by Ella Miles
“Here,” Zeke says, pushing the medic bag through the slits of the bars. He was shot in the same spot I was, but again, he puts my needs above his own. Yes, he doesn’t have any other physical injuries, like I do, but we share the most serious wound. And he needs treatment as much as I do.
I push the bag back through the gap.
“You need this,” Zeke says, trying to push it back through.
“Stop.” I give him a stern look.
He moves to fight me again, but I wince as the bag hits my leg, and he stops. My moan is much louder than necessary to get my point across, but I need him to listen to me.
I scoot my body around to face the door of Zeke’s cage. I can feel his gaze on me, but I don’t turn to look or stop to explain to him what I’m doing.
Reaching the door is the easy part; the hard part comes next.
I grab one of the bars and start lifting my body up.
“Siren, stop!” Zeke says, running to the door in an instant like he isn’t injured at all. He calls me by Siren instead of Aria, like he forgot my real name. And I don’t know which name I prefer falling from his lips. Any name, as long as it isn’t ‘lying bitch.’
“No, it’s my turn to protect you.”
He frowns.
I pull myself up, standing on my good leg as I reach into my back pocket and pull out the key that opens Zeke’s cell. A key I haven’t used since I first locked him in this cage.
I push the key in the lock and turn; the spring of the lock immediately clicking. I push on the bar door, and it falls open.
I lose my balance as I’m only standing on one leg, and I was leaning too harshly against the bar door.
I’m going to fall to the ground, and it’s going to hurt. I don’t even have the strength to catch my fall with my outstretched hands.
But instead of hitting the ground, I hit something else. Something equally as strong, but also soft—Zeke. His arms absorb most of my fall, but my head collides with his chest.
A shock of electricity surges through my body at the contact. I feel alive again. The pain shatters. And I want…I want more of this. I just want to be held in his arms, where I feel safe.
“Easy,” Zeke says, as he slowly lowers us to the ground. His hands never leave my body.
My head continues to rest against his chest as I sit between his legs.
“We need to fix this,” Zeke says, running his hand over my thigh near my wound.
I lean back against his chest and turn so I can see his wound, and then I do the same, my hand feeling his thigh muscles flex. “And this.”
Zeke reaches around me to grab the medical bag. He digs in and pulls out a pair of tweezers and rubbing alcohol.
“Don’t look,” he says.
I bite my lip, smiling. “You numbed my leg, remember? I won’t be able to feel anything.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
I tilt my head up and see Zeke look into my eyes. He’s afraid I will groan anyway. That I will have pain in my eyes. That it will hurt him too much to cause me any pain.
It’s sweet—Zeke is sweet. But I don’t like sweet.
I roll my eyes and grab the tweezers from his hand. Then I dig into my wound and pull out the bullet before tossing it on the ground outside of the cage. Then I press a piece of gauze over my leg.
Zeke shakes his head in awe. “You’re something else, Siren.”
“Aria.”
“No, when you are being a badass, you’re Siren.”
I frown. “Aria is pretty badass too.”
Zeke strokes my face. “No, Aria is courageous and sweet. Siren kicks ass.”
I smile and then look down at his wound. “Do you want me to do the honors? Or would you like to do it?”
Even though pulling the bullet from my own leg was uncomfortable, it’s nothing compared to what Zeke will feel with a pair of tweezers in his leg. He’s not numb. I was.
“You do it,” he surprises me by saying.
“I wish I had some alcohol or something to offer you for the pain.”
He chuckles. “This is nothing, remember? You have no idea what my past life was like. I got shot on a weekly basis.”
He places his hand on mine, where I’m holding the blood-soaked gauze to my own wound. I slip my hand out from beneath his, and then he applies pressure, the blood instantly slowing again.
I hold the tweezers in my other hand and then move to examine his would. The bullet looks deep, not near the surface. I use my left hand to gently open the wound so I can get a better look. And then I dive in, knowing the faster I get this done, the faster his pain will stop.
It takes me about ten seconds to find the bullet and pull it out. As I do, one of his arteries starts squirting blood.
Shit.
I grab gauze and apply hard pressure.
Stop, please stop.
Zeke doesn’t move. He doesn’t moan. He doesn’t even flinch at the pain he must be drowning in.
“I need the needle and thread, now,” I say calmly, not letting up my pressure.
Zeke doesn’t move fast enough. At this rate, he’ll bleed to death.
I grab for the bag and find the items I need. But I need Zeke to apply hard pressure while I start stitching.
“Give me your hands,” I say.
“But—”
“Now,” I snap, not caring about my own wound right now. He needs to apply a lot of pressure or he’ll bleed out and die before I can get upstairs to call an ambulance.
I grab Zeke’s hands and put them on his leg. I pull off my shirt and tie it around his thigh, making a tourniquet.
Zeke starts moving his hands.
“Don’t you dare move. You move, you die.”
He stills, immediately.
I start pushing the needle through his flesh, not caring how gentle I’m being or that he doesn’t have any painkillers to numb his agony. I work quickly and efficiently, mending the artery and closing up the wound in his leg. Every second that passes feels like an hour.
Finally, I finish. Zeke removes my shirt from around his leg, and he carefully moves his hands away.
I look up at him. He looks pale, but he’s still breathing. He’s going to make it.
“My turn,” he says, lifting my leg up onto his lap.
I don’t argue with him.
He finds a new needle and thread and goes to work on my wound. His fingers are slow and gentle, unlike my furious stitch job. My bleeding isn’t as bad as his, and my pain is numbed, so I can barely feel a thing. But for a moment, I wish that I could feel, even the pain. Because then it would be easier to feel the brush of Zeke’s fingers against my skin.
Finally, he finishes the last loop.
And then we are left staring at each other. I’m in nothing but my bra and jeans. I’m still bloodied and bruised, but I can barely feel anything other than my need to say so much, and yet not being able to say anything, to Zeke.
And from the look on Zeke’s face, he wants to speak to me too.
But neither of us say a word.
Zeke digs through the bag and finds a fresh cloth. Then he grabs my chin gently and begins wiping my face with it. It’s only then that I realize how much blood and sweat are covering my body. He starts with my face, neck, then shoulders. His hand trails over my breasts and then eases over my badly bruised ribs. He stops when he gets to my blood-caked jeans.
His eyes look up at mine, asking for permission.
I nod.
His coarse fingers unbutton my jeans, then unzip the zipper, and finally, he begins pushing the jeans off my hips. It’s not meant to be sexual. He moves more like a caretaker undressing me. But the heat from his fingers, the lust in his eyes, and his teeth biting his lip tell me that this could turn sexual in a moment.
Once my jeans are gone, he wipes the blood from my legs until I’m clean.
Then I turn and face him. He’s just as bloody, even though his leg is the only damaged part of him. But I gaze at the hem
of his shirt, wanting to do the same thing he did to me.
He nods, as I did.
And then I lift it, exposing his rippling muscles and tattoo-covered body. I dig out a clean cloth and begin cleaning his body of any remnants of blood. As I do, I notice things I didn’t before—scars and healed bullet wounds. Someone did a number on his body. He’s right in saying that the pain from one bullet is nothing compared to what he’s used to handling.
I move to his jeans. I unbutton them, then unzip, ignoring the erection pressing against the zipper. And then I slowly start pulling the jeans down off his hips, trying to limit the pain I’m causing him. Eventually, his pants are free.
I clean away the blood on his legs, forcing myself to focus on his wound, his pain, and not on his enormous package I never got to explore. That might be my biggest regret: not letting him fuck me before I betrayed him. At least I would have that memory. Not that the memory of him licking me, bringing me to orgasm, is a bad memory—it’s one of my favorites.
“Let me go see what alcohol or narcotics I can find for you,” I say, moving to stand up.
But between my leg throbbing and Zeke grabbing my arm, I don’t get far. I fall back against Zeke’s warm chest and immediately close my eyes.
This—this is what I need.
Zeke drapes his arm around me, holding me to him.
“This is all I need—stay. The pain hurts less when you’re here,” Zeke says.
Zeke takes away my pain too.
I close my eyes and decide not to argue with him. It’s probably not a smart move. The door to the cell is unlocked. Zeke could run if he wanted to. He could overpower me, hurt me.
But he won’t.
Because unlike every other man in my life, Zeke is a good guy.
He saved me.
He protected all those women who Julian wanted him to sell.
And then he saved me again.
He put me first.
No other man has ever done that.
Slowly, I feel the pull of sleep overtake me. And I welcome it. Being in Zeke’s arms will force me to dream of him. I’ll dream of something I will never have.
Sleep pulls me under.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I wake. We are no longer sitting in the middle of the cell. We are lying on Zeke’s bed. My head lies on his chest, and his arms are wrapped around me tightly. We are both practically naked, wearing only our underwear.
I shouldn’t have stayed. I’ve stirred up feelings in both of us we can’t act on.
But I feel safe in his arms, even though I shouldn’t. Zeke could betray me as easily as I did him. Julian will encourage it. And I’ll end up hurt again.
These feelings aren’t real. It’s just the drugs and pain talking.
I move to slip out from under Zeke’s arm.
“Stay,” Zeke says.
He doesn’t open an eye, but I feel his arm constrict around me.
“Why? This won’t end well. We shouldn’t feel anything but hatred for each other.”
He smiles with his eyes still closed. “I never was one for feeling what I should.”
“What do you feel?”
He opens his eyes. “Safe.”
I exhale a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. Safe—I don’t know what I was hoping he would feel, but safe wasn’t the word I wanted. I wanted more, even though I don’t deserve it. Although, what I should hope is that Zeke feels nothing, or better yet, feels hatred for me.
“Promise me, Zeke,” I whisper against his neck so the cameras Julian placed won’t be able to see.
“Promise what?”
“Promise me that when the time comes, you’ll choose yourself.”
He frowns.
“Don’t choose to protect Mr. Black, or your friends, or your family, or me. Don’t choose the innocent lives. Choose to save yourself.”
It should be an easy promise. If he truly hates me, he’d make it easily.
Instead, he grunts, and then moments later, he’s asleep as if it were all a dream. Maybe it was.
I should go.
But I don’t, because I too feel safe.
So instead, I drift back to sleep in Zeke’s arms and know that no matter what, I won’t regret this moment tomorrow. Not for a second.
6
Zeke
Choose you.
Her words haunt me all night. I dream about them, have nightmares about them. But every time I awoke and saw that Siren was still in my arms, I calmed.
I told her I felt safe with her here, and I do.
But I also feel so much more.
Lust.
Want.
Need.
My cock is fucking painful as it presses into her ass. I want her so badly. My one regret about how we spent our time together was never fucking her. I should have seduced her that first night. Then, we could have spent our entire time fucking instead of dancing around the issue.
Now it’s too late.
My leg feels stiff and painful, but I won’t move, not until she’s awake. I’ll cherish every moment of her in my arms. Because in my heart, I know this will be the last time. The last time I feel her warm skin against my bare chest. The last time I’ll smell her sweet scent. The last time my heart will beat in sync with hers.
It will also be the last time I feel like this—like I want her. I want to kiss her.
The only reason I feel any of those things now is because Julian discovered my weakness. I can’t stand to see others hurt—especially those who can’t or won’t fight back.
I don’t know why Siren didn’t fight back against Julian, but it killed me watching it happen. It stung every time I drove the needle through her body, closing her wound. And when she painfully whimpered out in her sleep, it was like my heart was being stabbed over and over.
Watching her suffer hurt me worse than getting shot.
But it doesn’t change the fact that she betrayed me. She chose herself over me. And she will do it again.
I kiss her hair, taking a deep breath. Siren is beautiful and strong and incredible, but she’s not mine. Her heart doesn’t belong to me. She doesn’t love me. I suspect she isn’t even capable of love.
We have that in common. We will never love. But that is where we diverge. Because she will always choose herself, while I will always choose others.
I feel her stirring in my arms, and our time together is over. In the daylight, with our wounds closed, our hearts will shut too. But it was nice to imagine, even for a moment, that we could be something more.
Siren doesn’t say anything as she slowly sits up, and this time, I let her. I don’t pull her back into my empty arms.
She turns and looks at me, while I study her flawless skin. Yes, her skin is marked with scars, bruises, and injuries, but to me, it’s flawless. Because it’s her, and it represents how tough she is, like body armor.
I can tell she feels like she should put some clothes on, but the only clothes for her to wear are covered in blood, sweat, and dirt on the floor.
I open my mouth to speak, but she puts a finger to my lips.
“I’ll be right back,” she says.
I frown, but let her go. It takes her a while to stand, her body adjusting to the pain in her leg, ribs, and face. The narcotics from last night have clearly worn off, but she doesn’t make a sound or grimace as the pain consumes her body. She’s focused and determined on her task.
Eventually, she starts walking. Magically, she makes it up the stairs. She doesn’t bother locking the door. I could make a run for it.
But I don’t. I want her to come back. And I can’t leave until I have a plan to kill Julian.
A few minutes later, she returns with a bottle of whiskey and clothes in her hands.
She stumbles, and I jump up intending to catch her, but my leg gives out, and I fall back into the bed. Apparently, taking it slow like Siren did is the way to go.
She recovers from her stumble and shakes her head. “You will never put yours
elf first, will you?”
She holds out the whiskey bottle to me. I take it and take a swift drink. Alcohol isn’t always the best for healing, but it sure helps with the pain. And I’m tired of acting like my own suffering means nothing.
I hold it back to her, but she shakes her head.
“Siren,” I say sternly.
She takes the whiskey bottle and takes a long drink.
I smile.
But then she holds out clothes, and I frown.
She laughs.
“Get dressed, I’m tired of looking at your scrawny, ugly ass body,” she teases.
“Ugly? And scrawny? Huh?”
She nods playfully.
I snatch all the clothes from her hands. “Fine, but I’ll need all of these clothes to cover my body then. I wouldn’t want you to have to look at an inch of my ugly ass.”
She tries to grab back one of the T-shirts she intended to wear. But I hold it high out of reach. But then she jumps, and the impact of her hitting the ground again brings us both back to reality.
“Fuck, Siren!”
I grab her and pull her back into my arms as I study her leg.
“You popped a stitch,” I say.
She looks down at the trail of blood trickling down her inner thigh. I wipe the blood away with my thumb, and then I suck it.
Her eyes grow big, and she bites her bottom lip. “I’m not sure if that was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, or the grossest.”
I laugh. “Let me fix you up.”
I pull her into my lap, and then she leans back to grab the medical kit. I pull out the items I need and then get to work stitching her up. I’m very aware she doesn’t have any narcotics numbing her skin his time. So I hesitate.
“Just stab me already. Take out your anger on my skin,” she says with a smile.
I roll my eyes and then do as she says.
She moans dramatically, like I’ve just shot her again.
I stop. Did I really hurt her?
She laughs. “God, you’re gullible. If I was a better actress, I could get you to do anything I wanted.”
“I thought you didn’t lie?”
“I don’t.”
“What was that, then?”