by Jocelyn Han
“Well.” Shou looked down at his hands with a shrug. “Bruce doesn’t need you to believe him, honey.”
With a shock, Lana realized that Shou wasn’t entirely correct. Of course Bruce didn’t need her to believe him – but he wanted her to, anyway. He felt the need to share things with her.
And that was what had drawn her in. Bruce was tough as nails, but he was also very human. He might be a killer, but he was certainly not ruthless or sadistic like John. No man quoting Walt Whitman from the top of his head was a heartless monster. The man who’d had sex with her last night had no longer been a cold-blooded criminal in her presence. He’d been gentle – more or less.
“I’m going to squeeze out the oranges,” she announced, getting up from the couch. “Bruce wanted to use them for juice.”
Quickly, she retreated to the kitchen to be alone for a while and think things over. Shou was right – nothing was as black-and-white as she’d been made to believe. She was dying to talk to her dad again, or at the very least, find out more about the situation on Prometheus. What did she actually know about the mines? Had she ever been invited to have a look around in the family business? She didn’t think so – which was odd, given the fact she was an Ivanov as well as a student of business economics. Moreover, the Promethean gemstone trade was a very important element of the Elite monetary system. The more she thought it over, she more she couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something not quite right about the whole situation. But slavery? How could she even consider the possibility her father would go along with something sordid like that?
Lana switched on the juicer and popped in the orange parts from the fruits she’d peeled so far, the whirring sound of the appliance drowning out her confused thoughts.
When the kitchen door swung open and Bruce stepped over the threshold, she looked up with a start. “I hope you don’t mind I’m making the juice,” she said, her voice artificially bright. “You were busy, so...”
A faint smile crossed his face. “No, I don’t mind. Gotta go anyway. John and Chester just called in to confirm delivery.”
“Of what?” Lana blurted out before she could stop herself.
“Recent recordings of the insides of the Ivanov Mines,” Bruce replied, his face expressionless.
Her mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? Nobody is allowed to film in there. It’s a Russian government facility.”
“That’s why I bribed someone to do it. I’ve been very generous.”
“What do you need those recordings for?” she asked nervously.
Bruce fixed her with his gaze. “I need them in case things don’t work out.”
“In what way?”
“If your daddy doesn’t listen to me, I might need something else to convince the Desidan authorities that our society is rotten at the core.”
So he was already contemplating a plan B. If her father didn’t obey Bruce’s orders, this criminal would have to dispose of her – there was no doubt about it. “Oh,” she whispered, a sudden feeling of sickness flooding her entire body.
The tall, blond pirate avoided her anxious gaze, looking suddenly a bit unsure of himself. “Add some sugar to it,” he said, gesturing at the squeezed juice. “Might be too sour otherwise.”
Lana took a deep breath. He wasn’t about to discuss the events that would lead to plan B. “Can I see them?” she whispered. “The recordings.”
That got his attention. “You’re serious?” His gray irises appraised her with suspicion.
She nodded. “Yeah, I’m serious.”
“Tomorrow, then,” he rumbled. “That’s when Chester and John return. I’m just flying out there tonight to hand over the rest of my payment.”
“They didn’t take the money with them?”
Bruce shook his head. “Such a large sum? No, I only trust myself with those funds.”
Lana bit her lip. “That’s a bit sad.”
“Not nearly as sad as losing some fine colleagues because they couldn’t resist temptation,” he replied. “Money tends to have a corrupting influence on people. And I speak from experience.”
Before she could respond to that, Bruce turned on his heels and left the kitchen. Lana slowly relaxed her shoulders again, which she’d subconsciously pulled up during their conversation. This was unbelievable – Bruce claimed to have film footage of the gemstone mines. How the hell had he even been able to find someone to bribe to do that for him? It was like managing to catch the Desidan president on camera while taking a dump. It just couldn’t happen.
After juicing all the fruits she’d picked, Lana wandered aimlessly around the house, her head still in a daze. The Japanese brothers were still busy tinkering with the device they’d salvaged, so nobody watched her as she tried some doors in the hallway next to the living room. Secretly, she was hoping to find her old phone – being able to talk to Tori would be the best thing that could happen to her right now. Most likely, though, Bruce had destroyed the thing.
As expected, the door to his study was locked, but the room next to it wasn’t. When Lana stuck her head around the door, she saw it was a storage room. The walls were lined with shelves straining under the weight of large, plastic containers, some of them padlocked. Was this where the pirates kept their weapons? She furtively tried a few boxes. The unlocked ones contained canned food, blankets, plain clothes, Elite uniforms, and different types of shoes. It seemed the group was prepared for every occasion. Maybe they posed as Elite gentlemen sometimes to get past security in certain parts of the solar system. Not all borders were equipped with electronic inspection systems.
A smaller, black box on one of the lower shelves caught her eye. It wasn’t locked, and it was too small to contain clothes. When she curiously popped the lid open, a handful of data strips stared back at her, a data reader sitting next to them at the bottom. Could this be sensitive information? Had Bruce forgotten to put this in his study?
With nervously shaking hands, Lana slipped one of the iridescent strips into the reader. It lit up with a flicker, loading what seemed to be image files onto the small screen. Her index finger had touched the first thumbnail before she’d had time to think twice. Maybe the images were snapshots of the mines, or taken during that meeting with her mother.
She sucked in her breath as the picture loaded. It was neither. This turned out to be an old photo of Bruce and Chester, back when Chester had still worked for the Randall family. He was wearing a typical private teacher uniform. And Bruce next to him looked so young – so innocent and happy. He and Chester were standing in a sunlit garden filled with rose bushes and cypresses. The images weren’t chrono-stamped, but Bruce seemed to be about twenty years old. He was strikingly handsome without all the bitterness and calculating coldness in his eyes and features.
Lana flicked through the entire set of pictures, some of them featuring Bruce with an older guy who looked so much like him it had to be his brother, though this man had darker hair. The last photo featured Bruce sitting in a deck chair reading the exact same book she’d been reading these past few days – the Walt Whitman poetry book.
Suddenly, she felt ashamed of herself for going through Bruce’s stuff. She wasn’t supposed to have seen this – it all felt so personal. Maybe Bruce kept it stashed away because he couldn’t bear to look at the pictures too often.
“Lana?” she heard Hikaru call out her name at that instant. Hastily, she stuffed the strips and reader back into the box and got up from the floor before scooting out the door.
“I’m here,” she called back, emerging into the living room. “What’s up?”
“Dinner is up,” Hikaru replied drily. “You want some?”
“Sure.”
Hikaru hadn’t bothered to cook – there was still some left-over stew from last night, when Chester had been on cooking duty. Since it was just the three of them, it was enough.
“Shou?” she ventured, when they had all eaten and were clearing the table. “You said you knew my mothe
r, right?”
“Yes.” He shot her a quizzical look.
“Did she – trust Bruce?”
Shou sighed. “I told you. You should ask him, not me.”
“I did. He told me what happened. How she was killed by some of his own soldiers.”
Silence descended in the room. Eventually, Hikaru cleared his throat. “She trusted him enough to go out there and see for herself. That’s all I can say about it.”
Lana flinched involuntarily. What about herself – did she trust Bruce enough to see things for herself? What would happen tomorrow morning, when John and Chester came back with the supposedly real recordings?
Even though Svetlana felt totally at ease with the two Japanese men, she decided to retire to her room after she’d cleaned the kitchen. Ironically enough, it had become so normal to sit in the living room and chill with dangerous pirates as if all was well with the world, and it was a huge reason for alarm. These people were all beginning to win her over – with the exception of John, whom she still thought was an absolute creep. It might be a good idea to spend some time on her own and try to sort things out.
After she’d changed into her pajamas, her eyes fell on the book lying on her bedside table – the poetry volume that had been with Bruce for such a long time. For all she knew, this little book and Chester were the only things left of his old, Elite life. Absently, she flipped through the pages until she’d found the stanza about the rain that Bruce had uttered when they’d been in the woods this morning, right before he had kissed her. Right before he’d asked her if that was still what she wanted. And she’d said yes – despite everything that had happened.
So why was it so difficult to believe his claims about her safe, familiar world? Was it because they touched the core of her – the relationship with the only family she had left?
A sound by the door startled her. Lana swallowed as a tall, broad figure appeared in the doorway. “Good evening,” Bruce said in his low voice.
“Hi,” she replied, suddenly intimidated by his presence. “When did you come back?”
Her heart stuttered when he smiled at her lazily. “Just now. May I come in?”
“Sure.”
He sauntered over to the bed, his dark-green shirt stretched around his broad shoulders, his hands in the pockets of his black pants, and his eyes never leaving her face. Only when he stood by the edge of the bed did his gaze trail down her body clad in just a camisole and boxer briefs, making her shift nervously. “What are you doing?” he inquired.
Lana held up the book. “I’m reading.”
He nodded, a look of interest crossing his face. “What’s your favorite part so far?”
“Just one?” she said.
Bruce smiled one of his rare, genuine smiles. “That’s the definition of favorite, Sveta.”
She blushed. “I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,” she replied.
“I call to the earth and sea, half-held by the night,” he finished, surprising her yet again. “That’s one of my highlights, too.”
“Ooh, smooth. You can have more than one highlight, obviously,” she muttered, a bit snubbed.
Bruce bit back a chuckle. “Hey. I can’t help it if you don’t know what all the difficult words mean.”
“Are you taking the piss out of me?”
“Oh, but you make it so easy.”
Lana couldn’t help but smile. Just for a moment, it felt like she was flirting with a regular guy in her day-to-day, normal life. The image of Bruce aged twenty flashed before her eyes, and she wondered what it would have been like if she’d met him like that – a well-behaved, Elite guy with a sparkle in his eyes and a bright smile on his face. Maybe that was why she couldn’t stay away from him – because she sensed that guy was still hiding somewhere in there.
“Read some for me,” Bruce unexpectedly went on, lowering himself onto the bed, sitting so close to her his hand brushed her bare upper leg. “I like hearing the words in a different voice than my own.”
“Okay.” She nervously cleared her throat and stared at the page. “Press close, bare-bosomed night; press close, magnetic, nourishing night. Night of south winds, night of the large few stars, still, nodding night... mad, naked, summer night,” she read out loud, her voice wavering at the word ‘naked’.
“Now you know what Earth can be like,” Bruce said musingly. “Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees, Earth of departed sunset.” He searched her eyes. “The kind of place where people would have mad, naked summer nights,” he continued, the atmosphere in the room changing as his voice dropped to a mere murmur. He reached out to grab her hand and gently took the book from her fingers, putting it carefully aside. Lana followed the book with her eyes as he placed it on the bedside table, trembling softly when Bruce put his other hand warmly on her knee. She looked up at him and knew she was lost.
“I – I thought you said everything about this situation was wrong,” she protested regardless.
Bruce bent over her, his simmering gaze on her face as he gently touched her cheek. “I’m trying to trust you,” he replied after a few beats of silence. “Telling myself you’re not just doing this to make me weak and save your life.”
Suddenly, it struck her how lonely he sounded. Was that what Bruce thought – that she was willing to have sex with him so he’d have a hard time killing her if he needed to? Stupidly enough, the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. She was many things, but cunning wasn’t one of them. Dragging a dangerous pirate to her bed so he’d start liking her too much had been the last thing on her mind.
“That’s ridiculous,” she blurted out. “You know that’s not true.”
He came closer, his breath tickling her lips, making them ache for him to kiss her. “Are you saying you like me?” he asked softly, his mouth curling up in a smile when he saw what effect his closeness had on her.
Lana bit her lip. “You fascinate me. I’m too scared of you to like you.”
Bruce caressed her neck, his fingers brushing the mark he had left there. “Good,” he said. “You should be scared. I’m very different from those Elite boys you’ve been with.”
And then he covered her mouth in a hot, soaring kiss. His tongue penetrated her, finding its way inside to tease and taunt her own, as slowly and languidly as the first time he’d kissed her. Lana couldn’t help moaning with desire. Her face turned red as Bruce pulled her hips flush against his, her soft flesh pressed against the hardness of his loins. It seemed to make her wet instantly. She drew a startled breath as he wedged one large hand between her legs, massaging her through the thin fabric of the briefs she was wearing. “You’re already wet, aren’t you?” he mumbled against her lips.
“And you’re already hard,” Lana responded coyly, surprising herself.
Bruce smiled. “I wonder if you can make me even harder,” he breathed, his voice ragged. He grabbed her hand and pushed it down so it touched his erection. Lana rubbed the bulge growing there, blushing when Bruce unbuttoned his black cargo pants and stripped off his pants and underwear in one go. He was still as enormous as she remembered.
“Shouldn’t we close the door?” she stammered, her gaze swerving to the door that was still ajar.
“Go on,” Bruce said, proceeding to pull off his shirt. “Let’s get a little privacy, Lana.”
On wobbly legs, she almost tripped on her way to shut the door. When she turned around again, Bruce was lying back on her bed completely naked, propped up on his elbows to watch her. He was so beautiful and mouth-wateringly sexy that she couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
“Strip,” he said huskily, his eyes burning through the clothes still on her body. Lana quivered under the hunger in his gaze. Slowly, she hooked one thumb around the spaghetti strap of her top and slid it down her shoulder. He licked his lips as she did the same on the other side, shimmying out of the cami so it exposed her boobs and dropped down to her waist. She could almost see his erection grow from where she was standing.
> “Lose the panties,” he continued, his voice so low now it was barely audible. Lana obliged, stepping out of the flowery boxer briefs she was still wearing. Her blush intensified when a few drops of her arousal dripped down her thighs. She had no pubic hair to conceal just how hot she was for him. Bruce’s eyelids lowered a little as he observed the wetness between her legs, his hand softly stroking up and down his cock. “Come here,” he told her.
When she stopped in front of the bed, his hands grabbed the camisole still wrapped around her waist. He pulled it down her hips, dropping it to the floor. Bruce moved to the edge of the bed, his legs on either side of her knees as he reached around her to grab her ass, his palms cupping her soft, round curves. With a slight smile, he slid one hand between her legs, touching her warm, moist pussy from behind. “You’re so wet,” he said almost reverently. “Is your mouth just as moist?”
Lana swallowed. “I guess.” She wetted her lips, gingerly sinking down to her knees to grab his cock and softly kiss the tip of his shaft. Even though the thought of giving Bruce a blow job still filled her with apprehension, she was also kind of curious what he’d feel like in her mouth. Slowly, she opened her lips and sucked the head, flicking her tongue around the crown. He tasted salty and much too manly to resist. Opening her mouth wider and closing her eyes, Lana slid down his penis, taking in as much as she could one inch at a time, trailing her tongue down his length simultaneously.
Bruce’s fingers raked the skin of her neck, tangling in her long, blonde hair as he gripped her head. She could hear his breath quickening. “Wow, that’s good,” he groaned, hardening a bit more when she cradled the base of his cock and moved her hand up and down. She responded by tightening the grip of her mouth a little bit, using her other hand to touch the sensitive spot between his balls and anus. It was rewarding to feel his control slipping away gradually, his hand fisting her hair as she sucked him slowly and enthusiastically. When he was so hot and hard she was sure he was about to come, Bruce made her come up for air.