Dark Sins and Desert Sands

by Stephanie Draven

  She noticed him staring, and self-consciously tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “Are you going to come in?”

  “That depends,” Ray said. “Are you going to run away from me again?”

  “No.” Her voice strained with emotion and she reached for him. “Ray…”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, because he couldn’t bear for her to see how much he liked hearing her say his name. He’d pulled her into his dungeon memories because he wanted to force her to remember, but now he wished he hadn’t. She’d seen his powerlessness. She’d seen him as he never wanted anyone to see him. It’d been more intimate than anything else they’d done together.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, taking his hands and drawing him into the cabin. “I’m sorry for what I saw inside your memories, and I’m sorry I ran from you. When I turned on the news, they were calling you a kidnapper, and a murderer, and a terrorist. I just got scared.”

  He forced himself to shrug. “Even after what we did last night, you didn’t trust me?”

  “I didn’t trust myself. I don’t even know who I am. I can’t trust my memory. I can’t even believe in my own sense of right or wrong. I used to think that I didn’t remember my life but at least I had values that were important to me. Now I find out that I’ve been involved with things I can’t accept. So I didn’t know what to believe.”

  “And now?” Ray asked, closing the door behind him and locking it.

  She put her hand on his shoulder, her lips brushing his neck. “The only thing I trust is this.”

  It was like that for him, too. Maybe it was because he’d been deprived of the most basic human contact for so long. Imprisoned, the only time anyone else’s skin ever touched his was when it came in the form of a closed fist. Touching Layla was more than sex; it helped him remember his basic humanity.

  The scent of her hair was in his nostrils and he had to back away to get himself under control. She’d been his interrogator, his tormenter, and now she was his lover. None of it made any sense. “Are you still afraid of me?” he asked quietly, his voice a whisper by her ear. “Of my powers.”

  “Yes,” Layla replied softly. “But I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of Seth. I’m afraid of my past. And I’m afraid of you, because when I’m with you, I feel things. I want things. I remember things, and I don’t know if it’s going to be my destruction or my salvation.”

  It was a perfect echo of his own emotions. She’d already helped steal two years of his life from him and now he was wanted for kidnapping her. She could be the ruin of him. Yet, he hungered for the soothing balm of her caress as if she could save him from the raging monster inside. His hands went to her hair, threading through the dark strands as he kissed her. They stumbled back together and he pressed her against the door. They were aligned now, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, his hardness pressing against her belly. He thought she might stop him, but her fingers unfastened his buckle as if she were more eager for this than he was. He wasn’t controlling her now. She was doing this on her own, and it made something squeeze in his chest. “Layla, I don’t want you to do this because you feel guilty.”

  She answered him by slipping out of her panties and letting them fall to her ankles.

  That was the end of his self-control. He plucked her up so that she had no choice but to wrap her arms around his shoulders. She felt featherlight in his arms, but he worried that the weight of his desire might crush them both. He wanted to be inside her. Needed to be. He pressed her against the wall and anchored her pelvis with his, feeling the beckoning heat between her thighs. He used one hand to unfasten his pants and pull himself out. She was still a very tight fit, but gravity helped draw her down onto him this time. She whimpered and he felt her insides spasm around him.

  He didn’t want to hurt her. He didn’t ever want to hurt her, so he tried to go slow, but her mouth found his ear. “Don’t stop,” she whispered, wrapping her bare legs around his waist.

  “I didn’t kidnap you,” Ray said, not sure what he was saying, only that he needed to say it.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  The pace of her breathing and the way she clenched around him threatened to make him unravel, but there were still things he had to say. “I’m not a traitor.”

  “Ray, I believe you,” she whispered. “I believe in you.”

  It made all the difference. She knew what he could do. What he could make her do. Yet, she was giving herself to him completely. He braced himself, ignoring the jingling of his belt buckle around his legs, and banged her back against the wood-paneled wall.

  Layla felt as if she might never touch the ground again; they hadn’t even bothered to undress. She hadn’t taken the time to think or consider or analyze it. It just happened. It wasn’t perverse or demeaning; her body simply recognized the demands of his and wanted to meet them. Now he was inside her so deeply that it edged upon discomfort before easing into bliss.

  If either of them had protection with them, maybe she’d have asked him to use it, but what happened with Ray crossed boundaries of skin and bone. A latex barrier would have seemed like an abomination. As before, Ray filled her, leaving no room for doubts.

  “You’re so sexy,” Ray murmured.

  What’s more, she felt sexy. Every time her back hit the wall, she marveled at the way lust tightened in her belly, how her nipples hardened, how her skin burned. She thrilled at each discovery. She delighted in the way that her body wasn’t just a prison. It wasn’t just a container to keep her from escaping. It was an instrument of pleasure. It was made of give and take. Hands that stroked the flexing muscles of his broad back as he moved. Thighs that strained around his waist, urging his release and her own. Wet folds that made him groan. She was doing this and it belonged to her. The sweat, the sighs, the shivers and chills.

  All hers.

  “I’m close,” Ray said by her ear, as he moved inside her.

  She wanted to beg him to look into her eyes and send her into soaring orgasm, but she wouldn’t ever ask him to use his powers again. “Don’t wait for me,” she said. “You know I can’t.”

  She thought he’d accept that answer, but Ray somehow found it within himself to stop. Shuffling through the tangle of his pants, he carried her to the bed where they collapsed on the mattress together, never separating. He positioned himself over her so that every time he stroked into her, his thumb brushed against her in the most sharply pleasurable way. “Oh, God.” She moaned frantically, rotating her hips, not sure if she were trying to escape him or get closer. “What are you doing?”

  “Turning you on,” he said, slow strokes sending a screaming need up and down her body. “Stop fighting it.”

  She wasn’t fighting it! She wanted it, ached for it, but some part of her wouldn’t let it happen. A stuttering breath forced its way up from inside her as her climax danced tauntingly close but just out of reach. The rush of arousal was in her ears like the roar of a waterfall, but she couldn’t get over the edge. “Please,” she whimpered.

  “Layla, this time you have to do it. It’s not real unless you let go completely.”

  Her nails dug into the mattress, fists closing on the quilt beneath her as he stroked slow and steady inside. Her thighs were locked around his waist, but she could feel them quiver. The shadow of his broad shoulders moved over her, again and again as he thrust into her, and animal sounds came from her throat.

  She thought she heard him say, “You’re going to come, Layla. You are.”

  “No, I can’t,” she wailed. She felt defenseless, left wide open and raw. The closer she got to the edge, the more exposed she felt. “Just stop.”

  “You’re safe with me,” Ray said. “Whatever you show me.”

  “No, no, I can’t!” she cried.

  Then she did. The orgasm wrestled its way up until she broke the surface with it, gasping for air like a drowning woman. The sensation churned her insides with exquisite pleasure until she was pulled fully into the underto
w. This orgasm was hers, and she claimed it, as if she had every right to it. Every right. Her screams harmonized with his sharp cry as he shuddered into a climax of his own, emptying himself inside her.

  She didn’t remember exactly what happened next. She only remembered the after-spasms that rocked her as Ray enveloped her in his arms.

  Chapter 13

  My touch starves the guilty

  My army feeds the poor

  The preachers use me weekly

  But the sinners need me more.

  Salvation or damnation. Looking at Layla, he still couldn’t say which she was. He only knew that she’d wrecked him. Utterly wrecked him. He’d been desperate for her, but she’d been more desperate for him. He’d never felt needed in bed before. Wanted, yes. Lusted after, sure. But needed? No.

  She’d let herself be safe in his arms, and now he felt a very real responsibility to never, ever let her down. Watching her as she slept, he thought he’d kill anyone who ever tried to hurt her.

  When her eyelashes finally fluttered open, she said, “You don’t have to keep watch. I’m not going to run away.”

  He felt himself flush. “Maybe I just like looking at you.”

  She lowered her lashes. “I’m not a statue.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re a puzzle. This whole thing is a puzzle. A little new for me.”

  “You’ve never slept with a woman before me?”

  “Sure, I have,” he said, and he wasn’t lying. Serving four tours of duty made it difficult to maintain relationships, but there’d always been willing women that he cared about. Maybe even thought that he loved. It just hadn’t been like this.

  “For some reason, I thought you were a Muslim,” Layla murmured.

  “I am… I was. I dunno,” he fumbled to explain, caught off guard. “My family practiced progressive Islam. My mother only wore a hijab to the mosque. My father and I were less devout. He liked to say that he’s more Greek than Syrian.”

  Thinking about his family made him wonder how they’d reacted to his disappearance. It may have been his mother’s instinct to wear down her knees in prayer, but he was equally sure that his father would have seen Ray’s disappearance as one more reason not to believe in God. And Ray wasn’t sure he could blame him.

  “Mostly, I grew up just like everybody else,” Ray said.

  “Ah. All very Americanized.”

  Was that judgment he heard in her voice? He’d spent two years being told how un-American he was. He didn’t feel like debating whether or not he was a bad Muslim. “Yeah. Well, I drink but I don’t get drunk. I don’t eat bacon if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  He knew that wasn’t what she was wondering. Strict Muslims weren’t supposed to have sex outside of marriage. Then again neither were Christians or Jews but nobody seemed to bat an eyelash when they lived their lives according to their own rules. His family had always fasted during Ramadan and venerated all the prophets including Mohammed, Moses and Jesus. But Ray had also been raised to believe in the autonomy of the individual in interpreting the Qur’an. Ray had never seen anything wrong with enjoying a woman’s company in bed or out of it.

  Layla shifted so that her head was on his shoulder. He liked the way her hair fanned out on his arm. It was dark and shiny as ebony. She pressed her lips to an old, faded military tattoo on his arm. A bald eagle. “Your family must have been proud of you when you joined the army.”

  “They were actually pretty pissed,” Ray confessed, and not just about the tattoo, which his mother denounced as a defacement of his body. They were also angry that he enlisted. He was supposed to be an engineer like his father, or a lawyer like his brother. He was supposed to go to college and get the fancy education his parents had saved up for all their lives. Instead, the day after his eighteenth birthday—ten days after his brother blew his brains out—the Twin Towers in New York City came tumbling down. The whole world seemed to be falling apart, and enlisting seemed like the only way to fix it. He didn’t know how to explain all that to Layla, so he said, “The military needed translators and I spoke Arabic. It made sense at the time. Each tour of duty, I spent about eighteen months fighting in the Sandbox, then a year stateside training other soldiers.”

  Her fingers idly traced his arm. “With skills like yours, you could’ve made a lot more money as a civilian contractor…”

  “Probably, but I’m not a damned mercenary.” He hadn’t meant it as a rebuke but the wounded look in her eye told him that she’d taken it personally. He just kept talking, hoping to push past it. “In any case, eventually the army bonuses were lucrative enough that I could help my parents out. They’ve had a tough time raising my nephews. Kids are expensive.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she murmured, and disentangled herself from his arms. He was already blowing it, and he wished he knew what he’d said wrong, but before he could ask, she said, “There’s something I need to show you. I don’t know if it will give you the answers you’re looking for, but maybe you can make more sense of it than I can.”

  He sat up and his gaze was still lazy and lustful as he watched her smooth her denim skirt back over her hips. It gratified him to see that she stood on shaky legs. She padded over to the closet and showed him the safe, opening it to reveal a stash that would be the envy of any government operative. Money. Guns. Official documents under different aliases. His eyes widened and he pulled his pants back on, coming to her side in three strides.

  “What do you think it means?” Layla asked.

  “I dunno,” he said, flipping through her passports. “You don’t recognize any of this stuff?”

  “I was hoping you might.”

  Ray explained, “I helped gather intel but I don’t know shit about serious spook stuff.” That’s when he noticed she was holding a folder. Clutching it, really. “You gonna show me what’s in that?”

  She drew her lips together and shook her head, but didn’t stop him when he pulled the folder from her fingers. Ray wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see inside, but the photos of the dead men shook him. Strangled men, hanged men, asphyxiated men. “What the hell is this?”

  “I don’t know,” she breathed. “Suicides. I think some of them are men who killed themselves at black ops sites. I think I questioned them.”

  Ray slammed the folder shut, trying to block out the way the word suicide still echoed in his ears. It was an ugly word. One that sent his mother into shrieking hysterics. One that left him with a hollowness inside that wouldn’t ever go away. Sweat broke out across his brow and the air seemed stifled. How hadn’t he noticed how small this room was before?

  It didn’t seem possible that it could fit the two of them and the bed, too. “I need some air.”

  She followed him out onto the deck in the back, and he had a hard time looking at her. He kept his gaze steady over the desert below. “I’m sorry. I have trouble with—”

  “Enclosed spaces,” she finished for him.

  Ray marveled at the grandness of the view, the golden arc of beauty as the sun set over the mountains. They really were alone out here. There wasn’t another cabin for miles. “I guess I’m claustrophobic.”

  “It’s post-traumatic stress disorder,” Layla said. “I know what you’ve been through, Ray. I saw it in your mind.”

  “Is there a cure?”

  She hesitated. “Sometimes. Therapy sometimes helps. After what you’ve been through, I think you’re going to need a lot of it. When all this is over, you’re going to need to trust somebody.”

  “Right now, I only trust this,” Ray said, pulling her into his lap, and she smiled at the way he echoed her earlier words. They sat together watching butterflies dancing amongst the desert flowers, when her stomach growled.

  “Are you hungry?” Ray asked.

  She nodded and looked a little bit astonished. “I actually think I am. I want to shower, and get dressed, and eat something…delicious.”

  “I didn’t see anything but beans and soup in your pant
ry,” Ray said. “But I’ll give it a shot if you want to go ahead and get cleaned up while I cook.”

  “You want to cook? For me?”

  “Don’t expect five-star service, but I can heat up some soup.” He took another deep breath of the great outdoors. It steadied him. “Just go and shower and it’ll give me a few minutes to get myself together.”

  In the shower, Layla remembered. She remembered all of it.

  Like a crumbling antechamber of an ancient pyramid, something inside her gave way and the buried treasure came spilling forth in all its beauty and horror. One minute the warm water of the shower was running down her back. The next moment, Layla was the cracked earth of the desert, soaking up the rain. She was made of sand and stone. Her veins were the burrows of scarab beetles and the blood that flowed inside her was that which had been spilled in the war above, the red syrup of mortal life that soaked into the ground. Her heartbeat had been the thunder of chariots, the march of men, with spears and swords. Her only tears, the milk of the cactus and her only companions had been the swift-striking vipers that slithered over her skin.

  Seth had changed all that. She remembered that now. He was no stalker ex-husband, no shadowy government contractor, no mortal man at all. He was the Scorpion King, god of Egypt, ruler of the desert, and her creator. With his hands running red with the blood of his vanquished foe, Seth had pushed them into the sand and molded her to life. Layla’s first breath had been the arid one he’d breathed into her. Layla had lived thousands of lives in thousands of years, and never aged. She was warborn, created to serve a war god.

  There was nothing that could have prepared her for this truth. No notes that she could have left herself that would have ever convinced her that she wasn’t human. As the memories continued to flow over her, Layla pressed herself against the shower wall and slid to the floor. She crouched there, in the steamy shower. A wretched noise heaved itself out of her, something keening and filled with loss.

  “Layla?” She heard Ray’s voice from the other room. She didn’t answer. She just went to her knees, unsteady and sick, wondering—if she were really made of sand—why the water didn’t just wash her down the drain. Seth had fashioned her into something lasting, something to serve him through the ages, that’s why. And she’d been a fool to ever think there was a way to escape him.