Rook and Ronin Company Box Set: Books 6-9 (JA Huss Box Set Series Order Book 2)

by JA Huss

  No. Brainwashing on this scale doesn’t grow out of love. And yet Harper killed a lot of people when she was triggered. A lot of people.

  And Sasha is a hundred times more deadly than Harper. Sasha has real skills. Sasha is smart and worldly. Sasha has no fear. Harper was a bundle of fear and anxiety.

  But Sasha. She is brave.

  And that makes her the perfect sleeper assassin, doesn’t it?

  I need to know more about Sydney’s life growing up. If her mother gave up her life for the promise and it didn’t protect her, then how can I be sure it protected Sasha?

  The garage light is off when I pull in, but the motion sensor triggers and it flashes on, blinding me for a moment. “Hop off,” I say, when Sydney doesn’t move.

  She swings her leg over and I do the same. I give her a push and she starts walking. I close the garage as we leave and we trudge through the blowing snow to the house. The warm air blasts us when we get inside and I start taking off my coat.

  Sydney stands there, looking at that acorn. Her glove is gone again. Dropped somewhere outside along the trail, I bet. “You know, it’s pretty stupid to hurt yourself like that.” I nod down to her hand when she looks up.

  “Who cares?”

  “Go upstairs, to the third floor. I’ll throw some wood on the stove and meet you up there. It’s the warmest room in the house and I do care.” She squints her eyes at me. “I’m not cutting your fingers off and I’m not taking you to a hospital because you can’t drive your truck out of here. So go the fuck upstairs and wait for me.”

  She heads towards the stairs. She responds to harshness. She’s probably been conditioned that way. Threats, abuse, humiliation. It gets her moving.

  I get moving as well. I stock up all three wood stoves that heat this house and then go into the kitchen and start looking for food. I grab a bag of chips and a soda, ready to head upstairs and see what I can do for her hand, when a thought comes to me.

  I might catch more flies with honey.

  So I put the bag of chips back and open the fridge to see what I have. Not much. I haven’t had a lot of time to cook the past few weeks. But I have some elk meat thawing. And some potatoes in the cold room that are still good. I stick all that shit in a roasting pan and shove it in the oven.

  A hot meal is nice. I could use one. And I’ve been feeding her shit for the past few weeks. It can’t hurt. I make some coffee too, then take a pot and two mugs up the stairs.

  She’s sitting on the bed, still looking at that stupid acorn. She still has her winter gear on, and there’s so much sweat running down her face, her hair is all wet.

  “Sydney,” I bark. She slowly raises her eyes to meet mine. “Take your fucking—” Honey, Merc. Try honey. I take a deep breath and beg myself to be patient. “Come on,” I say, pulling her to her feet and taking that stupid acorn away. I toss it on the bed and her eyes follow it as it rolls along the white down comforter. “You need to take off your coat and snow pants.”

  I unzip her coat and slide it off her. Her shirt is soaked with sweat. She just stands there, so I guide her back until she bumps into the bed and she takes a seat again. I bend down and start unlacing her boots. She kicks them off when they get loose enough.

  I wait, but she doesn’t stand. I’m not a patient guy. I mean, I have my moments when it’s necessary, but generally, I don’t like to coddle people. I didn’t coddle Sasha, and she was a good ten years younger than this girl here when we did that big job. I’m really not interested in coddling Sydney.

  But honey, Merc.

  “Take off your snow pants, Sydney.”

  She messes with the button and zipper, then slides them down her legs. Her pants should be dry, but they are soaked with sweat as well. She takes those off too, and then she’s bare from the waist down. She looks up at me and takes off her sweat-soaked shirt. That leaves her naked, since I didn’t give her underwear when I left her clothes at the cabin. I’m regretting that now. She’s a cute girl. And her body…

  I take the hand suffering from exposure and it’s still very cold. I touch her cheek with the back of my other hand and it’s warm. She leans into that like she’s starving for a gentle gesture.

  It makes me close my eyes for a minute. She’s so needy. It would be easy to just take care of that need.

  Instead, I kick off my boots and take my shirt off, then place her hand under my armpit. She tries to pull away but I hold her still and smile. “It’s a nice warm place, Syd. You have to heat up this hand. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna blister no matter what, but it needs to be warmed up.”

  “It’s gross,” she says. “I can do it—”

  “No,” I tell her back, sitting down on the bed and pulling on her at the same time, so she can’t remove it. “I’ll do it.”

  I scoot all the way back on the half-moon-shaped bed, which takes up roughly one half of the circular room, making her crawl along with me. Her tits are nice and firm, and hang down and bounce a little in a very alluring way. I keep pulling her until she’s sitting next to me, her frozen hand slipping out of place. So I put my arm around her and place her hand under my opposite arm, making her hug me a little. She stiffens when I do this and that makes me laugh a little.

  “You afraid of intimacy, Sydney? Tough girl like you?”

  “You’re tricking me somehow, I can feel it.” But even as she says this, she rests her head on my chest.

  “Probably. If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I don’t give anything away for free. So now that I’m taking care of your mistake out there, let’s talk about that deal. I went above and beyond. I didn’t let you freeze, I came out of my nice warm house to save your ass. So the way I see it, you owe me. Start talking. What do you know about Sasha?”

  “You kidnapped me.”

  “You came to me,” I correct her.

  “I left. I wasn’t coming to meet you.”

  I let that go for now. Time and place, Merc, is what I say in my head. Time and place.

  “You sprayed me with a hose. You—”

  I wait for it. The ultimate accusation. But she doesn’t finish. “I what? Raped you?”

  She holds her words in.

  “I hope you don’t think that. Because you were the one filled with secrets for that little affair.”

  “I wasn’t gonna say that.” She takes a deep breath. “I was gonna say, you disappointed me.”

  Usually I’d laugh at that. But I’m using honey. So I don’t. I think about it for a moment instead.

  “You were supposed to save me, Case. You were supposed to show up that night, kill Garrett and his buddies, and take me out of there. That was the deal.”

  “My end of the deal was over the minute I realized your militia friends knew I was coming.”

  “I didn’t tell them. I saw you out there and I lied to Garrett about it. I let you get close. If I had told, you’d be dead. I saved you, Case. I saved you when you were supposed to save me.”

  I say nothing. If she wants to talk, I’m gonna let her talk.

  “And then you left me there. He—”

  I wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t. “He what?” I prod.

  “Forget it. It’s over. I’m not going back. She shakes her head to emphasize this. “I’ll leave here, but I’m not going back. I’m not. I’ll kill myself first.”

  I look across the room and realize I can see her in the window. It’s still dark outside and will be for hours, so the glass that surrounds this room on all sides is like a mirror. “Were you supposed to go back? After the wedding?”

  In her reflection, her eyes dart back and forth, like she’s thinking hard about this question. “I don’t think I was ever getting married that day.”

  “What?” I’m officially confused.

  “I thought you wanted to know about Sasha?”

  Interesting factoid about the marriage. But I need to keep her talking. “I want to know about you first, Syd.” She notices me in the window now
too. Stealth trick over. “And what you know about the hush.”

  That makes her tremble, and I have a moment of regret for bringing it up. “It does something to me,” she whispers. “Makes me feel things.”

  “What things?”

  “I dunno. It makes me feel out of control. It’s a trigger, I think.”

  “So you know about the brainwashing they did?”

  She stares at my reflection in the window. It puts me on edge a little. “I don’t understand that word.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Garrett never said it.”

  “Then how could it affect you?”

  “I said it.”

  She removes her hand from my armpit and looks at it for a moment. I take it in my hand and feel it. Much warmer. And the coloration is better too. I press down on her skin and the indent turns white, then a slight pink color returns after a few seconds. “That’s better. But I’ll need to wrap it before the blisters form. I’m one hundred percent sure it will blister. Now how did that word affect you if you never heard it?”

  “Why are you being nice all of a sudden?”

  I laugh. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, wildcat. This is just a debrief.”

  “I hate that name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the word that Garrett used. And then I’d say hush in my head to make it stop.”

  “Make what stop, Sydney?”

  “The urges.”

  “So you knew? You were aware of the trigger and that it was implanted in you?”

  “I’ve been conditioned since I was three years old, Case. I’m twenty-four. I lied before. I know what you did in the army. Garrett reminded me all the time. You were PSYOPS too. You brainwashed people. You tortured them and got information. You turned them into sleepers by making them dissociate from reality. You caused them to go crazy and then you triggered them and made them do your bidding.”

  “Like you?”

  “Like Sasha,” she counters.

  I let out a long breath. I’m not sure I’m ready for that shit. I’m really not. “You seem to know a lot about this for someone who claims to be brainwashed.”

  “Claims?” she snaps. “Fuck you. You didn’t live my life. You didn’t grow up with me. You didn’t have to endure all that conditioning. That’s the innocent word you use for it, right? For the things that have to be done to people to make them into walking weapons? Walking zombies? You take away their freedom, only they never know it. You take away their free will. I know what I went through. I know what they did. I broke my conditioning six times since I was fourteen, and each time they put me back into compliance. That’s a nice innocuous word too. Do you talk about conditioning and compliance in your meetings, Case? Or do you call it what it is? Or maybe you have a nice fun slang word for it? Like—”

  “That’s enough,” I growl, cutting her off.

  “Why?” She turns all the way around, breaking the skin-on-skin contact we have, so she can look me in the eyes. “You don’t want to be associated with them? You want to pretend you have some justification for doing that shit? How many little girls did you steal away? How many little girls did you ruin?”

  “Let’s just get this out of the way right now. I know the techniques.” She makes a disgusted face at the term, but I let it go. “I’ve used the techniques. But not on little girls and not for the reasons you think.”

  “Justification,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. Maybe to cover herself or maybe just to demonstrate her disgust. “I put all my faith in you, Case. The last words you told me, I kept them in my head. It got me through so much. But now…”

  “But now you know,” I say softly.

  She takes a deep breath and then holds it.

  “I’m not gonna say I’m innocent. I’m not. I’ve done a lot of terrible things, Sydney. But I promise you”—I try to turn her so she has to look at me again, but her body is stiff now—“I promise that I have never hurt a child on purpose.”

  “On purpose?” she snorts. “You think that’s an excuse? And Sasha was a child.”

  “I didn’t brainwash Sasha. Please.”

  “You used her. You used her for all kinds of things.”

  “She was trained for that job, Syd. She wanted to do it. She wanted her revenge. And she came through just fine.”

  “So you say.”

  I stop for a moment. “She is fine. She’s better than fine, in fact. She’s very successful. She’s brilliant and social. She’s put it all behind her. And maybe we can sort this out for you, Sydney. Maybe we can sort this out and you can live a normal life too.”

  “She’s not fine. She’s sleeping.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Sydney

  “What you deserve and what you get are almost always two very different things.” – Sydney

  I know I’m pushing his buttons, but he’s pushing mine too. Turnabout is fair play. And since he suddenly wants to talk, I’m gonna go for it. “You know what I nicknamed Garrett? I mean, if he can make me into his wildcat and have me bobbing on his cock whenever he felt like turning me on—and not in the way I’d prefer to be turned on—then I can have a name for him too. Maybe I couldn’t control him with it, but it made me feel better.” I scoot away from Case. I want clothes. It’s hot up here—getting hotter in fact, since he added wood to the stove—and he had me in his night vision for God only knows how long, but he doesn’t deserve to see me.

  His look softens as I pull away and I know it’s a trick. Men like him don’t do anything without a motive. He needs information about Sasha from me. And now he’s being nice to get what he needs.

  “What did you call him, Syd?”

  “Don’t call me Syd.”

  Case puts his hands up, a little give-up gesture. “Fine, Syd-ney. What was his name?”

  I lift my chin to gather my nerve. “Soul splitter. Because that’s what he did to me. He split me in half. He took my soul—the one thing everyone has ownership over—and he gave half of it to someone else. Someone inside me that I had no control over. And you do that too. You split people in two and steal their souls. I hope one day you get split in half, Case. I do. I really do.”

  Case rubs his hand down his face. “I’m making food. Let’s go eat and then we’ll get some sleep.”

  “I don’t believe this act. Just so you know. I don’t believe you’re being nice to me for any reason other than you need to use me. Do you know why they do these things, Case? Do you have any idea?” I pause here. I want an answer.

  He shrugs. “Power? Obviously.”

  I scoff out a laugh. “Really? That’s all you have? Power?”

  “I’m hungry,” he says, standing up, giving me a cue to stand up as well. I stay sitting. I’m done following the cues. “Let’s eat, sleep, and talk again in the morning.”

  “Helplessness,” I say, just as he turns his back to me. “They want me to feel helpless. So they can control me. And they did a really good job, right? You came in and I sat there begging for you to save me because I was helpless. And then I let you leave me behind and I let Garrett take me again, because I was helpless. I asked you for help out on that mountain road because I was in an accident you probably devised, and so I felt helpless.”

  He walks to the stairs.

  “I’m done, Case. If you walk away, I’m done. Kill me. Please. Put me down like a dog and end my misery right now.”

  He shakes his head but doesn’t turn around. “What can I do to make you feel in control, then?” He looks over his shoulder at me. A snide, sidelong glance. “Tell me how to change this and I’ll do my best.”

  “Save me.”

  “That makes no sense. You want control? You save yourself.”

  I stay silent. My speech is over. His ball now. I can’t wait to see what he does.

  “I think you’re lying about Sasha. I think you need something from me and this is all a ploy. I think you know exactly what you’re doing.”

  “Th
en I guess we’re even then, right?”

  “I feel sorry for you. I really do.”

  That cuts me deep. I’m not after pity.

  “But I’m not the guy who made you into this person, Sydney. I’m the guy who can turn you back.”

  And then he walks down the stairs and leaves me there. Alone, naked, and completely helpless.

  I have no idea what to do, but my hand, which started out numb when I came inside, then started to tingle, is now burning.

  There is nothing else to do now. I need Case on my side to take the next step. And he’s got his own agenda. That Sasha girl is his only priority. Must be nice to have people who care.

  I get up and turn the lights out, ready to be done with this day, and then go back to the half-moon bed and get under the comforter. It’s soft and warm. Down, probably. I gather a pillow under my head and gaze up the windows in the ceiling. Perfect for stargazing.

  I lose myself in that, dozing off. But the creak of the steps jolts me awake some time later. Case is back with a bottle of water and a tray of something that smells too good to ignore. My stomach rumbles. He smiles. I don’t smile back.

  “Sit up and eat.” He walks into the room and sets the tray down on a small side table that holds the lamp. He doesn’t turn the lights on.

  I’m sitting up before I realize I just followed a command. That pisses me off. When I look up at Case again, he sighs.

  “I’m not trying to order you around. I’m not trying to make you feel helpless. I’m just trying to take care of you. Is that off limits too?”

  His rough voice, his shirtless chest, his good looks, it’s the perfect package. When a man comes up in your time of need and says things like that, you want to melt. I want to melt.

  But I know he’s lying.

  It makes me so sad that the only offer I get is a lie.

  He bunches up the comforter around my legs, being careful not to pull it down to expose my breasts—not that he hasn’t seen them a million times—and then gets the tray and places it on the mound of blankets.