance to before. I wasn’t lying when I said I’d never slept beside a man. My virginity was firmly intact. Only a few experimental kisses to a couple of teenage boys were the extent of my sexual exploration.
With gentle fingers, I’d traced the tattoos on Ink’s arms, chest and neck, being mindful of his injuries. I even allowed my finger to follow the script of my name up his sharp cheekbone. My name, on his body, permanently. I thought it meant he loved me, and maybe he did, in his own sweet way. For Ink, I would forever be the twelve-year-old girl he carried into Liberty. The nineteen-year-old woman who had unashamedly thrown herself at him would never be noticed.
I knew Ink shared beds with some of the women in Liberty. It wasn’t like he flaunted his women in front of me or anything, but it wasn’t a secret. Knowing he willingly slept with those other women while refusing me, took a massive hit to my ego. It hurt, and while I loved him like I loved no other, there was a small part of me that hated him a little for it.
Who was I kidding, I could never hate Ink.
It wasn’t his fault he didn’t reciprocate my feelings. I never knew he slept with Viviane though, and hearing it from a stranger was yet another lash to my beaten heart. It was further proof that I was nothing but a child in Ink’s eyes. Even now as he tugged me along through the compound, my fingers linked through his, it felt more like a father dragging his belligerent child behind him.
We were on our way to Viviane’s cabin, which I guess was now Jebediah’s. The soldier’s barracks had been cleared out, the seventeen soldiers who had survived the initial attack had found accommodation with friends and family. The entire compound had been searched, all weapons or so-called ‘paraphernalia’ removed. Our communications room was guarded, just as Jebediah promised, and the storage facility taken over by his men who were now overseeing the rationing of food and goods. The underground tunnel, which had offered us freedom to the northern side, was now guarded by Jebediah’s men. It seemed as if Skye was the only one to make it through before that exit was abruptly cut off. Either our traitor had wizened Jebediah to it, or they’d simply stumbled across it while locking down the compound. We were officially trapped and under Jebediah’s command. Our future was uncertain and that terrified me, though having Ink standing by my side helped keep that fear in check. His steadfast belief we would get through this helped bolster my own waning confidence.
My traitorous gaze slipped away from the path we were following and found Ink yet again. He looked so handsome in faded jeans, a blue tee shirt and a heavy jacket thrown over the top. He had rearmed himself with a few hidden knives which might or might not be confiscated. It all depended on how efficient Jebediah’s security was. I’d been given a small flick knife which was shoved down the inside leg of my boot. I wore my own faded tight jeans, along with a thermal tank, followed by a long-sleeved tee shirt over the top of that, and a knitted scarf. Ink told me to wear a jacket. I refused. I couldn’t move properly in a jacket, it made me feel vulnerable. My hair was separated down the middle and braided, then twisted into two knots high on my head. Ink said it made me look like a weird bug with stubby antennae. I flipped him off. He secretly loved my weird hair fashion, I could see it in the amused sparkle of his dark blue eyes. My hair was like my secret superpower, I adored it and twisting it into odd styles that people looked at with a confused frown was my favorite game. Just the art of styling my long, dark hair tonight had helped me find my calm place.
The soldier I’d killed still played on my mind, but if that man had of gotten his hands on me, he could have killed or raped me. Ink’s pride over how I handled the situation helped me deal with the remorse which sat heavy on my shoulders. If he had looked at me differently, maybe scolded me, I would have been crushed under that weight.
“You okay?” Ink asked, giving my hand a squeeze.
Giving him another sideways glance, I flinched at the damage to his face. The gash above his brow was deep, but Trigger had done a good job stitching it shut. One eye was bruised so dark it was almost black, the white around his pupil a
frightening red. Every time he moved the wrong way he winced, I’d never seen him fight such pain.
For four hours I watched him sleep. Waking him often, not because Trigger had said, but because I needed to know he was all right. Eventually, Trigger’s thumping on my door dragged Ink back to the world of the living. Since then, he’d been out in the compound talking with his men and seeing to the hundreds of problems that arose with an enemy’s invasion. He needed more rest, he needed to see Ashlynn for his injuries rather than rely on a fellow soldier who happened to be good with a sewing needle, but here he was asking if I was okay.
“Just peachy,” I replied.
Right now, my mood was as unpredictable as the weather. I was angry Ink wouldn’t go to see Ashlynn. I was scared at what we were about to face. I was concerned for the people of Liberty. I was worried about Skye. And all those anxious thoughts raced through my mind whipping up a storm of emotions. The corner of Ink’s mouth tipped up in a smile, and I scowled further, deepening my already sullen frown.
“It’s okay to be scared, Gracie. This is a shit of a situation we’re stuck in.”
“Understatement of the century,” I mumbled.
Ink abruptly stopped, and I ran into his shoulder, letting out a little ‘oomph.’ It was like hitting a wall. Turning to face me, he released my hand and cupped my cheek, pressing his forehead against mine. The intimate moment took me by surprise, and I didn’t fight him when his other hand came up to cup my other cheek and gently held me in place. We stood like that for the longest time, his eyes searching for something within mine and me, in turn, wondering what the hell this was. There was a lightness in my chest at how close we stood. The way he was holding me and looking at me was confusing yet exhilarating. It was intense, but history had taught me this was Ink’s way of caring for me. Not loving me, not seeing me as a woman or more than an obligation. I’d been burned enough times not to read too deeply into this moment, or act on my desire to lean forward and kiss him. Regardless of how much my traitorous heart and body responded to the touch, it was too much. Before I could pull away, Ink whispered, “Face, fear, fight.”
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