Crave fa-2

by J. R. Ward

  Whatever. Chances were good he was going to know one way or the other in not long at all.

  Thanks to the curtain of darkness that surrounded him, he had no conception of the number of them or the size of the room: The candlelight threw only so much illumination, and the wax-and-wick numbers were set at intervals of a couple of feet around him.

  So this was how a birthday cake felt: kinda worried, given that all your delicate frosting was damn close to open flames.

  Plus you were on the verge of getting eaten.

  Devina stepped into the light and smiled like the angel she absolutely wasn’t. “Comfortable?”

  “I could use a pillow. But other than that, I’m good.”

  Hell, if she could lie, so could he. The truth was those wires around his ankles and wrists had barbs on them, so there were bands of pain at all his pulse points. He also had a high-fashion necklace of the same shit that made swallowing just a boatload of fun. And the table under him was coated in some kind of acid—most likely the blood from the things around the periphery.

  Clearly, Devina had worked out a lot of demons on these planks, too.

  He was willing to bet Adrian had been here. Eddie as well.

  Oh, God . . . had the blond girl?

  Jim closed his eyes, and on the backs of his lids, saw that lovely innocent strung up over that tub again. Shit, to hell with saving the world. He wished he could have traded himself for her.

  Cold fingers drifted up the inside of his leg, and as they got closer and closer to his cock, sharp nails scraped his skin.

  A strange sound percolated up, and for some reason it reminded him of deboning a chicken—lot of loose flapping and muffled cracking. Then there was an odd smell . . . like . . . what the fuck was it?

  When Devina spoke next, her voice was warped, the tone deeper . . . lower and raspy. “I liked being with you before, Jim. Remember that? In your truck . . . but this is going to be so much better. Look at me, Jim. See the real me.”

  “I’m good like this. But thanks—”

  Nails gouged into his balls, and then his sac was twisted hard. As the driving pain hit the neuron superhighway of his pelvic girdle, its fumes created a curdling nausea in his gut. Which of course had nowhere to go thanks to the collar clamped around his neck.

  Yup, dry heaves were all he had to offer, because nothing was going to evac up his throat.

  “Look at me.” More with the wrenching.

  His gaping mouth took its own sweet time getting his reply out. Then again, it was busy trying to accommodate the gulps of air he was taking. “. . . No . . .”

  Something mounted him. He didn’t know who or what it was, because there were suddenly hands all over him, the gates unleashed—

  No, not hands. Mouths.

  With sharp teeth.

  As his cock penetrated something that had all the softness and slickness of a rusted-out sink drain, the first of the cuts were made on his chest. Might have been a blade. Might have been a long fang.

  And then something blunt was forced into his mouth. Tasting salt and flesh, he figured it was some kind of cock and he started to choke, air suddenly becoming a scarce commodity.

  Riding the crest of suffocation, he had a moment of total, autonomic flip-out. It was, however, a case of mind over body. The faster his heart pounded, the worse the lack of oxygen was and the brighter and hotter the flaring agony inside his rib cage.

  Slow down, he told himself. Slow it all down. Just sloooooooooooooow down. . . .

  Higher reasoning reigned and got the reins on his body: His pounding blood cooled and his lungs learned to wait for the withdrawals from his mouth to sneak a breath.

  Frankly, he wasn’t impressed. Sexual shit was so unimaginative when it came to torture.

  This wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, for real. But Devina wasn’t going to break him with this violation bullshit. Or by trying to fillet his fish with the knife work.The thing with pain was, yeah, sure, it lit up your switchboard, but really, it was nothing more than a loud sensation—and like going to a concert and having your eardrums compensate over time, eventually you got used to it.

  Besides, he had vast reserves of strength: Matthias had lived another day, his boys were hanging with Grier and Isaac, and while he would have preferred a time-out at Disney World or Club Med instead, the power of doing the right thing and sacrificing himself for another’s well-being was sustenance for every cell in his body.

  He was going to make it through this.

  And then he was going save Isaac’s soul and laugh in Devina’s face at the end of this round.

  The bitch couldn’t kill him and was not going to get the best of him.

  Game on.

  CHAPTER 29

  As Grier stared across her bedroom at the tattoo that covered Isaac’s back, her hands crept up and curled around her neck.

  The image in his skin was done in black and gray and was so vividly drawn, the Grim Reaper seemed to be staring right out at her: The great black-robed figure stood in a field of graves that stretched in all directions, skulls and bones littering the ground at its feet. From beneath the hood, two white spots glowed above the hard jut of a fleshless jaw. One skeletal hand was on the scythe handle, and the other reached forward, pointing at her chest.

  And yet that wasn’t the most terrifying part.

  Underneath the depiction, there was a row of lines grouped in bundles of four with a diagonal line bunching each one. There had to be at least ten of those. . . .

  “You’ve killed . . .” She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.

  “Forty-nine. And before you think I’m glorifying what I’ve done, each of us has this in our skin. It’s not voluntary.”

  That was nearly ten a year. One a month. Lives lost at his hands.

  With a quick, slashing movement, Isaac pulled his windbreaker and sweatshirt down—and just as well. That tattoo was terrifying.

  Turning to face her, he met her squarely in the eye and seemed to be waiting for a response.

  All she could think about was Daniel . . . God, Daniel. Her brother was a notch on the back of one or some of those soldiers, a little line drawn by a needle, marked permanently in ink.

  She had been tattooed, too, by the death. On the inside. The sight of him dead and gone—and now the stain of the details of that night—were forever on her mind.

  And it was the same for what she’d found out about her father’s other life. And Isaac’s.

  Grier braced her hands on her knees and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’m going to leave—”

  “About your past.”

  As she cut him off, she shook her head again. She’d been on a whirlwind since the moment he’d walked into that attorney-client room back at the jail. Caught up in a buzz, she’d spun faster and faster, from the run-in with that man with the eye patch to the sex to the showdown with her father . . . to Isaac hitting the self-destruct button sure as if he’d pulled the pin out of a grenade.

  But somehow, as soon as he’d done that, she felt as though the storm was over and done, the tornado having moved on to someone else’s cornfield.

  In the aftermath, everything seemed so clear and simple.

  She shrugged and kept staring at him. “I really can’t say anything about your past . . . but I do have an opinion on your future.” Her exhale was long and slow and sounded as exhausted as she felt. “I don’t think you should turn yourself in to die. Two wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, nothing can make what you did right, but you don’t need me telling you that. What you’ve done is going to follow you around all the days of your life—it is a ghost that will never leave you.”

  And the dark shadows in his eyes told her he knew that better than anyone.

  “To be honest, Isaac, I think you’re being a coward.” As his lids popped, she nodded. “It’s so much harder to live with what you’ve done than go out in a blaze of self-righ
teous glory. You ever hear of suicide by cop? It’s where a cornered gunman will fire once on a police barricade, and effectively force the badges to pump him full of bullets. It’s for people who don’t have the strength to face the reckoning they deserve. That button you pushed? Same thing. Isn’t it.”

  She knew she’d hit the target by the way his face closed up, his features becoming a mask.

  “The way to be brave,” she continued, “is to be the one who stands up and exposes the organization. That is the right course of action. Shine the light no one else can on the evil you’ve seen and done and been. That is the only way to come close to making amends. God . . . you could stop this whole damn thing—” Her voice cracked as she thought of her brother. “You could stop it and make sure no one else gets sucked into it. You could help find the ones who are involved and hold them accountable. That . . . that would be meaningful and important. Unlike this suicidal bullshit. Which solves nothing, improves nothing . . .”

  Grier got to her feet, closed the top of her suitcase, and snapped the brass latches down tight. “I don’t agree with anything you’ve done. But you’ve got enough conscience in you to want to get out. The question is whether that impulse can take you to the next level—and that’s got nothing to do with your past. Or me.”

  Sometimes reflections of yourself were exactly what you needed to see, Isaac thought. And he wasn’t talking about the puss-in-the-mirror kind.

  More like the eyes-of-others variety.

  As Isaac frowned, he wasn’t sure which was more of a shocker: the fact that Grier was totally right or that he was inclined to act on what she’d said.

  Bottom line? She was spot-on: He had been on a suicidal bender ever since he’d broken away from the fold, and he wasn’t the kind to hang himself in the bathroom—no, no, it was much manlier to be gunned down by a comrade.

  What a pussy he was.

  But that being said, he wasn’t sure how coming forward would work. Who did he talk to? Who could he trust? And while he could see himself going all-info on Matthias and that second in command, he was not going to give up the identities of the other soldiers he’d worked with or knew about. XOps had gotten out of control under Matthias’s rule and that man had to be stopped—but the organization wasn’t entirely evil and did perform a necessary and significant service to the country. Besides, he had a feeling that if that boss of theirs was put away, most of the hard-cores like Isaac would dissolve into the ether like smoke on a cold night, never again to do what they had done or speak of it: There were many like him, those who wanted out but were trapped by Matthias one way or another—and he knew this because there had been so much comment on Jim Heron’s release.

  Speaking of which . . .

  He needed to get to Heron. If there was a way to do this, he needed to talk it over with the guy.

  And Grier’s father as well.

  “Call your dad,” he said to Grier. “Call him and get him back here. Right now.” When she opened her mouth, he cut her off. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but if there’s another solution here, I’m damn sure he has better contacts than I do—because I’ve got nada. And as for your brother—shit, that’s rat awful and I’m so very sorry. But what happened to him was the fault of someone else—it was not your father’s doing. That’s the thing. When you’re being recruited, they don’t tell you everything, and by the time you work out the reality for yourself, it’s too late. Your father is way more innocent in this than I am, and he’s had to lose a son over it. You’re angry and you’re devastated and I get that. So is he, though—and you saw it for yourself.”

  Even though her face went hard, her eyes welled up, so he knew she was listening.

  Isaac grabbed the phone on the bedside table and held it out to her. “I’m not asking you to forgive him. Just please don’t hate him. You do that and he’s lost both his children.”

  “He already has, though.” Grier swept a quick hand over her tears, wiping them clean. “My family’s gone now. My brother and mother dead. My father . . . I can’t bear the sight of him. I’m all alone.”

  “No, you’re not.” He jogged the receiver at her. “He’s just a call away—and he’s all you’ve got left. If I can man up . . . so can you.”

  Sure, he was taking a chance in presenting the idea of coming forward to her father, but the reality was that Childe’s interests and his were aligned: They both wanted him the fuck away from Grier.

  Staring into her eyes, he willed her to find the strength to stay connected to her blood, and he was very aware of why it was so important to him: As usual, he was being selfish. If he did come clean to some judge or congressional hearing, he was going to stay breathing for a while, but he’d be essentially dead to her as he got swept up into a witness protection program of some sort. Therefore, her father was the best shot she had at being protected.

  The only shot.

  Isaac shook his head. “The bad guy in this is the one you saw in the kitchen back at my apartment. He’s the true evil. Not your father.”

  “The only way . . .” Grier wiped her eyes again. “The only way I can be anywhere around him is if he helps you.”

  “So tell him that when he gets here.”

  A moment later she straightened her shoulders and took the phone. “Okay. I will.”

  As a burst of emotion hit him, he had to stop himself from leaning in for a quick kiss—God, she was strong. So very strong. “Good,” he said hoarsely. “That’s good. And I’m going to go find my buddy Jim now.”

  Turning away, he went down the back stairwell, and rounded the landings with speed. He was praying that either Jim had returned or those two hard-asses out in the backyard could bring him in from wherever he was at.

  Bursting through the kitchen, he hit the door out into the garden, opening it wide—

  Over in the far corner, Jim’s buddies were bookending a glowing cell phone, looking like they’d been kneed in the balls.

  “What’s wrong?” Isaac asked.

  The pair glanced up and he immediately knew by those tight expressions that Jim was in the shit: When you worked on a team, there was absolutely nothing more gut-wrenching than if one of you got captured by the enemy. It was worse than a mortal wound in yourself or a teammate.

  Because the enemy didn’t always kill first.

  “Matthias,” Isaac hissed.

  As the one with the thick braid shook his head, Isaac jogged down to them. Pierced was looking green, positively green. “Who then? Who has Jim? How can I help?”

  Grier appeared in the open doorway. “My father will be here in five minutes.” She frowned. “Is everything okay?”

  Isaac just stared at the two guys. “I can help.”

  The one with the braid shut that right down: “No, I’m afraid you can’t.”

  “Isaac? Who are you talking to?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Friends of Jim’s.” He looked back—

  The two men were gone, as if they had never been there in the first place. Again.

  What. The. Fuck.

  As the creep-o-meter on the back of Isaac’s neck went wild, Grier walked over. “Was there someone here?”

  “Ah . . .” He looked all around. “I don’t . . . know. Come on, let’s get inside.”

  Ushering her back into the house, he thought it was entirely possible he’d lost his damn mind.

  After locking the door and watching Grier reengage the alarm, he sat down on a stool at the island and took out the Life Alert. No response yet and he hoped Grier’s father got here before Matthias hit him back.

  Best to have a plan.

  In the silence of the kitchen, he stared at the cooktop as Grier took up res across the way, leaning back against the counter by the sink. It felt like a hundred years had come and gone since she’d made him that omelet the night before. And yet if he followed through on what he was contemplating, the next few days were going to make that seem like the blink of an eye in comparison.

  Runnin
g through his brain, he tried to think of what he could say about Matthias. He knew a lot when it came to his old boss . . . and yet the man had purposely created black holes in every operative’s mental Milky Way: You were told only what you absolutely, positively had to know and not one syllable more. Some shit you could deduce, but there were vast patches of huh-what? that—

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  Isaac looked up in surprise, and thought he was the one who should be asking that of her. And what do you know, she had her arms around herself—a self-protective pose she seemed to fall into a lot when she was with him.

  “I really hope you can patch it up with your father,” he replied, hating himself.

  “Are you okay?” she repeated.

  Ah, yes, so both of them were playing dodge ’em.

  “You know, you can answer me,” she said. “With the truth.”

  It was funny. For some reason, maybe because he wanted to practice . . . he considered doing that. And then he actually did.

  “The first guy I killed . . .” Isaac stared down at the granite, turning the slick expanse of stone into a TV screen and watching his own actions play out across the speckled surface. “He was a political extremist who had bombed an embassy overseas. It took me three and a half weeks to find him. I tracked him across two continents. Caught up with him in Paris, of all places. The city of love, right? I took him out in an alleyway. Sneaked behind him. Slit his throat. Which was a messy mistake—I should have snapped his—”

  He stopped with a curse, well aware that his version of talking shop was hardly like some tax attorney yammering on about the IRS code.

  “It was . . . shockingly uncomplicated for me.” He looked at his hands. “It was like something came over me and put a lockdown on my emotions. Afterward? I just went out to eat. I had a steak with pepper—ate all of it. Dinner was . . . great. And it was while I was having that meal that I realized they’d chosen wisely. Picked the right guy. That was when I threw up. I went out the back of the restaurant, into an alley just like the one I’d murdered that man in an hour before. You see, I hadn’t really believed I was a killer until it didn’t bother me.”