Authors: Shannon McKenna
He exploded with a shout. Jets of hot, pearly come spurted out, fountaining over her hands, breasts, belly. He sagged against the wet tiles, staring at his come spattered over her fair skin.
A deep, animal impulse swelled up, taking him over. Before he could rethink it, he was painting her with his come. The tips of her breasts. Her taut, puckered nipples, the heavy undercurves, her dark aureoles. The swell of her belly. That spot right over her heart. The hollow of her collarbone. Slowly, like a ceremony.
Like he was putting his stamp on her.
She didn’t object, just leaned against him, shivering. Her face was glowing red, soft mouth faintly open. Her breath came fast.
He could feel her heartbeat, tripping, frantic. She grabbed his hand, lifted it to her lips. Sucked come right off his finger. The wet heat of her mouth made something flare, flames doused with accelerant.
He grabbed her, kissed her like he’d die if he didn’t get his dose.
She wrestled away after a while. “Aaro,” she pleaded. “I can’t—”
“Shhh,” he cut her off. “Please don’t talk. Not yet.” He put his finger over her lips. Could not handle anything she might say right now.
She gulped back whatever it was, and let him hug her. They were glued together with his come. Teetering on his own private cliff.
He felt her start to shiver. Turned the hot water back on, sluiced them off. They dried off with somewhat mildewy towels Nina had found, and pulled their clothes back on, such as they were. He ached for his bag of tricks, the extra firepower, the computer, the various other toys and tools. The clothes, too. The ones he had were rank with fear sweat, stained with blood from the luckless Wilder. Nina’s were, too, but she just pulled them back on without complaint, sat down with a comb, and got to work on her hair. Aaro climbed onto the bed behind her, laying the gun beside him on the mattress, and tried to take the comb.
She hung onto it. “I can do it myself.”
“Please.” His voice still shook. “Please. It calms me down.”
She gave him a long, silent look, but let go, and did not protest as he started combing.
It was just what he needed. Something long, slow, and careful, so he could concentrate on letting his stress hormones level off.
Julie’s black hair had been wavy, not curly like Nina’s, but it still had gotten tangled into long, terrible fuzzy snarls, and the hell-bitch Rita would scream and threaten her with the shears. Until Aaro intervened. He’d made it his business to keep the hair situation under control. He’d gotten good at it. Even kind of liked it.
It was his and Julie’s little private thing.
By the time he’d combed out all of Nina’s hair, he’d finally gotten himself to the place where he could say the words. Her hair was almost dry. Ringlets twined around his hands as he finger-combed them.
“Julie was my sister,” he said. “Three years younger. Committed suicide when she was thirteen. Swam out into the sound one summer night, when we were at our father’s beach house. Never swam back.”
Nina listened quietly. “I know how that feels.”
He grunted, doubting it. “Do you.”
“Yes, I do.” Her voice was tranquil. “For me, it was my mother.”
She turned sideways on the bed to look at him, but he didn’t want to be looked at. His throat ached. He didn’t want to have this talk, he didn’t even want to know, but he’d launched this fucking thing, and it had its own implacable momentum. No way out now but through.
“So?” He couldn’t keep his voice from sounding angry. “How did she do it? Carbon monoxide, alcohol, heroin, razor blades? An oven?”
The words were like blows, but Nina did not flinch.
“She used pills. I knew she was depressed. She hated herself for not being strong enough to leave him. For not stopping what he’d done to me. I wish she’d been stronger, too. But we are what we are.”
“That’s the truth.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth.
“I still wish I could have saved her,” she went on. “I felt guilty for years. I dreamed about it, obsessed about it. But it’s up to us all to save ourselves, I think. There’s only so much you can do for another person. The rest, they have to do for themselves.”
Julie’s face swam in his mind, as she’d been when they found her. The gray lips, the wide, staring eyes. Her long hair twined with seaweed.
The words burst out of him. “I want to save you.”
She gave him that sweet, mysterious smile. “I know you do,”
she said softly. “Good luck with that.”
He wanted to say something sarcastic, to flick that away, maintain security distance. But his sarcasm machine was disengaged.
“I want to save you, too,” Nina said. “Though you wouldn’t need any saving if you weren’t unlucky enough to be hanging out with me.”
“Oh, I need it,” he blurted out. “I need it bad.”
Her eyes widened. Her smile was luminous and tender as she reached out to stroke his bristly cheek. “Promise me you won’t misbehave when you get all pissed off at yourself for saying that, OK?”
It was nice of her to try to bullshit him into a lighter mood, but it was a lost cause right now. “I don’t know if I can,” he said, his voice rough. “Save you, I mean.”
Her fingers trailed down his jaw. “Maybe not,” she said. “But one thing’s for sure. If we don’t make it, it won’t be for lack of trying. That’s one thing no one in the world could accuse you of.”
“Trying isn’t enough.” He rubbed his face, swallowing to calm down his shaking voice. “Fuck, Nina. I don’t have a plan. I don’t have shit. I’m nowhere with this. I don’t know what to do next.
I’m flying totally blind, and it’s driving me . . . fucking . . .
crazy.
”
She slid her arms around his waist. He seized her in a hug so swift and hard, she let out a little startled
oof
. “Shhh,” she soothed. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be flying blind with than you.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The perks are amazing. The sex alone—”
“Don’t make me laugh,” he warned. “It wouldn’t be a pretty sight.”
“OK,” she murmured. “We’ll think of something, Aaro. We’ll take it minute by minute. And I’ve got a good idea for the next few minutes.”
“Oh, yeah?” he demanded. “What’s that?”
“Food. You cooked. That was how you seduced me, remember?”
That seemed like a really excellent idea. The light from outside was all but gone, and Nina rummaged through kitchen drawers and found a flashlight with just enough juice to make a wan, brownish light for them to eat by. Nina unearthed a can of some strange tropical fruit juice, which he pried open with his all-purpose belt knife. The Lean Cuisines had cooled in the micro wave, but they were ravenous and didn’t bother reheating them, just ripped off the plastic and fell to. Nina went for teriyaki chicken and the Cordon Bleu. He inhaled lasagna, turkey and mashed potatoes, Mongolian beef. They guzzled bizarre papaya cocktail.
Afterward, he persuaded Nina to lie down on the bed, whether she managed to close her eyes or not. There was no point in him doing it. Whenever his body came to rest, it jolted instantly into compulsive movement again. Besides, he knew what would happen if he got into a bed next to Nina Christie again. Enough. She was tired.
He paced for hours, peering obsessively out the windows. The moon was up, blazing on the lake water, which was glassy and still. No wind at all. The night was holding its breath.
He went to peek in on Nina. She’d fallen asleep after all.
She’d borrowed a plaid flannel shirt from their hosts’ closet, which swamped her, reaching halfway down her thighs. He’d tucked a wool blanket around her sleeping form. Something about her slight shape, bundled under the bulky blanket, made his chest ache.
That was the moment he felt them. His balls started to itch.
The hairs on his neck prickled up. At first he thought it was paranoia. All this psychic shit, stress, and adrenaline, two nights of sleep deprivation, all getting the better of his good judgment and his objective perceptions. No way could they have been tracked to that place.
But he positioned himself at the window with a view of the main road, and waited, gun in hand. Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
Headlights, finally. Flickering through the trees. Cruising along the winding road, until they reached the approximate position of the driveway. The lights switched off. There was his answer.
Shit.
He went instantly cold, detached. Their hunters would use the moonlight to navigate the driveway, if they drove in at all.
Perhaps they would approach on foot. Running away would be useless in the dark, with the thick trees and the snarls of bracken, jagged rocks, and steep rocky cliffs looming behind. The place had morphed from haven to trap.
“They’re coming, aren’t they?”
He spun around. Nina stood in the doorway, her voice eerily calm.
“You felt them?” he asked.
“I don’t know if I felt them or you, but I felt something go zing.”
“Go outside,” he told her. “Now. Go out back, and hide in the woods. Move away, as far away as you can, and do your invisible thing.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you.”
He could tell from her calm voice that there would be no moving her. It made him frantic. “Goddamnit, Nina, we don’t have time—”
“There’s no point. I won’t make it one step without you,” she said. “So we’ll face them together when they come.”
Die together,
too, if it comes to that.
He heard the thought as it formed in her head, and then her gray-fuzz, staticky mind shield surged, and blocked everything.
He pulled the Micro Glock from the small of his back. “Take this,” he said. “Six shots. Like I said. Point and shoot. It’s easy.”
She took it, gazed down at it. “Do we, um . . . have a plan?”
“Sure,” he said. “We kill them.”
Lily ran her hands through Bruno’s hair. She loved the crisp texture of his wild black curls. “You should go on home,” she urged. “You’re tired, and Lena and Tonio are trying to stay awake for you.”
“I know.” He rested his head on her shoulder. “They miss you, too. We all do. It’s just not as much fun without you.”
“Ditto,” she replied. “But it’ll be over soon. Go on, go to them.”
Bruno shook his head against her shoulder. “I don’t want to leave you all alone with this,” he said, his voice muffled. “I fucking hate it.”
“You’re doing all you could,” she soothed. “There’s no one she could be safer with than Aaro. Plus, I think she, ah . . . likes him.”
Bruno lifted his head. “Really? You mean, like,
likes
him?”
“Yeah, I do mean,” she said. “He saved her life. Girls notice a thing like that. And he is extremely good looking. Girls notice that, too. That is to say, he is when he’s not scowling.”
“And when is that?” Bruno asked drily. “God help her, then.”
Lily leaned in to him, to get a deeper sniff of his aftershave.
“I’m worried about Miles,” she said. “He’s so thin, now. Hadn’t seen him since he ran off to Aaro’s lair. He must have lost thirty pounds. And then he had to witness . . . that.” She shuddered.
“Poor guy.”
“Don’t think about it,” Bruno commanded. “It’s bad for the baby.”
Lily snorted. “You try that yourself. See how far you get.”
“Just try. You have to try.”
“Whatever. Now Miles is compensating by playing hero.”
“There are worse ways to compensate,” Bruno pointed out.
He made no move to go, and Lily didn’t have the heart to push him again. They leaned against each other. Bruno reached around her belly, feeling the flop and roll of the baby inside.
Nuzzling her neck.
Tension suddenly gripped him, and she turned around to see him frowning intently at the bouquets against the wall.
“Who the fuck is sending red roses to my wife?” he asked.
Lily looked, startled. A dozen big, perfect, red roses, floating in baby’s breath, with a few spotted orange tiger lilies as well, making a weird, unconventional bouquet. She’d just assumed . . .
“You mean, those weren’t from you?” she said.
Bruno’s mouth went hard. “No,” he said. “They should have been, but I haven’t had time to go to a florist. When did they show up?”
“This morning sometime,” she told him. “I found them here.”
Bruno unwound his body from hers, slid off the bed, and crouched, examining the bouquet from closer range. “No card.”
He grabbed the stems, and lifted them out of the heavy vase of smoky, opaque glass, dripping copiously. He peered at the stems, then inside the vase. He reached in. Pried out a plastic disk with a stick-on side.
Lily drew in a sharp breath and opened her mouth, but Bruno shushed her. She clapped her hand over her mouth. He dropped the thing into a pitcher of water, and carried it out of the room.
He came back in, dead pale. “Were those flowers here when Miles was giving Aaro the directions to that house?”
Lily struggled to remember. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I noticed them after the fetal monitoring, right before Miles came in. I remember thinking, oh, how sweet, Bruno must have left them for me. Then Miles told us what happened to Kirk, and I forgot all about it.”
Bruno pulled out his phone, dialed. He waited, and waited.
He put his hand over his face. “Oh, shit.”
Aaro crouched just inside the bedroom door, and Nina inside the bathroom, clutching her Micro Glock. He’d decided that the unfamiliar terrain outside was too dangerous. The house at least had cover, right angles. His eyes were adjusted to the dark.
He had shut down all extraneous mental activity. The goal was to cap as many as possible, as fast as possible. He wished he had night-vision goggles. But he had what he had. Suck it up.
“Close the vault.” Nina’s whisper floated from her hiding place.
“Shhh.” He visualized vault doors slamming shut—but before he could stabilize the image, something gripped his mind, glom-ming on like a clutching hand, squeezing, probing, squishing . . .
His eyes watered, his head pounded, he sucked in air—what the
fuck . . . ?
“Aaro? Aaro, are you OK?” Nina’s whisper, louder.