The Hard Way: Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5

by Annika Martin

  “And I trust that?”

  “You can trust it. We’ll go shake it and test it. Come on!” I jutted a toe into the chain link fence and climbed right over like the little trespasser I used to be. I certainly had come a long way in the property crimes department!

  I headed on in, happy when I heard the clink of Odin jumping the fence behind me. I went to the base of the structure and pulled out my gloves. “Did you bring yours like I told you?”

  With a dark and utterly hot look, he pulled his gloves from his pocket and put them on.

  I smiled. We’d had hot experiences with gloves before. But fucking was not what we were here for. We were here for climbing and being away from Hank.

  “We’re not going all the way,” I said. “See that platform thingy?” I pointed to a platform roughly two stories up. “There.”

  You could see for miles from that perch, but it was about more than the view. It was about perspective. It had always been my power spot, I guess you could say, and I wanted Odin to experience it. I wanted him to be fortified by the possibility and freedom I used to find out here.

  I grabbed hold of one of the supports and shook it with all my might. “Seems stable still. What do you think?”

  Odin came and inspected it, then walked around and pushed on a few places I wouldn’t have thought of testing. “Yeah, that’s stable enough.”

  I started to climb. “You have an engineering degree I don’t know about?”

  “Actually, yes,” he said from below.

  “Whaaaaat? Are you serious?” I looked down. “You have an engineering degree?”

  “Mechanical engineering.” He grabbed a horizontal board and hauled himself up below me.

  I continued on. “Wow.”

  Halfway up, my muscles were starting to feel it. I was out of shape for this. Finally I reached it and pulled myself up.

  The platform was metal lattice with wooden boards over most of it, except where they were rotted away, allowing a view of the structure and the ground below.

  I brushed off some leaves and acorns, careful to aim them away from Odin, who was still coming up. It was a good perch, well supported, unlike the top, which, admittedly had been a questionable place to climb around on, even two years ago.

  Odin arrived, and I moved over to make room for him. “There used to be a rail around this. In the olden days, I think people would stop off here on the way to the top,” I said. “Or maybe people who chickened out up top came back down here to get their shit together. While other people took their turn.”

  He stood up. “Wow.”

  I rose up next to him and gazed out the rolling hills. This was the view I loved, a view that stretched for miles, trees all brown with a mist of brilliant green—the budding of the leaves. The sky was a vivid blue.

  “Wow,” he said again.

  My heart expanded a little that he liked it. “Amazing, huh?”

  “I never thought of Wisconsin as pretty,” he said. “It seemed like just cornfields. But this area—”

  “It depends on where the glacier went through in prehistoric times,” I said. “The glacier flattened some stuff out and made the soil nutrient-dense, but it left places like this hilly.”

  “So many trees.”

  “We have a fuck of a lot of trees. Or I should say, they have a lot a trees.”

  “This place is still yours, still part of you.” He traced his finger along my forearm, up and down, tracing a feather-light design. I loved when he touched me sweetly like that. He was usually the one bossing the others, delivering on the dark, sexy drama. It was easy to forget how tender he could be.

  “When I used to come here…it wasn’t a death wish, Odin—not at all. It was more of a life wish. Like somehow, doing this, getting up all of that speed, it was about touching something greater.”

  I looked over at him, expecting him to be still taking in the view, but instead he was staring at me.

  I smiled. “What?”

  “Because it showed you that you could fly.”

  It was a startling thing for him to say, such an Odin thing, and so fucking true. I’d been a girl trapped on a sheep farm, longing for something more. With every breath I took in, now, I could taste that old longing.

  And here I was, two years later, sitting with one of the men I loved more than anything. It would feel great if not for the dark reality at the edge of it all. What if we couldn’t solve this mystery? My guys hadn’t said it, but it wasn’t hugely likely that they’d find an amazing clue in Hank’s home. Hank was a crafty man. He’d probably thought things through really well.

  I’d learned to fly, to soar, but I’d let my sisters fall. And maybe Odin, too. Letting him torture and kill Hank would hurt Odin more than it would hurt Hank. I don’t know how I knew this; I just knew it with every fiber in my being. If Odin went dark now, we might never get him back.

  “What thoughts, goddess?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  I shook my head, feeling like if I started talking I might start crying.

  Odin put an arm around me and pulled me back against him. He spoke into my hair. “I’ll get your sisters out of this. One way or another.”

  “I don’t want you to go dark. I won’t let you.”

  “You can’t stop me, can you?”

  Helplessly, I gazed out at the valley, so sharp and sad with beauty. “Odin. I mean it.”

  He put a finger under my chin and turned my face to his. We gazed at each other for a wildly long time, and then he kissed me, softly, his lips like butterfly wings brushing mine. The kiss took my breath away. “I love you, Ice. There’s nothing I won’t do for you.”

  “Except you can’t do that.” I pulled away and sat.

  He squatted down to my level and kissed me again. My whole body felt warm and good when he kissed me like that. He settled in next to me and pulled me onto his lap so that I was straddling his legs. Again we kissed, this time harder and longer. His fingers felt good in my hair and sparkly on my neck. I shoved my hands under his sweater and enjoyed how warm he was. I felt like I was in high school again, making out by the ski jump, all the pleasures of excitement and discovery. We kissed on and on until I pulled away. “Why does this feel like the wildest thing we ever did?”

  Odin’s smile sparkled. He reached up and took off his glasses—slowly like I loved.

  I straddled him, rolling against his erection. He felt huge and hard, like a bowling pin, though obviously he wasn’t that big. Odin was the perfect size. Odin was always perfect. I rolled on him again.

  “Stop!” he whispered.

  I froze.

  “Move again like that and I’ll explode.”

  “Oh, looks like the leather-padded tables are turned,” I joked. “You can see what it’s like now. Maybe I’ll sexually torture you some more and not let you come.”

  And then there was this moment where neither of us wanted a game.

  Like this need, this desire, this knowledge passed between us.

  “Or how about not.” I stood up, looming over him. He reached up and started unbuttoning my jeans. I pushed them down along with my panties and stepped out of them, and then, just for the hell of it, I peeled off my own shirt and sweater, so that I was totally naked before him.

  His gaze turned warm and crinkly. “You like being naked up here, I think.”

  “I like being naked with you. I always want to be naked with you.” I meant it in every way possible, and the warmth in his eyes told me he knew.

  He reached up. “Come here.”

  I knelt down, straddling him again, kissing him sweetly. He groaned and freed his cock, shimmying his pants off underneath me as I kissed him mercilessly.

  “God, Ice. I think I’ve never wanted you more.” He positioned himself at my sex.

  “Wait,” I said, stilling. “Go slow.”

  “What?”

  “I always love this part. When you’re not in, but I feel you there. And I need
you in me so bad, and I know you will be. It seems like the most perfect thing. Like a miracle to want you so bad and then have you.”

  He rubbed the head of his cock around and around on my clit. I started panting, so turned on.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe I lied. I don’t want to wait anymore.”

  He grabbed my hip with one hand and guided himself in with the other. He wouldn’t make me wait. That’s not what this was.

  “Oh,” I gasped when he was fully sheathed in me. “Okay, maybe this is my favorite thing.”

  “Maybe it’s mine,” he said hoarsely. Slowly he churned and circled underneath me, guiding me loosely as I moved on top of him, sliding our bodies together so deliciously.

  I thought he might bite my nipples, admittedly one of my favorite things to have happen when fucking, but instead he held me tight to him. I pulled back just enough to look into his eyes, to gaze into his eyes, this man who’d do anything for me.

  And I’d do anything for him.

  “I love you,” I whispered, clinging to him, taking him in. We got into a rhythm that seemed to come from both of us and neither of us, like it came from the stars or from the valleys that stretched out so big and wide. Eventually he closed his eyes. That was Odin; he sometimes couldn’t go past a certain point, couldn’t let you see too much. I loved that about him, too. He shifted and hit a different part of me.

  It was like he was spearing me all over again. I groaned with the pleasure of loving him, moving along with him until I felt my orgasm building, and I could barely wait.

  I opened my eyes.

  “No waiting, goddess. Take what you will.”

  But I was already going, spinning, stars shattering in my head. I felt him vibrating and pulsing inside me. He cried out, gripping my back, pulling me into him so tight that I didn’t know where my pleasure ended and where his started.

  We stayed joined for a long time, up there on that ski jump platform.

  Lost together, alone together.

  I brushed his hair aside. “I’m trying to remember the last time we had sex, just us.”

  “Mmm.” Maybe he couldn’t remember, either.

  “I’m going to…”

  “Slow, baby.”

  I pulled off of him as slowly as I could.

  Even so he groaned, like it was painful for us to unjoin.

  I smiled and collapsed next to him. He pulled a pair of handkerchiefs from his pocket and handed one to me.

  “Aren’t we Johnny-on-the-spot.”

  “Always.”

  I cleaned up and rolled the handkerchiefs up and stuck them in a pouch in my bag, then I pulled my clothes back on. “Does my nose look okay? Is it on straight?”

  “Miraculously,” he said, pulling his pants on.

  I just straddled him again.

  “What are you up to?”

  “I missed you.”

  He settled his arms around me. “Well, this certainly improves the view.”

  “Are you being funny?”

  “You’re the only view I need.”

  “Butter me up all you want, you still don’t get to torture and kill Hank.”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t the good kind of smile. This smile contained way more hate than happiness.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Like what Zeus said—we won’t let you lose your humanity over this. There’s always another way.”

  “There isn’t always another way,” he said. “Sometimes all you have is losing your humanity. Sometimes all you have is going dark. You don’t know. And I never want you to.”

  “I won’t let you lose yourself.”

  “I lost myself a long time ago, goddess. The idea that I’m like a regular person or like you or even like Thor and Zeus, that’s a fiction.”

  “Stop it.”

  He brushed my hair back. “It’s true. You didn’t know me before.”

  “I know you now.”

  “You don’t, baby, not really. I’ve done very dark things. Things that don’t get washed out with time.”

  I ached with such grief for him. “You’re beautiful and good, Odin. You see yourself wrong. You’re not objective.”

  “It means everything that you think that,” he said sadly. “It means everything.”

  “Fuck that. Like I just think it. Like it’s this fiction.”

  “If you knew the things I’ve done. If you knew what I did to get my men out of that prison in Algiers.”

  “Whatever you did, you had to.”

  He gazed out over the valley, arms tight around me. We just sat there, gazing out.

  I laid my forehead on his shoulder. “Tell me, then. I want to know.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Tell me.” I met his gaze. “Make me understand. Here and now.”

  He shook his head. No.

  “Why?”

  “It’ll change things.”

  “Not for me.”

  Again he shook his head.

  I traced the shell of his ear. “Trust me with it. That’s what a marriage is for—right?” Silence. “Do you ever dream of being free of the darkness of it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. Do you?”

  “I suppose.”

  I swiped my thumb across his beautiful cheekbone. “Remember our wedding vows?”

  His gaze clouded. Oh, he knew where I was going with this.

  “I promise to always love you. And to protect you. And to fight for your dreams. Do you remember? That’s why you’re going to tell me. Because we’re allies.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said.

  He gave me his stormy look, like this wasn’t the time for levity, but actually it was. What better time?

  “It wasn’t planned, what I did,” he said suddenly. “During the escape, I mean. It’s just that we’d gotten really far. It had taken months of planning and loosening the joints of our cage. We had a helper on the outside, a ride. We had drugged the guards. It was our one and only chance.”

  I stayed extra still as he spoke, outlining the plan. Explaining the unthinkable conditions, the way Mahfoud the Sadist was breaking the men that Odin had fought alongside. The way he’d been going further and further. The political conditions had evolved to where they could never be let free; Odin felt sure the clock was ticking. That Mahfoud was breaking them for sport. The punishments were getting more random. One of his men had killed himself by drinking drain cleaner, unable to bear going back in the hole.

  “We were out of our cells, and we came upon a gate. This gate, it was new. Not in the blueprints we’d acquired. Not in the circuitry diagram. A new gate. Computerized. There was a code to it, and one guard had it. This man, he was one of the better guards, a family man, a man we didn’t want to hurt. But he wouldn’t tell us the code.”

  He was silent a while, studying the view, all lime green and candy blue. He explained about the viciousness of the war. I didn’t know what war it was. Odin was from Morocco, but he had family in Algiers. I didn’t interrupt to ask. And really, war is war.

  “This man, he knew he’d die if he told it. I had to make him tell. You can’t believe the ways I made him hurt. A few of my men wanted me to stop, but we were dead if I stopped. There was no good option. The things I did to this man to get us that code…it cut deep. It cut in a way you cannot understand.”

  I brushed my fingers over the furrow in his brow.

  “Even my men tried to stop me. But we had to go forward.”

  “And you took the darkness into yourself. All into yourself.”

  “Don’t make it sound heroic. It was at that moment I understood that I could leave myself. People who have near-death experiences often talk of leaving themselves, and glimpsing the beautiful place beyond. The light. The sense of oneness. Of connection.”

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “I left myself, too, but it was not beautiful. I pressed the blade into him, slowly, painfully,
over and over. I know how to make a man hurt without killing him, Ice. I would die to keep you from knowing this kind of pain I inflicted on this man. With every cut, I cut myself off from my heart and life and little bit more as I looked into his brown eyes. One little broken vein toward the inside part. Wrinkles here.” He touched his face. Like the face of the dying man was inside his. “I met his gaze, I knew that he saw me leave. It was a terrible kind of intimacy, because he knew—he knew it all. Nobody will know me as he did just then. I became something other.”

  I took his hand. “You’re not cut off from your heart now.”

  He said nothing. Did he not believe it? I looked down at our hands. His large hand, olive-skinned, lighter on the knuckles and the scars. My hand, small and pale.

  “I joined up with ZOX after that. They had many uses for a man like me.”

  “You’re not that man anymore. That man in that escape.”

  “I’m very much still that man.”

  I guess he believed it. That he was still there. “You know what the one thing you didn’t tell me about that prison just now? You didn’t tell me what your men would’ve suffered if you’d turned back. If you hadn’t forced yourself to get the code from the guard. You sit there telling me this tale, making no excuses. You’re taking in the darkness for yourself even now. That’s a kind of love.”

  “There’s no love in what I’m telling you.”

  “Your men tried to stop you. But they would’ve been killed if they’d stayed. Being so far along in the escape. Right?”

  He just shrugged.

  “I think you wanted them to try and stop you,” I said. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. It bubbled up from his story. Or maybe from our connection. “I think that going dark like that was a gift that you gave to your men. I think you didn’t want to save just their bodies. I think you wanted to save their souls, too. You had to let them oppose you, even to hate you. It’s the only way they could be free.”

  He shook his head.

  I continued, stubbornly, “You wanted them to try and stop you. That’s how you saved their souls. So that they could live with clear hearts after the escape.”

  He stared down at our gripped hands. His fingers flexed, and I wondered whether it was emotion flowing through. He wasn’t showing me his eyes, so it was hard to tell.