by Rebel Hart
My gut inclination was to call out. I’d talked myself out of trickier situations, and I wanted to believe I could backtrack out of that one if I really wanted to. I’d learned a thing or two about the Westun family though, or Mari, at the very least.
Whenever I thought I was one step ahead of her, I usually wasn’t. Everything I’d considered for this encounter had probably crossed her brain and she had likely disseminated that information to whomever was waiting inside to kill me. My best bet was to play everything in the moment. Show my true stealth and assume everything had already been accounted for.
And even then, I could still die.
To the right of the door was a doorway that looked like it led into the kitchen, or I could continue straight down the hallway towards a living area. I didn’t try and assume that any one path was safer than the other. I just pulled my gun up, made sure it was prepped to fire, and crept down the hallway. There were no lights on, only the late afternoon light coming in through the windows from outside. I moved as slowly and as quietly as I could, making sure to step on the outside of the floorboards as opposed to the middle where they were most likely to creak.
Eventually, I reached the end of the hallway and was able to peek slowly around the corner. There, against the wall of the living room closest to me and holding a gun up, was Mari. She was facing the kitchen and was quite obviously waiting for me to come around that way. I took two large, but quiet steps into the living room and then brought my gun up to the back of Mari’s head, and she stiffened.
“Didn’t think I’d just take the hallway, huh?” I whispered. “Or are you the bait to lure me out into the open?” My eyes were scanning the room carefully, knowing that one of the other Westun siblings was likely to jump out at me any second. “Are both your brothers here? More than that? Or did your father come to finish me off himself.”
Rather than seeming afraid, she just chuckled. “Your lack of confidence that I could handle you myself is noted.”
I’d seen it a split second too late. The flap of her jacket moved, and I realized that she had her right arm wrapped around her stomach and was pointing a gun backwards at me. It blew a hole through the fabric and I just barely managed to throw myself against the wall to keep from getting hit. In that instant, she flipped around and pointed both guns down at me. The visible gun and her staring the wrong way was a feint. She was always expecting me to come down the hallway.
“Your preparedness would be a huge turn-on if it weren’t for the fact that you just shot at me.”
“Yeah, well desperate times call for desperate mea—”
I didn’t let her get the rest of the sentence out. I tossed my leg out and kicked one of hers, tripping her and sending her dropping to the ground. One of her guns discharged in her panic as she fell, but it just grazed the side of my thigh, nothing I hadn’t experienced before. The other, she dropped and I kicked it away from her, at least bringing us down to one weapon each, then I crouched and looked her directly in the face.
“You may have figured out a thing or two about me, but I don’t want you to underestimate me, Mariana. I’m no slouch. This is my bread and butter.”
There was panic and frustration in her eyes as she looked up at me. “I assume that you would have learned by now that not only am I not underestimating you, but that you shouldn’t underestimate me.”
She slammed her face into mine, sending a blast of pain stabbing down my skull. She reached out and tried to take my gun, but I snatched it back before she could. The cock of her gun clicked in the air, and I rolled off to the side before she could fire, the gun splintering the wood as it took her bullet instead, grazing a little too close to my head for comfort.
She was right. I was underestimating her.
The underside to the couch in the living room was open, so I rolled under it, scooping up the gun I’d kicked away from Mari in the process, and popping up on the other side, but my lapse in judgement felt costly, because in that split second, Mari left the room. She couldn’t have gone far, and there were no stairs I could see, but she knew the house better than I did.
Pushing her spare gun into my waistband, I got to my feet and started to slowly creep my way through the living room. She would have had to walk past me to get to the hallway, so she either ducked into the kitchen, or disappeared down the second hallway that led further into the home. I peeked through the doorway to the kitchen as I passed it, but it was open and I didn’t see her. Regardless, as I slid down the hallway towards the back of the house, I side-stepped, keeping my eyes flicking between the two directions so she couldn’t get a jump on me.
Hoping that I could unearth her by catching her by surprise, when I got to the first door, I kicked it open. It slammed inward, banging against the wall as it swung, and not from that room, but from one down the hallway, I heard a barely-there clatter. I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that there was someone else in the room, but Mari was arrogant in the way that she spoke—no one knew that better than me.
She was there to end me alone. Like me, she had something to prove.
“Mariana,” I called out. “I hope you know you’re gonna have to put a bullet in my skull soon. I’m getting a little tired of this game.”
At the very end of the hallway was a door, partially ajar as I approached it. I led with my gun, and continuously looked behind myself just in case, but once I got the door open, I noticed that the closet door was cracked. Inside, though just barely visible in the darkness, there was a sleeve hanging over the doorknob. Someone was planning a quick open and fire.
If only she hadn’t underestimated me.
Quickly I made my way across to the closet, stuck my gun into the opening, and pulled the door open.
And my heart sank.
A jacket carefully hung to cast the sleeve over the doorknob fell to the floor, and half a second later, a fist came down on the top of my hand, knocking the gun away. Then there was a barrel against the back of my head.
“So tell me,” Mari said. “Should I be more upset that you actually think I’m that stupid, or that I let a guy touch me who fell for the closet trick?”
Swallowing hard, I smiled. “I say both.”
Hey… at least it was a hell of a way to go out.
“I don’t want to do this, if it’s any solace.”
I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “I’m sure. That’s why you’ve been hand-feeding your brothers everything I told you and why you set us up to have a run-in at the casino.” I held up my hands and turned around. “Grant a dying man one last wish. Tell me if any of the last month was true, or all toeing the line.”
She lowered her brow at me. “I didn’t tell my brothers anything about what you said and I didn’t set you up. I don’t need their help to take you down. Clearly, I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
“Come on,” I said. “You bolted out of my place right before we got the call, and your brothers told me all about how you were meant to distract me so they could expand their territory. I don’t like being lied to, Mari.”
“I’m not lying.” Then she cocked her gun. “Not like it matters. You’re gone anyway.”
There was a sincerity behind the irritation in her gaze. “You didn’t set me up?”
“Not for them. I lobbed a few to myself. You’re pretty easy to manipulate.”
“Then why’d you leave like you did this morning?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it, then pressed her gun against my forehead. “Enough. None of that matters.”
“It matters to me.” I looked right into her eyes. “I’m dying anyway. What’s the harm in telling me?”
I saw her considering it, the internal struggle showing all over her face, then finally she let out a long sigh. “I was scared. I felt too… comfortable.”
“Comfortable.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And happy. It was… easy to be that way. All domestic and cute. I just… I knew this story had a bad ending, so I ran.”
“Do you have feelings for me?”
“Why are you asking me that when you know where this is going? Feelings or none, it doesn’t matter!”
“It matters to me,” I fought. “Am I gonna die a happy man or a sad one?”
“Surely such a simple thing couldn’t make that decision,” she replied, but there was a quiver to her lip that spoke volumes.
I looked right into her eyes and nodded. “It could.”
There was a long, seemingly endless silence before she finally just said, “Yeah. I don’t know when or how, but… if the circumstances were any different. If you weren’t a Misterro. I’d have probably already fallen for you.”
A smile rose to my face before I could stop it. “That’s the first time I’ve ever kind of wished I wasn’t one. Thank you.” With that, I closed my eyes, and waited for the inevitable. “Guess I’ll die a happy man.”
There was only the sound of Mari and my breathing before she finally hissed, “Fuck.”
I expected the shot, but instead I got the unexpected and welcome feeling of Mari’s lips pressed to mine.
18
Mari
Bryce wrapped his hand around my wrist holding the gun. I didn’t stop him, but rather allowed him to pull the gun out of my hand and set it aside on one of the dressers set up in the room. I knew that he still had the second gun I’d brought that he’d knocked from my hand, but as soon as I thought about it, he pulled it out of his waistband and set it aside as well, leaving us both officially unarmed.
“I’m gonna keep going if you don’t stop me,” Bryce huffed.
I looked up into his gray eyes and hummed, “Why would I want to stop you?”
Taking that as a go-ahead, Bryce’s hands flew forward, threading into my hair and pulling me towards him to kiss me again. I tried to breathe through the slamming in my heart, leaning against him as his hands smoothed down my back and settled on the small of it. I pulled on his hair, coaxing him backwards, and he stepped back until he was falling onto the bed with me on top of him.
At first, his hands settled on top of my thighs and slid gently up. His fingers dipped under the base of my shirt, dragging it upwards, and I took over, lifting it over my head and tossing it off to the side. With his palms resting on my stomach, he looked me up and down, a pensive look in his eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“I really am happy, you know? That wasn’t a lie.” He pulled his fingers downward across my skin, leaving a tingling sensation behind in their wake. “I would have died happily.”
My face started to burn. “Since when are you so sappy?”
“Is it sappy?” he said. “I’m just being honest.”
“Just…” I sighed, not at all used to having feelings or having someone express them towards me. “Shut up.”
I dropped to him, bringing our mouths together, and quite enjoying the feeling of his hands wrapping around my back and holding me to him. Suddenly, there was this desperation between us that couldn’t be denied. Maybe it was the fact that we’d both just made valid attempts to kill one another, maybe it was the admittance to feelings, maybe it was the fact that this was the first time we were becoming intimate with the ulterior motives hanging between us. Either way, we were all over each other like it was the last chance we would ever get.
Sliding my hands between us, I undid the button on his pants and worked to pull him out while he took his own shirt off. Both times that we’d had sex prior, I’d been blindfolded, so I wasn’t able to see the grand reveal. Bryce had an incredible body—perfect abs, carved pecs, bulging biceps—but I’d never seen him go from wearing a shirt to not. That glorious moment where his shirt is peeled away and his torso is revealed. The sexy way the shirt caught his hair, briefly pulling it out of his face to reveal his square jaw. The way he then ran his hand through that hair to put it back in place.
Sinful.
“I don’t have any deprivation tools here,” he said with a seductive grin on his face.
“That’s okay.” I ran my hands up and down the length of him. “I have a feeling we’ll do fine without them this time.”
I loosened the tie on my wrap-around skater skirt and it came loose from my hips. Bryce snagged it and chucked it off to the side before bringing his hands back to my waist. He continued to look me up and down with that needy gaze that was driving me wild, but I didn’t resist it.
Couldn’t if I wanted to.
Instead, I lifted myself up and slid forward enough to press the tip of him just inside my opening. Sensory deprivation was good—really good—but right now, everything was stripped away. It was just the feeling of him filling me up as I slowly lowered myself down, mixed with the sight of his pupils getting a little larger and his mouth holding slightly open. His hands gripped tighter and tighter around me the further down I moved, until he was buried all the way in and squeezing me so hard there would be marks tomorrow.
Not that I minded.
“How does it feel so good every single time?” he asked.
My legs were already shaking a little and my brain was fuzzy from the pleasure of his huge self pressing all the way to the back of me. “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”
Not moving too fast or too slow, I began lifting and lowering myself on his member. His tattooed arms moved upwards, his hands gripping around my breasts, and he licked his lips. He didn’t fight me as I took control, riding him up and down and back and forth, stirring him along the best spots inside of me. Before too long, I had my head tossed back and my eyes closed. My core was burning in the best way. If I never had to stop enjoying this euphoria, that would be my preference.
Suddenly, Bryce sat up, bringing his face close to mine. Impulsively, I leaned in for a kiss, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, but though he kissed me as well, that wasn’t his motive. While our lips were locked, he continued forward off the bed, never pulling me out of him, and lifted me up. I locked my legs around his hips and trusted him as he moved me backwards to press against the wall. In this new position, there wasn’t a piece of him that couldn’t get to me, and he started to shove all the way up into me, making my whole body shudder with each powerful thrust.
An orgasm crashed into me like a truck. My fingers dug so hard into Bryce’s back that there was no question he’d have scratch marks tomorrow. The spot he’d found was perfect, and he continued to hammer it as I came, slowly unraveling my consciousness until I felt like I was going to pass out.
“Bryce,” I murmured. “It’s too much. I can’t.”
“Just a little longer,” he grunted. “I’m so close.”
He pulled me away from the wall and carried me back over to the bed, this time lowering me down on my back. My legs shook outside of my control as I either came again, or never came down from my first orgasm, I wasn’t entirely sure. I kept Bryce clasped to me, so he kept his arms wrapped around my back, set his lips on mine again, and thrust into me with ever more rapid and forceful movements, until he pushed all the way in and started to stutter. Deep inside of me, I could feel him releasing ribbon after ribbon of hot liquid—the sensation a little too good.
This man had the ultimate control over me, and the worst part was, I was pretty sure he knew that.
“That is not quite killing you like I was instructed,” I said, catching my breath.
“You sure?” Bryce replied, equally spent. “I kind of feel like you killed me.” I started to laugh and Bryce laughed alongside me before lifting his head up enough to look down at me. “We made a mistake, didn’t we?”
“Looks like it,” I said. “I’m not sure when it happened though.”
I tried my hardest to think backwards. Since first meeting Bryce downtown on my way out of the MasCat meeting, back when he still thought I was Jade—or at least when I thought he thought I was Jade—I’d tried to focus my mind on the goal. I kept telling myself over and over that dating Bryce was just a means to an end; something I was doing for the betterment of
my family. Sure, I’d kept his mind off the MasCat deal, but I hadn’t accomplished much else. Nique always thought I was in it for him, rather than any ulterior motive.
Maybe she was right?
And if my family found a way to exploit my relationship with Bryce without telling me, that meant they never trusted me to use the relationship to their benefit regardless. To sit me down at the table and tell me that they’d kill me if I didn’t kill him; they also firmly believed my feelings for him were real. How long had it been since I started yearning for him the way I did? Where did I go wrong?
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Just… trying to pinpoint the moment you got me,” I said honestly.
He smiled. “I know when you had me.”
I tilted my head. “Really?”
He nodded as he flopped off to the side of me, finally pulling out of me, and turning his head to look at me. “The first time I ever saw you.”
“Downtown?” He shook his head. “Oh… when you came and spied on me?” but he shook his head again. I furrowed my brow. “When?”
He laughed. “When my mom first showed me the picture of you. Well… of Jade.”
“I thought you hated the red hair and fake eyes.”
“I do, but your eyebrows were still blonde. I could see past the stuff that obviously wasn’t real and,” he snapped his fingers in the air. “It was so obvious Baylor even warned me to be careful. It was already too late by then though.”
“I thought about dying my eyebrows, but I have so many different personas, and people only pay attention to the hair on your head anyway.” I leaned my head over and set it on Bryce’s shoulder and he wrapped an arm behind my back and pulled until I was snuggled against him. He kissed me on the forehead and it clicked. “That was it.”
“Huh?”
I craned my head so I could look into his eyes. “At your place this morning, when you woke up, you kissed me on the forehead before leaving the room. Then you did it again in the kitchen.”
