by Selena Kitt
In only a few seconds more, Mike came back to her and with a vicious jerk, grabbed her collar and pulled her forward. The stab of pain that shot through her leg as her injured ankle was twisted again was brutal, and her loud cry was not at all feigned. Unable to do anything else, with Mike's rough grip on her collar unrelenting, Emily limped behind him, aware, even through her anger, that it made them look all the more authentic. Emily heard the loud snickers of the two boys as she and Mike passed through the gate.
As soon as they were out of eyeshot of the gate, Emily jerked back on Mike's grip. "What the fuck did you say to them? Why were they laughing at me?"
"What I told you. You were a runaway bitch of a wife and I was bringing you home, at which point I was going to fuck you in the ass and make you suck my cock for punishment."
"Jesus, Mike… and they were laughing?"
"For a religion that supposedly veils women to protect them, they don't think much of women. Or haven't you figured that out yet? They thought it was hilarious." Mike snorted. "What do you care? It got us out of there."
An angry reply simmered to the surface, but she bit it back, abruptly too drained to argue. "You're right; it doesn't matter." She found, though, that she had to ask about one thing more. "Did you give them dollars?"
"You betchya. They may hate Americans, but when it comes to bribery, nothing talks like dollars. Just the fact that I had American money gave me status in their eyes."
Emily looked around as they moved forward, recognizing the square from the previous day. Had it really been barely eighteen hours since she and Father Timothius had come through here? This was where the bus had dropped them.
Emily was suddenly completely exhausted, both emotionally and physically. Everything crashed over her all at once. Father Timothius was dead for all she knew, and her uncle, who also happened to be the President of the United States, apparently tried to have her killed. Still… she had the scroll safely in her backpack. She'd really done it. She'd gotten it out of Aleppo, and the thought of that was utterly overwhelming.
"I don't know much farther I can go, Mike," she whispered. "I really don't."
"It's okay." Mike lifted his arm as he saw what could only be divine providence zooming around the square. "Taxi!"
Chapter Seven
The taxi was shabby but quick, and as they went farther and farther south in Aleppo, into the area that was under the control of the established regime, the streets returned to some level of normalcy. Some of the cafes were open, the electricity was on, and here and there men actually sat at outside cafe tables sipping their breakfast coffee. Emily even saw a few women without male companions with babies in strollers and older children. From the fact that the children wore backpacks, it seemed they were going to school. Some of the women were even in pants and were wearing nothing but a simple headscarf.
When they'd caught the cab, Mike had whispered a quick instruction into Emily's ear: "Do not speak," and he had proceeded to carry on an incredibly rapid-fire conversation with the driver in colloquial Arabic. Emily caught very little of it, but it sounded to be about football. Exhausted, in spite of the careening vehicle, honking horns, and cursing driver, she shut her eyes.
It seemed only a moment later that Mike was shaking her roughly. "Amena, eshy," he commanded in harsh Arabic. Wake up.
She was so exhausted simply opening her eyes was painful, but in the nick of time she stopped herself from answering in English, and for one second she was actually glad for the face veil; the driver could see nothing of her reactions. "Ana asfah," she whispered. I'm sorry. It seemed like a good choice. Women in Syria apologized a lot.
After Mike paid the driver and the taxi squealed away, Emily looked around. They were in the middle of a busy square. "Come on, quickly. It's still a couple of blocks. I didn't want the driver to drop us too close, just in case they find him and he's questioned. A bus station is right over there, so dropping us here it looks like we took a bus."
In just a few minutes more, they were on a side street, at the bottom of a narrow staircase. Mike took a quick look around, and when he saw no one, he pulled Emily up the stairs. "It's still very early. I'm hoping no one sees us."
"Are you not supposed to be here?"
"No, it's fine that I'm here. But… it's still better if no one sees us." Within just a moment, they were on an interior landing, sheltered but still open to the outdoors. Mike reached high, behind a wall panel, retrieved a key, and opened a locked door.
The door closed behind them and suddenly, it was like they were in a different world. Quiet, safe, alone. Emily lifted the itchy veil off her face and looked around. They were in a small apartment. It was hot and smelled stale, as if had been shut up for a long time, but it was clean and dry. "What is this place?"
Mike dragged the gutrhal head-covering off of his head and ran his fingers impatiently through his sweaty hair. The didasha followed, exposing his T-shirt and munitions belt. Suddenly, he was an American again. "This is my cousin's apartment. My mother's cousin actually. He owns the tea-shop downstairs. When the fighting started, he sent his wife and children to France, and he moved out to the country. I pay him fifty bucks a month not to rent it to anyone else, and in return, he can use it any time he comes back to Aleppo. Gives me a place in Syria that's off the grid." He scratched at his beard and looked out the small window, considering all the ramifications. "You'll be safe here until I figure out what to do with you."
As she listened, she was untying the headscarf and easing out of the abaya. "Does the government know about this place?"
"The American government? No." He shrugged. "If someone was looking for me hard enough, and they talked to my mother who put them in touch with everyone she's still related to in Syria, eventually someone might figure out I've been renting this place, but that would take a while. For now, we're really truly off the grid." Michael shook his head. He unbuckled his belt and laid it on the table. "Come on."
"What?"
Michael held out his hand and his voice softened. "Come on, baby. I want to get you cleaned up, see what they did to you."
In one moment, hearing him call her 'baby' caused all the stress of the previous twelve hours to crash onto Emily in one horrific wave of pain and emotion, and she collapsed down on to the floor, weeping wordlessly. It was over. It was over, and she was safe, and she hadn't died. And she had what she came for in her backpack.
Michael didn't wait for questions or answers. He reached down, swept Emily into his arms and carried her into the bathroom. Her head dropped loosely against his broad chest and he tightened his arms around her. "Hopefully the water's running," he murmured. "It's been hit or miss lately." One quick turn of the knob on the old-fashioned bathtub, though, showed that he was in luck. That was a good thing, because he really didn't know what he would do if there were no water. After a brief blasting spurt of brownish water, it began running clear and fast, and because the system was tied into the cafe downstairs, there was actually hot water within just a few moments more.
Mike reached for Emily's T-shirt, and in spite of everything, she stiffened and slapped at his hands. "Emily, cut it out. I don't want to have sex with you. I want to get you cleaned up, get disinfectant on these cuts, and get you into bed. Now put your hands down, or you're going to get that spanking I've been thinking about giving you for the last ten hours."
"I thought you said you didn't want to have sex with me."
"I did. I didn't say I wasn't going to spank you."
Emily caught his eyes, and held them. Memories they shared consumed both of them. "Thank you, Mike," she whispered. "If you hadn't come for me…"
Mike dragged the tee off over her head. It was stiff with dried blood from her head wound, which, from the looks of things, had bled seriously for a while. "If I hadn't come for you, Emily, you'd probably be dead now," he said bluntly. "I'm not going to lie to you about that. And as it is, we're in a world of shit, both of us. But for right now…" he reached his big ha
nds around her and unhooked her brassiere, "for right now, I'm giving you a bath."
He sat her down on the closed commode seat, and deftly, as if he were undressing a little child, he first pulled off her sneakers and socks, then the filthy jeans off of her legs, noticing with a grimace that the slime from the floor of basement had dried to a stinking stiffness in the fabric. It had also soaked through to her panties, which were also still sodden with the filth. She'd sat there by herself for six hours, he realized, waiting for someone to come. Mike shook his head, not wanting to think about it.
There would be no washing these clothes; he intended to burn them. With no fanfare, he pitched them out of the bathroom and down the hall, as far away as he could get them. She stood naked before him, the first time he'd seen her like that since they'd broken up two years ago, but before she could even think about being shy, he lifted her into the tub, then knelt down on the floor beside her.
Emily sank down into the hot water and closed her eyes. "Oh my God, this is amazing," she whispered.
With no preamble, he lifted her leg gently and looked at it clinically, carefully averting his eyes from the neatly-shaved plumpness between her thighs. Don't do it, dude. Don't do it, he admonished himself, trying desperately to focus instead on her ankle. Now is not the time. Unfortunately, his cock was starting to tell him something different.
He blinked, forcing himself to concentrate. There was a nasty abrasion on the outside of her right ankle, and it was puffy and red, but there was none of the black bruising or real swelling that would indicate a bone was broken. She'd managed to walk on it for more than a mile, so all indications were that it was a sprain, nothing more, and a mild one at that.
He looked the rest of her over carefully. "Sit up," he ordered quietly, wanting to see the backs of her arms, and then take a look at her head wound. But of course, when she did that, it just made her breasts more full and beautiful… Don't do it, dude.
The jeans she'd been wearing under her abaya seemed to have protected her very well, and except for the ankle and a few bruises, her lower extremities were unharmed. But her arms… wow. They were pockmarked with dozens of little cuts and abrasions, some hardly more than scratches, and others much deeper.
Michael recognized them immediately for what they were: injuries caused by flying debris, some of it nearly microscopic, when bullets hit concrete or metal very near someone. From the number of such wounds, up and down the backs of her arms, she'd been narrowly missed by more than one shot. In spite of seeing injuries like this dozens of times, and having a few of them himself, seeing them on Emily was gut-wrenching. At least one or two looked bad enough that he thought there was probably some debris embedded that should be removed; a doctor needed to probe them under a local anesthesia. Nothing was life-threatening, but if one of them got infected badly, it could be serious. "How many men were chasing you, Emily?"
"I don't know." She laughed cynically. "A hundred?"
With his fingers he gently probed a few of the worst abrasions and he could see from her face that it hurt, but it had to be done. He had to know now if he needed to find a doctor or if it could wait. "How did you lose your abaya?" he asked her.
Emily looked at him. "They caught me."
Mike's hands froze. "What?"
"They caught me. I got caught." Her voice was numb.
"ISIL?"
"No, the other ones. There were two groups. Father Timothius thought we might have picked up someone following us even before we went through the checkpoint. A tail, I guess you'd call it in English."
"And you still went through with it." It was a statement, not a question.
"I had to." Her voice was equally flat.
Mike looked away from her, his jaw hardening. This was, in a nutshell, the old fight, the fight that had ended their relationship two years ago. He opened his mouth to argue, then clamped it shut. Now was not the right time. Of course, part of the problem was that there had never been a 'right' time.
Emily was leaning forward, her forehead on her knees, and as he carefully parted her blood-crusted hair, he could see the wound. It was a laceration about two inches long, and from the looks of it, she had definitely been grazed by a bullet.
"What happened?"
"I was running around a corner, and I ran smack into two of them. They grabbed me; there was nothing I could do. They were dragging me into a building, up a flight of stairs…"
"And they weren't ISIL?"
"No," she said flatly. "They weren't speaking Arabic." Her voice got distant as she tried to remember. "It sounded like Russian, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Maybe Ukrainian?" She looked at Mike as if he'd have the answers.
"You're the linguist, honey, and I wasn't there. Don't look at me. If you say it was Ukrainian, then my guess is it was."
"But why would Ukrainians be chasing me?"
"Emily, I have no idea. But from the sound of it, there are a lot of folks interested in what's in that backpack of yours."
She got that distant look again. "Right."
Mike took the warm washcloth, and deftly began sponging the blood away from her matted hair, from the crease in her scalp. There was nothing left here to suture; he was just going to have to clean it and let it heal. "So what happened?"
"They were forcing me up a flight of stairs, and I was fighting them and then one of them just slipped, I guess. Lost his balance. He fell down and grabbed for me, but he caught my abaya instead and dragged it off. Fortunately, I had thrown the abaya on over the backpack. Then I think the other guy grabbed for him… for the first guy… and they both fell all the way down a flight of stairs. When they hit the bottom someone's gun went off and one of the guys shot the other one. I think. I'm not sure, I just ran down the hall. It was a big building and very dark but there was another flight of stairs, another way out. I got out and it was so dark, and I just kept running. The voices got farther and farther behind me. Then about ten minutes later I fell into the basement where you found me."
Mike just kept listening and sponging at her head, hoping she couldn't tell how much he wanted to vomit. Did she have any idea how much danger she'd been in? She'd been shot and spent the night in a cesspool of a basement, so he had to assume she did, but still… He found himself getting angry all over again, and wishing he could figure out a way to shut her in a cage for the rest of her life. "Lie back," he ordered quietly. "I want to rinse the rest of this blood out."
Her face drooping with exhaustion, she did, allowing Mike to simply have his way. Quickly, though, the water became so dark with blood and filth that Mike knew they were going to have to go a second round. "Stand up," he instructed quietly. "I want to run a fresh bath."
Obediently, she stood. It was warm enough in the apartment that she didn't seem cold, though the water evaporating off her nipples were causing them to pebble into hard little knobs. Mike let the water out, deftly wiped down the sides of the tub with a rag, started refilling the bath… and tried not to look. It didn't matter, though.
His dick had started to get hard when he took her bra off, and it had stayed hard ever since. It was a typical reaction after combat situations, and the fact that he was now with the woman who had done things to him sexually that no one else in his life had ever been able to touch wasn't helping matters.
He couldn't resist touching her, and as the water started to refill, he dipped the washcloth into the fresh water, rubbed it with a small bar of soap he'd found on the sink, and began washing her, slowly soaping her, then letting the warm water rinse her clean, then doing it again.
His breathing deepened and he kept washing. "Mike," she said softly, "my breasts aren't dirty." He looked up and realized that her eyes were wide open and she was watching him. "I thought you said you didn't want to have sex with me."
He gently soaped her breasts again, then dipped and rinsed. The nipples peaked under his ministrations and she shuddered. "That was ten minutes ago. A lot has happened since then."
"Right," sh
e whispered.
"Emily, spread your legs. I need to wash you there, too."
"Mike, is this a good idea?"
A switch had been flipped. He wasn't going back. He was going to fuck her whether she said yes or no. "Do you care? It's a good idea. Spread your legs."
But she didn't argue. In the bedroom, she had always obeyed—sometimes willingly, sometimes not so much—and old habits died hard. At his command, she leaned back against the bathroom wall and parted her thighs as far as the narrow tub would allow. Deftly he drew the warm washcloth over her bare shaved skin. Mike had always loved Emily's pussy, loved how the pretty pink inner lips and little clit peeped out like a shell. Over and over again he washed her, wringing the cloth out over her pussy, the warm water running down her legs.
He had loved to shave her pussy. It was so kinky and every goddamn time he did she would fuss and struggle and pretend to be embarrassed. So then he'd have to spank her good and hard and tie her legs open… and then he'd take his own sweet time over it, take so long, spread her so wide, that her clit would be so swollen and proud by the time he was done that she would come at the merest touch. If he let her. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he made her wait.
"Who's shaving you now?"
Her eyes flashed open in shock at the abrupt question and she looked horrified, but still she answered. "No one. I do it myself."
As hot as he found it to shave her, he went rock hard at the thought of watching her do it to herself. They'd never done that. "Should we check to see if you missed a spot?"
"Oh God, I hate how you do this to me," she whispered. "Every time…"
Mike saw her thighs were trembling and it was over… it was all over.
With one motion, he pulled her out of the tub, wrapped her legs around him and began walking to the bedroom. His mouth found hers, hard and soft, biting, soothing, and licking all at once. Their tongues met and tangled furiously. He forced her mouth open over and over again, demanding to be let inside.