“Damnit …” She whines, forcing herself to regain some self-control. “Finish on your own.” She backs away from him.
“Wait.” He grips her hips. “Don’t go. I’m close already.”
He clutches at her so frantically, he pulls her off balance. She stumbles forward, catching herself against the back of the chair, practically leaning over him, the arm of the chair jutting awkwardly into her thigh.
Finding that position to his benefit, Alex moans.
“Stay there.” He thrusts a keen hand under her shirt and seizes her breast. “I’m gonna come.”
Usually, Alex is tender and gentle.
Not tonight.
He squeezes his hand around her breast, pushing and pinching it, fondling her clumsily and desperately. At one point, he hurts her and she winces, biting back a yelp of pain when he catches her sensitive nipple with his nail, digging into her.
Oblivious to her discomfort, he finds his release. With a stifled growl of pleasure, his shaft pulses, and he massages the head of his cock until he’s spilled all over the floor between them. As soon as he’s done, Silver wrenches herself away from him, her cheeks flushed with anger. It’s all she can do not to slap him.
“Don’t ever do that again, you selfish prick,” she snarls in a low whisper, then snatches up the blankets and leaves.
When she returns to the living room, Luka—curled up in one of the armchairs—can tell that something’s wrong. Her shirt is riding up on one side, her cheeks still flaming, her eyes wet with tears she refuses to let loose.
“Is everything okay?”
She nods, unwilling to divulge any part of what happened upstairs, finding the whole incident strangely humiliating. In silence, she hands him one of the blankets and retreats to the couch. A few minutes later, Alex enters the room, buckling his belt.
Luka watches him try to make eye contact with Silver, but she pointedly ignores him, tucking herself up and turning her back to the room, ready to go to sleep.
Sleep doesn’t come, though.
When Luka wakes in the middle of the night, he finds her gone. Treading lightly, so as not to wake Alex in the other armchair, he creeps out of the living room to look for her, and eventually finds her outside the cottage, on the back deck. The scent of cigarette smoke is wafting all around, and he’s surprised to see her with one of Alex’s cigarettes in her hand.
“Should you be doing that?”
“Probably not.” She draws the poison into her lungs anyway.
“You’re not gonna take up the habit again, are you?” He joins her at the deck railing, staring out into the moonlit forest.
“Fuck, no. I just needed something to take the edge off.” She puts the cigarette back to her lips. “It was either this, or the bottle of rum I found in the pantry.”
Luka isn’t sure how to respond to that. This is probably the longest period of time she’s gone without alcohol in a good while.
“How many days sober are you?”
She holds up four fingers.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he feels compelled to ask.
She shakes her head, inhaling more poison. “I can’t sleep is all. This little adventure of ours isn’t exactly shaping up the way I expected it would.”
Suspecting there’s more to her despondency than that, he digs deeper. “What happened between you and Alex tonight? What did he do?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t bullshit me, El. Did he force you to do something? Did he hurt you?”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If Alex fucked up like that.” She takes one last draw from the cigarette, smoking it right down to the filter. “The thing is, though: I can take care of myself. I don’t need a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me from my own husband.” She flicks the butt away.
Luka sucks in his cheeks, affronted. “That’s not why I was asking, but if you’re gonna be a bitch about it, forget I said anything.”
Silence descends.
Then, “Doesn’t it bother you that we left that man there to die in the city?” Silver pulls a one-eighty on the conversation.
Luka shrugs. “Who says he’s gonna die?”
“His prospects didn’t look great.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but ours aren’t so shit hot either. I’m aware that you don’t like it, but we need to put our own safety first. At least for the time being.” He tugs on her arm. “Now let’s get a few hours of sleep in before dawn.”
Silver allows him to lead her back to the living room, and they slip back into their separate sleeping areas without exchanging another word. They think they’ve managed to tiptoe back inside without waking Alex, but they’re wrong.
In the morning, both men wake to the sound of a woodpecker hammering on the chimney, and sunlight pouring in through the window.
They’ve overslept.
Alex glances over at the couch, but Silver’s things are packed up, and she’s nowhere to be seen. He calls her name, but receives no response.
He turns to Luka, his expression fierce. “Where is she?”
Luka sits up, snapping and popping his joints and rising into a yawn, rubbing night crusties from his heavy eyelids. “How the hell should I know?”
Alex’s right hip cracks when he gets up out of the armchair, his six-foot-four frame stiff after sleeping awkwardly in a scrunched up ball. “You tell me. You were the one sneaking around with her last night.”
“She was upset.” Luka challenges him with a glare. “Any idea why that could’ve been?”
Alex doesn’t answer, and both men make it their business to hunt her down. As it happens, Luka is the one fortunate enough to stumble upon her while she’s washing her hair in a small lake not far from the cottage.
He knows he should look away, but can’t bring himself to do so. She’s only wearing jeans and a bra, and he likes the way his cock responds to her. He takes a deep breath, feeling it move inside his clothing. If he concentrated, he could probably suppress his arousal, but it’s been a while and he needs the release.
So, convincing himself that it’s nothing more than a biological imperative—some sort of physical therapy—he quietly unzips his pants and fishes out his hardening cock.
In his hand, with Silver in full view, he becomes fully erect in a matter of seconds. Leaning against the tree behind him, he starts to stroke himself, feeling the veins start to pulse against his palm. Desperate to relieve the pressure in his groin—and afraid of getting caught—he doesn’t try to draw it out. He lets his climax build, his balls tightening right before the first jet of hot, thick liquid explodes out of his cock, quickly followed by another … and another … and one more. Afterward, he times his return to the cottage perfectly.
Alex is already there—having exhausted his search for Silver—and he doesn’t seem to think too much of it when Luka and Silver arrive simultaneously, but from completely different directions. In fact, he seems far more preoccupied with the fact that she’s found a use for the silk chemise he’d stuffed in her hold-all when they left Amaranthe: she’s using it to carry berries.
“Breakfast.” She dumps the stained chemise into his arms. “I already ate.”
Since none of them are in the mood for much conversation, they pack up and move on soon after, still heading blindly west, into more dense forest.
After walking for an hour or two—passing nothing spectacular—they stumble upon a handwritten sign staked into the ground on a large metal spike: No Taints Allowed. A few hundred yards later, another sign: Mercians Keep Out. And Silver spots one more: Delta Territory – No Trespassing. Could they have crossed the border already?
“Hey, guys,” she calls to Alex and Luka. “I think we’re—”
She hears the whoosh of the arrow, but doesn’t have time to react to it. The metal arrowhead rips into her shoulder, embedding itself there, and the world turns black as she hits the ground.
CHAPTER SIX
Silver is on
ly unconscious for a few seconds. When she comes to, having tumbled down a small embankment, Alex and Luka are kneeling by her side, and Alex is much too close for comfort. He leans forward to give her assistance and she flinches, reflexively pushing him away from her.
“Back off!”
Alex topples backwards and lands in a pile of leaves. “I’m trying to help you, El.”
“You can’t help me.” She lets Luka maneuver her into a seated position, leaning against a tree trunk. “I don’t want you anywhere near my blood.”
She looks down at her shoulder, the arrow tip completely buried in her flesh.
“What do you want me to do?” Luka puts pressure around the wound, Silver’s blood flowing over his fingers. “Should I pull it out?” He wraps his hand around the wooden shaft of the arrow, preparing to tug.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
An archer appears at the top of the embankment, a wooden bow in his hand, another arrow primed and ready to fire. He’s not a day over forty, his hair jet black, his eyes strikingly blue. Dressed in navy blue trousers tucked into knee high leather boots, with a matching fitted waistcoat over a white shirt, he looks quite handsome. He’s armed and clearly dangerous, but a pleasant specimen of manhood nonetheless.
“You shot me!” Silver booms at him.
“You’re trespassing.” He takes a few steps down the embankment, keeping his arrow trained on them. “Didn’t you read the signs?”
“We’re not Mercian.”
“Obviously.” He runs his eyes over her odd clothes. “So I suppose it’s just as well that’s not why we shot you.”
“What the hell is your problem, then?!” She glowers at him. “You sonofabitch!”
“We don’t like Taints.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” She catches on to the pronoun.
Giving the all clear with a flick of his head, he summons three more archers to appear: two men and a girl, all with different colored crests painted on their arrows near the fletchings.
The man standing on the embankment has a green crest, the man standing to his left has an orange crest, the other man has white, and the girl has purple.
Silver checks out the color of the crest on the arrow in her shoulder: purple.
“That’s right.” The green archer smiles. “I didn’t shoot you.” He looks proudly at the girl. “She did.”
“You people are batty.” Silver grits her teeth against the pain. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Your kind aren’t welcome here.” He steps closer, turning his arrow on Alex. “Taints shouldn’t be this far west, especially not brazenly flashing their violets. You’re lucky we only fired a warning shot.”
Silver does the sums. If Alex is a Taint because he has violet eyes, then Taint must mean infected.
“I’m not a Taint,” she offers up. “Neither is he.” She nods to Luka. “Or my baby.”
“Baby?” The green archer hesitates, looking around. “I don’t see a baby.”
“Quick biology lesson for you: babies don’t appear by magic. They live inside a mommy’s tummy for nine whole months, then, one horrible day, they emerge into the world via her cu—”
“You’re pregnant?” He cuts straight to the point.
“Yeah, you shot a pregnant lady,” Luka dives into the conversation, still trying to stem the bleeding. “I hope you’re pleased with yourselves.”
The green archer lowers his bow.
“Linx,” he calls to the girl. “Sniff ‘em out.”
Grinning, Linx slips her arrow into the quiver on her back, shoulders her bow, and skips down the embankment toward the trio of strangers. She’s dressed similarly to the green archer—they all are—but her pants are black leather, her waistcoat tighter. Up close, Silver can see that she’s the youngest of the group. Barely twenty, she’s petite and slender with a pale complexion. Her shoulder-length hair is tied in short pigtails and dyed dark purple, matching the crest on her arrows—a shade slightly darker than her eyes.
Her bright, violet eyes.
“You hypocritical bastard.” Silver glares daggers at the green archer. “She’s a fucking Taint.”
“She’s special,” he defends her calmly.
Silver can tell by his understated reaction that this likely isn’t the first time he’s had to explain himself, and Linx has the cocky demeanor of a girl who’s used to being protected and defended. She winks at Silver as she walks by, opting to start her assessment with the object of most interest: Alex.
She inspects him at close range, cocking her head to one side like an inquisitive dog. Very slowly, she walks around him, looking him up and down. When she gets back to his face, she leans in close and stands on tiptoe, inhaling his scent.
He smells faintly like cologne, more so like earth, and mildly of cigarettes. The cologne is an alien fragrance to her; it’s something not native to this land. The earth is a mixture of city and country, beginning east, in the Peak District forest. Layer upon layer on top of that traces his path through Manchester city, and into the forest here—straight into Delta territory.
When she’s done with her investigation of him, she moves on to Luka, giving him a brief once over before shoving her face into Silver’s hair.
“Get the fuck off me.” Silver elbows her in the ribs. Not hard enough to cause damage, but with enough force to make her reel back.
Linx laughs.
“Well?” the green archer prompts her.
“They’re foreigners.” She hovers near Alex, fascinated by his eyes. “They landed in the Peak District a few days ago. I’d say more than two, but less than a week. From there, they wandered into Manchester, but didn’t stay long. They’ve been traveling west ever since.” She points in Silver’s direction. “The woman’s telling the truth: she’s pregnant. Ten or twelve weeks, maybe.” She glances at Luka. “And he wanked over her a few hours ago, which probably doesn’t please this one”—she points a finger at Alex—“since I’m fairly certain they’re wedded.”
Alex scowls at Luka, but there isn’t a pause long enough to give him any chance to make a scathing comment.
“Wait a second.” The white archer scoffs at Linx. “They smell married?”
“No.” Linx rushes toward him and shoves him in the chest. “They’re wearing rings, genius.” She turns to grimace at the green archer. “Why did we have to bring him? He’s such a dick.”
“Don’t talk about your brother that way,” he admonishes her.
Brother, of course. The white archer is tall and lean, and only a few years older than Linx. They have the same nose, the same cheekbones, and he has the same color hair and eyes as their father, the green archer.
“What are we going to do with them?” Linx is talking to her father, but she’s looking at Alex, a small smile spreading across her lips. “I think we should take them with us.”
“We should leave them here,” the orange archer finally speaks, his bow still raised. “If they came from Manchester, there could be people after them.”
“So you’re going to leave my pregnant wife bleeding on the forest floor?” Alex glowers at him. “What kind of twisted fuck are you?”
The orange archer might be cold and heartless, but the green archer isn’t. Before his friend starts to run his mouth, he takes back control of the situation.
“The arrowhead is barbed.” He hands his bow off to Linx and rolls up his sleeves. “If you pull it out, it’ll cause too much damage. You have to push it through.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” Silver squeals at him. “You wanna put another hole in me?!”
“I’ve no choice. Yanking it out could tear a major blood vessel, and I have nothing here to stop the bleeding. But if you want to give it a try, go ahead.”
He stands back and waits, but Silver doesn’t need to think about it for long.
With a roar of frustration, “Fine. Do it.”
The green archer approves of her decision with a sharp nod and kne
els beside her, instructing Linx over his shoulder. “Take your brother and fetch the horses.”
The siblings do what they’re told, play fighting with each other along the way, while he sets about scrutinizing the trajectory of Silver’s wound.
“Lean forward,” he directs her, feeling gently around the arrow’s entry point and the back of her shoulder, carefully determining the best angle to force the arrow through on.
Close by, Alex—impotent and sidelined, much to his chagrin—watches with no small amount of jealousy and irritation as Luka rubs Silver’s arm in comforting repetition. His hands are covered in her blood, and so are the green archer’s.
“You can touch her?” he asks the archer, some of the envy seeping out in his voice.
“Of course I can touch her, I’m a Delta. Even if she were a Taint, I could still touch her—I’m immune.”
Silver catches sight of a brand on his left wrist—the same brand she saw on Tomkin—and she makes a connection.
“That’s what Delta means? Immune?”
The archer’s brow furrows briefly, bewildered by how little they seem to know about the country they’re in. “So where are you people from anyway?”
Silver opens her mouth to answer, but before she can form the first syllable, the archer pushes the arrow all the way through her shoulder.
Searing pain.
She cries out, her throaty yell echoing through the forest, causing a flock of birds to take to the air in a flutter of rapidly flapping wings and squawks.
“You cocksucker,” she whines breathlessly.
“Aiden,” he informs her. “My name is Aiden.”
He breaks off the softwood end of the arrow shaft below the fletching, then pulls the arrowhead out behind her, making her wince.
“This is my daughter, Linx,” he continues, pointing a bloody finger in her direction as she and her brother return with four horses. “My son, Cody”—he points the dripping arrowhead toward the white archer—“and the ugly one is my friend, Mason.”
Mason, the orange archer, grunts.
Aiden’s comment about his attractiveness—or the lack thereof—is meant to be jocular, but it’s plenty accurate. He’s in his forties, with graying hair and a slight paunch. His face is jowly and unshaven, his eyebrows bushy and thick. He’s nothing special.
Lex Talionis Page 6
