MadetoBeBroken

by Lyra Byrnes

  Just as she felt the wave begin to crest, something hard and wet rammed inside her opening. Her hand drifted toward her crotch but he stopped it, mashing her fingers in his, fucking her pussy with his tongue and her asshole with his fingers. Her body shook, her back arched, everything in her vision melted into darkness until she was just a bundle of nerves and need, panting and moaning like an animal. Finally he pressed the flat of his tongue hard against her throbbing clit and ground the wet organ against it, shattering her into a thousand pieces that seemed to shoot from her body and burst into the forest like Roman candles.

  She didn’t know how long she had lain there panting, blinking the darkness away, but Alexi swam into her vision, unsmiling but with a soft look in his glittering eyes. He was hard again.

  He landed a kiss on each knee as she struggled to her elbows.

  “Are you going to fuck me, Alexi?”

  He let out a short, barking laugh. “Is that your question?”

  She had forgotten about the questions.

  “No.”

  “Good, better not to waste.” He pulled the robe over her shoulders, although the sun had fully risen and was soaking the trees, grass and the water of the lake with its warmth. “Did you see the birds take flight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nature has instinct, just like you and me. Is true that what happened last night was ‘normal physical reaction’, but also true that your body responds to me, little red bird. In my hands, you take flight.” He shrugged. “Nature.”

  It was so weirdly close to what she had thought earlier—that their sexual union was as much a part of the landscape as the trees and grass—she briefly wondered whether he had some sort of power to see into her mind. Silly, she thought, shaking the idea away. She was still piecing herself back together after the shattering power of her orgasm. One thing certainly was true—her body responded to his.

  And she would use this to her advantage.

  “I want something to eat,” he said. “So ask.”

  Coco took a deep breath of the cleansing air. “How did you get your scar?”

  Gain trust.

  Chapter Nine

  “Eggs, bread, fruit, even tomatoes—this place is fully stocked.” Coco opened and shut one cupboard door after another. “Someone readied the safe house, and recently.”

  “Your operation, no doubt.” Alexi put a pile of white clothes on the wooden kitchen table. “These were in chest of drawers.”

  She held up a sleeveless T-shirt and grimaced. “You can have any color you like, so long as it’s white,” she quipped. “Tags on everything. Even the panties are new—Marks and Spencer. I wonder who made the trip up from London.”

  “Go change. I will make us something to eat.”

  “A ruthless killer and he cooks too.”

  Alexi ignored this. “We learn long time ago to do without—no gas, no power, no running water in my village. But we have fields with rabbits and birds, and potatoes are hard to die, even after grenades. With fire, I can cook a nice rat on the hood from Russian military vehicle.”

  She shuddered. “Rat?”

  “Innocent girl. Yes, rat and more. Is nature as well, the need to eat, to get drunk, to fuck. Only two kinds of medical care were left after the Russians bombed our hospital—maternity and grave injury.”

  “The potatoes made the vodka, I guess.”

  “No, no. Is more important for food. For alcohol, they drink antifreeze.”

  She emerged from the bathroom in a tiny T-shirt and panties, her eyes wide. “Like, from a car radiator?”

  “We took raiding parties into nearby villages to find more soldiers. Every month, two months, to replace the bodies. I told my men if they brought in a man with blue lips, I would kill them both.” There was something feral about the grin he wore. “Now you see why I do not drink much.”

  “Don’t think I’m gonna forget for a second what I’m here for, despite our bargain.”

  “Sure,” he said, turning his back to her. “Is only business.”

  The smell of eggs and sausage filled the room as he busied himself at the stove. Coco reheated the tea, marveling at the bizarre situation. It seemed so cozy and domestic—mind-blowing sex in a lush valley, hot tea and pleasant conversation about drinking poison and eating rats while your average scarred rebel warlord whips up some lunch. Would he make a run for it today, force her to fly back to Washington with her tail between her legs and beg for backup? Or worse, would he kill her in her sleep? He had tried to kill her already. And then there was the closet full of torture implements, restraints, clamps and whips. She would not have to use them if he kept his part of the bargain. If…

  She could see the fresh bandage through the thin white cotton of his trousers. The wound no longer seeped and Alexi was not slowed by his injury. He was still strong and still remorseless. It would not take much for him to overpower her and make use of the arsenal in the armoire himself. Hell, he even had her gun. She had only the hope that she had gained his trust and the sex would be enough to keep him from reaching for it.

  “I said before you ask wrong question,” he announced, putting plates on the table. “This one is a little bit right.”

  “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

  “You are mocking me because I do not understand American joke. Know this—I am a difficult man to kill.”

  “Not if I had aimed at your head.” She crunched into a slice of toast.

  “But you did not, because I am more valuable alive, no? Was same for the Russians. What you call me—strongman? Is quite true. In my village and many more in the coldest, most unforgiving lands in Chechnya, I was strongest man. My men called me General. We controlled supply lines to other freedom factions, planted hard vegetables and also fougasse—what is the word in English? Explosive in the ground.”

  “Land mines.”

  His smile brightened. “Yes! Land mines chipped into the frozen ground. We lost men to them, but only the stupid ones. The Russians lost many more.

  “To run a city that is also an army, you need very little. One engineer, one nurse or medical student, one chemist, one farmer, one fixer, one strongman. We had all this and were very lucky. You do not know, little bird, that drive to make your civilization again and again from ashes and shrapnel. Remember you said America was on top from the beginning and you fight to keep her on top? I fight to rebuild my nation after it is crushed. This we have been doing for hundreds of years.”

  His face was calm and unlined as he spoke, his eyes turned inward. In their depths, Coco could see the urge to grow from spoiled seedlings even a rickety, barely functioning semblance of what had come before. Perhaps it was something like this—a warm cabin, fresh eggs in the cooler, a rugged but beautiful landscape just outside the window. She could see what it took out of him, to go from that to cooking rats on stolen jeep hoods and turning young boys into murder machines.

  “To kill me would give the Russians great publicity, but would bring the wrath of all Chechen region on their heads, which would be bad publicity. But there were other ways to reach me.” He poured some more tea into her cup. “Kill the body, you see, and the head will die.”

  “They wiped out your army?”

  “Oh no. Impossible. They wiped out my family.”

  Coco stilled, frozen with shock.

  “At night I slept in caves in the mountains, wherever we moved our headquarters, to keep them safe. But not this night. It was my little girl’s birthday, the younger.”

  “Alexi¼” she breathed.

  “You asked and you will hear it,” he said harshly. “They knocked on the door, if you can believe, as if they were men and not filthy beasts, and then kicked it in. A jar from my wife’s mother fell from the mantelpiece and smashed. It sounds silly, I know. She rose without thinking, and they cut her throat in front of my eyes. Avala loved that jar.

  “I flew to protect my girls, but it was too late. They threw a grenade under the table where my daughters were h
iding. I lost everything that night—my wife, my little girls, my house and this little bit of my face. A cruel God spared me. He built me again, from ashes and shrapnel, in his own image.”

  Grease congealed on Coco’s tongue. She wanted to retch, or cry, rip off the faces of men who would do such a thing, but she just sat there, tasting the cold fat lining the inside of her cheeks.

  “You clean. I’m going out.”

  *

  The sound of the waterfall faded as Alexi made his way across the valley. He did not want to be reminded of his ruined house, his dead family, even of bliss with the beautiful red bird. Bliss was a sort of weakness too. He rounded the lake and struck off toward a crag whose face was in shadow from the bright sun directly overhead.

  That would be south-southeast, he realized automatically, accustomed to mapping the landscape wherever he went, the direction of London and airports. If he walked long enough, a village would rise up on the horizon eventually, and with it, vehicles, a telephone. He could head to Glasgow and make contact with the one person he trusted in this benighted country, or return to London and try to right what had gone horribly wrong. Or he could just fly back, back to rubble and tainted water and no bread and hundreds of starving people, grown cunning through desperation, who looked to him as a savior now that they had lost their first faith.

  He had seen the question in the girl’s face, the question he had asked himself after the grenade ripped him from everything he had ever loved, everything he had ever been. Why not work with the Russians? Better to be well-fed under the Moscow boot than to die in a frozen field with nothing to take into the afterlife but your independence. But was it? He had read her dossier—all she did was travel from one embattled hellhole to another, talking strongmen like him out of reclaiming their manhood, urging them to give in to a greater power, to bend their necks to the boot. And when she could not sway them, a bullet sent the message instead.

  No, Russia would not forgive her breakaway children for what they had done—for what he had done. His beloved land would be punished for a hundred hundred years by those brutes, and American would hand them fresh lashes as the old ones wore out.

  He knew this because he had tried another way. If only she understood that, she would not still be asking the wrong questions.

  As he had suspected, there was a deep indentation at the foot of the crag, shaded by rocks and shrubbery. He pushed aside the thistles and found a ledge on which to sit, gazing through the flowers that blurred the land outside. Caves, trenches dug into frozen earth—the war had made him a feral creature more used to savage hidey-holes than warm beds. He dug out a cigarette—there were only three left—and lit it. Just as well he was running out. A truly strong man had no addictions. Addictions were another form of weakness, and vulnerability easy for an enemy to exploit. He had to be stronger than ever, not just in his body, his conviction, his intelligence, but, as the American writer had said, strong at broken places. His leg throbbed but he would not show it. Unlike the girl’s internal wound, his had scarred over, sealing the three girls he had loved inside forever. Love was weakness and he would never feel it again.

  So what would she ask next, he mused? “Alexi, did you order the massacre of a train full of civilians?” “Did you stab a French diplomat outside a theater in Grozny?” “Did children, innocents, your own people, die because of what you have become?”

  Yes, yes, yes.

  *

  By the time he opened his eyes again, the cigarette was a log of ash against the lichen-spongy rocks and long shafts of orange light slashed across the landscape. He had not dreamed, only vanished from his thoughts into a dark and silent place, and reappeared in his cave behind a screen of thistles.

  I could live here, sleep here, die here, but I have a duty to perform.

  For the first time since the murder of his family, his thoughts were in Chechen, not Russian.

  Golden light glowed from the windows of the cabin as he approached it in the deepening twilight. This place of torture and interrogation looked as humble and welcoming as any crofter’s cottage in any sleepy Western village. Is this a place I could live in, sleep and die in, he asked himself? No, he had a mission and nothing would sway him from it, not the red bird’s beautiful body or the light that splashed warmth against the grass.

  The white van was still resting crooked on the gravel, but there was another car next to it, a round-shouldered black vehicle like those London taxi drivers used. His steps slowed instinctively as he crept up in a crouch, every other footfall gouging at his injured thigh, and put his hand on the car’s hood. Still warm. So the visitor, whoever it was, had only just arrived.

  The girl was in the sitting room, a towel wrapped lavishly around her head like a turban, handing a bottle of beer to a black-haired man with a severely pockmarked face. Alexi raised his eyebrows in recognition and sank back into the shadows. Inside, the fireplace roared with a ferocity that suggested she had poured kerosene on the logs. The girl was smiling and talking, but her eyes were dull, giving away nothing. She shrugged, occasionally turning up her hands in a gesture of helplessness as the man spoke, leaning toward her with intensity. Finally she nodded. The man set down his empty bottle and rose.

  Without the sun to warm him, Alexi felt the chilly bite of the Scottish evening. He had on only the thin cotton pants and a T-shirt, all white like a beacon in the darkness. Boris Luganov might be ugly but he wasn’t blind. The two disappeared into the bedroom, the girl leading him like the chatelaine of a grand house, and reappeared, then into the kitchen and back out to the sitting room. Luganov seemed to sniff the air, his eyes darting around the room suspiciously, but eventually he picked up a spotless black homburg from a side table. Alexi darted around the side of the house and waited until the rumble of the car’s engine had ceased to stir the still night air.

  She was depositing the beer bottle in the trash, holding it pinched between two fingers as if it were a dead rat.

  “You want to tell me what that was?” he demanded.

  She handed him a business card. “Guy from the Russian embassy. Guess who he was looking for?”

  He crumpled the card in his fist. “What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing. I said I had no idea who he was talking about, that I never saw you or met you and I was just a dumb American tourist with a vacation rental. Hope you like your current ensemble, by the way. I burned all the men’s clothes in the fireplace when I heard the car. I’ve met him before, you know. The good thing about having hair as distinctive as mine is that it’s the only way people remember you.” She pulled off the towel and threw it on the table.

  “Clever girl.”

  “Don’t get smug. I didn’t turn you over to him because you’re still technically in my custody. I’m not going to give those Russian bastards the glory of taking down the fearsome Alexsandr Maksimov.”

  “Is that why you protected me?”

  She regarded him for a long time, her expression unreadable.

  “I don’t owe you any loyalty, but I don’t expect your thanks, either. After what you’ve been through¼” She trailed off. “Come with me.”

  He allowed her to take his hand—such slender fingers she had, on a pretty white hand that had squeezed a trigger many times, even once at him. Do such rich and horrible contradictions live inside all of us, he wondered as he followed her into the bedroom, or just we who toil in the shadows, gun oil under our nails and scars where our hearts once were?

  She stripped off her T-shirt and panties and stood to face him, the ugly skin on her side forgotten.

  “Just you and me, Alexi,” she said, as if answering his silent question. “No fighting, no power plays, none of¼this.” She gestured at the shackles on the wall.

  “Take me to bed, no questions asked.”

  Chapter Ten

  She was watching him undress, arms behind her head, still unsmiling and blank-faced, but already his cock twitched in anticipation of spearing the soft pink body o
n the bed.

  It creaked as he knelt, straddling her. Those firm tits pointed straight up to the ceiling, their roseate tips pouting, begging to be sucked. But that could wait. He wanted to taste her lips again, this time without the fear behind them.

  He leaned forward, palming one breast with his large hand, savoring its warmth, and kissed her hard. She opened her mouth obligingly and their tongues met, deliriously twining. He felt the smooth hardness of her teeth, the slick inside of her cheek, sucked on her plump lower lip until she whimpered. One pink nipple escaped between his fingers and she gasped as he squeezed it. The sound of her intermingled pleasure and surprise sent a jolt to his cock.

  With long, circular licks, he wetted every inch of her left breast and then the right one, pausing only to suck on her nipples until another satisfying little moan escaped. Touching her was like playing an instrument like a virtuoso, so attuned was she to every motion, every stroke and nibble. She responded to him eagerly and without hesitation, arching her neck to thrust her bosom upward and running her hands greedily over his shoulders, his back and buttocks.

  His cock was throbbing now, but he drew out his pleasure, running his tongue down the indentation along her torso, tasting her peach-fresh skin. He paused to suck hard and briefly on her pussy, which elicited a beautiful howl. Her hair spread against the pillow like a flaming curtain, framing her face. He nipped at her hipbone, felt the contours where her body flared and pushed her onto her stomach.

  “Is this how you want me, Alexi?” she murmured.

  His mouth went dry at the sight of her white, round ass, tender and juicy. “Every way,” he grunted. “I want to take you in all ways, krahsniy.”

  She shuddered with every kiss—on her neck, her delicate shoulder blades like birds’ wing bones, her lovely, long back. He supped at the dimple at the bottom of her spine, his hands everywhere, wildly taking in the sensation of her soft flesh against his calluses, stroking her as if molding a statue from clay. His touch eased to a whisper against the thick ridges of her scar, but he touched every inch of it as well, his fingers like feathers. The pillow muffled her cries as he kissed her ass cheeks, sucked on them and licked the cleft where they met. She spread her legs and he tested her sweetness—she was wet with honey. His hands explored her long ivory legs, his lips marked the progress down to her toes, which he sucked gently. At that sensation, she shivered and let out a giggle that almost made him smile.