by S A Gardner
He needed one to shoot again. It was how long it took me to tuck, roll, unfold and kick the gun out of his hand.
He sagged to his knees. I did, too. Inches away from him.
To any onlooker, we’d look like two lovers brought to our knees under the weight of emotion, about to merge into a starving embrace.
The hideous reality was that I’d killed him.
I’d hit him with succinylcholine. A paralytic used for induction of general anesthesia. Sux bound to the nicotinic receptors on muscle cells, imitating acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that made muscles contract. But it didn’t share its rapid hydrolysis, not allowing muscle cells to repolarize. This made them unresponsive to further stimuli, trapping them into useless fasciculation, followed by total flaccidity.
In a minute he wouldn’t be able to even blink. Then he’d be unable to breathe. Sux would last up to ten minutes, since I’d hit a blood vessel. Even if it lasted only five minutes, that was long enough for him to suffocate, while fully, agonizingly conscious.
While I got a first row seat to his demise.
He was already flushing, tremors cracking the surface of his steadiness, asphyxiation starting to blossom within his lungs. I knew what he must be feeling as the drug coursed in his blood, on an invasion path to his every muscle fiber, robbing him of the things he needed most, control…and air.
The heavenly color of his eyes brightened, his gaze filling with reproach, sorrow and oh, God—love…
So much love.
His choking words were the worst thing yet in this rollercoaster of torture. “I knew you were like me…in every way…my love. When you believe…it’s for the greater good…there’s no better terminator. And you will believe…in my cause…one day…”
Sobs hacked me until I was groping for breath like he did. Anguish liquefied into a deluge of acid, eating through my soul, down my face. “It shouldn’t…have been…this way.”
“I…told…you…I’d do anything never to be…imprisoned again…”
“Damn you, Jake. Damn you…for making me…do this.”
His eyes started dimming as he reached out a trembling hands to me. “I had to…my darling…”
Like the first day I’d seen him, I grabbed his hands. But I did what even the impulsive teenager I’d been couldn’t have. I took them to my lips. Drenched them in my agony.
What he did next stopped my thrashing heart. He yanked at my hand with what remained of his volition, the hand that had poisoned him, answered my homage with burning lips. Then his head fell forward, resting his blazing forehead on it. As if he was praying. To me. For me. His murderer.
“Don’t…regret…my love…” His voice rattled inside his chest with the accumulation of exudate, with the last departing wisps of air. “Don’t…witness…”
A thousand volts scorched through the heart. My whole body convulsed with the insupportable ghastliness of his absolution, his solicitude.
My hand tore away from his. Being all that supported him any longer, he collapsed forward. The sight of him, face down on the ground before me…
A wail gashed out of me like an exorcised demon. I staggered up, blind, out of my mind, agony and misery and grief a million ants eating through me, hollowing me out.
I stumbled away. From the mutilation of his love. The horror of my crime.
I’d come to save him.
I’d only executed him.
Fifty
“Don’t”
The rasped entreaty trickled like warm blood through layers of debris, cracking fissures into the solid ice encasing me.
Was it Jake? Still telling me not to regret killing him?
The voice rumbled again, interlacing among a churning noise. Trying to tear me out of the quicksand I sank deeper in with every breath.
I clung to the mental seizure that had claimed me after the hellish trek back to the convoy. Every step I’d taken away from Jake, knowing I could still save him if I turned around, had felt like a white-hot skewer lancing through every exposed nerve.
When the fugue had finally descended on me, I’d clawed for its refuge. It had deepened while we’d crossed the border, and PACT and GCA helicopters had picked us up, with their operatives driving our convoy out of the region.
All through, I’d tripped on a noxious mixture of guilt, horror and depletion. My mind kept desperately trying to latch onto any outlet so it wouldn’t fracture. Like Jake’s had.
I knew I’d never pose as grave a danger as he had if it did. But a Calista without my remaining brakes was a scary enough prospect…
A dry, warm touch feathered the wet, cold cheek I was leaning on something metal. A gurney’s railing.
Damian.
He was awake.
His long, powerful fingers smoothed away the bangs sticking to my swollen eyes. I fumbled for them, pressed a trembling kiss between the cannula and the pulse oximeter. Tears slid to my lips, slicked his hand.
“Dios, Calista.”
His groan sounded so pained, it forked fright through me again. It catapulted me to stiff, trembling feet to recheck his measures and monitors, for the zillionth time. Every value of his vitals remained as scary slow and steadily powerful as it had been all through. So why had he sounded so distressed?
As if he heard my question, his voice, bass, gruff, broke over me. “I can’t withstand your tears.”
“Yeah, right.” I sniffled, blotted them on my sleeve. More just kept streaming, as if I had a leak inside me. Which I did. A crater-sized hole in my soul. “Says the man who withstood a gunshot to the heart.”
“Goes to show you that seeing you weeping is worse for me.”
“You sure woke up with your priorities jumbled up. My tears shouldn’t make your list of worries when you almost died.”
“I did no such thing.” His voice thickened to an intimate caress. “I wouldn’t have dared die.”
I gaped at him. Still joking about it? And sensuously, too? Could he be all systems go to that extent?
Or was that only to make me stop crying?
If so, he knew me well. Implicitly well. It worked.
“So—I hear you had my heart in your hands,” he whispered, his gaze an encompassing embrace. “Literally this time. Yeah, I woke up once while you were gone.”
The tension holding me up drained as if into a black hole. I sagged down like a used-up mop.
As unbelievable as it was, he was a hundred percent stable and lucid, only hours after being shot in the heart, sawn open and wired back together. This was the best prognostic criterion.
If only more of my patients were anything like that powerhouse of stamina and resilience. Not that it wouldn’t be a hard road back. Especially to his former level. But he was already on it. And hard was what he was all about. He would be his superhuman self again. And not before long.
Now I could hate him.
I let the world crash back, let the anger that had been buried under the avalanche of dismantling anxiety resurface. It came in gusts that drowned even the din I now registered. The CH-47 Chinook helicopter’s twin-engines and sixty-foot rotors.
“Whatever it was I held in my hands,” I spat. “It was an uncanny imitation of the real thing.”
He closed his eyes. Panic swamped me again. I’d developed phobic tendencies toward seeing his eyes closing.
“You keep your eyes open, damn you.”
He complied at once. It snapped some more nerves seeing no defensiveness or guilt there. Just passion. “I told you why I lied to you, Calista. But I never lied about my feelings. If anything, I haven’t told you the half of it.”
That only made me more furious. “More evasions, omissions and half-truths, huh? If you told me the truth from the start I—I—”
“It was impossible to tell you.” He spared me from finding a punch line. I had no idea what I would have done. Or I did. Nothing I now knew I should have done. “We would have lost GCA’s backing if they suspected it was a search-and-destroy mission. Y
ou would have probably led a kamikaze counter-rescue mission. We had no solid proof to offer you that the so-called hostages were willingly, gainfully involved in biological-chemical weapons research and production.”
“So what kind of proof did you have? Liquid?”
A surprised snort escaped him. A long groan followed, his hand going to the focus of agony, his bandaged, sawn-open-and-wired-shut chest. I pounced on him, nightmares of finding another crimson stain spreading on his chest swamping me.
“Don’t make me laugh if you’re so worried I’d bust open your meticulous efforts to put me back together.”
“Make another joke, and I’ll put you under again. For the next few weeks until there’s no chance of that.”
I must have looked as rabid as I felt, as he sobered fully. “I’m fine, Calista. You saved me. Again.”
Yeah. I saved him. After I almost killed him. Again. And there’d been no almosts with Jake.
I had to focus elsewhere. This interrogation. Getting to the bottom of this might make it all a little less unbearable.
“The proof, Damian.”
He filled his chest, exhaled with the same care. “It was the accounts of two militants we captured. Before they died.”
“How convenient for you,” I scoffed.
“Just what I thought you’d think.”
“You bet. We would have needed a séance if we wanted to interrogate them ourselves.” Another suspicion hit me. “But it’s not like you to depend on unsubstantiated hearsay.”
“If you’re implying I killed them so no one could check my claims, I didn’t. It’s a long story how they died, and it was among the many reasons I believed their reports were real. But those reasons wouldn’t have held much weight with you. Especially in the beginning, when saving Jake and the supposed hostages would have eclipsed any other consideration for you. The Intel focused on the weapon and the base, and didn’t say much about Jake’s role in it all. I thought he was only one of many. That is, until I saw him again.”
The change that came over him was right out of a horror movie. It was like he had a demon inside him that manifested at the mention of Jake. A demon capable of anything at all.
My every hair follicle seized as he raised his bed to a reclining position, let me see it head-on for the first time.
Yet when he continued talking, his voice remained the sonorous frequency that thrummed my being like its own exclusive instrument. “The realization was almost instantaneous. That whatever I’d abhorred about Constantine when we’d interacted had fully manifested. Into a full-fledged monster. One capable of anything.”
It was me who snorted this time. Almost what I’d just thought of him. Could I pick them, or could I pick them.
His gaze acknowledged my assessment, reminding me I was the same. He clasped my hand again, dragged it to his lips, singed it in a kiss, as if to say it was why he loved me.
Then he sighed. “But with that limitless intellect you wouldn’t shut up about, I had no doubt he wouldn’t be ‘a part’ of anything. He’d be the instigator, the mastermind. I soon had some revealing conversations with the militants during our business consultations to validate my instincts about him. Then you told me about the refugee deaths and that he knew what I was. I pieced it all together then.”
I pulled my hand away before I gave in to the urge to strangle him. “And you still said nothing.”
His eyes grew morose. “If I’d told you then, would you have believed it of Jake? You heard it for yourself, from his own lips, and I bet you still can’t believe it.”
Which was a valid point. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it all.
Would I ever?
Still, Jake had given me a diametrically different version and set of motives for the same events. I bet Damian wouldn’t tell me Jake had made a deal with him.
He sighed again. “Then he approached me.”
When would I stop this futility of making projections where he was concerned?
“He told me he’d do anything to help us destroy the base in return for freedom and amnesty. His only condition was that you stay out of it, in every sense.”
I could believe that. Jake had been his accomplice in leaving me in the dark. He’d wanted me safe. And he’d needed to “work on me” after Damian was dead, and after he’d set up the ideal parameters for converting me. He’d been confident he would eventually. It had been a paramount need to him.
The depth of his obsession with me was another thing I’d never make peace with. Or the fact that I’d destroyed him so many times, in so many ways, because of it. Now literally.
“And you shook on it,” I choked. “Intending to double-cross him. But he double-crossed you first.”
“I knew he would, but I didn’t expect him to before we got him out. I don’t get how he knew when and how we’d attack, was ready with his counter plan.”
“I told him.”
I’d always thought Damian incapable of being shocked. He was flabbergasted now. Seemed only I could create buttons he previously didn’t have.
I told him why I had and all animation seeped out of him.
“So you didn’t trust me even then.”
“What’s to trust?” I hissed. “You lied to me from day one, you used me as a smokescreen…”
His eyes ignited again. “This is the line you’re not allowed to cross with your suspicions, Calista. You know by now I’d die and kill and everything in between for you. I did everything I could to stop you coming at all, then to limit your role, to keep you safe, ending by trying to make you leave before the most dangerous part of the mission started. You, and everyone else, did everything you could to thwart me.”
He’d argued that during the showdown with Jake. And it had been a legitimate argument then as it was now. I had the proof of dead colleagues, of Mel, of him lying here right now.
It had been all to protect me.
Still… “I can understand, though not condone, that you lied at the beginning, when you had such a low opinion of my restraint and judgment, but later…”
“Later I was scared you’d take his word over mine. Every time I saw you with him…” He stopped, his pupils engulfing his irises in darkness, as if the memory hurt more than the bullet he’d taken to the heart. His voice dropped to a strident whisper. “I believed I’d never mean half as much to you.”
The retort that he was such an insecure moron recoiled in my throat. For I wasn’t any better where he was concerned.
And then, he did make perfect sense. Again.
Emotional allegiance wasn’t about towering passion. Jake had had his vise around my being through more intricate elements. The awe of idolatry. The echoes of first love. The weight of loss and guilt. Then I’d seen him again and pity, empathy and mental affinity had entered the equation, and his hold over my emotions had been multiplied by a hundred.
It had by a thousand, now that I’d killed him.
Damian’s gaze grew bleak. Thinking I wasn’t buying his explanations, was drifting farther? Or was this another act?
I hated this. That my perception of him had been infected by this virus of distrust. And there was nothing I could do to change that.
My shoulders slumped under the depressing knowledge. “You know the silliest part, Damian? All through our enmity, I trusted you. Implicitly. Now I love you, and I wouldn’t trust you to…”
He jerked, startling me into muteness. Before anxiety could crash back into me, my mouth dropped open. Right before my stupefied eyes, all his vigor flared back as he sat up, as if nothing had happened to him. If I hadn’t opened him up, bathed in his blood and held his heart in my hands, I would have believed he’d been faking it all.
“You love me?”
Fifty-One
If wonder-laced elation had a sound, that had to be it. Damian’s ragged exclamation.
As if that was news to him.
From the dumbfounded disbelief accompanying his delight, it seemed it was.
&n
bsp; I had to burst his bubble. “Yeah. But so what? I said…”
“I’ll never lie to you again, Calista.”
His pledge was the embodiment of sincerity. But I now knew he could sound and look and feel just like that when he was telling the most outrageous lie. The only times I’d read what he hadn’t intended me to read had been when his loathing of Jake had tampered with his chameleon powers.
“Really? You won’t lie to me again if you think it’s a need-to-know, or a better-not-know basis? Or if you think you’re looking out for my best interests, no matter what I believe them to be? Or if you believe you’re protecting me, from others or from myself?”
That extinguished the glow in his eyes. Thought so.
Whatever lies and manipulation he believed needed for those all-important ends, he’d use and rationalize them.
Silence stretched, churning with the ceaseless thunder of the helicopter and that of our perpetual tension.
Then he finally exhaled. “Calista, I love you…”
“As if that excuses everything—or anything,” I interrupted him. That malignant distrust ate at me. I wanted to hurt him with it as much. “And just how do I even know that you do, Damian? There could be ten different explanations for everything you claim proves your love. It’s a classic case of cry wolf. All the things you told me since you came back into my life could have all been a ruse. With Jake as its reason and target. I know how single-minded you are when you have a mission, and Jake wasn’t only your most critical one, he was personal. You hated him with a cold, inventive vengeance. I now know what you’re capable of, what an incomparable actor you are. I saw you when you took off your mask with him. Every step you took in our relationship, everything you herded me towards, everything you had me believe, synchronized too well with all the stages of your plan.”
His eyes went dead. He lay back down, everything in him seeming to slump. “And I’m continuing the ‘ruse’ in case Jake resurfaces and tries to get to you? I’m trying to secure you in my power to use you as a weapon against him, and to deprive him of his heart’s desire, now our vendetta has raged out of all proportion, after we both almost killed each other? As long as he’s out there, you’ll never believe me?”