Marina’s hips jerked, but Oliver’s mouth held her to the bed, working her, strumming her to the brink and launching her through it. As he’d promised, she shook with need. Her hands left the bed and clamped onto his head. She guided him to the very tip of her clit. Her hips rocked back and forth against the vigorous strokes of his tongue.
He lifted her from the depth and tumultuous currents to the company of clouds, to the place where dreams were worth dreaming because sometimes they might actually come true. If Marina had known to dream of Oliver, she would have wished on a thousand stars and all twenty-three birthday candles on the cake she never had.
Tears streamed her cheeks, but she was too spent to wipe them away.
Oliver crawled up her body while Marina willed the quiet sobs away. It was finally his turn to take his pleasure. God knew, no man had ever spent so much time with her before. She longed to hold him inside and give back a quarter of the pleasure he’d given her.
He lay next to her and pulled her back to his chest.
Marina let her finger graze across the front of his pants and his massive erection, but he stole her hand away. Before she could speak, he wrapped his around it and tucked their hands between her breasts. His legs pulled up, tucking her into the protective cocoon of his body. There was her safety.
“They’re not sad tears.” She sobbed and snuggled into his pillowing bicep.
“Didn’t think they were.”
“Thank you, for this, all of it.”
“You never have to thank me for that or this.” He kissed her temple and smoothed her hair back with his chin. “Marina, dangerous or not, you’re the best risk I’ve ever taken.”
13
Oliver shoved a stray lock of hair behind his ear and continued to stare into the refrigerator. Marina deserved breakfast in bed. Too bad the only thing that looked good to him lay in a satisfied heap under the covers about twenty feet and three walls away.
Water rushed through the old pipes in the remodeled house. Oliver shifted his junk to keep it from strangling in his jeans. She was awake. He needed to get out of his head and into food.
Thank fuck, Hunter’s bedroom was empty. This was the first time in Oliver’s life his cock hadn’t gotten him into trouble, not that it wasn’t trying its damnedest. No way did he want his friend around to see it because if his sniper rifle-wielding brother was correct, the only organ more important than Oliver’s dick called the shots on this one.
He pressed a hand against his bare chest. The offending organ strummed a steady, upbeat rhythm.
Not possible.
His heartbeat spiked.
Then again, he was an idiot prone to poor decision making, and twenty-eight years of evidence backed it. So what was a known traitor but another in a series of bad choices? Only things were never as simple as they seemed. Moment by moment, Marina revealed more of herself. When he looked at her on the prison cot, he saw a broken girl. Now, he saw a brave, conscientious woman with a strong drive to meet her goals. If only she’d share them with him.
Forget pancakes and bacon. Judging by her responsiveness last night, maybe some syrup would do the trick. So much for not leading with his cock.
A loud crack reverberated through the kitchen.
Oliver crouched and reached for his gun. His hand met air because the damn thing was on the nightstand. The opaque panel in the upper half of the back door cracked into a billion tiny pieces. Glass rained and puddled. One leather-clad fist boasting a Brödraskapet logo reached through the hole, gripping at the double key lock. The key ring lay on the far counter, nearest the door. Too near the groping hand.
He pushed off the balls of his feet and spun to the counter at his back. The butcher’s block looked like good enough ammunition for the narrow entryway. Over his dead body would they get past him to Marina. And he didn’t plan to die today. Oliver selected a steak knife, weighted the blade end between his fingers and then launched it. Serrated metal traveling at a speed in excess of eighty miles an hour met leather, meat, and then wood with an abrupt and pleasing stop.
The tough guy howled through clamped teeth that leaned around the doorway. His other hand and bloodshot eyes searched to see what had pinned him to the wood.
Bad move.
The second knife severed something important. Blood joined the glass and created a gory spectacle. Behind the body’s slumped form, another smear of leather blurred to cover.
Why hadn’t he listened to instinct yesterday and moved locations? Whether purposely or not—holy fuck, he hoped not—Marina’s call compromised them. They needed to move pronto.
“Marina?” He hollered her name to keep the desperation from his voice.
Not a word returned.
Silence churned his blood to a thick foam. Oliver grabbed an eight-inch slicer and wished he had his KA-BAR. He shoved another steak knife in his back pocket, watching the door while he stole the keys from the counter, and then eased to the hallway. His gaze scanned left and right for any movement. The hum of the refrigerator’s compressor died, and his ears perked. Every sound was an attack waiting to happen. Sweat trickled between his knuckles.
His feet whispered from wall to buffet and bookcase to couch, using every angle to peer through the tall windows without being shot. Though, as weapons went, the Brotherhood preferred their fists, and Oliver’s ached to oblige. The covert shit was for more highly sophisticated groups like his. Only, he didn’t feel very concealed at the moment with his ass crack hanging out of his jeans and Marina not answering.
She was showering. That was it. Had to be. He refused to entertain anything else. Tried to, at least, but images of her slipping out through the bedroom window and worse used his brain as a giant flat screen.
Movement at the back door caught his eye. A skin-headed Bastardhood member overlooked the knife protruding from his buddy’s throat and yanked the one from his hand. The behemoth used the dead man’s arm to clear away the glass shards in the bottom of the frame, and then he unceremoniously dumped the corpse on the stoop.
Oliver quickened his steps through the living room to the first set of doors. He swept quickly, but efficiently, then stilled at the door to his bedroom. When he’d gone in search of breakfast, he’d left the door wide open. He more than liked her but hadn’t wanted to provide her any more opportunities to endanger her life, even if she didn’t see it that way. Way to overlook his sidearm, though.
A small, ominous gap hung between the door and frame. It taunted him with no more than a glimpse into the room. Through it, the sounds of the shower ran with an eerie hollowness. Its stream cascaded too steadily. Marina’s body and moving limbs should vary the flow.
His palm itched for his pistol. The knife’s handle didn’t have quite the same soothing effect.
Behind him, the man grunted.
The bastard levered a sizable belly through the hole in the door. He extended his arm toward the counter. He gripped it and awkwardly hoisted himself through the window. Behind him, another thug shoved him over the apex of his stomach through the crack. Two to one wasn’t a big deal, but he’d rather not engage hand-to-hand with Marina in the mix.
Using the point of the blade, Oliver shoved the door wide.
On the floor in front of the bed, Marina knelt without a strip of clothing on her thin body. Water dripped from the tips of her hair. They coursed down her trembling shoulders and arms and onto the floor. The barrel of his gun protruded from her beautiful lips. Her eyes bloated in fear and her nostrils flared with heavy breaths, but she didn’t make a sound.
Behind her, shattered glass pooled beneath the bedroom window with a leather jacket thrown over the ledge.
Tor Royan stood over her. A sinister sneer contorted his features. The supreme bastard’s finger hugged his trigger.
Oliver’s heart seized.
For a moment, he was no longer a highly trained operative, masterful in the art of killing. He was a child, watching others grieve. Knowing he’d caused it and couldn’t do anything to rect
ify it.
Training took over. In less than a second, he assessed the situation. At least three Tangos, but only one really mattered. If he could disarm Tor, they’d be set. Oliver focused on the base of the bastard’s skull, where his brain stem met his spinal cord.
“The last time I wasted my time on this one, she choked on my cock. I prefer this much better.” Tor pressed the gun into the back of Marina’s throat.
His brave woman refused to gag, but a single tear slipped down her cheek.
That tear turned Oliver’s world red more than the man’s words ever hoped to. The knife handle threatened to crumble in his grip.
“What do you want, Tor?”
“Just…” He tapped his free index finger over thin lips and then popped it off his long narrow nose. “Vengeance.”
“You want vengeance? For what?” Oliver spat. The bastard had fucked so many people’s lives over the years, and he wanted reprisal. Only in this world.
“My brother is dead.” Tor speared the index finger in his direction. “You killed him.”
“A shame really that I didn’t, but the pleasure wasn’t mine.”
“No, but your people did. Her pseudo-mom did, and you two will suffer the consequences.”
Huffed breaths alerted Oliver to the men joining him in the narrow hallway. They hung back in the mouth near the living room.
Even with a perfect throw and completely severing Tor’s central nervous system, it didn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t blow Marina’s brains all over the bed on which he wanted to make love to her.
He needed the gun turned in his direction.
“Revenge?” Oliver gestured to Marina. “What about her revenge? What about how you’ve treated her?”
“She is just a thing.” Tor dismissed her without a glance.
Oliver kept the wall between him and Tor but backed up enough to see all three Brödraskapet thugs. He didn’t spare a word to the two in the hall with him. Instead, he let the blade in his back pocket do the talking. It sank into the first man’s eye socket.
Screams ripped through the house, bouncing off the fine art and rebounding off the crown molding.
“A thing is what you will be when I get done with you—a bloody, whimpering, disfigured thing,” Oliver promised.
Tor’s shallow laugh mingled with his comrade’s shrieks and moans.
An empty chill crawled up Oliver’s spine.
“You, upstanding, moral citizen, are bound by laws, which don’t trouble me.” Tor shrugged.
“I’ve never been known for following the rules.” He shifted the knife in his hand ever so slightly. He would take the chance with almost anyone else’s life. Could he take the chance with Marina’s?
“But you will. To save his own life, a man will do almost anything.”
“I don’t give two shits about my life.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I bet you care about hers.” Tor’s pale fingers tangled in Marina’s hair, and he wrenched her head back. The gun pointed toward the floor. Only the back of her skull stood between the two. “The sound of my own men’s screams gives me pleasure. Could you say the same?”
“You can’t hear her scream with the gun in her mouth.”
“And with the gun in her mouth and my hand on the trigger, you can’t kill me. Like I said, you will follow my rules. What will it take? Pleasure.” Tor’s thick finger slipped down Marina’s neck, across her breasts, and stopped at her delicious nipple.
Oliver wanted to scorch the earth, to burn everything to the ground except her.
“Or pain?” Tor twisted and yanked her perfect bud toward the sky.
Marina’s eyes pinched closed, but still, she remained quiet. She was so strong, so beautiful, so special.
Uncertainty, a foreign concept, brought an overnight bag and made itself at home in his belly. If he conceded, they’d both be dead in the next two days after a shitload of pain. If he chanced it, and Tor’s bullet ripped through Marina, Oliver would welcome death at the hands of one of the men left standing.
God, he wanted this to go down differently with broken bones, blood, and a fighting chance.
He dropped the knife. It clattered against the hardwood.
“Good decision. Not that you really had one.” Tor chuckled and then pointed his chin toward the weapon. “Kick it away.”
Oliver slid the knife to the far end of the hall away from the Brotherhood members, standing and not. His bull’s-eye guy quit carrying on and curled into a heap on the floor. Let them think he was weaponless. He’d killed and incapacitated more than his fair share with bare hands.
“Whoever’s still alive out there, bag him and tie him.” Fuck Tor up the ass with a cattle prod. The son of a bitch kept the gun in Marina’s mouth.
The biggest of the three and the only one left upright in the hallway moved forward slowly. As he should, if Tor didn’t have him by the balls. He pulled a length of rope from one pocket and spoke Swedish.
Oliver clamped his hands in front of him.
“In the back,” Tor barked.
Fucked for choices, he did it, hating every cock-sucking moment. The big guy wound the rope around his wrists tight enough the circulation ceased, and his fingers tingled with the cinch of the knot.
“Is it tight?” Tor asked.
“Ja.” The thug pulled on the binding for good measure.
“Good work.” Tor nodded. His gaze dropped to Marina. “You too, my tiny pawn.”
Oliver’s stomach followed Tor’s gaze and then continued on to the center of the earth, baking and disintegrating in the intensity of fire and fury.
“You sent the signal like I knew you would.” Tor caressed her cheek. “It made it too easy to find you.”
Marina gagged and hacked on the gun.
Blackness slipped over Oliver’s eyes. It matched his devastation perfectly. He never saw the punch coming and didn’t much care about where it landed. Hard to care when your hopes and stupid dreams were crushed or when you were unconscious.
Oliver came to in total darkness. It wasn’t the threaded slivers of the black bag, but the raven hopelessness of a room with no windows and no lights. Water slicked his body, raising gooseflesh from head to toe. He lay on a bed of cold metal coils. Leather straps bound his wrists, torso, and legs. Rage morphed to dread because he knew exactly what type of gnarly beast awaited him. He just didn’t know when.
Wasn’t that the shit of it.
He must have fallen asleep. What the hell else was there to do in total darkness and isolation? A precise mix of voltage and amps shot his eyes wide. Every muscle in his body contracted, making him a Mexican fucking jumping bean. His jaw clenched so tightly his teeth screamed. Metal rattled on metal as the bed electrocuted him.
Finally, the current stopped.
Oliver wanted to shout and roar. He wanted to tell Tor exactly how he was going to end him. Instead, he took a cue from Marina. A full breath filled his aching lungs, and he drew on her strength. Traitorous though it might be. He pulled another breath and another and kept quiet.
Only the sounds of his ragged breaths accompanied him in the room. Though he knew Tor was there either in the room or an observatory, watching and listening. A crazy bastard like him got off on the act, not the outcome.
Asleep again? Oliver lost track of the minutes, and then the hours, in the darkness. Worry and pain had been his only company. Gracefully, his body freed him from it until the electric fire roared again…and again…and again.
“Oliver. Oliver.”
His name cried from Marina’s lips pulled him from darkness into blinding light. Instinct drew his hands to his eyes to shield them from the retina-searing brightness. Unforgiving manacles imprisoned his wrists above his head. His eyes watered. He blinked the moisture away.
Again, Marina called to him, weakly, desperately.
He blinked furiously and lifted his heavy head in search of her. Less than ten feet away, she stood in a sprawled X bound with manacles and chains to the
floor and ceiling. A tear streaked her face.
Oliver’s heart bled.
“I didn’t. I didn’t call them,” she sobbed. Her bruised and too visible ribs flexed with each hiccup. “I know I told you not to trust me, but you have to. I didn’t call them. I don’t know how they knew. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t ever do this to you. I—”
Tor’s sickening laugh pinged off the cement walls and jabbed Oliver’s kidney. “This is going to be more fun than I’d realized.” He tapped his chin with the index finger Oliver wanted to run through a meat grinder and looked back and forth between their naked bodies. “I mean”—he chuckled—“I figured no one would want her, with how she’s abused herself. Nothing but bones and who wants to mount that? But…”
The man’s biker boots and bald head didn’t match his thin body. Still, he walked them as if he owned them front and center to Oliver. “But I can see you do.” This up close and personal, his sneer revealed a chipped tooth, the big one on the left. Oliver wanted to knock the damn thing down his throat. Every single one, actually. His pointy finger tapped Oliver’s chest. Boy, did it drive home the sentiment.
“Maybe you more than just want her?” Tor shrugged. “Hum hum hum hum. Very interesting. What’s better is the girl who I’ve never seen care about anything… Well, let’s say it looks like she cares about something now.” His brows wiggled, and the broken tooth flashed.
Did she care about him? Did it matter? They were both about to meet their ends in the most painful, humiliating, and gruesome ways Tor Royan could concoct. Oliver had heard tales of the man’s innovation when it came to torture, a game that had been around since the dawn of time.
Holding out was their only hope. As brutal as Tor was, he was also a businessman. He would use them as leverage to get what he wanted. Dead, they had no value. Alive, they could be a bargaining chip. For what? He didn’t know. Money. Weapons. Who the fuck cared?
“Look at you both with your fair-flowing manes. I think that’s what will go first, before the fingers and toes, the teeth and the nose. Would you see there, I can rhyme,” Tor squealed and danced about. The man truly was sick in the head. He possessed the joyous smile of a kid on Christmas morning or a boy about to get his first good lay.
Variations (Base Branch Series Book 9) Page 10