by E. S. Carter
“All rats stick together,” Jason agrees.
We return to silence. Our bodies weary but our eyes ever alert. The occasional sounds of creatures scurrying along the forest floor have us spinning in place, guns aimed and ready, only for nothing to come out and bite us. No assassins burst through the foliage. No bullets split the bark from the trees.
The silence, in some ways, is worse than an attack. My muscles ache with the stiffness of always being on alert. Jason looks like he’s seconds from falling over, yet he remains upright, his gaze continually tracking our surroundings.
Those men wouldn’t have just walked away, so where did they go if they didn’t follow us?
A shrill whistle pierces the air from the direction of the outbuildings. I look at Jason, and he shrugs.
“Can’t be any worse than waiting here like sitting ducks.”
I couldn’t agree with him more. Even in the cover of the trees, I feel exposed. We wouldn’t be hard to pick off.
“Need a hand?” I ask as he struggles to move away from the tree that’s been holding him up.
“Nah, I’ll follow you.”
“I’m not leaving you behind.”
He raises a brow. “I’ll keep up, don’t you worry about me.”
I glance at his injured leg and figure I’ll take it easy. We’ve lost too many men today, and I’m not willing to lose Jason too.
Fucking Sasha Federov. It had to be him. That bastard is going to pay.
As soon as we break through the tree line I hear the rumble of an old engine. Before we have a chance to take cover, an older Volkswagen Beetle—with more rust than colour covering its battered body—chugs around the corner of the crumbling buildings and I don’t have to stare to know that Luke is behind the wheel.
The sight of this man, this dangerous killer, squeezed behind the wheel of this old banger is beyond comical even in our dire circumstances.
A grin tugs at my lips as he pulls alongside us and yells, “Quit laughing and get fucking in.”
“Where the hell did you find this?” Jason asks as he squeezes his massive frame into the back seat allowing me to ride shotgun.
“Does it matter where I got it? Get in and stay alert. We’ve got backup flying in but not until tonight. We have to stay hidden until then.”
Luke forces the car into first gear, and as we putter over the rough concrete surrounding the old buildings, his words hit me.
“How did you get word to send backup?”
He lifts his arm and flashes me his wrist. “My phone was lost, likely ruined in the crash, but my watch is virtually indestructible.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It has a satellite mayday beacon. Once triggered, my men will immediately track me and send an extraction team. I activated it seconds after the car stopped rolling. We’ve been walking for around two hours, so I estimate no more than another four at the most before we’re picked up.”
“We can’t leave, I have someone to collect. And Sasha needs to be shut down,” I argue a little too forcefully considering this man is the reason I’m currently alive.
Luke steers the car down a rutted, one-lane track with an old farmhouse visible through some bushes a couple of metres to our left. Once past the home from which we’ve stolen this car, and with no old Hungarian farmer chasing us down with a shotgun, Luke looks at me, his face hard, his eyes filled with murderous darkness.
“We’ll leave when I say we’ll leave.”
“Then you can go alone. I’ll—”
“We’ll leave,” he continues, interrupting my words. “When I have Sasha Federov’s head. Only this time, we’ll do it my way.”
I stare at his profile, ignoring the way his powerful hands adeptly manoeuvre the car over rough ground. Part of me rebels against the commanding tone of his voice, but the darker part of me revels in it.
“No innocents are to be harmed,” I give a command of my own, one, judging by the tilt of his full lips, he finds funny.
“You’re just like my brother.”
“I’m nothing like Cole.”
“Hero complex. You both have one.” He looks at me, his stare penetrating but brief. “It almost killed him, and today you. You think I’m deadly? The need you both have to save everyone is far more lethal.”
He returns his attention to driving, and soon we are off the single-track lane, and onto the wider country roads.
“Stay alert,” he says, as another vehicle approaches and passes us by without incident. And those are the last two words he utters until he pulls up in the back street of a small village, and turns off the engine. The drive has been no more than thirty minutes, and I spent the entire time replaying his words.
I don’t have a hero complex. Nor a death wish.
“Stay in the car,” he commands without looking at either one of us, but I know the warning isn’t only for Jason in the back. And I’m about fucking done with his orders.
I push open my door with a rusty creak and step out onto the cobbled road. “I’m coming with you.”
Luke looks over his shoulder at me while buttoning up his rumpled suit jacket in an effort to cover the blood on his shirt. It hides very little. He still looks like a businessman that’s been to a conference in an abattoir—or a killer.
“Do you speak Hungarian?” At my silence, he responds with a dismissive, “As I thought. Stay in the fucking vehicle until I come out.”
I want to follow him to prove I can. To show him—and me—that he has no control over me or my actions. But, like the pet he’s made me feel, I stay put. In an act of pathetic defiance, I remain outside the car leaning up against the door waiting for the Hunter to return.
Jason doesn’t speak, so neither do I, both of us weary but ever alert. The two of us waiting for the inevitable ambush.
We got away, when we should be dead.
We made it this far without being followed.
It seems a little too easy, and a little too convenient.
Luke doesn’t take long, ten minutes, maybe fifteen, before he walks back towards us, his eyes locking with mine and narrowing when he sees me still outside the car.
In one hand he holds a full plastic water bottle, and it’s only then I notice that he never took a weapon with him—at least not one I could see.
“Get in the car, James.” Another command given in a voice that sends shivers down my spine and I want to disobey, but I want out of here more. We are exposed on this street. Easy pickings.
“Where’d you get that?”
He tosses the water to Jason in the back seat first, who gratefully gulps down the liquid before tearing his mouth away and passing it to me. Our trek through the forest has left us exhausted and likely dehydrated, and I don’t doubt the big man could’ve downed the lot in one go.
“The same place I got the phone.”
As if to emphasise his words, he tosses what looks like an ancient mobile phone into the hole in the front console where the ashtray once fit and then starts the car. The old engine growls and grumbles in protest, but Luke coaxes it to life, and we swiftly make our way out of the narrow back street and wind through the seemingly deserted village. Curtains twitch in the old homes, but nobody walks the cobbled streets.
“They think we are with Federov,” Luke says as we pass the last home with the feeling of a dozen hidden eyes on our backs, and head out onto the quiet country roads. “I didn’t confirm or deny it. Let them think we’re part of The Dominion.”
“His reach has expanded farther than our intelligence indicated,” I mumble, my head turning to watch the small village disappear behind us.
“His reach had claws in your own men,” Luke spits, his gaze catching Jason’s in the dirty rear view mirror. “I think we can safely confirm that your intelligence is beyond fucked.”
It was obvious who he blamed for that, but I was glad to see Jason didn’t back down and stared right back, his jaw tight, his eyes like flint.
“My
men died today, I want the cunt’s head more than you,” my head of security grits out in fury.
Luke laughs in response. It isn’t a derisive snort. It’s a fully rounded laugh like Jason has just told the funniest joke ever.
“The only place you’re going, not so pretty boy, is straight on a plane with your tail between your legs. A one-legged gimp is of no use to my operation.”
“Fuck you, Hunter. Even with one working leg, I can still hold my own—”
“Cock? That’s about all you can hold. And if you piss me off further, I’ll cut the fucking thing off, and your leg, and send you home a eunuch. Do we understand?”
Jason doesn’t answer. I don’t think he can speak through the red haze I see in his eyes. My head of security looks like he’s about ready to rip Luke Hunter apart, gimp-legged or not.
Where do my loyalties lie?
As I watch both men battle silently for dominance, I find myself unable to answer honestly.
Jason has been by my side for years, and Luke… well, I wonder when, not if, he will put a bullet in my brain or carve out my heart.
Still, that dark pull towards him only gains in strength. I know I wouldn’t be alive now if it wasn’t for him, but it’s more than that, and it has been from the beginning. Even though he’s barely indicated any interest in me except to threaten and bait me, I still can’t get him out of the mess that’s currently my head.
My men are dead. A mission that should’ve been simple turned into a shit-fest.
And still, the dark and deadly man at my side, currently driving us God knows where holds all my attention.
Maybe that knock to my head did more damage than I’d initially thought?
Who was I trying to kid? It had nothing to do with my head and everything to do with the self-imposed drought I’d endured. My cock was only going crazy because it was neglected. It was biology, pure and simple. I need to get off. I need that release. It didn’t have to be with Luke Hunter.
Liar. Liar. Liar.
Even the last vestiges of my conscious knew I was full of shit.
We eventually pulled off the road sometime later, Luke steering the old Beetle into an empty field of grass before tucking the vehicle behind a border of thick hedges. The quietness inside the car is choking me and I must get out. I need to breathe air untainted by him. Before he’s even pulled the handbrake and turned off the engine, I’ve grabbed a gun and stumbled out into the meadow not even bothering to slam the door shut behind me.
I’ve driven myself crazy with the need to get away from him and his presence. If he dares to issue me an order right now, I will snap. I’m so close to the end of my tether that I feel like I’m standing at the edge of an abyss, looking down into a bottomless pit of nothingness. Only, I want to dive in its pitch-black depths to my doom. And I can’t. No matter how seductive the darkness is, I must fight it. I have to fight it for her.
Alice. Alice. Alice. I repeat my daughter’s name like a prayer. I beg her very existence to stop me from making a mistake from which I can never return. With my eyes closed, I wish for the strength to overcome. I squeeze them so tightly shut that when I open them, hazy lights dance across my vision before they clear and the world comes back into focus. I almost gasp when I see the answer to my prayers. I stand in awe and thankfulness as it bounds out from its warren. A pure white rabbit, no colour on its fur, leaps gracefully across the meadow, and I track its every move. At one point, it stops abruptly, stands tall on its back legs and stares directly at me, before sniffing the air and carrying on its way.
That pure white creature is a message from the woman whose ghost still echoes in my heart.
My wife named our daughter Alice after the girl from Wonderland, and I know, I know, it’s a sign from her. I smile and breathe deeply, marvelling at the peace I feel. That is until the rabbit picks up its pace and leaps high before it disappears back into the ground. Back into the darkness—the inevitable abyss.
My heart sinks. It isn’t a message of strength; it’s a warning.
“You can’t fight this, James.”
In a field full of tall grass, under the fading Hungarian sun, I slump down to the ground and lie on my back, my eyes tracing the heavens. As the sky turns to dusk and the light takes its last dying breath, I make a vow—a promise to purge Luke Hunter from my thoughts.
This ends now.
Seven
Lily
* * *
My body aches.
My abused muscles scream with every minuscule movement. The whip marks across my buttocks and thighs burn with the heat of a furnace, and the flesh between my legs pulses with an increasingly familiar pain.
But the agony inside—deep inside—that radiates from my back entrance, is raw and ragged and causes my stomach to churn with any effort my body makes to adjust my uncomfortable position on a bed made with clean cotton sheets that smell like violets.
How long have I been here?
It had been months, maybe a year since I was taken, but how long have I been where I am now?
I estimate three days in this room, and before that, maybe a month in the cell with the bare concrete floor. The time before that is a blur, but I know I’ve been transported around the globe. I spent hours in a tiny cage in the cargo hold of a plane. Days in the back of a transport lorry, even more in the boot of a small car. I remember most of those times I would wake up disorientated. Whatever drug they’d pumped into my body wearing off and allowing me brief interludes of consciousness where the thick fog of nothingness had lifted.
There were times I craved that murky emptiness. In the dark, nothing could hurt me. I felt nothing, I heard nothing, I saw nothing, and my strongest sense—my sense of smell—that I’d learned was unlike everyone else’s, shut down until all my awareness went offline. It was as if someone had pulled the plug and I no longer had the power to function any further than breathing.
I’d swiftly learned that nothingness was the equivalent of bliss, and there were times I begged for the needle to slide into my veins.
Was I a junkie now? A junkie and a whore?
No. I wasn’t a whore. Whores had choices. I was a hole. A receptacle for untold abuse, to be filled at will by whatever my owners decided.
Then there were times my craving sickened me.
I was stronger than this. Stronger than them.
I plotted and planned and vowed. I screamed at any God that would listen, and promised him that once I was done with them, I was coming for Him.
No so-called God should allow someone to hurt the way I was suffering now.
No fucking God who sat on His throne in the fluffy white clouds, should sit back and watch another take, and break, and fuck, and kill, and destroy another person the way these men did with me. And not just me, but so many more.
What God would do that?
What God would give a person infected with evil so much power that they abused it in vile and sickening ways?
On those days, I screeched my promise to the heavens.
“Once I am done with them, I am coming for you. Have faith in my vengeance, dear Lord. Your flock is turning, your shepherds are dead, and I am the blackest sheep of them all.”
But He never listened. God had forsaken me.
The devil owned me now.
* * *
I needed to pee. But that would require moving.
“Get up, Lily. Don’t give up. You’re still you, no matter what. You’re a part of me. I’m here, Inside you. Use me.”
My mother’s voice had been coming and going, whispering words in my ear from the very first week. The first time I heard her, I thought I was dead. I thought I’d joined her. I thought it was over and I was finally free.
How wrong I had been.
Hearing her was both a blessing and a curse.
She never talked of him, though. He was a part of me, too. I felt him in the dark recesses of my mind. To me he had been a loving father, it was only since capture I’d found out he w
as just like them, if not worse.
A man who took and destroyed. A man who used and slaughtered. A sadist. A killer. A monster.
Alec Craven. Long-dead leader of something these bastards whispered was the Red Order. He had never been that to me, though. As far as I knew, he was my Dad. A wealthy businessman, and a devoted partner to my mother.
He went away for weeks at a time for business, but always came back to us laden down with gifts, and we would spend glorious days together as any normal family would do until he had to leave again. I never questioned where he went or what he did. I had no reason to do so. Life was perfect. Until it wasn’t. Until our staff were murdered in the dead of night, and my mother and I were dragged from our beds.
Six men took turns to rape and cut her in front of me.
Six men used her in brutal ways that still burned red behind my closed eyelids.
And through it all, she never took her eyes off me.
She gave me her strength as they took away first her dignity. Then her body. Then her life.
Then they took me.
I’ve wished for death ever since.
“No. You’re stronger than death,” she whispers again. “Death is not the greatest loss in life. What dies inside of us while we live is. That part of you is not dead, my sweet Lily. It’s here inside you. I’m inside you. Now get up. Get up. Get up!”
Keys against metal.
The scrape of the door as it slides open.
My eyes blink, their swollen lids allowing only a slit of harsh light to seep through.
“Get dressed,” an accented voice demands before what I assume are clothes are thrown at me. “And clean yourself up. You fucking stink.”
Just before the door closes once more, he adds, “Make sure to wear the shoes and the lipstick. You’re to please Sasha’s friend. He likes his whores to be clean, not looking like a filthy, ten-cent, infected cunt on a street corner.”
“Fuck you,” I croak through a dry and cracked throat.
