But then Smoke had come and everything else was so broken that she’d loved him almost by accident. When every minute felt like a prelude to death and disaster, she’d allowed herself to steal moments of comfort with him. They were to be only that-stolen moments, meaningless moments, episodes she would pretend to forget in the daylight. Only that hadn’t happened. He had loved her at noon as much as he did at midnight, and having Ruthie back was so joyous and overwhelming that she forgot to keep resisting. She forgot to keep protecting herself, and she’d allowed him to take up the yoke-to care for her, to nurture her, to hold her. Sometimes their lovemaking felt transcendent, as though climax transported her outside herself for splintered moments of divinity. And sometimes, when Smoke held her afterward, it was confusingly like being held by a parent, or by God Himself, someone who would love her forever.
But Smoke did not love her forever. Not enough to stay, anyway. He chose vengeance-ugly, dark, violent-over her. And that was that. Her one failure, her one fall. She’d built that wall back up in record time, and it was twice-strong, twice-high.
Dor watched her carefully, and she knew he was waiting for her to crack. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She was stronger than that, stronger than he knew.
“Nothing I haven’t heard before,” she lied.
Dor blinked, looked uncertain. “Still…”
“Still nothing. You were right to leave her the gun, but you know she’s just going to use it on herself.” Her voice sounded tinny, a cheap and insubstantial version. She made herself face Dor, but she couldn’t stand to look in his eyes. They were cinnamon-flecked in the light, a deep, deep brown; but at night, with only the candle for illumination, they were depthless black, and she didn’t dare risk being absorbed by that unknowable gaze. Instead she focused on his jaw; on the stubble that had appeared before the morning was done, on the hard lines of his bones.
“Cass…”
“It’s all right.” She shrugged. “It’s better, really. Hopefully she’ll do it outside, and that way if some freewalker comes through they won’t have to deal with the mess.”
Dor reached, hesitantly, to put his hand on her shoulder again. It seemed to be his entire repertoire of comforting gestures, and his touch was awkward, heavy. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Act like…like it doesn’t affect you. Like it doesn’t hurt.”
Hot, acid tears instantly welled up in her eyes, and Cass knew that if she blinked they would spill. So she would not blink. She bit down on her lip, hard enough to distract herself. “It doesn’t affect me. How could it affect me? I don’t know her. She’s just some other woman. The difference between her and me is that she got caught. I didn’t. I mean, yeah, it was probably thanks to you…do I need to thank you? Is that what this is about? Do I need to give you credit for the save? Okay, Dor, if it wasn’t for you, I’d be tied to that bed too and she and I would be getting fucked together, fucked until we were used up and I wasn’t anything at all. So, thank you. Seriously.”
Cass was breathing hard, and she suddenly couldn’t stand his touch, his tentativeness. She shoved his hand off her arm but she didn’t move away from him on the couch; she could see his scar, the one that had slowly faded and disappeared under the hair he no longer cut, tracing across his forehead.
“Look, Cass…” Dor sounded almost alarmed, and that pleased Cass. The ravenous angry part of her trembled with excitement; she’d gotten to him. She’d provoked him. “I know you’re upset about Smoke, that you’re feeling-”
She hit him before she realized she was going to, flat hand across his cheek, a resounding slap that took him off guard and probably stung like hell. “You have no idea what I’m feeling,” she snarled, and then she pulled back to hit him again, astonishing herself. The sprite that was her anger danced in ecstasy, sending her heartbeat wild with excitement. She felt the spittle at the corners of her mouth and the blood rushing to her face and the tingle of the slap in her palm.
He caught her wrist, hurting her, his strength a ridiculous overmatch to hers. He held her arm in the air, glaring at her, and she wondered for a moment if he would throw her to the ground. The sprite chortled within her, urging her on. Make him, it cried-make him do it.
“You don’t know who I am-what I have really been,” she said. Spittle landed on him and she didn’t care.
“I know you’ve been through a lot,” Dor said, the flash of anger quickly receding, his features rigid and careful. “I know you’re tired and possibly in a state of post-traumatic stress, and what you need is to-”
“Fuck what I need,” Cass said. “Fuck you, you have no idea what I need-” You were there, she wanted to scream. You shot him in the head. You saw that poor wreck of a woman. You saw the rings.
Oh, God…the rings.
They’d taken the rings, slipped them from fingers shrunk from hunger, tokens of times unimaginably long ago, of celebrations and promises. They shot the husbands and the wives in the backyard. They put the rings in a bowl. The bowl sat on the table. They smoked and ashed in that bowl. Down the hall the women cried and wished they were dead.
He was close, so close to her, his silver-streaked dark hair falling in his eyes, his expression shocked and hard, angry. Had she made him hate her? The sprite crowed with satisfaction and victory as Cass struggled to free herself from his grasp and he only held on tighter, hurting her, his fingers tight on her wrist, squeezing. With her free hand she pushed him, put her palm to his face and ground against his mouth, his teeth, and he grabbed that hand too and held it just as hard so they were locked in a silent battle. If he let go, she would claw his eyes out, she would tear his skin. She would draw blood and then he would know that he did not know what she felt, that he could never know what she felt.
She climbed on top of him, hooking one leg over his lap so she was straddling him, making him twist her arms painfully.
“What are you doing,” he muttered, but she ignored him, she dug her knees into the sofa on either side of him, she pressed her body against him, ground herself into his lap. “What the hell are you trying to do, Cass-”
She saw the confusion in his eyes and it excited her. She knew that she had provoked him and that meant that she was the stronger one now. She had won. It had been touch-and-go, she had let it go too far-but she’d found his weakness and not given too much of herself.
“Get off of me,” Dor ordered her in a strained voice, trying to hold her wrists back as she ground against him. “This isn’t right. You know this isn’t right.”
But instead she bent down to his face and kissed him hard, her fury hot in her throat, her hair falling in his face, getting caught up in their mouths. He twisted his face away and tried to buck her off; she chewed her hair and it tasted of salt, of sweat, of dirt.
He was stronger than she was, stronger by far but she had the advantage, an advantage formed in devastation and honed by the knowledge that she’d never give herself away again. She’d piled everything on the wall, the detritus of every past hurt, every betrayal, until she had made a barrier of thorns and broken glass and funhouse mirrors, and then she’d mortared it with the few good things she’d ever cared about, because they had to go, too; they had to be burned away. Her few friendships, her moments of tenuous faith, a handful of pretty things she’d collected, all crushed and tossed on the pile. She’d made of herself a spiked and impenetrable thing, and then-in only the last three months, oh God, how had she been so careless, how had it come over her so fast-the wall had fallen away like the knotted rags of a desert wanderer, leaving her naked and vulnerable to the sun that could burn her, could kill her.
Smoke had been that sun and she’d lain under his shine, turned her face to it and drunk it in greedily even as his heat and light beat down on the last of her defenses, the ones that guarded her very soul, leaving them withered and sere. She’d made love to him a hundred times and every time she’d given him everything, from the very first time
to their last morning together, the morning of the day he betrayed her. She’d opened every cell of her being and sealed herself to him with her body, with her cries and her garbled love words, made him part of her, and now she had to shed him and it was going to be hard, hard, hard.
But she would start now.
She spat out the strands of her hair and drove her body against Dor, feeling him grow stiff underneath her. His fingers weakened around her wrists and she yanked them away, too fast for him, too devious. She put her hands on his shoulders and dug in with her fingers, knowing she was hurting him and not caring.
He cursed and swore low in his throat, the sound of an animal, ferocious in its need, insatiable, reverberating through her body into her spine.
His hands closed on her ass and pulled her hard against him, pushing himself up against her. He dug his fingers into her waistband and yanked, the tight-woven fabric unyielding, the zipper scratching against the tender skin of her belly. “Get these off,” he ordered her. “Do it now.”
The anger in his voice was a spark to the tinder of her crazed greed for him. She rolled off, clumsy, knees knocking, not caring. Zipper down with fingers slick with sweat. Panties already sodden as she peeled them away. Dor kicking off his pants, pulling his T-shirt over his head, throwing it to the floor. In the flicker of the candle Cass saw his body reflected in burnished night-glow and for a half a second the sight almost stopped her-he was that beautiful, his chest muscular and smooth and dark, his sternum rent from chest to navel by a pair of scars, pebbled pocked fissures in his smooth skin, and her fingers fluttered with the need to touch him there, and then the flicker-thought was gone as he leaned naked and uncaring and grabbed her wrists again, pulling her back to him. He seized the placket of her shirt and yanked and the buttons spun through the air and the fabric tore and his hands on her back were rough as rocks, hot as embers.
He pulled her against him and his mouth on her neck was hard and his teeth grazed her skin as he lifted her like she was nothing. He found her nipple and bit. She cried out in pain even as sensation rocked her, from his hot wet mouth along her nerves to her core and out to the edges of her, the place where she ended and the rest of the universe began, that place that was lost because she was just the spiral of fury and hurt and need that Smoke had made of her when he left.
Dor lifted her hips, his hands holding her and moving her against him. She felt his cock brush against her, slick and sliding against her furrow and she threw her head back and grabbed his shoulders again and thrust against him but he held her away. God, he was just so strong, he held her as though she was a sack of feathers, a sack of dried and crumbling leaves. As though she were nothing at all. “This is wrong,” he said through gritted teeth, the quivering head of him hot against her, and she dug her fingers in to brace herself and struggled against him, bucking and begging with her body, and still he held her off, his fingers bruising-hard in the soft flesh of her ass. Cass’s breath turned into a cry, a wail, a pleading keening and finally, finally oh God finally he relented and jammed her down on him with a cutoff cry of his own.
She was ready, so ready, liquid in her need and still he split her as an adze splits bark already taken from a felled tree. She felt herself cleave clean around him, he was so hard so demanding and still she wanted more of him, she wrenched and englutted and he grunted and forced his way ever deeper until there was nowhere else to go. Her keening wail turned into something else, an excited, hungry clamor that matched him thrust for thrust, urging him on, making him go faster, harder.
Dor’s eyes were shut tight and he grimaced as though he were in excruciating pain, sweat beading along his brow, slicking his chest hot even as the night grew deeper and the room grew ever colder, this abandoned remote place of death and devastation, forgotten by everyone.
Cass saw how he fought himself and it excited her and she kissed him with her mouth open and tasted bitter, knew she would hate herself for it later but she drank the bitter deep, slammed herself against him and seized the energy that ebbed from him. The bitter taste was triumph, and she couldn’t get enough, could never get enough.
“I didn’t-want-this,” he managed to get out with difficulty. Cass found his nipples with her fingers and twisted; she grazed her teeth along his jaw, nipped his flesh and laved him with her tongue. “I don’t-want you.”
Her hair had fallen between them again and she mashed her face against it, the strands gritty against her skin. And she laughed. It started deep inside her, a rumbling, unstoppable reaction to the bitterness she’d swallowed, and Dor pushed her off of him only to prop her ungently with her face against the back of the couch, her hands finding purchase on the scratchy synthetic fabric, as he took her that way, his hands on her thighs as though he would hold on through a storm, a hurricane, the wrath of God Himself-and her laughter grew and rang through the room until it finally turned into something else and there was no way to know whose cries burned the cursed and frigid air.
16
IN THE MORNING HIS EYES FELT LIKE THEY WERE full of fine grit, and he lay on the hard carpeted floor under the twisted blankets and thought of the shale cliffs along the Iowa riverbanks of the summers of his youth. He spent them with his Neary cousins from his father’s side of the family-the Irish side-skinny redheaded farm boys reckless and restless, throwing themselves off the cliffs in banshee-screaming cannonballs into the brackish pools below. Afterward they lay on the sandbars steaming in the sun, good-naturedly insulting each other and speculating about every girl within thirty miles. Dor, younger by three years than the youngest Neary, listened while he baked deep brown, having inherited his Afghani mother’s complexion. Dor couldn’t keep up with any of them and so of course hadn’t yet realized that in time he would be able to beat the shit out of any of them without breaking a sweat. They raced each other through the fields late in the afternoons, kicking up dust, getting it in their eyes.
Dor didn’t know what had happened to any of his cousins, his good-natured doughy aunts, or his portly stoic uncles. A couple of them had sent Christmas cards last year. Dor kept them in a file folder, pushed far back in a cabinet at the office he would never return to.
Of course, they were on the other side of the Rockies. Maybe they had a chance.
Dor rubbed at his eyes, pushed himself up and leaned back against the sofa. The same sofa where, deep in the night, he’d…Jesus. No. The memories came back sharp and whole, and he gave up struggling against them. How the hell had it happened? She’d fought him hard, all lean strong limbs and teeth and that hair of hers, wild like a pale discordant halo around her face.
He remembered the way Cass looked when she first came to the Box. She’d been timid then, beat-down. He hadn’t known about Ruthie at first, hadn’t known what drove her, what haunted her, but they were all like that, every traveler who found their way to the Box. Loss and hunger, a mix he’d come to know well, a calculation he had a particular genius for; he could take its measure and instantly know what a person needed, and what it was worth to them. But not with Cass. Even then, there had been something elusive about her. She was scared and she was a thin line away from frantic, but you could also see her checking around for escape routes, even if she didn’t know she was doing it-she was a hedger of bets, a hoarder of backup plans pinched in her fingers like a cornered fox.
Her hair had been short then, soft and brown like a boy’s…ragged…as if it was torn. Her first day in the Box she’d had the barber do something to it, bleached the ends, made it stick straight up and askew. It should have been ugly. Since she’d moved in with Smoke she hadn’t cut it, but she’d kept it dyed a blond so pale it was nearly white, and it had grown fast, jagged pieces down past her chin already, down to her shoulder blades, one of the strange things that made her seem so otherworldly at times. Probably another outlier trait. He saw her working in the gardens on steel-cloud fall days, her pale head unmistakable among the glossy leaves of her citrus seedlings, the carefully pruned branches of her
prized fig. She wasn’t a talker. He didn’t know if she had ever been.
When he first did talk to Cass, she gazed straight into his eyes, a challenge, a dare, a provocation. He felt himself shut down, and he sent her away as soon as he could, unsettled and not in the mood to be. He didn’t expect her to last. Later, after she and Smoke settled in, they kept their distance from each other. He knew Cass resented him for recruiting Smoke to head his security team. How to explain his choice? It was no more or less than instinct-but he owed her no explanation. He owed her nothing. She didn’t work for him. She worked for no one but herself, and she gave away her herbs and roots and flowers just as often as she traded for them. Sometimes it almost seemed as though she did this to provoke him, giving away the things of most value and cherishing bits of worthless trash: broken bottles in pretty colors, soiled silk scarves and books with missing covers. Of course, it was easy to be generous when you had more than enough-Smoke earned more than they could use up. Dor rewarded Smoke well and with care because he had been right about him and did not wish to lose him: Smoke was that rarest of men, a born leader who did not want to lead. And Dor’s security force-renegades, thieves, adrenaline junkies and soldiers all-could only be led by such a man. Even now Dor marveled that he was the only one who ever understood that dynamic, but he supposed that had always been his gift, understanding people’s natures better than they understood themselves.
Except for Cass. It should have been easy: recovering addict, driven by loss and guilt-they were a dime a dozen, a currency so devalued they practically flooded the Box these days. A huge number ended up killing themselves one way or another. But this one had a couple of additional facets. Fiercely protective mother. Passionate lover. Survivor. Cass had become a wild card.
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