He swallows, closing his eyes. “I hate this,” he whispers. “I hate this so much.”
My heart twists, and before I can stop myself, I’ve got my arms around him. His head drops to my shoulder—the opposite of how we stood in this room last night, right before Ash palmed my cock and made me come all over his fist. Now I’m the strong one, now I’m the one offering comfort and release.
I hold him tighter. “I’ll get her back,” I swear.
“It should be me,” he says into my shoulder.
“But it can’t be.”
“You have to come back to me. Both of you. If I lose you, too—” His voice cracks suddenly. “My little prince. Please come back.”
People are casting sympathetic glances at us, at our seeming display of fraternal comfort. But I see the way Kay and Merlin look at us, the only two people in the room who know our past, and I see them wonder. About me and Ash. Me and Greer.
I step back, shuddering slightly at the feeling of Ash’s stubble rasping against my cheek as he pulls away. “I’m coming back,” I promise. “And your wife is too.”
After all, if it weren’t for Greer all those years ago, I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of love again. If it weren’t for Greer, I wouldn’t have Ash again. If it weren’t for last night, for the vows we spoke to each other and the promises we made with our bodies, then I wouldn’t have my own soul.
I have to rescue her.
She’s already rescued me.
3
Greer
after
I’m in a car. That much I know, that much I can feel by the vibration of the road thrumming through my skull. The thought comes, illuminating my mind, and then other sensory information floods in after it. My hands are taped behind my back, my ankles bound together. There’s something over my eyes and something over my mouth. I can’t see, can’t move, can’t hear anything over the roar of the tires. I tentatively stretch my legs out, first down, then side to side, then up. That and the scratchy carpet against my cheek confirm what I already suspected—I’m in a trunk.
For a moment, I’m almost amused. I’ve become one of those damsels in the legends that I teach about at Georgetown, one of those women in the stories who represents sex or virtue or deceit or any number of things to the gallant knight she’s entreating for help. To complain that these women are passive is to miss the point; they aren’t women at all. They’re symbols, defined by the meaning the knights make of them, recognizable only as the role they play in the knight’s adventure.
And right now, it’s hard not to feel a kinship with those cardboard characters. I’m in this trunk because of the meanings Melwas made about me, even because of the meanings the President and his Vice President have made about me. To Melwas, I’m a thing to be possessed; to Ash and Embry, I’m a living projection of their love and promises.
In other words, I’m being moved around in a story that isn’t my own, and I squeeze my eyes shut against my blindfold and vow that it will not continue. Not even if I have to kill Melwas myself.
I take a minute to calm my thoughts, to keep back the tears that might stop up my nose and keep me from breathing. I’m in a trunk. All modern trunks have trunk releases, right? If I release the trunk and we’re in heavy traffic, then someone will see me bound and gagged and surely I’ll be saved. But if I release the trunk and there’s no one around, then I’m screwed. He or they—whoever is in the front seat—will simply stop the car and shut the trunk again. And maybe hurt me for the trouble.
Which means I need my legs free at least, so I can run, no matter what the scenario.
The clean smell of the trunk carpet hints to me that this is a rental car, which means there’s a chance my captors haven’t been thorough in certain respects. I wriggle—quietly, trying to keep thumping to a minimum—so that my hands find the edge of the trunk carpet, and just as I hoped, it lifts up. Underneath, there will be a cavity where the spare tire and jack are stored, but I don’t care about that. I just want the tools. One tool in particular.
It takes a long time, or at least it feels long in the dark, having to move so slowly. But then I find it: a cheaply made vinyl bag resting in its own cavity under the carpet. I slowly work it open and extract the pry bar, thanking God that Grandpa Leo insisted I learn how to change a tire when I was a teenager, even though I had no reason to drive anywhere. It serves me now as I brace the bar against the side of the trunk and begin working the sharp points of it into the tape.
My wrists are stinging and aching after only a few moments of this; several times the sharp end misses the tape and digs into the soft skin of my inner arms. Luckily, the tape over my mouth stifles my yelps of pain, and after my hands go numb and my arms are bleeding and sore, it happens. The tape tears enough to free my hands. I wincingly peel the tape off my mouth and lose the blindfold, and then set to work on my feet, which takes much less time.
And without the blindfold, I see what I’m looking for, the only point of light in my dark world. A tab marked Pull.
I want to pull it now, right this instant, but I force myself to wait. Wait until the car slows, rolls almost to a stop. I bet we are at a stop sign or stoplight, and praying for daylight and lots of traffic, I yank the tab. The trunk lid pops open.
The light is blinding. Actually blinding—I can’t see, can’t even make out shapes and surfaces right in front of me. But I force myself to move anyway, climbing clumsily out of the trunk, forcing my half-asleep legs to run, run, run, even though I can’t see where I’m going and my bare feet struggle to find purchase on the wet asphalt beneath them. Even though I feel the hotel bathrobe I’m still dressed in begin to flap open, exposing my nakedness underneath. There’s a yell, a shout in Ukrainian, and I will my eyes to see more, see faster, as if I could shrink my pupils at will.
And sight is gradually creeping back in. I’m next to a large building, I think, stumbling on a narrow drive. It’s evening time; I must have been unconscious for a very long time. And there’s a smell, a familiar smell, something other than the rain…
My legs are pumping hard and I veer away from the drive and cut across the wet lawn, but it’s not enough, my stiff legs can’t move fast enough, my dark-weakened eyes can’t steer me to safety. I’m taken down only a moment later. I’m flipped over onto my back and the robe gapes open. I struggle to pull it closed underneath my abductor, and to his credit, after an assessing flicker of his eyes across my breasts, he lets me. I recognize the man who attacked me in the hallway of the hotel. He’s still wearing his janitor’s uniform, the one that says Daryl.
“You are too much trouble,” he hisses, and I wrestle with him, jamming my knee into his balls. He loosens his hold and I slip almost out of his grip, but then he seizes and flattens me, leaving his hands free to pin mine above my head.
Funny that some of the best moments of my life have been lying like this underneath Ash, and yet now, I’m all fury and fear. If I ever wondered if my sexual programming is messed up, here I know the truth—I only want my pain and humiliation from one man.
I think of last night and despite everything, I smile. Maybe two men, I amend.
“You think this is time for smiling, bitch?” Not-Daryl unleashes a slap so fierce I see stars. And then he hits me again, flat enough not to leave a mark, hard enough to draw tears.
Two other men join him and haul me to my feet, and as I’m struggling and crying out for help, I realize I know that familiar smell.
The sea.
4
Embry
before
Lieutenant Colchester turned out to be a real fucking thorn in my side.
First, there were the drills. Before Colchester, the platoons trained separately, simply because of the space limitations on the base. But after Colchester came, he convinced the captain to let the platoons drill together, which then meant that Colchester and I had to drill together. Which meant every morning, Monday through Saturday, I had to watch Colchester run faster than me, march l
onger, jump higher, squat deeper.
I mean, I didn’t mind the deep squats so much.
Then there were the patrols. The separatists were encroaching fast and converting many of the locals to their cause. So it was our job to walk through the five or six villages closest to the base, and shake hands and hand out bars of chocolate, or whatever bullshit the government had sent that month to try to buy local goodwill. And even though we each had our own platoon, our units were small enough that the captain had us go together, which meant that my afternoons were spent watching Colchester conversing with the villagers in fluent Ukrainian, helping them move boxes and jumping into impromptu soccer matches with the children, and overall just being so fucking helpful and likable as to be disgusting.
And even when we weren’t together, I felt his presence, as if I were magnetized and he were a slab of iron, and at night in my own room, my skin prickled with the awareness that he was just on the other side of the wall. I told myself it was because we’d fought—and I’d lost, no less—and I told myself it was because I didn’t want another fucking lecture about how to do my job. I told myself those things, even though it had been three weeks since that fight in the yard and Colchester hadn’t once tried to talk to me in all that time. But I caught him looking at me several times a day, those lake-green eyes unreadable and his expression both stern and a little amused.
Which pissed me off. Who was he to find me amusing? I was always the first to laugh at myself, to be the butt of the joke, if the joke was funny and the night full of liquor and life. But for some reason, the idea that Colchester didn’t take me seriously rubbed me the wrong way.
I was used to being rubbed the right way.
All of this irritation built and built, and I found myself growing unaccountably tense around him, around everybody. I drank more, smoked more, stayed up later at night, unable to shake the feeling that I’d outgrown my skin somehow, that there was something itchy and new inside my veins that I couldn’t escape. And sometimes, when I got very drunk and the base was silent and the cold stars winked outside the window, I wondered if I even wanted to escape it. It was an awful feeling, but it was addictive, like a cut on your lip you couldn’t stop licking just to feel the sting, just to taste the iron-salt taste of your own blood.
Maybe I could have stayed in that agitated, itchy place forever, but the universe had different plans. Merlin would have said it was destiny and Ash would have said it was God, and Greer would have agreed with both, but this wasn’t the well-ordered hand of a deity or a pre-ordained timeline. The next three months were fucking chaos.
And it began as most chaos did and still does: with my sister.
Morgan was set to arrive the day before we were going to Prague to spend my R&R week sightseeing. Well, she wanted to sightsee. I wanted to find some absinthe and fuck my way through New Town, and pretend that there wasn’t a condescending green-eyed asshole waiting for me back on base.
At any rate, she was coming to stay in the village near the base tonight and then we were taking the train to Prague together. But that day was also the day we were executing one of our worst drills—an eight-hour belly crawl through woods infested with mock hostiles, establishing a mock outpost. The mud was cold and wet, the soggy pine needles still sharp somehow, and by the six-mile mark, most of my men had bleeding fingers and runny noses. I called for a break so people could tape up their fingers and catch their breath, and that’s when it happened. Colchester’s group—our “hostiles” in the exercise—swarmed up over the lip of a nearby creek and lit into us.
The dirt around us exploded in a hail of simulated bullets—paint-filled rounds that we could shoot from our real weapons—and I screamed into my radio for the soldiers to take cover. I hadn’t been a total idiot—we’d picked a fortified place to rest, sent out a couple guys to watch the perimeter—and somehow we managed to form a coherent defense against Colchester’s men. But we couldn’t beat them back, soldier after soldier getting struck with paint and laying down to simulate death. Soon it was just me and Dag, my platoon sergeant, returning fire against six or seven of Colchester’s men. Then Dag got hit, grunting as the round hit his vest—the paint can pack a mean punch—and giving me an apologetic look as he stretched out on the ground.
I kept firing into the creek, swearing internally, fighting off that annoying magnet feeling that Colchester was here and close and probably wearing that stupid, pretty smile of his…
Something cool touched the back of my neck, and I jumped back, spinning around to see the end of Colchester’s Glock pointed right at me. He had his M4 slung over his shoulder, and with his other hand, he was holding his radio close to his mouth to tell his men that he had me.
“Goddamn fucking shit,” I said.
But you know what? I wasn’t going down without taking Colchester with me. I ducked, faster than he could move, aiming my M4 at his chest and firing. He twisted away in the nick of time, avoiding the paint and swinging his own gun around. My bicep exploded in pain as the fake bullet hit my arm. No body armor there, no sir.
I staggered back with a gasp, but not fast enough. A boot hooked around my ankle, and with one quick jerk, I was flat on my back, blinking up at the tired, threadbare pines.
“I win,” Colchester said. His other boot was gently pressing against the wrist that held the gun I tried to shoot him with. “Now don’t move.”
“Fuck you.”
Colchester smiled, that dickhead, his firm mouth parting into a grin and revealing the faintest dent of a dimple in his left cheek. His boot pressed harder against my wrist—not hard enough to truly hurt me, but hard enough to be uncomfortable—and he used the muzzle of his M4 to nudge at the paint splatter on my arm. “You okay, Lieutenant? I know those things sting.”
It did sting. It stung like a motherfucker, and I didn’t even want to think about the ugly bruise it would leave on my arm. But when I glanced up into Colchester’s face, I couldn’t bring up the right words to tell him that. I couldn’t even muster another fuck you. In that instant, I felt the viscid weight of every moment leading up to this, of all the itchy nights I’d spent drinking and staring at the stars. I felt unmoored from myself, from everything that wasn’t Colchester’s boot on my wrist and green eyes on my face.
And I didn’t imagine what happened next. At least, I don’t think I imagined it, but it’s hard to tell with everything that happened afterward, what Rubicons were crossed when and how. But Colchester looked down at his boot on my wrist, at my panting chest as I struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked from me by the fall, and something unshuttered in his face. For a single moment, it seemed like we were breathing in tandem, as if he were mirroring my gasping breaths or maybe I was trying to mirror his steadier ones, and then he moved his boot off my wrist, replacing it with his knee as he knelt down next to me. The pine needles rustled under his boots. From somewhere in the trees came the plaintive churr of a turtledove.
Colchester took off his helmet, and the gesture felt strangely medieval, like a knight taking off his helm. A prince kneeling next to the glass coffin of a sleeping princess…if that princess were a spoiled playboy from the west coast.
And of course, no fairy tale prince ever said what Colchester uttered next.
“It’s a shame I’ve already shot you,” he said softly. “I would have so liked to hear you beg.”
All around us, soldiers were stirring, chafing at their new bruises or laughing or playfully shoving the brothers who’d just “killed” them moments earlier, but Colchester and I were worlds apart from them, existing in a bubble of time that had been frozen in that forest for centuries.
I was too apart from myself to be anything other than truly honest. “You’d have to hurt me much worse than this if you want to hear me beg.”
I expected bluster, I expected a snappy, aggressive response where he’d promise to hurt me the next time he had the chance. Hell, I almost wanted it. But he didn’t do that. Something in my words seemed to
turn him inward, upon himself. He blinked, bit his lip. It was the first time I ever saw him uncertain and without answers.
“I want to do more than hurt you,” he finally said, looking troubled as he said it. And then he stood up and walked away, leaving me to puzzle over what he meant by those words…and what I wanted them to mean.
I went straight to the showers. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I went straight to the showers and stripped off all the sweaty, muddy clothes, stood under the spray turned up as hot as it could go, and tried to rinse off the smell of pine needles and gunpowder. Tried to rinse away the feeling of Colchester’s boot on my wrist.
I would have so liked to hear you beg.
Make me, I should have said. Or maybe that would have been the wrong answer too. But I didn’t know the right answer.
And the problem wasn’t that I had a certain kind of appetite that excluded Colchester—I had every appetite. I went to an all-boys boarding school and had sex with the boys there; I came home and slept with the rich girls summering on the coast. I was lucky with my parents, lucky in the Northwest—no one seemed to mind. Once or twice there had been the insinuation that I wasn’t able to “make up my mind” about who I liked to fuck, but that was ridiculous. I knew exactly who I liked to fuck, and it was everybody.
So it wasn’t that I found Colchester attractive that bothered me. No.
It bothered me that he was perfect.
It bothered me that I hated him.
American Prince (American Queen #2) Page 3