by Dia Cole
Heaven in Hell: Episode Two
Dia Cole
Contents
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Afterword
About the Author
Books By Dia Cole
Excerpt Heaven in Hell: Episode Three
Summary
Chapter 1
Thank you
Heaven in Hell: Episode Two
All rights reserved.
Published by Black Diamond Press LLC.
Copyright © 2017
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction, electronic sharing, or other unauthorized use of this book is prohibited without the express written permission of the publisher.
Cover Art by Majeau Designs
Edited by Anne-Marie Rutella
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-946975-02-7
Summary
Seduce him or die trying…
While stranded in the most zombie-infested part of the city, Lee will do anything to save her injured friend—even seduce Dominic, the dangerous army sergeant leading their mission. Although he tries to resist, she challenges his orders not to fraternize with civilians in the hottest way possible. Unprepared for the soul-shattering desire that burns between them, Lee quickly finds herself in over her head. Soon the seducer becomes the seduced and Lee must fight to keep her heart, and her dark secrets, from destroying them all.
For the brothers...
1
Gentle hands stroked my hair.
“Gran,” I whispered before remembering that she was dead.
Unless…am I dead too?
I shifted against the hard floor. My ankle and calf screamed in protest.
No. There’s too much pain for me to be dead. Besides, the afterlife has to smell better than cheap pine air freshener.
My eyes fluttered open to meet Dominic’s dark gaze.
Lines of worry marred the sergeant’s handsome face.
Well this is unexpected.
Like a kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar, he quickly yanked his hands out of my hair.
A few strands caught in the wristband of his watch.
“Ouch.”
He shifted position.
My head rolled off the gray backpack that had been serving as my pillow and smacked on the black-and-white linoleum.
“Are you trying to kill me?”
His cheekbones reddened as he carefully untangled his watch from my hair. “How are you feeling?”
“Like crap. Where are we?” I croaked, rubbing my head. There was a weird ringing in my right ear.
“We’re inside what used to be a travel agency in an office complex down the street from the Western Warehouse.”
That explained why the walls were plastered in colorful posters featuring exotic places I’d never see.
“We’ve been here awhile. You should drink something.” Without waiting for a reply, he moved away, giving me an unencumbered view of a kitchenette, several round tables, and two vending machines—a soda one and a snack one. The front of the snack machine had been kicked in.
Looks like someone needed a Snickers ASAP.
The remains of a Christmas tree withered in the far corner of the room. Three intrepid ornaments clung to bare branches. The rest of them lay shattered amid the pine needles on the floor. The brightly colored fragments glinted in the light coming from the cracks in the mini-blind-covered windows. It was another reminder that there would never be another Christmas. Given the dark memories I had of that holiday, it should’ve made me glad. Instead it saddened me.
I gingerly touched the goose egg forming near my temple.
Why do my head and leg hurt so badly?
I commanded my muddled brain to boot up faster.
Dominic knelt next to me and held a plastic bottle to my chapped lips. “Drink this.”
Expecting water, I gulped down the liquid and immediately choked on the fizzy sweet flavor. Warm soda sloshed over the rim and ran down my neck.
The next sip went down easier, and by the third, the sugar melted away my mental cobwebs.
Like a wrecking ball, the events of the day came rushing back to me. I relived each memory.
The supply run to retrieve medicine for a sick child going terribly wrong. My sister, Eden, being killed by the zombie horde and then coming back as a Howler—a kind of super fast zombie. A zombie biting and infecting me outside the animal hospital. My friend, Reed, being impaled by his weapon in the crash that totaled our vehicle and left us stranded in the middle of zombie central.
“Oh, God.” I pushed Dominic’s hands aside and sat up quickly. Trying not to hurl as the room spun wildly around, I asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to, “Reed. Is he…alive?”
“Corporal Ross is stitching him up in the other room.” He nodded in the direction of the doorway. “He’ll pull through.”
“Good.” I let out a breath and sagged back down. “Still. I should check on him.”
“You need to take it easy. You hit your head pretty hard in the explosion. And there’s your injured leg.” His gaze dropped to my blood-covered jeans.
Oh, crap.
My heart seized.
He knows about the bite. What will he do?
I braced myself up on my forearms expecting the worst. Just earlier today he’d killed our friend Roger when he’d been bitten.
Dominic’s eyes were shuttered. His expression told me nothing.
“Dominic, I can exp—”
He reached for my leg. “I haven’t had a chance to check it out. Let me look at your ankle.”
He didn’t know.
Fear rushed out, replaced by wariness.
I’ll have to be careful if I want the chance to say a decent goodbye to Reed.
“It was a minor sprain. It’s fine. Really.” I leaned forward and flicked at some of the dried gore on my sneakers. Thankfully, the stains on the bottom of my jeans hid any evidence of the bite and gave me a good cover story. “This is from stomping in a couple of Biters’ heads. They were licking up Eden’s blood.” My breath caught as the pain of her loss knifed through me.
As if sensing the turn in my emotions, Dominic slowly rose to his feet. He looked as dangerously sexy as ever with his dark hair rumpled and streaks of black soot covering his face. He prowled to the window and turned his back to me. After a minute, he spoke. “I take full responsibility for your sister.”
I took a deep breath. “She and Reed should’ve stayed at the school.” Neither one of them had any business leaving the safe house. Reed couldn’t or wouldn’t fight zombies and Eden had been so rocked by the loss of the man she loved she hadn’t been eating or sleeping.
Dominic surprised me by nodding. “You’re right. I thought they’d benefit from getting combat experience. They weren’t ready.”
I opened my mouth to lay into him, but then closed it. It would be so easy to blame him, but that wasn’t fair. Eden’s actions were the r
eason for this shit storm. She’d decided to throw all our safety to the wind by rescuing a dog that had infected Rosie, one of the children at the safe house, with the canine flu.
“No. It wasn’t your fault. She didn’t listen to your orders.”
Eden had never been one for following rules.
Must be something in our blood.
I blinked hard against the onslaught of tears. I refused to think of Eden. If I did, I’d crumble apart like a puzzle picked up by the edges.
“She’s not the only one.”
Dominic’s long legs ate up the space between us.
I gulped at his dark expression. This was the face he wore before ordering us to do fifty push-ups for failing a training maneuver.
Today, I’d disobeyed him, repeatedly. Now I had to pay the piper.
But Dominic didn’t start yelling. That fact alone made my knees tremble.
He crouched down next to me and leaned over far enough that I could smell the cinnamon gum on his breath.
“You ignored a direct order. What happens when orders are disobeyed?”
The rote response came easily to my lips. “People die.”
“Going back for the backpack was idiotic,” he said reminding me of how I’d made the suicidal decision to return to our zombie-infested vehicle to retrieve my backpack and the canine flu antiviral medicine in it.
I nodded.
“You could have been killed.”
I nodded again.
“You would have been torn to pieces if I hadn’t gone back for you.”
My head dropped to my chest. “I know.”
He leaned in so close I had to look up into his penetrating stare. “Don’t ever do it again.”
He didn’t say “or else” but the unspoken threat hung between us in the pine-scented air.
“Yes, sir.”
Seemingly mollified, he rose and turned as if to leave.
“Reed will be okay, right?” I dared to ask again.
Dominic spun around. He didn’t say anything. The temperature of the room seemed to drop fifty degrees.
I clenched my fists. “You said he’d pull through.”
“Ross says it’ll take him weeks to recover. And with an injury like that, he’ll likely lose the use of his left arm. Permanently.”
Reed’s left-handed.
My smile faded. “There has to be something we can do.”
“There isn’t. He’s deadweight. If we bring him back, he’ll be a burden to everyone at the safe house.”
My mind raced as I scrambled to make a case for Reed. “He could learn to do things with his other hand, I know he could. And he already helps with the cooking. He could take over more of the food prep.”
Dominic’s expression didn’t change. “He isn’t on the list.”
That stupid list again.
Dominic and his squad were under orders to rescue all civilians on some mysterious list. I was on the list. Reed wasn’t. I wanted to growl in frustration. “You can’t abandon him. I promise I’ll follow every single order you make from here on out. Just don’t leave him.”
Dominic sighed and scraped a hand down his face. The movement spread soot from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw. “We’ll get him back to the school.”
Relief made me sag in the chair. “Thank you.”
“After your theatrics back in the Warehouse, I know you’ll stay with him even if it means your death. Right?”
I didn’t bother dignifying that with a response.
“Are you and Reed lovers?”
My head shot up, my indignant gaze tangling with his narrowed one. “It’s none of your business.”
“You seem ready to die for him. I need to know why. Anything that affects the survival of this group is my business.”
“No. We aren’t lov… together that way.” I shifted, uncomfortable with the line of questions. Reed and I were complicated. “We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
He snorted. “You’re still a kid.”
His imperious tone rankled. I lifted my chin up. “I’ll be twenty-one soon.”
“Case in point.”
“How old are you?” I studied the rugged angles of his face. I’d initially put him in his mid-twenties, but maybe he was older than that.
He sank down into a squat next to me. “Old enough to know better.”
What did that mean?
My head began that slow sweet spin it did whenever he was less than a foot away. I inched backward trying to get some distance.
“So you met when you were young?” Dominic prompted.
“Yeah. He lived next door. The Acres was a pretty tight-knit community.”
His eyebrows shot up. “The old hippie commune?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “It hasn’t been a commune for decades.” I don’t know why I was feeling so protective of our old neighborhood. Growing up, I’d been ashamed of the place. I hated the way the kids at school made fun of our homemade clothes and the garden vegetables we brought for lunch.
Dominic’s lip curled up in something close to a smirk. “That explains a lot.”
What does he mean by that?
Deciding to tell him the whole story, I continued. “When Reed was fourteen he and his mom were in a car wreck. She didn’t make it. He came to live with us.” That’d been such a dark time. For a while it looked as if Reed wasn’t going to survive his injuries. It’d taken three surgeries and multiple blood transfusions to save his life. “Later, when Gran got sick, I took over guardianship of him and Eden.”
Dominic cocked his head as if seeing me clearly for the first time. “You can’t be much older than they are.”
“I’d just turned eighteen when Gran had her stroke. They were still considered minors.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility for an eighteen-year-old.”
“You’ve no idea. I was two months from graduation and counting down the days until I could join the Corps.”
Dominic’s eyebrows shot up, “The Marines?”
I laughed. “Hell no, the Peace Corps. My best friends and I were going to do it together. Before you start thinking I was some Goody Two-shoes or something, you should know that my friends were the ones with altruistic motivations. I just wanted to leave the Acres and this godforsaken town in the dust.” My face fell as I thought about the moment when all my hopes and dreams had gone up in smoke and the person I loved most in the world left me. “One day I came home to find Gran on the floor.”
“She’d died?”
“No. Not right away. But she never regained consciousness. Eventually, some lady in a suit came over from Social Services. Since we had no other family, the state wanted to take custody of Eden and Reed. They would’ve handled Gran’s medical expenses too.” My face scrunched up as I remembered the awkward meeting with the sharp-nosed older woman.
“But Eden and Reed would’ve ended up in the system, and God only knows what kind of government subsidized medical care Gran would’ve received. And that was after they’d auctioned off Gran’s stuff.” Even thinking about how dispassionately the lady talked about liquidating the house and everything in it made my blood boil.
“I couldn’t let them sell Gran’s treasures.” A lump grew in my throat as I thought about the antique chair she’d rocked us in when we were small. The old grandfather clock that never kept the time. And even her silly collection of porcelain frogs.
“So you refused?”
“That’s the long and short of it.” The reality was that I debated for longer than I’d like to admit before doing the right thing.
“So Reed’s like your brother,” he said, a note of relief in his voice.
I wanted to say yes but the memory of Reed’s warm lips on mine came unbidden. In a moment of drunken idiocy, I’d let him forever change the dynamic between us. It was something I deeply regretted, but could never undo. “I won’t leave him behind.”
He chewed on my answer in silence. When he looked up t
he intensity in his gaze took my breath away. “And I won’t leave you behind.”
2
A maelstrom of emotions rushed through me. Confusion swam to the surface. “Why do you care if I live or die?” I searched for the truth in his eyes. Even if I was on some military save list, it didn’t make sense that this man…this soldier would keep risking his life. For me.
Dominic’s full lips pressed together. He got a faraway look. “You remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
Ignoring my question, he jumped to his feet and stalked over to the vending machines.
Not for the first time, I wondered if he was with someone. Before I could think better of it, I blurted out, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
One sable brow rose. “What’s with the interest in my relationship status?”
My face heated. “I just wanted to know who I reminded you of.”
Wholly expecting the gruff brush-off I’d received the past few times I’d asked anything personal, I was surprised when he turned to look at me. “Jen…Sergeant Brooks. She was one of the soldiers on this mission. She didn’t survive.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t known he’d had more than one female soldier on his squad, much less that she’d been killed.
“You look like her. Her eyes were light, not dark like yours. But you have similar features—and you’re both fighters.” He said the last word with a tenor of warmth in his voice that I hadn’t heard before.
“What happened to her?”
“She and Hunter were evacuating civilians from the South Valley when they were ambushed by the gangs. She sacrificed herself so the rest of them could escape.” Dominic’s gaze grew unfocused as he stared at the rows of chips in the vending machine. “Apparently she gave ‘em hell before she died.”
His jaw relaxed as some memory had his lips curling. He rested his forearms against the machine, his head bowed between them. The movement pulled his tight black shirt taut over his muscles.
