by Amy Faye
“You want a drink?”
“No,” she said. “But you can pour me one.”
“I’ll do that.”
He poured a glass of something amber from a bottle that was far too well-sculpted for her to be drinking from. When he passed it over, it had a spiced smell to it.
“To new experiences,” Blake said, raising his hand.
“I’ve had too many new experiences with you already.”
“Really? First time ever?”
“In an airplane? You bet your ass. What do you think, I want to get fired every time I get laid?”
“Then what would you drink to?”
Lara thought about it for a moment. She’d never drank to anything at all. She drank because it tasted good, or because she wanted to be drunk. She’d never needed any other reason.
“To new friends.”
“Friends? Sure.” Blake raised his glass. Lara met it in the air.
“Cheers,” she said softly. He muttered it under his own breath and they drank at the same time.
The liquor was strong. She didn’t let it sit on her tongue long enough to get any subtlety out of it, but it left a complex taste in her mouth after the fact. The burn stayed in her throat as the spices left something behind.
“And now,” Blake said, drawing close. “To dessert.”
His arms wrapped around her hips. Just a little teasing would be alright. There was no problem with just a bit. His lips tasted good. Vaguely alcoholic and distinctly masculine.
Stubble scratched her cheek, but she didn’t pull away. Not just for that. He felt good. Without all the fabric in the way, she was finding something that surprised her. There was barely an ounce of fat on him. How much time exactly did this guy spend in the gym?
Whatever the answer, she felt his muscles bunch up under his shirt, and then his arms tightened around her waist and he picked her up off the ground and lifted her onto the arm of the easy chair beside them. This was where she ought to stop him from going any further. Where the ride ended. A little kissing, a little suggestive behavior, and then she’d walk out.
Only, she didn’t want to walk out. Not yet. Just a little more. Then she’d be entertained, and he’d be bought in, and when she walked out, it would really sting. Teach him something about how to act around her.
His hands worked the buttons on her blouse. His teeth pulled at her lips. It felt good. Felt sexy. She loved this feeling. His hands reached inside her blouse, palmed her breasts. She could feel herself breathing hard, wanting more.
This was the time that she should walk away. This was the second time that she’d thought it, and it was even more true now. If she kept going, she wasn’t sure she would stop. Wasn’t sure that she could stop.
She was surprised at the sound of her own voice. “Don’t stop.”
He obliged her. His face pressed into the crook of her neck, kissing the sensitive skin there. She leaned into it. She wasn’t a slut, of course. Not really. She was just enjoying herself. Anyone had the right to do that. He wanted her, and she wanted him. She wanted to be wanted. That was perfectly reasonable, too. Nobody would question her about it. Why should they?
And of course, she wasn’t planning on taking him up on his offer. But as his hand snaked its way out of her shirt, pressed between her legs, and found the sensitive nub at the peak of her entrance and pinched it softly… well, plans change. That’s perfectly normal, too. Nobody would judge her for that. She laid back in the chair and closed her eyes, and as he knelt between her knees, she knew that plans had changed, and she was more than happy to accept that.
Eight
“You know what we do here, right?”
Blake laid down in bed beside Lara. He liked it that way; he took a moment to look over at her breasts. They were comfortably sized, topped with dark pink nipples. Sensitive. He guessed they were B-cups. He fought the urge to pull one into his mouth.
“Security,” Lara said, like she’d read it off of a website. He guessed that she probably had. Which begged the question whether or not she had read any of the speculation. Whether or not she had any particular thoughts on it, and what she believed out of the whole lot.
“Meaning what?”
“Bodyguard duty, maybe?”
“That’s part of it, sure.”
“Not all of it?”
“Of course not all of it. Not even close to all of it.”
“Oh.”
“If you don’t want to know, then I won’t bother you with it.”
She closed her eyes and laid her head back on the pillow. He slid down until he could lay down, too, rather than propping himself up on the wall.
“No,” Lara said finally. “If I’m tied in with you guys, I want to know what the score is.”
“Good girl. You should know. Because eventually, someone’s going to say, ‘where are you working?’ and you’re going to want to do something other than lie to them.”
“Why would I lie to them?”
“So you didn’t do much research.”
“Ten minutes isn’t very long.”
“No, I guess it isn’t.”
Blake stood up from the bed. He enjoyed being close to her. Enjoyed the feeling of her smooth skin. Enjoyed being pressed against her. But he hated the feeling of stillness. It felt like dying. He sucked in a deep breath and walked around the room.
“There’s a lot of people out there who seem to think that my job is to make sure that we kill as many babies and women as possible.”
“Is that true?”
Blake rubbed his temple. The question was an obvious one. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t see it coming. And yet, being asked now, it deserved some answer.
“Not particularly.”
“But a little bit?”
“I employ soldiers,” he said. “Mostly. You’re a fairly rare exception, if I’m being frank.”
“Then why’d you hire me?”
“Because I liked you, you had a good attitude under pressure, and because you lost your job.”
“So you hired me for my ass and pity?”
He looked down at her, and for an instant he felt a twinge of annoyance. “Self-righteousness doesn’t look good on you, darling. No, I didn’t hire you out of pity.”
The smile on her face as he said it told Blake that he’d taken the comment too seriously. He relaxed and took another pass across the room.
“So you hire soldiers. Doing what?”
“Doing the same things they were doing before, mostly. Protecting VIPs, keeping people from getting killed.”
“Your men have a lot of guns for people who are responsible for preventing killing.”
“Haven’t you heard? War is the number one way to end wars. We’ve been trying it since the first World War. You don’t think it’s been working?”
“No,” Lara answered. “It seems like it’s not working at all.”
“You’re right. It isn’t.”
“I don’t understand your point.”
“My point is, we’re getting boys killed, day in and day out. We’re getting everything and everybody into trouble. There was a time that we accepted that war was going to happen. These days, though… we’ve got this funny idea that we’re going to get out of it somehow. Like if we just work hard enough, we’ll be able to get a free lunch. And nobody cares if a few eighteen-year-olds get caught in the crossfire. After all, we’re bringing Democracy to the Middle East.”
“I’m not following.”
“What I’ getting at is this: we’re in trouble. We’re going to remain in trouble for the foreseeable future, like it or not. I don’t want to fight. Not really. I don’t want to kill anybody. But if we’re going to do it, I want it to be someone making sure that if a kid takes shrapnel in the eyes, he gets taken care of. That’s what I do.”
Lara didn’t have a response to that. Blake didn’t really expect her to.
“And what happens at the end of it?”
“At the end, we all get to
go home. But I’m afraid that there’s not going to be any end of it. But if that day comes, then I’m happy to walk away from the whole mess. If it comes.”
She stood up and grabbed her shirt.
“You sound like you’re planning on staying here until everyone but your boys is dead.”
Blake turned. “You’re wrong about that,” he started. But then he stopped.
She was wrong. He wasn’t planning on anything at all. He wanted to make sure that the men got their due. That was it. As long as that kept going, he didn’t care whether they were fighting or not. But that wasn’t the sort of attitude that was going to get them home, in the end. He needed to be a little smarter about it. She was right about that.
But he couldn’t say any of that. He wasn’t going to start questioning himself now, not when he was in the middle of trouble. He closed his eyes and took a breath. And in the moment of false darkness, he heard her moving. She slipped out of bed.
“I’m going back to my room,” she announced. She sounded annoyed. He didn’t know by what. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to ask. But he had to.
“Are you upset?”
“No,” she said. She sounded upset. But he couldn’t say what was upsetting her. He doubted that she could say, either.
“You seem upset.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m not.”
“I’ll walk you to the room.”
“I don’t need you to do that.”
“I would like to, though. So unless you’re going to stop me…”
“You don’t just get to boss people around, you know,” Lara growled.
Blake took a deep breath and leaned against the wall, watching her dress in a hurry. “No?”
“People get to make their own mistakes,” she said. “And it’s not your job to cover up for it. So just think about that next time, will you?”
Blake pressed his lips into a line. “You got it.”
Nine
Lara told herself she was going to go back to her room. But she didn’t. Which was a mistake, in hindsight. Going back to her room would have solved all of her problems; it wouldn’t have caused any of the ones that she fell into.
She slipped into the hotel bar and ignored the fact that it was a public space. It had a prominently-displayed liquor license; she knew what it was by instinct, rather than being able to read the large Arabic letters across the top. She sounded out the words in her head. It was slow going. Eventually, she gave up.
The man behind the counter spoke decent enough English as she ordered herself a bourbon, neat. The man brought it in an Old Fashioned glass and then turned away from her without a word. Lara leaned on her elbows. She could almost hear her mother’s voice in her head: “Lara! Elbows off the table!”
Well, Mom, fuck you, too. She took a drink. It was stiff and strong and exactly what she wanted. The bar was full. Just like it always was, she guessed. She’d stayed in plenty of hotels, some of them in the Middle East, and they all had full bars. Outside of hotel bars, and a few other bars and restaurants right around the hotels, Arabic towns tended to be pretty close to dry. And with the crack-down on illegal drinking establishments…
Well, this place wasn’t illegal. At least, she assumed not. It was very western here. The staff wore European suits that seemed to be surprisingly well-tailored. She guessed that they spent more than she made for a ten-hour flight both ways to get those suits. Per person.
Which was to say that they spent a lot of money, and it showed. Lara finished her glass. She was already tipsy. After she did a little more drinking, she might need help getting to the elevator. Luckily, a place like this, she guessed that they would have someone who could help with that.
It was a really nice place. Lara rubbed her hands along the heavy wooden bar. She’d been in plenty of hotels. Hundreds, really. A half-dozen in the Middle East between Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. This was her first time in Syria, but she guessed that they were, by and large, similar to the places that she’d stayed in the other countries, for the most part.
And this was the nicest place she’d ever been in, by far. This was apparently what it was like to have a billionaire paying your bills. A billionaire who felt bad for you.
She swallowed the drink and forced herself up from the bar. She wasn’t going to keep drinking herself into a hole, not if she could help it. She was going to dig herself out. Eventually. She just didn’t know how yet. That didn’t matter, not really.
Lara’s eyes drifted shut and she steadied herself by holding herself up on the bar. Which saved her life, she discovered, when a moment later a massive force smacked her in the front from the tips of her toes to the top of her skull.
It was hard enough to rip her off her feet and send her flying, but it was force, not heat. That was something, at least. Her side smacked hard into the lip of the bar, and then knocked her into a bar stool, which she could feel threatening to break under the weight of her body being thrown back against it.
Then she hit the floor, as hard as only gravity knows how to throw someone to the floor. Her breath forced itself out.
A pair of hands wrapped around her arms and pulled her back. Lara’s eyes opened without any intervening thought between her brain and her body. A man stood over her, not even looking at her. He was looking below her. No, behind her. Back the way they’d come. The words got all muddled in her head.
He looked hurt. His shirt was ripped and torn. And he looked like he was as comfortable with the situation as she could never be. Like he was actually used to all of this. Which was completely insane, but she couldn’t deny it.
“Blake?”
“Don’t try to speak,” he said, his voice loud. “Just stay loose. I don’t know how badly you were hurt. Did you hit your head or your neck?”
It occurred to her that his hands were crossed behind her neck, that he was holding her head up for her. Holding it stable, even as he dragged the rest of her body behind. Some things had to be sacrificed in favor of speed, Lara guessed.
Lara thought back. Did she hit her head? Or her neck? Or her spine? Her neck hurt. Her head hurt. Her spine hurt. But she hadn’t hit any of those things. She’d hit her side, and her hip, and her arm had threatened to rip right out of its socket when it caught on something as her body twisted.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
The relief was visible on his face. He propped her against a wall. “Stay here.”
Lara didn’t have much choice. She watched as he ran back the way they’d come, a dozen feet. A couple rested under what remained of a table. He leaned down and pressed his fingers into their throats. Then he lifted himself up a little, and moved another few feet. The message was impossible to miss, and impossible to ignore.
Lara shivered and watched. He felt for the pulse on another man. Then his hands balled up into fists and he started pulling the guy towards her. Behind the bar, the bartender tried to lift himself to his feet. He had blood streaking down his head where something had cracked him in the skull. He probably had a concussion, at the very least, Lara thought dimly. Call 9-1-1.
Her head started to clear very slowly. They don’t have 9-1-1 here. In Syria, the emergency services number was… she didn’t know. She’d read it, once. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that she really needed to know. Airport staff would be able to get emergency services much faster if you just had the pilot radio in. There was no pilot. They weren’t at the airport. So she didn’t know. In Iraq, 9-1-1 would work. Or 1-1-2. They could patch you through to the correct number. But they weren’t in Iraq.
Lara tried to move her arms. They moved, but there was no particular connection between what she wanted in her mind and what they did. They lifted a little ways, then trembled there for a moment, and then dropped.
Her feet wiggled for her. That was easier. It was less tiring, at least. She was so tired. But there was a good chance that something in the explosion had caug
ht her on the head. Don’t fall asleep. Try to focus on something.
The man propped up beside her was wearing traditional Arabic dress. A gown and a head-scarf. The watch on his wrist was expensive enough to mark him as very wealthy. His head lolled where Blake had put him. Her soldier grabbed someone else and pulled them back. A woman. Dimly, Lara felt a pang of jealousy that she couldn’t begin to explain. It wasn’t an appropriate emotion for the time. But that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it. She chastised herself. As if it would make a difference.
And then the world started to dim. She needed to stay awake. Stay focused. Watch Blake. Get some kind of explanation for what’s going on here. As long as she was awake, she’d get whatever she needed. If she fell asleep, then there was a very good chance that she wouldn’t wake back up again.
Her eyes closed on their own. Inside her head, Lara screamed at her eyes to open back up. To wake up. Then the voice got quieter, and finally the world around her disappeared entirely as she lost consciousness completely.
Ten
Blake Prince sat on a heavily-padded hospital chair. Syria had a lot of big messes on their hands. The Lord hadn’t quite turned a blind eye on the place—after all, he’d granted them attention from nations more readily-equipped to deal with their problems.
But looking at their infrastructure, which had crumbled since the proliferation of religious militants, it was hard not to think of it that way. Even Damascus looked like it had been destroyed by decades of war, and the fighting was barely two years old.
There were still places, though, that money bought you something. Not peace, of course. Nowhere was safe enough that they could be certain that there was no danger. Not when the enemy soldiers looked like men wearing the same clothes that everyone wore. Everyone but the Westerners who had showed up to make the waters even muddier.
A saline drip line ran into Lara’s arm. She was asleep. It wasn’t a coma. First and foremost because he believed her when she said she didn’t really hit her head hard enough to cause any permanent damage. People injured in accidents—and in things that aren’t remotely accidental, like the attack in the lobby of her hotel—tended to know best where they’d been hurt if you asked them immediately afterward.
