by Dee, Bonnie
“You got it, baby.” She kissed his chest.
“Even someone like Brody?”
“Even someone like Hitler. You can’t hate people for ignorance, for swamping themselves in delusion. They deserve sympathy and a helping hand if you can give it. Wash away the mud and there’s a shining gold soul in everyone.”
Ian squeezed her. “Okay, sunshine. Enough sugar before I go into shock.” He felt her smile against his chest.
They fell silent.
Ian listened to the sounds of the motel’s heating system humming and Foster and Fujikawa’s quiet voices out in the hall, keeping watch over them. Mira’s breathing deepened as she fell asleep in his arms—an astonishing end to a surrealistic day.
That he should even meet a person like her was amazing. That she should choose to be with him rather than her equal, someone like those two guys in the hallway, was beyond belief. Ian wondered again if he really could become a better version of himself, worthy of such a remarkable woman.
He vowed to change, no matter how hard it was, and maybe some day he’d measure up to be the man Mira believed he was.
Epilogue
Justin Foster ran his hand over the smooth, wood surface of the box inside the bag on his lap. He switched on his signal and checked traffic carefully before taking a left. The last thing he needed was to be pulled over by a cop or be involved in an accident when he was so close to his destination. After everything he’d gone through, it would be ludicrous to have something so inane interfere with his delivery of the box.
He pulled into a parking space near the building and sat a moment, checking the street for danger before getting out of the car. Shouldering the precious bag, he walked through the front door of the office building and waited in the fern-lined lobby while the receptionist confirmed his appointment.
Justin was met and guided by security personnel to a small room past the lobby, where they searched him for weapons or wires. After he’d passed muster, the guard accompanied him to the elevator, which shot straight up to the top floor of the building.
The elevator doors whispered open and he faced a mahogany paneled corridor, dimly lit by ornate wall sconces. His feet sank in plush gray carpet as he followed his escort down the hall to a pair of double doors. The guard held the door open for him to enter then closed it quietly behind him.
“Mr. Foster.” The man at the desk swung his chair back and forth, hands steepled beneath his chin. He didn’t rise to shake hands. “It’s been quite a ride and rather more difficult than it needed to be, don’t you think?”
“The situation was delicate. If you want me to remain at KOTE, I couldn’t blow my cover. I had to appear to be protecting the Keeper and the box.” Justin forced his voice to remain cool. “Everything would have gone more smoothly if you had let me handle it my way and not sent your men after us so soon.”
Brody’s eyes narrowed. “What was your hesitation? Were you getting cold feet about keeping our deal? I lost a couple of men in that accident because you wouldn’t pull over.”
“I told you I wanted to question Kashi and find out what she knew before I let them bring us in. I could have handed you the box with no issues at all if you’d simply given me more time.”
“Perhaps. Or maybe your Protector instincts kicked in and you had trouble taking a fall.” He shrugged. “But aside from the loss of a few staff members and this inconvenient trip to Reno to meet you, it all worked out in the end.” He stopped his chair and sat up straight. “You do have it, don’t you?”
Justin reached into the bag and drew out the satin-smooth box, walked to the desk and set it down. “KOTE has a duplicate, created by a wizard who works quickly and doesn’t ask questions. There was very little time to get it done, magically sealed, and make the switch, but I think the result will fool even Kashi if she sees it again.”
Brody’s eyes gleamed as he took the box in his hands. He grasped it so tightly his knuckles turned white and looked as if he would kiss it if Justin weren’t watching. No wonder. It would take a braver man than Raymond to face Algernon Brody with news that he’d failed in the simple task of looking after a box.
“They have no suspicion they’re holding a fake?” Brody asked.
“No.” Justin forced his hands to stay loose at his sides. He sounded more confident than he felt about the ludicrous scheme. “I understand they don’t plan to open it immediately. Their goal is to keep it from your father. They’re afraid that what it contains may be harmful to the world.”
Brody stroked the box like a pet cat. “You’re absolutely certain Black invented the amulet and doesn’t have it hidden somewhere?”
“Yes. The man never opened the box and took nothing from it.”
Ray set the box on his desk, resting his hands protectively on top of it. “Well done. Although it’s a pity I didn’t get to kill that lying weasel, Black, or keep the Keeper.” He smiled faintly and murmured “keep the Keeper” to himself. He looked up at Justin. “So, what can I do for you in return?”
“You know.” Justin’s jaw tightened. “You know exactly what I want.”
Brody nodded. “It shall be done.” He petted the box absently. “You will have what you want in due time. For now, I want you to resume your duties at KOTE and keep reporting to me as you have been.”
Justin nodded once. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it down along with his disgust for the man.
“That will be all.” Brody smiled as he dismissed Justin, clearly enjoying his power over him.
Without another word, the Protector turned and walked from the room. Outside the glossy mahogany doors, he paused, drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. It was over. KOTE still trusted him and his filthy task was finished.
He felt poisoned by it. But nothing could interfere with his ultimate goal. He had done what he must to achieve it and no one could fault a man for that.
* * * *
Ray spun his chair from right to left in hypnotic repetition. Things were back under control again. Everything was going to be all right. His father need never know about the little blip on the radar. The box was secure and he could breathe easy.
After he’d counted his tenth swing, he reached for the drawer where he kept the Pepto-Bismol, then laughed and dropped his hand from the drawer handle. He didn’t need it tonight. His stomach was fine.
Rising, he picked up the box and carried it to his wall safe, tapped the combination on the keypad and spoke a few words for voice recognition. The door swung open and he set the box inside. Its shiny wooden surface glowed in the safe’s interior light.
Ray touched it one last time; then closed the door, leaving the box and its mysterious contents in darkness. It would be there when his father asked for it and Raymond, the dutiful son, would present it and earn his gratitude and praise for a job well done.
He would finally be a man in his father’s eyes.
The End
About the Author
Whether you're a fan of contemporary, paranormal, or historical romance, you'll find something to enjoy. My style is very personal and my characters will feel like well-known friends by the time you've finished reading. I'm interested in flawed, often damaged, people who find the fulfillment they seek in one another.
Visit my website at: www.bonniedee.com
Fruits of Betrayal
Bonnie Dee
First Published 2007
ISBN 1-59578-335-0
Blurb
When good guys go bad, and bad girls go … worse.
Elyse Greenwood’s psyche is a battleground where good and evil struggle daily. Torn between her Protector tendencies and her Destroyer allegiance, she has yet to fully commit to either side.
Justin Foster has long been a respected, valued Protector of the Keepers of the Environment. When a box containing a crucial piece of the Destroyers’ plan to take over the world and his ward Trina are both taken by Destroyer Raymond Brody, Justin’s loyalty to KOTE is shattered. His protective ins
tincts require him to rescue Trina, but his duty is to recover the box and thus protect the world.
As more of Brody’s plan for world domination is revealed, Elyse and Justin must work together. They discover the conflict between desire and duty can twist them in ways they never imagined, and the fruits of betrayal are not always sweet.
Chapter One
Justin Foster pounded his fist into the Destroyer’s face, relishing the feel of pliant flesh, slippery blood and hard bone against his knuckles. There was a snap of bone breaking, maybe a cheekbone or jaw; the Destroyer’s nose was already broken. Justin grunted as each punch landed. He hammered his fist into Raymond Brody’s face again and again with the full force of his Terran strength. It felt good.
As a Destroyer, Brody had superior strength of his own, but he was a cringing coward who bent and broke like a twig in the Protector’s hands.
For the first time in a long time Justin breathed freely. He felt like a man released from prison as he punched and punched, turning Brody’s face into an unrecognizable, pulpy mass.
Suddenly the Destroyer’s eyes popped open. They blinked away sheets of blood and gazed at Justin. His mouth stretched in a startling grin, white teeth against scarlet blood, a broken tooth hanging precariously against his swollen lip. “It doesn’t matter, you know. You can’t change what you’ve done. It’s too late.” His face faded away until, like the Cheshire cat, only the grin remained.
Justin gasped and sat up in bed. His chest rose and fell with his rapid breathing. His naked body was drenched with sweat and his heart pounded so hard it felt as if it would jackhammer through his breastbone.
“Fuck!” He blew his breath out and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, then opened them to stare at the familiar shapes of furniture in the darkness of his room. The images of the dream slowly faded, but the futile feeling stayed with him.
Swinging his legs out from under the tangled sheet, he got up and plodded to the bathroom. The dim glow of the nightlight illuminated the room. He flipped on the tap, filled his hands with tepid water and splashed his face. Gripping the edges of the sink in his hands, he bowed his head and inhaled a long, calming breath.
He looked at his image in the mirror; square jaw and strong, regular features, sandy hair growing out from its short cut and flopping over his forehead in damp spikes. He looked young. Humans would perceive him as a twenty-something man when he was actually much older, the Terran lifespan being longer than humans’. His face also looked honest, wholesome and forthright. Hell, Justin would trust that face himself if he didn’t know better.
How the fuck had he come to this, colluding with a Destroyer? Raymond Brody was second only to his father Algernon in sheer evil, and now Justin, a Protector of the Keepers of the Environment, was nothing more than his puppet. All he’d fought for during his eighty-some years on the planet he’d thrown away when he helped Brody secure a missing box that held a crucial component to possible global destruction. Did this mean he was a Destroyer now?
Justin heard a faint crunching noise. When he looked down, a web of cracks made by his gripping hands marred the white porcelain surface of the sink.
Hell, even a petty criminal like Ian Black turned out to be a hero, sacrificing his freedom to deliver both the ubiquitous box and two KOTE agents, one of them Justin, to safety. But Justin had betrayed everything he believed in by secretly replacing the box sent to KOTE headquarters with a fake and delivering the real one to Brody. It didn’t matter that he did it to protect Trina, his ward, the person he loved most in the world. He knew perfectly well the good of the planet sometimes had to come before the welfare of a single person and he’d betrayed his very purpose in being—protecting the world.
Worst of all, he didn’t know if Brody would ever really release Trina. He would likely dangle her forever as a carrot to keep Justin in line and obedient to his will.
“Damn it!” Ripping the sink from the wall, he sent it crashing across the room. Water spurted like a geyser from the ruptured pipe, drenching him. Shouting a string of curses, he dropped to his knees and turned off the valve, cutting the flow of water.
He sat for a moment on the slippery wet tile floor, his head in his hands. “Should’ve murdered him when I had the chance.” He remembered facing Brody across his glossy desk and handing over the box. One small lunge across the desk and he could’ve torn the bogus religious leader’s throat out. That simple, lethal act might have saved millions of lives.
But it would surely have ended one. Trina’s. Sweet, guileless, ethereal Trina. Since she had been a child, Justin’s ward had the otherworldly air of someone who saw things others couldn’t. When she was three, Justin would look up from reading to see her sitting in her quiet, still way, so unusual for a young child, staring into space as though listening to music only she could hear.
She’d been like a daughter to him for sixteen years. How could he abandon her now? He couldn’t, which was why Raymond Brody had the mysterious box and Justin was beating himself up for betraying KOTE and possibly placing the entire world at risk.
Justin pushed himself off the floor, threw a couple of bath towels down to soak up the water, then shuffled back to bed, feeling weak and exhausted as an old man. He flopped on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Was Trina somewhere now, gazing up at a ceiling, wondering where she was and when he’d come to save her? When he’d first seen the girl she’d been behind bars and he’d vowed she’d never be caged again. It had been 1989 in Romania after the fall of the USSR. At that time, Justin had worked for the CIA and been on a mission when circumstances brought him to question a woman who worked in an orphanage. The rows of rusty metal ‘cribs’, which were no more than containment cells for the many orphans of the beleaguered country, were horrifying. These hadn’t been sweet bassinets holding sleeping infants, but cages containing older children as well as infants.
Justin had considered himself hardened to life from his many war experiences and general operative bullshit. But the children in that orphanage had dark eyes like sharp knives that cut him as he strode through the ward. Why Trina and not one of the others had attracted him, Justin never understood. Maybe it was the huge, liquid, dark eyes in her pinched, little face. She lifted her stick-thin arms up to him, not beseechingly, but as if she firmly expected him to pick her up and take her away from all this.
And so, unbelievably, Justin had picked her up and taken her. He’d held the kid in the crook of his arm as he talked to the woman he’d been sent to interrogate, then left the building. No one had stopped him from taking the little girl. They’d either been intimidated by him or too tired to care.
As both a CIA operative and a Terran, Justin had many resources for fabricating necessary documentation. He’d found a way around the paperwork and taken the child back to the U.S. When he’d gotten Trina home, Justin wondered what in the holy fuck he’d been thinking. He couldn’t raise a child, especially not a human one.
But he had.
He’d left the CIA and began working directly for KOTE. He’d found a trustworthy Romanian au pair who didn’t question his comings and goings or how a single man had come to adopt an orphan. And he had cherished the frail, little girl, who’d grown into a quiet, skinny teen and then a reserved, willowy young woman.
Justin stared at the gray light of early dawn coming through his window. He had no one but himself to blame for Trina’s kidnapping. It had been his fault for being stupid enough to get involved with a twisted bitch like Elyse Greenwood.
The thought of Elyse made him shiver, and not just with disgust or anger at her betrayal. A sharp stab of lust pierced his groin, swelling his cock despite his attempts to suppress it. He hated her, but even after everything she’d done, his body still craved her. The images of her silky auburn hair glinting by firelight, her pale face hovering over his, her translucent gray eyes glittering with lust, set his heart racing.
His eyes closed as he gave into the sensation and recalled her
smoky voice whispering in the dark.
“Not yet.” She scratched sharp nails across his chest, leaving bloody welts in their wake. She squeezed his hips between her thighs and her inner muscles around his straining cock. “I’ll tell you when you can come.”
She’d used handcuffs on him that time. Not some sex-play version with plush lining, but the real deal, cold metal cutting into his wrists. His fingers gripped the bars of the headboard, arm and neck muscles corded with the strain of holding back. His body twisted helplessly on satin sheets, hips bucking up and down as she’d ridden him mercilessly for what felt like hours. Then the exquisite moment had arrived. With sweat dripping down his body, the salt stinging the scratches on his chest, Justin had finally received her permission.
“All right. You may come now.”
The cock ring she’d fastened to the base of his shaft to prolong his erection couldn’t hold him once she’d issued her command. Fire raged in his veins. His balls drew up tight and he’d thrust into her once more, driving deep inside her wet heat. The ring had broken as his cock swelled impossibly larger and his orgasm burst through him. The superb ecstasy of release had made him shudder and he’d cried out, a guttural surrender to her will.
Only then, distantly from the heights of his rapture, did Elyse cry out shrilly as she impaled herself on his shaft, her inner muscles clenching hard and milking him dry. “Bitch,” she’d screamed, slapping his jaw and knocking his head to the side as she’d come.
Justin groaned at the erotic memory.
“Damn it!”
He threw the sheet off and got up. Stiff as a pole, his cock stuck out at a right angle from his body. He glared at his offending member. “Fucking hell.”
He went to the bathroom again, slipping on the wet tile as he crossed to the shower and turned it on. As he was about to step under the cold spray to quell his raging hard-on, his cell phone rang.