by Lea Griffith
He shook his head and she smiled. She’d noticed his perusal and cocked her head.
“It would be easy, Mr. Beckett. You’d solve so very many problems for me. Come,” she urged him, her soft voice a siren’s call to everything male in him. “Ease my pain.”
He moved to her again, leaning down as he whispered, “You would have to hurt first, and I think that I should take care of that now, don’t you?”
She didn’t respond, smile still in place as he removed the blanket from her, leaving her exposed to his gaze.
“Dmitry?” he called, and the man entered the room. “Tell Ken to meet me in the courtyard.”
“Rand—”
“Now.” He’d known Dmitry would protest. The man had made his feelings clear within a day of tending her. The hardest of them all had a soft spot for a killer.
Rand had no understanding of this, but it was fact. He searched for the numbness he’d need to complete his coming deeds.
“So you are Bullet.” He received nothing in response but that same serene smile.
White hot and intense, his anger was readily accessible. But he needed ice, not heat. He planned to hurt her, and to do that to this woman, with her splash of freckles and vulnerable eyes, he’d need to be numb, immune.
What would Lily think of what he was about to do?
His silence must have gotten through to her where his threatening tone had failed. She licked her lips, and his eyes followed the path of her tongue. Irrationally, he wanted to taste her.
More anger. He needed the freezing deadness. Think of Lily and Anna, he told himself. Think of your beautiful daughter’s white-blonde hair colored red with blood. Think of Lily, head blown almost completely off as she lay over your daughter.
But in that moment, the only thing he knew was the blooded velvet of her red hair. The creamy skin of her body. The luscious curve of her lips.
“I hate you. There is no part of me that does not hate you,” he pushed out between clenched teeth. In that moment, he meant every word. She was alive, and his precious wife and child were gone.
She had killed them.
“It wasn’t her, Rand,” Dmitry said at his side.
Rand turned the force of his gaze on his man. “It was her. She admitted it herself.”
Dmitry shook his head and there was a mournful quality to it that confused Rand.
“You said she killed your brother. . ." Rand trailed off, ignoring the woman for a few seconds.
“I did. He deserved killing. She is not the one you’re looking for, Rand,” Dmitry intoned in a soothing voice.
She interrupted then. “I am the one he seeks, Dmitry. I am The Collective. The truth is I am everything he has searched for, everything he wants to destroy.”
Rand turned a startled glance to her. Something in her words had a part of him urging caution. The part that wanted vengeance ignored it. “You see? By her own admission she is the one at fault.”
Rand reached for her, unlatched the cuffs, and pulled her roughly to her feet. Her eyes closed and a grimace contorted her features, but he pushed his instinct to soothe down deep, pulling back up the welling grief and anger.
“Walk,” he ordered her in a gruff tone.
She tried but couldn’t. She’d been out of it with a raging fever for nearly a week, and her legs were limp noodles. He looked over at Dmitry, who grabbed her other arm, and between the two men they literally carried her up the stairs.
She never made a sound.
They walked outside, the late afternoon sun shining. She winced and dropped her head. They pulled her another thirty feet out to an empty courtyard that had once been filled with Lily’s flowers. They’d not gotten to live here, but she’d planted flowers once they’d framed up the house.
“Berrirose,” the woman, Bullet, whispered. “She’ll love you forever if you plant berrirose.”
“You shut the fuck up,” he yelled, the rage taking over as he thrust her away from him. She teetered and crashed to the ground. He almost reached for her but stopped.
She lay there for long moments and finally glanced skyward. “It’s warm out here.”
She seemed confused, and that was not what Rand wanted. How dare she speak of berrirose and what they meant? How fucking dare she!
Ken stepped into the courtyard and nodded.
“Get up,” Rand demanded.
She shook her head, pushed wearily to her feet, lifted her shoulders, and looked every inch the warrior he knew her to be.
“Don’t do this, Rand. You’ll break her,” Dmitry was damn near pleading.
Before Rand could speak, she did. “I will not ever break.”
Rand saw her there, so proud and defiant, and part of him recognized this was wrong. That what he was about to do to her may well break her. She’d saved his life twice now, and come to him with some notion of—what? What had she expected coming to him? And she’d admitted she’d known he’d followed her after the beach episode. Why had she fucking come?
“Rand?” Ken’s voice was strident.
He glanced at his friend, his brother, and then back to the woman.
“I will not be party to this. It is wrong. She did not kill your wife and daughter,” Dmitry said in a cold, hard voice.
He looked at his man. “Then leave.”
What Rand had set into motion could not be undone. She’d suffer in some way before she died. He’d promised his wife and daughter revenge. This was going to be a step toward that. This woman known as Bullet wasn’t Joseph. But she was someone he prized.
He looked her over again as he pulled his gun from the holster at his back. She stared at him limpidly, accepting.
“I’ve heard that Joseph trains you in the mountains of Arequipa. I’ve also heard his favorite tool for punishment is the water pit.” And there it was, just a tightening at the corners of her eyes and mouth, a sudden rise and fall of her chest. “I think in order for you to know a measure of my pain, you should reacquaint yourself with the concept. And pain, Bullet, can be offered in many different ways.”
Her body shuddered. It was the one thing that betrayed her but she smiled again, defiant to the end.
He pointed the gun at her, and as he walked forward, she stepped back. Five more feet and they were at the hole he’d dug himself especially for her. Rand lifted a woven bamboo covering off the hole and stood up.
“You may think that what you’re doing is what it will take to break me. But know this: I survived Joseph Bombardier, and so too will I survive you, Rand Beckett. I was formed long ago out of bone, blood, death, and the tears of a small child. Nothing you do can break me.”
Her words ricocheted through his mind. He glared and in response she stiffened her spine. She lowered herself into the freezing water of the half-filled pit, and then she turned to look up at him as he pulled the rope ladder up and latched the top back down. Through the bamboo bars she stared at him, and his chest wrenched so hard he felt he was bleeding inside.
He couldn’t breathe, the tightness in his body coiling and recoiling, winding deep, and striking. Rand barely resisted the urge to rub his sternum. He stepped away, the numbness finally making an appearance, though he was unsure of the cause.
As he moved into the house, he told himself it had nothing to do with the betrayal he’d read in her sky blue gaze. Nothing at all.
Chapter Eight
The water was frigid. So cold mud hadn’t even had time to form; Remi went numb quickly. Her feet lost feeling first, and she dug deep into the sodden ground under her, wiggling in far enough that she would be able to keep her head above water when her legs failed. Though the pit itself was only filled halfway, it came above her waist.
She began to dig toe and hand holds into the sodden earth around her. Her legs shuddered, protesting the cold and freezing conditions as the sun fell in the western sky. It had been so warm when she’d walked out into the sun. Joy had rippled through her only to be crushed underneath Rand Beckett’s resolve for retrib
ution.
She dug into the earth with her hands, ripping nails as she pulled clumps of rocks and dirt out, dropping them into the water beneath her. She’d dug a shelf out in fifteen minutes. It was big enough to pull herself onto and lift her legs and feet out of the water for minutes at a time. She’d be fucked if it rained, but for now, she could pull her frozen limbs out and give them a break.
The cold stung, but the only thing worse than that was the numbness. Tiny bites of pain meant she was alive, that her blood was flowing. Numbness, in her limbs anyway, meant death was approaching.
She ignored the brutal cold of the air and hunkered into herself on the shelf for long minutes at a time. She was forced every few times to dig deeper into the shelf, but this meant standing in the water for longer and longer as she became sluggish, muscles refusing to cooperate.
She used the shelf every fourth time to lift herself up to the bamboo hole covering and despite the fiery agony in her shoulder, she would lift herself up and lower herself down, doing pull ups over and over until her muscles warmed. Then she’d fall back into the water, dig further into the shelf and repeat the process.
Eventually, she had a hole big enough to fit her entire body into. She lay there, feeling bugs and worms crawl over her, snatching a few here and there and shoving them into her mouth to swallow whole. She had to have energy to survive. That meant eating things left off most menus. The insects were pure protein, but they always gagged her.
She glanced up, knew she needed to do a round of pull-ups, and met the night sky. Line of sight broken by the bamboo bars above her, the velvet darkness of the night reminded her of him. Rand.
He’d returned every hour, on the hour by the seconds that ticked off in her head, and asked her the same two questions: Have you broken, and where is Joseph?
She shivered, felt wetness on her cheeks, and that curious tightening in her stomach occurred again. She’d experienced it earlier today and wondered at it. Anger? She turned the word in her mouth, felt the rightness of it. Yes, it was anger, but it was also betrayal. When had she begun to hope for something more?
So she’d named the emotions but had no one to blame for the cause but herself. It mattered not that she given him her breath, that she’d taken bullets meant for him, that she’d not blown him away. She mattered naught when all he really wanted was vengeance.
Remi couldn’t blame him. Wasn’t that what drove her? What drove them all?
She’d known nothing but this soul-squeezing emptiness for so long, yet in his dark gaze she’d found an ember, and it had lit a firestorm inside of her. She’d gazed at his picture a year ago and something inside her had been irretrievably changed.
She was nothing to him. But at some point, he’d become so much to her. That made this particular water pit different from any Joseph had made her work to survive in. That made this water pit painful. So in effect, Mr. Beckett had gotten exactly what he’d planned for—her pain.
Her breath stopped, and a sound was torn from her she’d never heard before. Her chest hurt as another harsh sob ripped from her, leaving her gasping for breath.
“Please,” she whispered. She was so cold, and her heart hurt so badly.
The pain was a tsunami, burying everything in its wake.
A shadow moved over the surface of the water in the pit, and she looked up. His eyes glittered in the glow of the moonlight, features set in a determined mask.
“Tell me, Bullet, have you broken?” he asked her in a hushed tone.
She steeled her spine against the look on his face. “I will never break.” She would not let her sisters down.
His faced hardened even more, the beautiful planes of it cutting a harsh relief against the velvet of the night sky. Her entire body ached, and she was so tired.
“You’ll kill yourself to defy me on this, won’t you?”
“You wanted me to feel pain. I feel pain.” A shudder wracked her body and she went to a knee, legs giving out. She coughed and spit water out of her mouth, tried to rise using the side of the hole to push off and up. She slipped, fell face first into the freezing water. She couldn’t feel her left hand anymore.
“I want you to suffer,” he bit out.
“I have suffered my entire life, Mr. Beckett. There is little you could do that hasn’t already been done.” She managed to get the words out, but they were slurred, and a sense of unreality hovered over her.
That worried her. She’d always been able to overcome her conditions, had trained her mind to conquer any weakness of her body. This cold, though, was more than she’d ever known. It had seeped into her soul and refused to let go.
She let her head fall back. There was nothing to be done for the defeat in her posture. Her body simply refused to cooperate.
This must be what death was. Her right hand clenched, and the fire he’d begun deep in her belly began to spread.
“Don’t leave me. . ." she’d wailed as a child. “It’s so cold. . ." The black-eyed man had pulled her out of the pit, staked her to the ground, and left her without food for two days, her tiny body drying out and blistering in the sun of the high desert in the Peruvian Andes. He’d returned, thrown her a crust of bread, and then tossed her back into the pit, leaving her there for another full day. The nights had been so cold, and her body had wanted to give up.
But she’d remembered another little girl, and she’d refused. Refused to the let the man with the black eyes defeat her.
“I hate you,” she whispered, lost in the recollection.
“You could never hate me as much as I hate you,” Rand spit down at her. “Where is Joseph?”
She glanced up, vision clouding as her adult body began to succumb to the elements. “He is everywhere. You must be very quiet before he hears you.” She wanted to recall the words, recognizing she’d just given the man standing so tall above her information she’d never given another. Would he use that information in his quest to break her?
The moonlight touched her skin. She imagined that it warmed her and knew then she was lost.
Something changed in his demeanor, some humanity replacing the icy coldness of moments before, but she was too far gone to hope. She fell to her knees. The water sloshed, entering her nose and clogging her throat.
“Dmitry!” he yelled.
She watched Rand rip the bamboo covering off the hole even as she sank deeper into the pit, face almost completely submerged. She would give herself a rest on the ledge in a minute. She was so tired right now.
He yelled again, and she wanted to tell him to be quiet lest the black-eyed man punish them all.
Then she knew nothing at all.
His heart seized in his chest. Was she trying to kill herself? What the fuck was this, some attempt to get him to release her?
The water closed over her face, her eyes dull and lifeless in the shine of the moon, and he recognized she was beyond this place. She would die if he left her in the pit much longer. He yelled for Dmitry, ripped the bamboo fencing off the hole, and attached the ladder to the stakes in the earth.
“What the hell?” Dmitry called as he ran from the house, Ken close on his heels.
He had to get to her. He lifted her up once his feet met the bottom of the pit. His legs began to numb immediately even though the level was only to his thighs. She was naked and so much smaller than him. How the fuck she’d survived for the last three hours, he had no idea.
She was slack in his arms, head lolling on her neck, body like an ice cube. What the fuck had he done? How had he done it? Stuck her in a pit filled with freezing water—what the hell had he become?
“Hand her to me,” Dmitry demanded.
Rand did, her deadweight causing his chest to constrict and his throat to close. Ken and Dmitry lifted her out, though Dmitry held onto her. She damn well wouldn’t die on him. She was his only lead.
Fuck that, he thought viciously. It had become about much more than Joseph. When she’d given him her breath underwater in the Pacific, she’d
ripped a hole in him, and she was going to pay. Somehow, someway she was going to pay for making him feel.
“I fucking told you, Rand. She’s too small, too weak for this,” Dmitry bit out. Ken remained silent, his face blank as he looked anywhere but at the woman.
Rand climbed out of the hole and grabbed the woman from Dmitry’s arms. The other man looked at him like he’d lost his mind, but Rand started into the house, bypassing the stairs that led to the panic room, and moving instead to the stairway that led up to his suite.
“Where are you taking her?” Ken asked a note of warning in his voice.
She was so cold, lips tinged blue, body muddy and dripping. “Upstairs,” he replied, and his tone brooked no argument.
“We can care for her downstairs.” Ken’s tone was hard, uncompromising.
Rand ignored him and took the steps that led up to his suite two at a time. Mud dripped along the floor; he didn’t care.
“You need to get her warm,” Dmitry said from directly behind him.
“I will,” Rand replied.
He entered his room, headed for the bathroom, and then he turned holding her out for Dmitry to take. At the last second, he pulled her back to his chest and nodded at the tub.
Confusion played on Dmitry’s face, but he turned on the water in the enormous garden tub, and before a minute had passed, steam was rising from its depths.
Rand’s gaze tracked over her body. She was filthy and the long skeins of her hair were icicles against his arm. Her face was pale, and he wondered if he was too late. Dmitry checked her pulse, and the sight of the other man’s hands on her neck gave Rand pause.
