An Eye For An Eye (The Club #11) (8 page)

“She was sold, but I don’t know by whom.” I pressed the gun into the wound in his leg smiling. “Ahhhh…An older man came to take her. Dark hair peppered with grey, dark eyes and he wore a suit. A three piece fucking suit in July. He looked like a professional, a lawyer or someone important, but I don’t know his name.”

“A name.” I pressed deeper knowing it would be too easy to end it and my gut twisted thinking I already knew who I was looking for.

“I don’t know what happened after that.”

“I could gut you right here, right now.”

“But you’d be late for your date.”

“I know. So that’s why I’m going to let you hobble your ass out of here. Once I get a name.”

“But, I don’t have one,” and the trouble was I believed him. Ken seemed to pause a bit and paled under the flood lights in the alley. “I could identify you.”

“You could–but a mute man can tell no tales, now can he?” I lifted a knife from my boot stalking him in the alley. He looked horrified and it would send an effective message. Sorenson would be disappointed I didn’t end this now, but I had a sinking suspicion I was going to need to look closer to home for this fourth player.  

Looking down at my ruined suit, I lamented the mess knowing I needed another fucking shower.

Thirteen

JUDE

The front door opens and my heart skips a beat when I smell metal and pine. “Lorand.” I’m practically jumping up and down with excitement to see him. It’s silly and school girlish, but I can’t help myself.

“I thought I told you stay at home today, Jude. Someone likes to disobey. Hmm?” He pushed me down on the couch. Desperately, I wanted this. I knew I overstepped my bounds, but I can’t help wanting him. Besides, being bad seems to have worked out well for me so far.

“You won’t hurt me.” Of this, I am absolutely certain as he pushed me down over the armrest. He’s rough but gentle letting me know who is in charge. I crawled up along the leather seat which was underneath my legs now, hands clutching the back of the couch. He was pulling my dress up, standing behind me and grabbing my hair, the pressure of pulling the thick bundle of strands stings, but doesn’t actually hurt and I followed his lead.

“Define hurting you, Jude. I’ve done a lot of things to hurt you and will likely to continue to do so.” Harshly whispered against my cheek, my face flamed hotly, as he forced me awkwardly over the side, arms reaching out for the wall. My palms splayed out as he flipped the back of my dress up exposing me. Stubble from his chin rubs against my back and lower still until his tongue sweeps down tasting my skin.

“If this is hurting, you’re nothing but a pussy cat, Lorand.” I’m taunting him by attacking his manhood setting him off. He might be one hundred percent alpha but he’s putty in my hands. A jerk of his hand released my hair to push me over flat on the leather couch, my face rested against it. His lips kissed just above the crease in my cheeks; his teeth bite the lace and ripped my panties clear off my ass.    

“There’s only one pussy in this room, it’s yours and it belongs to me, Judith Mae.” Set and match, Lorand fights back using my given name pulling me to the end of the couch wrapping an arm around my middle, the leather rubbing abrasively against my hyper sensitive skin. He must be kneeling behind me when he uses his hands to part my ass wide open, my slit pulses, flooded with wet desire. I wondered what torture he planned to do next when a finger teases my clit pressing down and moving in a deliciously slow figure eight pattern.

“Oh god.”

“You better be coming with my name on your lips.” His fingers bite into skin parting my legs wide exposing my core to him from behind. His breath heats me as his tongue touches without hesitation. Long and wide, his wet flat tongue strokes over me, my juices dragged up toward my forbidden star. Each touch makes me flinch, the puckered skin contracts and I hear him laugh. “We’re not ready for that yet.” He kisses my ass with a loud smack and pulls me up, his arm around my middle again as he turned my hips and made me face him.

“Lorand.” For a fleeting moment, I’m not sure I want him to have any part of me like this, slightly mad and rough no matter how feverish with desire and drenched I feel.

“Oh, I think so.” Still kneeling at the end of the couch, one hand holds mine over my head and his body keeps my legs open to his view. “Look at how you try so hard to keep me out when you so badly want me in. Your honey is pouring out for me and your center clenches waiting for me to fill it.” To make his point, Lorand leans over me and kisses between my thighs, licking and sucking my lips as if he were kissing my face, open mouthed. It’s the filthiest kiss imaginable as he tongue fucks me, lapping my juices up. His free hand begins to play and part my lips gently opening them wider for his mouth to fit against me. A blunt fingertip circled the center but doesn’t penetrate me, merely knowing that he could spear me, deeply plunging inside makes me contract with wanting and all because he denies me the very thing I crave.

“Lorand, please.” His nose moves up and down against my clit, his wide chin lightly peppered with stubble grazes my thighs. I’m dizzy and drunk on just Lorand. He has reduced me to shameless begging and nothing else mattered except fulfilling the need to have him over me and inside me pounding away.

“Perhaps another time, love.” Abruptly, he pulled away and shoved my legs closed holding them together. The warm stickiness cooled quickly leaving me desolate from denial. Leaning up on my elbows, my dress still shoved above my hips and exposed, I squinted watching him with blurred lines of color wipe away my juices from his face. I didn’t think I would like punishments like this, but my body continues to hum and pulse with desire for him.

“I thought we were done leaving things unfinished?” I pushed my dress down covering my vulnerability.

“I’m sorry, Jude. I’m mad you left the house, but I’m angry with myself more. I feel like we should be taking things slowly, getting to know each other, but it’s a whole lot of fucked up between us and I don’t know that we have the time to wait.” His words are cryptic as usual since he gave up being the silent type.

“It’s only fucked up because you let it be.”

“Mouthy, you are.”

I counter with a saucy retort. “Too silent you’ve been.” Our breaths are unsteady yet matched as our body heave against each other finding a new rhythm.

“Your eyes are so beautiful.” He turned to me and cupped my face in his hands obviously looking at me close up. It feels unsettling and disarming, intimately exposing me more so than a stupidly rumpled dress.

“These broken things?” We’ve been down this road before.

“Stop it Jude. I wish you could for one moment see what I see when I look at you. Your eyes are a focal point, yes, but they are not what define you. They are darkest shade of brown I’ve ever seen.” He pushes out a ragged breath continuing. “My mother had a jacket she wore often when I was a child. It was velvet. Soft and rich, so much like your eyes and even though you can’t see clearly, they reflect every emotion that crosses your face. If you played poker, your eyes would be your tell.

“Yeah, a real shitty one.” I tried to get him to let me go but he held on tight and I gave up.

“Take a compliment would you. Otherwise, we can go back to orgasm denial if you like.” He’s teasing me, but he’s serious and I shivered thinking about what else we might do. Instead, I decided to use the moment to get more details from him. I knew a rare opportunity when I
felt
one.  

“What happened to your mother?” I asked touching him, connecting us as much as I could. His silence denoted he was pulling away from me and I couldn’t let that happen. “No, tell me, please.” I grabbed for him and his hands wrapped cruelly around my wrists, thick manacles keeping me still.

“She died heartbroken when my sister’s missing person’s case was closed.”

“Your sister?” I pushed up against him until he released me and I gathered him close to me, his head resting against my breast. I soothed him by rubbing the tension from his neck and pressing my fingers into his softly shaven head. I vaguely remember her missing, but I was young and overheard my parents saying she hooked up with some guy and ran off after the spring semester from school.

“Yes. She’s–Ah god she’s the reason I’m in your life.”

“How?”

“I had been looking for the men responsible, the ones who took her and it led me full circle back to you.”

“Me?”

“The man I was meeting at the club is my mentor. I owe him several debts which I hope to repay.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am a hunter, little mouse. I track down men who have hurt others. Who have hurt children and women.” His hands stroked down my flanks as if to soothe me. What is said next fills me with trepidation. “Jude, I kill them for money.”

“Oh Lorand.” My hand covered my mouth, shocked by his confession, and he pulls it away kissing each fingertip.

“Please Jude just hear me out.” I’m shaking my head no. I’m scared, worried and numb. “I’ve done a lot of bad things. Things that make me unworthy of you.” Lorand is pleading with me and all I can do is sit there absorbing his confession.

“You murder them for money?” Cold is the only sensation I feel and he rubs my skin like it will change what he’s just told me.

“Yes. I’m given a contract and I’m paid to do really bad things to people who have no right to share the air you breathe.” His hands drop from me and I stand unsteady. I reach out for the wall falsely hoping to stabilize the fissures in my heart that steal my ability to anything but stand there frozen.

“Be honest with me.” Could I tell if he was lying to me?

“You mean the details?”

“No. Please not that,
the other
. I need to hear why, something that rights the wrong. Something that explains why you do what you do.”

“Nothing makes it right. I made choices and they haunt me every day.”

“I will hear you out before I pass any judgements…but I can’t promise I won’t be hurt or disappointed….” I didn’t know what to be or what I expected him to say next.

His breath makes a hitched sound, a puff of air forced from his lungs. “You don’t remember, but Lacy used to babysit you as a kid.” Her face comes back to me, it’s something I remember because she was so kind, so good and loving.

“Oh, but I do remember. She was always so happy and she sang songs all the time. The voice of an angel, she was…wonderful.” My reminiscing is interrupted by Lorand’s icy and detached voice. Clearly we are remembering two very different pasts.

“And they killed her. Sold her more precisely into sexual slavery. She was taken and everyone was told she ran away. They spinned a story that she followed her dreams to Nashville except she never got there. Didn’t even bring her guitar.”

“Who said that?” I needed to know.

He ignored me and kept going. Reaching out to touch him, he shook and when my hand cupped his cheek, it was his tears that I felt hot and wet on my skin. “None of that was true, of course, but it was the lies they fabricated which made the case an easy one to close as a runaway. It destroyed my mother.”

“That’s awful, Lorand, but you said you found them? The men who did this. Did you make them pay, did you k-kill them?” I was scared, but not for the rational reasons I should be.

“All but one.”

Fourteen

LORAND

“Tell me who they are.” Jude took my hands and opens the palms smoothing them out. I hadn’t realized I’d been clutching my hands together so tightly until now.

“Robert Beringer, Beau Lassons, and Kendrick Halstad.” Each name burned as I voiced them.

“They were the Academy’s Administrator’s before they elected a chancellor to take over the school.” Gasping because that original chancellor could have been her mother had she not left for the east coast. Taking my hand back from hers, I pressed against the crease in her forehead smoothing the skin.

“Smile. I don’t like to see you frowning.” I tell her.

“The things you do…”

“They are bad people.” Frowning, I begged her to understand.

“Don’t justify it.” It’s amazing how blind eyes can still pass judgement and I’m trapped under her glare left wanting.

“I’m not. But it is what I do.”

“I don’t believe you’re that person.” She has no idea the kind of person I am. I destroyed a science lab to rid the world of that scum and instead nearly killed her.

“This is the truth. I didn’t speak to you because I was afraid you’d figure out it was me.” She gives me nothing so I continue my story instead. “Those men are all dead now. Two by my hand in the explosion and Halstad by cancer.”

“Right.” I kiss her lips before each sentence.

“What do you know about Sorenson Walker?”

“My uncle?”

“Your uncle, Sorenson Walker, is my mentor. He practically owns me. I need to be careful with you and anyone involved in my life.”

“I’m done being protected Lorand.”

“You say that now, but you don’t have any idea what that means. What that means to people who wouldn’t think twice about hurting you to get to me.”

“So explain it to me.” She punches the couch, tears brimming in her dark eyes.

“I’m trying too,” Jesus she made me frustrated at times. “Your little girlfriend just about offered you up to one of the biggest assholes in this town.”

“I’m blind, not an idiot.”

“Then for once shut up and let me do the talking.” She gasped and I’m immediately feeling contrite. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. Continue.” Subdued she urges me to keep going though that’s the last thing I want to do.

“All that travel he does, it’s to negotiate contracts for hired killers, assassins like me.”’

“I guess I never really thought his airplane parts job was completely legit.”

“Oh it is, but that’s his cover. I meet with him once a month, usually on a Friday and that’s how I saw you there with Ella.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“It kind of serves me right; I just wish she hadn’t set you up with Ken. That’s complicated things enough.”  

“What do you mean?”

“Kenneth Halstad is Kendrick Halstad’s son.”

“Ella’s Ken?”

“Yes.” I can feel the veins in my body ready to pop and I’m glad in that moment she can’t see me.

“Can you forgive me?” Jude is looking down and our clothed bodies are a mess of limbs and twisted fabric.

“What on earth would I need to forgive you for?” She floored me saying this and guilt washed over me like dirty water.

“I let Ella do what she did to me because I was angry and spoiled I didn’t get what I wanted from you. I didn’t understand why you would pull me in and then push me away.”

“I tried to walk away from you, but I simply couldn’t. I was drawn to you in a way that terrified me. That’s why I would see you but then I would wait months at a time before I came back. You were still so young to me; you still are young to me and what I did back then. It was abominable.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know.” I tapped her nose gently emphasizing my point.

“Tell me then.”

“You are something uniquely special to me and I’m afraid I am undeserving of your forgiveness.”

“I think we’ve both been so damaged by life and circumstances we’re afraid.”

“Jude, you scare the shit out of me.”

“How could I possibly scare you of all people?” She squeezed the muscles in my arms playfully and I knew I had to tell her.

“Because I’m the one who set the explosion at the school, you need to be wary. I’m not a good man. I should have checked that building a hundred times instead of ten. You weren’t supposed to be there. No one was.” I laid my head against her and let the tears I felt go. Her hand cupped my cheek brushing them over with her fingertips.

“I forgave you a long time ago. I think I’ve always kind of known it was you that day. Nothing else made sense.”

“I can’t forgive myself.”

“You can hold onto that guilt like a sinking anchor because nothing I say will make you forgive yourself, but I’m freely offering you my body, my trust, and my surrender.”

“You have no idea what that means and because I know better than you that there is no turning back once I’ve been there. What you’re offering is a gift and I’ll be certain you don’t forget its parting.”

“Flowery words coming from a man who never had a conscious before.”

“Because that’s the power you have over me forever and always.”

“And to think Ella could have satisfied the ache you created within me.”

“We both know that was your way of punishing me and in the end I had to save you anyway.”

“No need to be so smug about it.”

“Just stating a fact sweetheart.”

“Ella was a distraction and a poor choice.”

“I know.”

“So…do you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. I’ve handled things poorly and created a mess with Sorenson among other things to clean up.” I embraced her and rested my head between her breasts. We’ve got a learning curve ahead of us. She was blind, but she saw through my bullshit and owned my soul.