by Tilly Delane
“Get rid,” I say, before I get up and leave the room in search of my wounded girlfriend.
Kalina
I’ve cleaned most of the blood from my face when Diego opens the door to the bathroom and slips in behind me. There are still two ugly shadows of blood ringing my nostrils, but when I tried to dab at them with a cotton bud it hurt too much, so I stopped. The scratch across my cheekbone is already crusted over, the flesh beneath and around it starting to colour dark. It’s throbbing but it’s not a kind of pain that bothers me. The nose is a different matter. It hurts like a bitch. And I look a mess.
“I look a mess,” I say to Diego as our eyes meet in the mirror.
He smiles and strokes lightly over my shoulders.
“You look beautiful. Like the cutest warrior I’ve ever seen.”
He bends down to pepper my neck with soft kisses then straightens up again.
“You want me to take you to a doctor?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“No. No point. It’ll heal. Painkillers would be nice.”
He reaches across my shoulder to open the bathroom cabinet.
“Help yourself. Ibuprofen, paracetamol, codeine, all there. If it’s too bad, I can get you some morphine. Medical grade. No probs.”
I shake my head.
“Ibuprofen will do.”
He takes a packet down, pops two pills out of the foil pack for me and places them in my outstretched hand. I swallow them with a bit of water from the tap.
“Anything else?” he asks when I straighten up again and our eyes meet once more in the mirror.
“Touch me,” I say. “Wipe out his hands on me.”
He smiles at that and gently pulls up the t-shirt he covered me with. When he comes to my face, he takes the same great care not to touch it he took earlier, and then I’m standing there in my torn tank top. Rather than take it off the same way, he grabs it left and right of the tear and rips it completely, so he can slide it off my shoulders. Each movement he makes is slow and deliberate, but he hisses, when he sees my breast. There is a huge bruise on it from where his father had grabbed me. He looks at it and tears form in his eyes while he keeps staring at it, his lip trembling, his movements frozen.
“God, Kalina, I’m so sorry. I should never have dragged you into my world, I’m...”
I spin around to face him and reach up to grab him by the neck and pull him down to me. Forehead to forehead. It works, because it’s about the only part of my face that doesn’t feel tender right now.
“Shhh,” I say. “Don’t cry. I chose to be with you, okay? It’s not like you picked me up in a bar and I thought you were some harmless businessman. I knew who you were, Diego. I’ve known you for months. And the first time I met your father he was shouting for Rowan to kill Silas. My choice to be here. You didn’t make me. Now please will you put your hands on me?”
He nods, blind with tears, and then he hides his face in my neck and starts skimming his hands lightly all over my body. I already took my shorts off earlier and put them in the bath in cold water to soak the blood out that my nose dripped on them. So the only scrap of fabric I’m still wearing is my thong, giving him easy access to my butt cheeks.
He slides his hands over them and cups them, massaging them gently, while he starts nuzzling my neck. A moan escapes me as his kneading of my backside pulls and tugs at my clit, teasing me and making my pussy release her honey.
He pulls my bottom half in closer but makes sure he doesn’t squish my hurting breast. I feel the hard ridge of his erection behind his jeans nestle against my naked stomach, and a shudder of pure sexual joy runs through me. Even battered and bruised, I can still make this man hard as rock, and that’s a power rush like no other. As if to verify my thought, he lets off my neck and looks into my face before he starts kissing my brows and then moving his lips gently over my unhurt cheek to my mouth. There is something extra sexy about having somebody kiss your swollen upper lip better. He licks gently at the seam and I open up slightly. We keep the tongue play light, just the tips chasing each other around a bit, because we both know a full-on kiss would hurt my nose and lip. But it doesn’t matter. In a matter of minutes, this gentle caressing has my pussy dripping and the need to be touched by him becomes unbearable.
“Touch me,” I whisper against his mouth.
He chuckles.
“I thought I was,” he quips.
“No,” I say, and reach around to grab one of his hands off my buttocks and bring it around the front to shove it down my thong. “Here.”
“Demanding,” he says and laughs again, quietly, as he runs his middle finger down my slit and back up again to circle my clit.
I groan out loud, because the sensation is pure relief, like the first sip of an ice-cold drink on a hot day. I push against his hand, panting.
“More,” I say. “Make me come.”
He kisses me again lightly before he answers.
“That’s generally the plan. On my hand, my cock or my mouth? Your choice, baby girl.”
“All of them,” I moan.
“At the same time? Tricky.”
I grab his wrist and pull his hand away from me, shove my thong down and spin around, bracing myself on the edge of the sink as I push out my butt.
“Fuck me,” I demand from his reflection.
But he’s already one step ahead of me, unzipping his jeans and pushing them over his hips, along with his briefs. His cock springs free and brushes over my butt. A happy shiver of anticipation runs through me. He crouches a little to line himself up at my entrance and his right arm sneaks around me to my front. His left hand guides him in, while his right goes straight back to rubbing my clit. I make eye contact with him in the mirror and he groans when I make him watch me as I slide my tongue over two of my fingers, coating them in my saliva, before I reach down and tangle my fingers with his, massaging the base of his cock between the V they form as he keeps circling my nub. I watch our fingers dance, mesmerized, as they get slicker with my juice. I feel his movements inside me go jerky, and his legs shudder with the strain of crouching and fucking into me at the same time. It’s glorious and when I look up again, the minute our eyes meet, we both lose ourselves in an explosion of spasms, as our orgasms hit us hard and fast.
Still clenching and unclenching in the aftermath, I sling my hand up to snake around his neck and make him focus on me in the mirror again.
“Thank you,” I say, and he smiles, skimming his hand ever so lightly over my bruised tit.
“Any time, baby girl. Any time.”
Diego
I don’t want to leave her behind ─ I have visions of taking a bath together and then making her come a second time, eating her out on my bed ─ but the moment I detangle from her, I hear Rowan’s thunderclap voice boom through the flat.
“Diego? We’re back!”
I sigh and spin Kalina around.
“You gonna be okay? You sure you don’t want a doctor?” I ask her.
She smiles crookedly. She’s gonna smile crookedly for a few days.
“I’ll be fine. They’re not going to do anything. I know the procedure.”
I frown at that because it catapults me straight back to the question from earlier. How did this slip of a girl get a handle on my dad and choke him out? And what does she know about broken noses?
“Hello???”
This time it’s not Rowan’s voice reaching me but Julian’s, and it sounds a fuck load closer than Rowan’s did. Like he’s just on the other side of the door, in my bedroom. I open the bathroom door and see that I’m right. Julian is standing in the middle of my bedroom, holding a laptop open in his hands and is looking around.
“What the fuck, Julian? Do you mind?” I say and quickly close the bathroom door, so Kalina has her privacy.
Julian pulls a face at me, the kind of pissed off look women get when you’re not appreciating them enough for their liking and they kind of suck their cheeks in between their teeth.
“We
ll, excuse me, but I thought I’d better check on you. You’ll understand once you’ve seen this,” he says with a nod at the screen in front of him. Silas appears in the bedroom door behind him and shrugs.
“Sorry, man, I told him it was a bad idea to come in here, but he insisted,” he says and then throws a small object at me.
I catch it and realise it’s Kalina’s lift key, which explains how they all got back up here.
“That was still dangling,” Silas explains then jerks his chin out at Julian. “He insisted on coming up with us. Thinks you’re in danger from Kalina.”
“What?”
I’m so stunned that I don’t know which one of the two to focus on.
“You’ll see,” Silas answers, grinning. “He’s got CCTV footage of Kalina and your dad in the lift. He showed us on the way up. The girl’s a killer. She is fucking amazing. If you hadn’t just sold the league, I’d say branch out into women fighting, you got a champ in your bed. You want me to go make some coffee? You look like you need one.”
“What? Yes. Thank you, Silas.”
He disappears from the door and I make a gesture to tell Julian to follow him. Once I’ve ushered him out successfully, I close the bedroom door behind me and point at the coffee table.
“Go on then, show me.”
He puts the laptop down and sits down on the sofa, making space, so I can sit in full frontal view. Rowan and Silas have both disappeared to the kitchen, which means the first time around that he shows me the footage I get it without a soundtrack of their commentaries.
There is only one camera installed in the lift, in the corner opposite the doors, so you get a view of who’s entering and of the button panel.
It starts with the bit I’ve already seen. Kalina is entering the lift by herself, putting the key into the keyhole that gets you to the penthouse. The doors start sliding shut and my father squeezes in between them. Kalina says something to him and then tries to reach for the first-floor button. He slaps her hand away before it touches the button and puts his body between her and the panel. She backs up and he leans down, saying something to her. Then his hand darts out and he grabs onto her breast. Red hot anger flows through me once again when I see this part for the second time today. But then I hold my breath as the section of the scene unfolds that I didn’t witness, too busy running after my damsel in distress. Who is not a damsel at all, it turns out. There is a fraction of time while he’s holding onto her when she is frozen but then, all of a sudden, she moves. She leans in, cups his balls, squeezes until his grip loosens on her tit. It’s then that he lands the punch on her that breaks her nose, but that is the only other move he gets to make. She twists away, out of shot, and the next thing I see is her foot kicking his kneecap. Another spin, other foot, other kneecap. Another spin, first foot, back of the knee, repeat on the other side. He falls forward, onto his knees, and she climbs him, blood streaming from her nose but gripping his hair in both hands. Literally, scales the fucker until she’s sitting on his shoulders and then she crosses her legs and her slender thighs start squeezing his neck while she is cupping his jaw in with one hand and holding the top of his head with the other, preventing him from biting at her or moving his head at all. You can tell in the way he is twitching that he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Kalina’s entire upper and lower body have become one powerful vice, intent on choking the fucker out. And she does. The elegance of her move when he starts falling forward is second to none. She lets go and is on her feet above him, her feet securely planted left and right of his hips, the second his face hits the floor. The rest of the footage shows me how they arrive at the penthouse and how she rolls him over and starts dragging him, then it loops back to the beginning.
“See?” Julian says when we watch it the second time around, and points at my bedroom door. “She’s a fucking killer, Diego. Honeytrap, I tell you.”
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Silas says as he and Rowan come in bearing trays with coffee and biscuits.
They put them left and right of the laptop onto the coffee table and start pouring coffees. Rowan’s phone pings in his pocket and he takes it out to look at the message, leaving Silas to hand out the mugs.
“Oh, cool. Grace and Raven are back early. They’re rolling into Brighton station now. Wanna know where we’re at,” he says, flopping down on a chair by the head end of the coffee table.
Silas and I exchange a look over the mug he’s handing me. Raven’s a nurse. It would do Kalina good to be looked at by a medic. I nod at him.
“Tell ‘em not to get on the train to Shoreham but come straight here,” Silas says, and Rowan starts tapping.
Once he’s sent his message off, he snatches a packet of Hobnobs from the table and starts unravelling the plastic.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asks after he’s already taken a bite out of the biscuit, so it fits into the mug Silas has put in front of him when he starts dunking. “Funny. I always had you down as a custard cream man. You’ve just risen in my estimate, Diego. I’m impressed.”
“He is a custard cream man,” Silas throws in. “My guess is, Kalina bought those. She likes all things oaty. Give her a flapjack and she’s your friend forever.”
He lasers in on Julian, who is the last to have a coffee thrust at him.
“Which is why your honeytrap theory is utter bollocks, Julian. She’s lived with us for seven months, man.”
“Look at it!” Julian exclaims exasperatedly, pointing at the screen where we’ve gone back to the bit when Kalina’s got Dad in her full body vice. “That’s a trained fucking killer. That’s not some girlie who’s done a few self defence classes, where she learned to hit someone with a French stick and key his eyeballs. That’s a fighter. I tell you, she is not who she pretends to be, Diego. Be fucking careful.”
“He’s right,” Kalina says from the bedroom doorway, where she stands, dressed in a new t-shirt and leggings, looking petrified.
Kalina
Sometimes your number is up. It’s as simple as that.
Clearly, today my number is up.
I’m gonna have to trust these guys and throw my lot in with them properly.
It scares the living daylights out of me.
I work alone. I’m a free agent. Always. Before I came to Brighton and I got slowly absorbed in the vortex that is Sheena’s house, I never even went out for fun in a group. When I hit town for a drink, I always went alone. None of the going out in tribes for me or buddying up with a wing woman. I love the freedom to make my own decisions, to call the shots on when, where, what and with whom ─ without the duty of babysitting someone else, or being babysat.
I anchor myself in Diego’s eyes as he looks across to me, shell shocked but his gaze still full of care and passion, waiting for me to explain myself.
It’s why I don’t register Silas prowling over until he’s standing right in front of me and gently cups my chin. He tilts my head this way and that, scrutinising the damage. I’m the oldest of my siblings at home and this is a new feeling, the feeling of a protective brother looking out for you. His hazel eyes lock onto mine.
“You iced it?”
I shake my head, and he makes a hissing sound before he looks over his shoulder at Diego.
“George, you fuckwit. You need to put an icepack on that, otherwise her eye is gonna swell shut by tomorrow. You should know better than that. What the fuck did you two do in the bathroom?”
Diego and I clear our throats at the same time and Silas rolls his eyes, blushing slightly along the jawline. Unlike the rest of the guys around here, he doesn’t wear his virility on his sleeves, or as a perma-tent in his trousers. I know Grace is a very satisfied woman, thanks to the paper-thin walls in Sheena’s house, but out in public Silas is, well, mostly discreet with his desire, where Rowan and Diego are definitely not. Rowan is the worst of them, and it’s no surprise that he laughs out loud at Diego’s and my obvious distraction-from-pain activities.
“Yeah, that work
s, too,” he says through the laughter and makes a beeline to the kitchen. “I’ll go get some ice for you, Kal.”
Satisfied that his brother is on the case, Silas turns back to me.
“Did you take any pain killers?”
I nod.
“Ibuprofen.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he groans, looking back at Diego. “What is this? Amateur hour? Ibuprofen will thin her blood and make her bruise even more! You should have given her some morphine.”
Diego mumbles something about offering it, but it’s obvious Silas isn’t listening as his eyes come back to mine. He lets go of my chin.
“So, which one of us are you after, killer-bee?” he asks, evenly.
I bark out a nervous laugh.
“Déjà vu. That’s exactly what your mum asked me at lunch.”
“Mum knows?” Silas exclaims but then shakes his head and throws his hands up with an eye roll to heaven. “Of course she does.”
“And what was the answer?” Diego asks coolly from his perch on the sofa.
His tone makes me swallow hard. Gone is the love from his grey gaze, replaced by storm clouds of barely suppressed anger.
“You know what?” I ask, finding my sass among the soup that’s coursing through my veins, a stew of physical aftershock from the fight, post-orgasmic comedown and feeling pushed right out of my comfort zone with the idea of telling them who I am and why I’m here. “You lot really are full of yourselves. I’m not after any of you. Shocker, I didn’t even know any of you existed before I came here. It was complete coincidence that the language school placed me at Sheena’s. I’m not a cop, I’m not interested in any of you, I don’t give a shit what you do with your lives. I’m...”
I don’t get to finish my rant because suddenly I start shivering violently and my legs give way beneath me.
The world turns black, just as I feel Silas catch me midair.
Diego
I see her collapse and my life stops.
Not just my heart, my entire fucking life.
It’s the weirdest sensation.