Fractured Refuge

by Annabelle McInnes

  Smith didn’t turn to him. The quiet between them was loud with unspoken thoughts. They shared a tangible horror story. Each was a performer in a terrible play, where their lines had been screams, and their costumes their own blood. But to know that someone understood, comprehended the blackness that could never be washed from the walls of the set. It was the creation of an instant linking of minds, of assertions, of loss.

  Nick’s heart swelled, only to shrivel again.

  Smith’s voice was hoarse when he finally replied. He kept his eyes downcast. ‘How long have they had you?’

  Nick swallowed. ‘Two days.’

  Smith nodded. ‘I think they had me for over a month.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘That’s one word for it.’

  Nick felt as though he had a mouthful of sand. He left Smith to bend over the sink and turn on the shower. His hand outstretched under the water spray as he waited for it to warm. His heart damn well cracked when Smith began to finger an unfamiliar image in mirror over the basin.

  There was wetness in the reflection of his icy blue eyes. ‘Is that me?’

  The disbelief was so audible, Nick had to clear his throat of the emotion before he spoke. ‘Yeah.’

  Dirty fingers buried themselves in a mass of hair. ‘I need a haircut.’

  Nick couldn’t help it. It bubbled out of him like popcorn. Smith’s face was nothing but crusted blood, stitches, bruised and swollen skin, hollowed cheeks and vacant eyes. His body was mutilated by scars. The bones of his torso were acutely pronounced from lack of nourishment. And the man wanted a fucking haircut?

  No way.

  Nick chuckled.

  Then he laughed.

  Loud, strong, unstoppable.

  He bent as he clutched his chest. His hand from the shower wet the fabric. His eyes teared up. His lungs laboured.

  When he finally pulled himself upright, he dared to look at Smith. Icy eyes met his; mirth feathered the corners.

  ‘Yeah,’ Nick said. ‘You need a fucking haircut.’

  And despite everything. Despite the torment they’d both endured. The horrors and the nightmares that would forever plague them. The scars that marred their skin and their souls, the desperation for vengeance and retribution they would probably never achieve, they shared a simple moment, a smile, and knew that another person on the earth truly understood the shadows that were their constant companions.

  ***

  He gave Smith a pair of scissors and left him to his shower. If it were anything like his first time under the warm spray, Smith would indulge. He needed time to marvel at the true colour of his skin, to be surprised by how much dirt swirled down the drain and appreciate how big his dick looked against a skinny body.

  Kira rested on the lower bunk with Lily. The surgeon had fallen asleep not long after she’d finished with Smith and their conversation. Kira’s graceful frame aligned herself with Lily’s, their bodies almost touching. Only the layer of bedding was between them. A skeletal form was barely more than a lump under all the covers. Kira’s fingers brushed gently through her dark hair, over her pallid skin and thick eyebrows until the woman’s frown eased in her sleep.

  Sweet Jesus. Nick’s thoughts had veered towards his own failures. If only he’d killed those bastards himself. If only he’d been man enough to let Euan go so he could hunt them down, wipe them from the earth, painfully.

  But he’d needed him. Christ, how he’d needed that big fucking brute.

  However, none of it would have mattered. There would be others to take their place, other corrupt souls to shit on what was left of humanity. Other bastards to be cruel and mean and heartless.

  That was why they had to do everything they could to keep Euan here. It wasn’t worth the risk. His life was far more important than two idiots who were trying to play God. Or Death, as it were.

  It took long moments for Kira’s focus to shift. When she eventually turned his way, where he casually held up the doorframe of the spare room, she offered him a warm smile.

  He didn’t return her outward sign of affection, but his features were soft as their gazes met and held.

  Kira’s goodness soaked into him. It was nice, to simply be. To look, to feel. Just the two of them, like this. Forever.

  Hopefully forever.

  He tilted his chin towards the kitchen and left the doorframe.

  ‘I heard you laughing,’ Kira said when she entered the main living area a short time later.

  She looked wrecked. Her pink cotton t-shirt was rumpled and stretched, her jeans creased and ill fitting. Her eyes were glassy, purple shadows beneath. She pulled at her hair and left it standing. The hand she scrubbed over face was chapped and dry.

  Nick leaned into the supple leather of the three-seater couch, breathed in the dry, filtered air. ‘Smith wants a haircut.’

  She gave him a quizzical look and moved towards him. Her bare feet were silent on the carpet. ‘A haircut?’

  The corner of his mouth tilted. ‘Exactly.’

  She sat next to him. The scent of lavender, blood and disinfectant enveloped him. He lifted his arm to create a small nook against his chest. Her small body perfectly fit into the space. She burrowed into his embrace. ‘You’re okay?’ she asked.

  He kissed her hair, took in her essence. Ignored the twist in his gut. ‘I’m okay.’

  Her fingers trailed along the edge of his thermal shirt and wormed their way under the fabric. Her skin was warm as she caressed his belly and twirled the light dusting of hair that grew there. He liked her touch. He liked her smell. He liked being surrounded by her art and her books.

  He especially liked being surrounded by her very safe bunker.

  His lips eased into a small smirk.

  ‘Euan isn’t,’ she said.

  Nick’s smile faded. ‘He isn’t.’

  Her gaze shifted towards him. Her chin rested on his pec muscle. ‘He agreed. To let me go outside. To be a part of everything.’

  Nick sighed and watched as her head moved with his exhale. He remembered the words Euan used to announce the shift in focus. He also remembered the broken look in his eyes. ‘Gathered that.’

  Her hand left his stomach and feathered up to his chest. Five fingers pressed over his thundering heart. ‘He’s going to leave.’

  Nick reached around with his free arm and held her hand through the fabric. ‘He’s going to try.’

  Cobalt blue was bright. ‘Where is he now?’

  Nick reluctantly looked towards the ceiling. ‘Punching bag.’

  Her response was pained, desperate, uncertain. ‘What should we do?’

  Nick’s answer was the opposite. ‘Love him, Pix. Love him as much as we can. That, and break his legs.’

  Chapter 17

  The blood wouldn’t come off. He couldn’t get it out of the crevices of his cracked hands and from under his fingernails. He could see it. Dark, almost black, staining his skin with the horrors of what had happened.

  His knuckles stung as he scrubbed, the skin lost to the makeshift punching bag they’d built together. A bag made of reused leather and sand that hung in one of the spare rooms in the aboveground home. He had ignored the bite of pain for hours as his body had laboured under his anger, his despair, his drive for retribution. The sweat was still cold on his skin.

  How could everything have turned into this?

  There had been a time when he had thought that the plague had been a blessing for him. He’d found Nick. He’d found Kira. Somehow, they’d fallen in love. All three of them. It was an impossibility.

  The ache in his body was acute. But the pain in his heart was worse. It was an incessant throb that vibrated through him. It cracked the foundations he’d cemented into his soul. The chrysalis he’d encased the sensitive organ had not only been shattered, the pieces had turned to dust. He was vulnerable in every way possible.

  What he could have changed if he’d followed his head instead of his heart. The people he could have saved. Live
s, souls, hearts. He thought of the scars on Smith’s chest and the type of implement that had been used to create such macabre markings. He thought of the men strung up on meat hooks. The torn flesh of the rotting carcasses, the burnt skin, the missing limbs. The blood …

  Knowing that they had been young men, brothers, listening to their kin die as they struggled to take their own last breaths.

  The burden of the knowledge crippled him.

  ‘Euan?’

  He couldn’t look at him. He felt the enormity of the shame and horror of what had happened weigh upon him. It was a suffocating cloak of misery and despair. It held him immobile where he hovered over the blood-smeared sink. The faucet ran cold.

  Nick spoke to him through a tunnel of shadows. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

  He squeezed his eyes tight. He wanted to believe those words. He did.

  But he couldn’t.

  Nothing was ever going to be okay again.

  Firm footsteps came his way. When a masculine hand rested on his naked bicep, he shuddered. He wasn’t honourable enough to receive that touch.

  He’d failed Nick once. He had left an untainted, spirited soul and returned to find a mutilated, shattered one. The remains of an uncalculated decision had not only destroyed Nick, it had obliterated Euan. The burden of carrying that suffocating weight, regardless of Nick’s improvements, still tormented him.

  This time, he planned to desert him …

  Christ, he was going to be sick.

  The warmth of Nick’s body pressed up against his spine. A head rested on his shoulder. Euan swallowed. Twice. But his stomach still rebelled, and the tremor in his muscles continued.

  ‘You couldn’t have stopped this,’ Nick murmured into the fabric of his t-shirt.

  His words caused him physical pain. They were shards of glass that sliced him upon contact. He turned off the water with a jerk and viciously pulled himself from his grasp.

  Euan growled. ‘Just leave. I’m fine.’

  Nick threw his head back and laughed. The sound was strained with a mocking edge. ‘You are so far from fine.’

  Euan simply sneered.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ Nick implored.

  ‘I can’t.’ He said it because it was true.

  Nick moved closer to him. ‘When are you going to get in your thick skull that we’re in this together? All of it.’

  Never, his mind screamed. But outwardly, he remained silent.

  The stifling blanket of hell was so heavy his knees could no longer support the weight. Nick’s face twisted in worry when he took the two steps to the toilet and sat with a crash. His hands trembled as he used them to cover his face.

  Those long fingers were now at his face. They ran over his shortly cropped hair. They cupped his head, and brought it to a hard stomach. Euan leaned into the warmth, the strength. He smelt man and hope.

  He didn’t deserve either. But he could no longer ignore the open fissures, the leaking sentiment, the emotional turmoil. His hands continued to fucking shake. ‘I’m falling apart,’ he told him honestly.

  There was a pause. ‘Then let us put you back together.’

  Euan began to shake his head. ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘You don’t need to think,’ a female voice whispered.

  Euan pulled from Nick’s embrace and looked up.

  His attention latched onto an apparition who stood in the doorframe. A female prodigy of indefinable value. A look of disquiet and concern was etched in her features. Kira’s eyes were serious, a reflection of the moment and the feelings that swirled around the room.

  She seemed to float towards him. A fantasy in truth. An illusion made real. In her eyes he saw the beginning and end of all things. In her eyes he saw their future. Not his future, because that was over, but the future of the human race. This tenacious, driven, little platinum-blonde spitfire was going to drag humanity back into civility. Kicking and screaming.

  Euan’s only job now was clear the path for her.

  She stood alongside Nick. Her concentration didn’t waver. She studied him. She comprehended the character of the small, indistinguishable creatures he thought he’d hidden deep within his soul.

  Euan had stood before men with weapons of steel and wood that were held comfortably in their fists. He’d taken the lives of men to save them from destruction. He’d stood on the cliff of humanity’s destruction and watched as it imploded. And yet, when he met the crystal-blue eyes of the tiny woman before him, he was naked, childlike, vulnerable.

  ‘Trust us,’ Nick beseeched.

  Euan’s gaze flicked between Kira and Nick. He swallowed. Trust them? Could he? His stomach tightened.

  Kira’s hands were now on his head. But this time, there was a sensual element. They explored his broad shoulders, his neck. They gently pried under his fingers so she could hold his hands in hers.

  Then she knelt so they were eye to eye.

  He was going to implode. He was. He knew it. As much as he knew that his heart was filled with the love for both of them, in this moment, his body and mind couldn’t manage the dichotomy of the love for them, and the hate for himself.

  Her gaze was all encompassing. ‘We’re going to love you.’

  ‘No.’ His voice broke on the single word.

  Her voice consumed his world. ‘You’re going to let us.’

  ‘You can’t—’

  Delicate fingers were placed over his lips. ‘I can. We can. We do.’

  ‘No,’ Euan mumbled as his heart shattered.

  She whispered, ‘Yes.’

  The earth beneath him began to shift and tilt. He stared down a tunnel. The only light was an oncoming train.

  ‘Let’s get him out of here,’ Nick’s voice came through to him from clouds high in the sky. Wisps of thought and sound lost to him as soon as they were uttered.

  Kira shifted and he was on his feet looking down. Her tiny, feminine stature was dwarfed by his giant one. Yet it was her courage and determination that brought their gazes in line with one another. She took his hand, her smaller palm a cool comfort in his. He squeezed back instinctively.

  Nick directed him from behind. A comfort as the cocoon of sanctuary closed around him. It assuaged the ache in his chest, the tightness of his joints, the shallowness of his breath.

  Kira directed his pliant body towards the bedroom. When he stood in the doorway, her delicate hand was still encased in his. Her crystal-blue eyes held him immobile. They attempted to reassure and sooth. She leaned in and reached up to place her free hand on his chest, over his thundering heart.

  ‘Mind if we undress you?’ she asked. Her voice was a whisper against his skin. It brought him further into her exquisite spell.

  ‘The blood,’ he tried to choke out.

  Her eyes were gentle. ‘There is no blood. You washed it all away.’

  He was too overwhelmed to verbally assent, to rebuke, but Kira took his silence as permission. She extracted her hand from his. Her fingers moved to his leather belt. She unclasped the latch with gentle tugs.

  He fought with the beast that wanted to take command, the dominant animal inside that gnashed its teeth at the bars that currently caged it. But the light Kira used to uncover the parts of him that yearned for love, affection, devotion was now a beam of sunshine. It scattered rays of illumination over every grey gradation to his soul. Its warmth enveloped him. He could do nothing but finally capitulate.

  Submit.

  To both Nick and Kira.

  He would give them both this, the only prize he had to offer. The gift of himself. A lasting memento of him. A tangible object they could hold after he was nothing but dust and memory.

  Nick was at his back. Strong, sure hands caressed his arms, his shoulders, his lats, down to the base of his spine. His fingers traced the patterns of tattoos that covered his body, even hidden under the fabric of his shirt—the lion’s head, the dove, the angel of death, the scrollwork and starbursts that all held significance to moments in
his life.

  Euan wished there were an artist who could imprint this occasion on his soul. It would be the single token he would take with him to the afterlife.

  Nick’s fingers caught the hem of Euan’s shirt and lifted. He complied without hesitation, his long arms rose up to the ceiling. Kira’s lips brushed the indentation between his pectoral muscles. Her small, feminine hands clasped his exposed hipbones, her lush breasts pressed against his upper stomach.

  His belt and pants were now undone and rode low on his hips. Kira knelt at his feet to untie the laces on his boots, but the subservient nature of the act flayed him as cruelly as a bullwhip on his exposed skin.

  He found his voice after a stuttering start. ‘No, Kira. Don’t … kneel. I think I’ll watch first. You two enjoy each other.’

  The overhead light was on and Kira’s eyes glistened. Her fingers threaded through his chest hair and scraped over a flat nipple. She licked her lips in feminine excitement as it puckered from her attention.

  Nick’s lips pressed against the sensitive skin of his shoulderblade. The lock of roguish hair that always fell over his brow tickled. ‘No more watching.’

  Kira agreed on a mumble as she took Euan’s dark nipple in her mouth. She sucked, bit.

  He inhaled sharply. That flash of pain brought new desires to the forefront. He wanted them to devour him, eat him alive. Consume every morsel of his body with tiny baby-bird bites.

  A distinctive growl reverberated through his chest. Kira answered with an increase in strength to her jaw.

  Hands began to tug at his pants. They pulled on his boots, brushed over his skin—one set of masculine rough palms, the other feminine, delicate. They soothed. They were gentle. Euan clenched his fists at his sides as they removed the last remnants of his physical armour.

  ‘Easy, big man,’ Nick crooned in his ear. His tongue trailed the whorls, dips and ridges. ‘Breathe. It’s not a battle. Just us.’

  Kira’s fine-boned fingers tunnelled into Euan’s closed fists to loosen them. Her lips were wet as she teased him with kisses over his chest. Her long eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings against his skin. ‘We’ve got you,’ she promised. ‘You’re safe. Relax and let us take care of you.’