He’d warned her more than once. He’d made it clear he wanted her more than once, that he was a danger to her, more than once.
He’d told her to leave.
He’d told her bluntly that if she didn’t leave, he might act on those things.
He could almost convince himself that if she stayed accessible to him now, after everything he’d told her, it wasn’t much different than consent.
The thought made his headache worse.
It also brought a coil of unwelcome shame, mixing a darker nausea with the separation pain he’d been feeling for coming on a week now. No amount of fucking Raven or Terian’s playthings seemed to help. No amount of blow or H seemed to help.
No amount of anything seemed to help.
If anything, his attempts to fill that lack only made it worse.
He still hadn’t gotten her damned name.
He was like a sex-starved adolescent with her, forgetting all of the relevant questions as soon as he tasted even the barest edges of her light. It had gotten worse in the intervening days since they’d first spoken. Even now, all he could think about was that green dress she’d worn, the light in her clear eyes as she’d studied his face.
He’d felt her heart, pieces of her aleimi that he couldn’t remember feeling on anyone, not even the young recruits while he taught them how to shield their light. They were young and this seer wasn’t.
She just had… more.
More in her light, more in structure, more in presence.
There was just more to her, plain and simple.
She had things in her light he couldn’t even understand, even as they turned him on to the point of complete distraction, making him want to offer her money to lie with him, or maybe just beg her or her mate for one night in their light together.
He knew the biggest resistance he had to forcing her at this point was that he might not get what he wanted, not if he tried to take it. She could probably keep him out of her light, even if she couldn’t keep him out of her body. She might close to him, and he wanted her to open. He wanted her completely fucking open… especially while he had his cock in her.
He wanted to look in her eyes, and know she felt him, too.
He knew how delusional the wish was.
He knew it, but he couldn’t seem to shake the want from his mind, especially when he could still taste her in his light.
She’d touched him.
He’d openly threatened to rape her and she’d touched him, standing so close to him he’d had to fight with himself to keep from touching her back.
He wondered if she had any idea how close he’d come to acting on that threat.
The thing was, he knew she’d meant what she said about having a mate.
He knew she hadn’t been teasing him about being bonded, either. The green-eyed seer hadn’t been teasing him at all, even when he tried to convince himself that she was, that she was toying with him, trying to get him to lose control, trying to seduce him. She hadn’t done that. He knew she hadn’t. He’d watched her light carefully enough, he should know. Rather than screwing with him, she’d been cautious with him.
Hell, she’d been almost… motherly.
She’d even tried to convince him that his reactions were normal.
Misguided, she’d seemed to think, but normal.
He didn’t care. He couldn’t make himself want to care.
The mate would probably come after him if he touched her. He’d probably try to kill him, but Revik couldn’t make himself care about that, either.
Fighting back and forth about whether he should walk back to the Caravelle, see if she was still registered there, he forced himself to walk past the plaza near the Caravelle instead, and then past the scorched front of the Grand to the river.
He made his way purposefully back to The Majestic, wondering if Terian had gotten back from securing the new recruits on board the ship. He wondered if Terry had returned to the suite alone, if so, or if he’d brought them more friends to play with, before they left for the jungle again tomorrow.
He also tried to remember if they had any heroin left.
Coke wasn’t going to help him right now.
Heroin might, especially if he shot up instead of snorting it.
He took the elevator to the floor housing their room, even though he normally used the stairs. He felt actively sick by then, sick enough that he figured he’d probably be kissing porcelain before he could keep down anything harder than water.
He glanced at himself in the elevator’s mirror and frowned at how pale he looked under the mirrored shades.
He looked like a human with malaria.
But seers couldn’t catch malaria, or most of the sicknesses that plagued their weaker cousins in this part of the world, thank the gods.
Maybe Raven was right.
Maybe he’d been doing too much H already.
Or maybe he just wasn’t eating enough to counterbalance what they’d been doing to their bodies just about every night for days now. Wiping his forehead, he stared at his damp palm, wondering at how much he was managing to sweat even inside the cooler hotel, right before he wiped his hand on his pants.
He still had a hard on, even though he felt like he was going to be sick.
He found himself wondering if he should go out trolling with Terian, assuming the seer hadn’t done so already.
Maybe he could find himself a young human, one who looked as much like the green-eyed seer as he could manage. Maybe he needed to go a little dark for a few days, get this thing out of his system before it drove him out of his fucking mind.
If he could find the right body, the right candidate, he might be able to expend the worst of his pent up aggression, especially with Terry’s help.
Terry would understand.
He didn’t want Raven along, but he could bring Terry.
In his own way, Terry could be kind of a genius with the psychology of things like this, including with Revik’s own psychology. Terry would have an opinion about how Dehgoies could best exorcize the green-eyed seer from his system.
Hell, he’d be eager to help.
More importantly, Terry would have ideas around how to get the bitch out of his light––which Revik strongly suspected was much more of the problem than his cock.
Terry was his friend. He’d be more than happy to help.
Knowing him, he’d probably get off on it.
Terry understood about obsession.
Terian lived for obsession, really, and actively seemed to cultivate it in himself. He was always trying to get Revik to join him on his little crusades for whatever thing he was on about this week or that week. He’d be thrilled to come along for this ride, especially if Dehgoies decided to ease up on his self-restraint a bit more than usual.
Terry had been telling him for years that he needed to start finding the occasional slave to dominate and fuck––for real, that is, not just as a game, the way Dehgoies sometimes did with Raven. Terian insisted that Dehgoies needed only to admit to himself that it was an appetite of his and stop denying himself.
He’d offered to walk Revik through it, even––to show him the ropes, so to speak––but Dehgoies had always declined up until now.
Maybe today was the day to finally say yes.
Terian claimed the desires would worsen with time, if he didn’t act on them.
He also said they’d probably come out anyway, and likely even more twisted than if Dehgoies just started being honest with himself and gave himself permission to have what he wanted every now and then.
Terry’s words felt true in a way.
Or more true than not, perhaps.
Even so, the idea made Dehgoies nervous.
He knew he tended to be a bit of a voyeur when Terry did it. It was an uneasy compromise, but one he’d learned to live with. It at least blunted the worst edges of those harder thoughts he still carried with him sometimes, without tipping him over that edge he felt, in that darker part of h
is light.
He didn’t know what he feared exactly. He didn’t even know the origins of those darker feelings, much less what they really wanted.
He did know that those desires brought up intense feelings of self-hate.
That alone had kept him from acting on them.
He tried to shove the feeling aside now, but couldn’t quite succeed.
Maybe getting Terry involved in his problems with the green-eyed seer wasn’t such a great idea after all. Terry was a little too in love with the dark he felt on Revik at times. Revik didn’t know if it was the dark itself that drew his friend, or something he felt behind it, or if the amber-eyed seer was just so insanely curious about Revik’s past, he was happy to swim through any manner of shit just to get a better look at it.
Whatever drew Terry, it wasn’t an abyss Revik particularly wanted to stare into.
Thinking about that now brought back the other day, the image of that fake Viet Cong seer that he’d shot at the drop spot on the outskirts of Bảo Lộc.
That same seer had stood back and let his seer sisters be raped and beaten with impunity, regardless of their age. Moreover, he’d shot the males who loved them when they kicked up too much of a fuss. The thought of doing that to another among his own people made him feel sicker than he felt already… sicker than he could really acknowledge, especially once it hit him that he’d been contemplating doing just that to the green-eyed seer.
Even the idea of a human slave didn’t appeal to him.
It certainly didn’t appeal to him in the way Terian had meant… not without consent, not if he’d picked up his friend’s intentions accurately from his light.
No, Revik wouldn’t be doing that.
He wouldn’t be doing either of those things.
He’d go back into the jungle, and he’d never see the green-eyed seer again.
When he got back to Saigon, maybe he’d ask Galaith to transfer him out of here, leave Saigon and the jungle and the heat and this whole damned war behind.
Maybe he’d just drink himself into a coma, instead.
Either way, he wouldn’t see her. He’d make sure he stayed away long enough to give her mate time to convince her to leave this place, to go home… before Revik did something he would regret for the rest of his life. If he got drunk enough, he might not even have to think about it again until tomorrow.
If he got drunk enough, he might not be sober until he was already hiking through the jungle. If he left her here again, he strongly suspected she would be gone when he returned.
Perhaps she was gone already.
Either way, he would request some leave time from Galaith. If his boss granted it, he’d go back to Europe for a while, clean himself up. He might even do it, too––clean himself up, that is––providing he went alone, without Raven or Terian.
He needed some time to get his head together. He’d been forced to deal in this shit hole of a war for far too long. He needed a break. He needed to sober the fuck up. He needed to go back to civilization, stop looking at whores and child seers and dead bodies.
He needed to look at something beautiful again.
He needed some time where he could just stop. He wanted to stop thinking, stop constantly fucking rationalizing, stop justifying his own actions to himself, stop telling himself unconvincing stories about the greater good.
Maybe he could go to the Swiss Alps, or the mountains in Bavaria.
Maybe he could just spend just a few fucking weeks not helping Galaith ship slaves from Southeast Asia to the New World.
The thought felt traitorous, almost.
Traitorous enough that he suppressed it, the instant it crossed his mind.
Even so, the intensity of feeling behind it shocked his light, lingering long enough to scare him. He tried to decide if this was a new feeling, if he’d ever felt like this before. He tried to decide if these sharper, angrier, seemingly clearer thoughts had been there all along, if he’d merely been suppressing them from himself until now.
What was making him think this way? Why now?
He’d thought he believed in what he’d been asked to do here.
It used to make sense to him, that the Org would take over the slave trade, rather than dismantle it. It was the most logical approach. It would keep the worms feeling like they controlled the wider population of seers, while providing an easy and relatively safe route from the remaining unaffiliated seer colonies to the ranks of the Org itself.
He’d approved the approach, goddamn it.
He’d been one of the few seers Galaith had pulled in to his design and decision-making session around their overall strategy in Asia. Revik had been the one to offer to oversee the initial implementation. He hadn’t been conscripted, he offered, telling Galaith he was happy to do the initial groundwork until they had things running smoothly.
That’s why he was fucking here.
Thinking about it now, that harder feeling lodged in his throat turned into something closer to fury. He barely saw the corridor as he walked down it from the elevator, fighting to control his light as the sickness worsened, trying to turn into something else.
That fucking cunt had completely screwed with his head.
She’d done something to him, twisted him around somehow.
Feeling his jaw harden as he approached the door to their suite, he fumbled his key out of his pocket without bothering to ping whoever might be inside.
He inserted the key into the door’s lock, hearing someone moving in there, hearing voices.
He didn’t bother trying to make out what they said.
Rather, he simply entered, using his other hand to jerk the handle open as soon as he’d turned the key. He saw two sets of eyes look up when he entered the room, but because he was still lost in his head, it took him a moment to make sense of the expressions on their faces.
“What?” he growled.
Stopping just past the doorway, he looked between Raven and Terian warily.
They weren’t sitting on the couch, or any of the crushed velvet chairs.
Instead they stood in the middle of the room, half-facing one another, as if they’d been in the middle of an argument, or some kind of heated discussion. Dehgoies could almost envision them in mid-gesture before he’d shoved open the door and walked into the room.
Now they both stared at him.
Their faces each bordered on caught-looking, although they expressed their surprise and defensiveness in different ways.
Raven’s expression turned aggressive, bordering on overtly hostile.
Terian, if anything, looked relieved to see Dehgoies standing there. Even so, the amber-eyed seer looked over Revik’s body in a few flickering glances. Terry noted his pallor with something like alarm, and possibly the sweat that soaked his shirt.
“My friend. Are you all right?” Terian said. “What is wrong?”
Before Dehgoies could think about answering, Raven cut him off.
“Where have you been?” She pressed her lips together as she looked him over with a less-sympathetic eye. Her voice sharpened, growing louder. “Well? You’ve been gone for hours. Since the middle of the fucking night.”
He gave her a flat stare. “And?”
“And? Where the hell were you? Where were you Dags?”
His mouth tilted in a frown. “Do you seriously expect me to answer that?” He grunted, looking between their faces. “Why the fuck would I? Do I work for you now? Do I work for Terry? Did something change in the pecking order here I’m not aware of?”
Her eyes narrowed.
He’d never pulled rank on her before.
He may have actually shocked her by doing so now.
When he only held her gaze, silent, she bit her lip, as if fighting back harder words.
By then, Dehgoies had noted the more manic look in her eyes, along with the extreme dilation of her pupils. Frowning more subtly that time, he glanced around the room, spotting the mirror on the main table, covered in several pile
s of different-colored powder.
Clearly, they’d gotten into the second bag of shit Terian brought with him back from Bangkok.
Increasingly wary as he realized how high the two of them were already, Dehgoies turned his scrutiny back on Terian. The male seer’s pupils looked roughly the same size as Raven’s did, but he had a calmer feel to his light, along with a lot more caution in his aleimi as he aimed his stare at Dehgoies.
“You okay, brother?” Terian asked him again.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Dehgoies said. “Just how fucked up are you two?”
Terian smiled. “Fucked up enough.”
Dehgoies grunted, aiming his eyes back at Raven.
He could still feel something else going on, but both of them were being evasive with their light, shielding from him even as they skirted around Revik’s own aleimi. In addition to concealing whatever was going on with them, he felt them both trying to read him, touching his light in furtive probes.
Fortunately… or unfortunately… they were too high to be particularly stealthy.
Feeling a few more darting scans from each of them, along with a more distant flicker of intent, and what felt like manipulation, Dehgoies rested his hands on his hips, staring between the two of them as he scanned them openly.
“Did something happen?” he said finally.
Raven and Terian just looked at each other.
Dehgoies forgot his own caution as his headache returned with a vengeance. When they still hadn’t broken the silence, he bit his lip, abruptly losing his temper.
“What the fuck is wrong with the two of you?” he said. “If one of you doesn’t start talking, I’m flushing the rest of the shit down the toilet––”
“No, no, brother.” Terian smiled at him, holding up a calming hand. “No, no… no need for that. Nothing bad is happening here. We simply have a present for you.”
Raven muttered, “…You’d damned well better appreciate that present, too.”
Dehgoies gave her another piercing stare, feeling his jaw clench.
Whatever he could feel on her now, it was making his muscles tense, enough that his body slid into a near fighting stance as he stood in front of them. Or maybe he was just readying himself for whatever bad thing this was starting to feel like.
Revik Page 15
