“Smart dog,” he murmured, glancing at his injuries, unable to stop the gushing from his stomach. As it was, he was so weak, his arms felt like wet noodles, and his gun, a fifty-pound barbell.
Too soon, before he was ready, a beauty of a woman, despite a bad blonde wig, sauntered around the corner, dressed in a maid’s uniform. He hadn’t even known when she’d entered the room, which told him he was in a bad way and fading.
He grimaced up at her. “What happened to knocking before you enter?”
“From the mess you’re making on the floor, I thought you needed maid service.” She straddled him, a gun in her hand, and even the conservative maid’s dress she wore and a hole in his gut did nothing to stop his gaze from following the path up her skirt. If he was going to die, he was going to die happy.
He managed to lift his gun without using both hands. “I see we like the same toys.” Spots splattered in front of his eyes. Shit. He was going to pass out.
She nudged his hip with her foot. “Don’t you dare bleed to death until I’m done with you, Renegade.”
“Hello, Chale,” came a familiar male voice.
A man stepped forward then, removing a baseball cap he wore low over his face, to allow Chale to identify him.
“Thought Adam had killed you, greedy bastard,” Chale said to Lucian, an Area-51 GTECH turned Zodius, who’d tried to overthrow Adam.
“You assumed what we wanted you to assume,” Lucian said. “What we let you believe. Your plan to evacuate the Russian has failed. He’s dead. I let your people keep the wife and kids. We have no time for babysitting.”
Anger coiled inside Chale, and he tried again to lift his gun. The woman kicked it aside.
Chale raked his gaze over her in an intentionally hungry fashion. “Sweetheart,” he drawled. “I can assure you, even bleeding to death, that I’m a better ride than this lowlife. Let me kill him, and we’ll talk.”
Lucian’s boot connected with Chale’s face in a blast that rattled his teeth. His ears rang from the jolt, and blood spilled from his mouth, but he laughed and looked at the woman.
“Jealous type, I guess,” he said, a second before the next kick sent his head jerking to the left, and everything went black.
Self-preservation was all that kept Sabrina from shooting Lucian herself right then. “Are you trying to kill him before he tells us what we need to know?” she demanded. “You shouldn’t even be here. Chale recognized you. Someone else might recognize you.”
Lucian slid the cap back on his head, like it was really some sort of disguise. “Chale recognized me because I gave him the chance,” Lucian said. “He won’t live long enough to tell anyone. I told you to trust me. I covered your sweet little ass just like I said I would. I killed the Russian, and I’ll kill Lara.”
Never, in this lifetime or any other, would she trust Lucian. She never should have gone to him. He was setting her up. She could feel it in every inch of her body. “For all we know, she’s already told the Renegades about Serenity.”
“She believes they killed her family,” he said. “I’m betting that hasn’t changed.”
“Excuse me if I’m not willing to gamble with my future,” she argued.
“They won’t trust her,” he said. “Whatever she says is nothing without proof, and she won’t live long enough to find any.” He bent down next to Chale, snatched the Renegade’s cell phone from his belt, and held it up. “We have everything we need to get to Lara right here.” His free hand slid around her thigh. “Trust me.” His fingers brushed her crotch. “Do exactly what I tell you, and your place in Serenity will be secure.”
Said the wolf to Little Red Riding Hood, and for the first time in a very long while, she felt like the girl with the red cape—helpless and at the wolf’s mercy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wild didn’t begin to describe what kissing Lara unleashed inside Damion. He had never felt anything like he felt in this moment, never felt so out of control, so out of his own body. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, there was a warning, a voice telling him this wasn’t normal.
One minute they were arguing, the next they were all over each other, touching, licking, tasting. Her naked little backside rubbing against his cock, driving him insane with need. He couldn’t get enough of her. Couldn’t make himself stop kissing her, stop touching her, couldn’t resist molding her breasts to his hands and swallowing the moan that slid from her lips to his. He was a man who didn’t lose control, but he was now. He was with this woman, this stranger. In some far part of his mind the word “voodoo” played again, warning him something wasn’t right about his reaction to this woman, that she claimed something wasn’t right about her reaction to him. He told himself to stop. Instead, they melted into one another, his tongue stroking hers. The wildness of passion exploded into an unfamiliar desperateness like nothing he had ever experienced with another woman, a need to escape into each other, a need not to speak, not to think.
Damion’s hand slid up her back, into her hair, angling her mouth to deepen the kiss, to take more. Whatever happened beyond this moment, beyond the desire, it didn’t matter right now. There was no right or wrong, no enemies or even friends. There was just feeling, needing, taking.
Reality slammed into him the instant her fingers touched the zipper to his body armor over his rib cage. Damion jerked back from her, suspicion over her motives a cold slap of reality. What the hell was he doing? Then, more importantly, what the hell was she doing? Accusation narrowed his stare. Had she ever been hallucinating, or was this all a ploy to take him out? Had she heated him right into a big pile of stupid?
She blinked up at him, her lips swollen from his kisses, her eyes clouded with desire that was quickly dawning with unhappy realization. Aware. She was now all too aware of what he was thinking, the distant confusion she’d shown minutes before, long gone. Long gone, like it had never existed. Damn it to hell, he didn’t like being made a fool and didn’t make a habit of it.
The phone on the wall by the door started to ring, a scream of sound in the midst of the silent tension that had Damion ready to roar with both irritation and relief at the timing. He needed space from this woman, but he didn’t want it. Caleb and Michael had heard Lara scream, though, and if he didn’t answer the call, they’d think something was wrong. Clearly there was, since she was naked and in his arms, and no matter how much he believed she was a victim, she didn’t hide her desire to kill all Renegades, him included.
The phone was on the second ring. “I have to get that, or we’ll have company I don’t think either of us would welcome right about now.”
She nodded tensely, her gaze, hot only moments before, now downright icy. She slid off of him, grabbing the towel on the floor.
Damion sat there a moment, both with an ache in his groin at the sight of the ivory curves, but more so, with an odd sense of loss he’d never experienced before.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, her expression clouded, confused, wounded, rather than angry at his distrust. Wounded. This word sang in his mind, and with it, guilt in his gut about daring to touch her when she was vulnerable. Unless she wasn’t vulnerable, unless it was all an act.
The phone stopped ringing. Damn it. Damion scrubbed his jaw and jerked into action, biting back a groan at the uncomfortable stretch of his zipper across his raging erection. He grabbed the phone attached to the wall and said, “2020,” a code that changed with every use and indicated that the facility was secure and he wasn’t under hostile takeover.
“That’s one bit of good news,” Caleb said in a heavy sigh. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the same to give you.”
Caleb didn’t take the long way to a point, unless he didn’t really want to get to it in the first place, and he was now. Damion glanced at Lara, not sure what he was willing to let her hear. She gave him a look scrubbed of any emotion and headed toward the walk-in closet, her hips swaying beneath the towel. His cock pulsed with the memory of wh
at was—or rather was not—beneath that towel.
With a barely contained moan, Damion turned away from her and lowered his voice to speak to Caleb. “Did something go wrong with the extraction?”
“Lev is dead,” he said. “Thankfully, his family is safely in Renegade custody and headed to Sunrise City, but I’m not looking forward to telling them the news.”
“How?” Damion asked, pretty damn sure he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Lev left the room in disguise and made it to the car we had waiting. That’s when a wind-walker appeared behind Lev, shot and killed him, and shoved him into the car.”
“A woman?” Damion asked, expecting one of Lara’s people.
“A man wearing a hooded jacket with a baseball cap beneath,” Caleb said. “He was there and gone too fast to make his identity. At about the same time, a woman showed up at Lev’s room claiming to be maid service, we assume as a distraction, while the assassin did his job.”
“Sabrina?” Damion asked.
“No one but Chale saw the woman. Chale sent Houston and Jesse through a passage in the ceiling, while he stalled the maid to give Lev time to escape. He was supposed to follow, but ten minutes later, Chale hadn’t shown up, and he wasn’t answering calls. Houston and Jesse went back to the room, and Chale was gone. That’s how fast this went down. Ten minutes and Chale was nowhere to be found. His captors must have opened the sliding door and wind-walked with him out of there.” He hesitated. “You should know, Damion… Jesse and Houston found blood on the floor and bullet holes in the door.”
Damion’s gut clenched. Blood could only mean one thing. “Adam Rain still has Green Hornets.” The lethal bullets could not only penetrate their armor, but shred bone and muscle, often beyond even a GTECH’s ability to repair the damage. Chale was in deep shit.
“We knew that when we stole Adam’s stock, he’d create more,” Caleb said. “But I thought we had at least a year, after we managed to destroy his blueprints. Instead, we got a real fast six months.”
And if Chale was really shot up with Green Hornets, he had hours at most. “Chale’s alive, or they wouldn’t have bothered taking him.”
“We had Trackers on him within fifteen minutes of his disappearance, and no one picked up a trail,” Caleb said. “And since I know Chale is smart enough to let down his mental shields so we can find him, they either took him somewhere close and underground, instead of to Zodius City or—”
“He’s underground,” Damion said, refusing to hear the end of Caleb’s sentence that finished with “dead.”
Someone spoke in the background, and Caleb offered a muffled reply. “I need to go,” he said. “Concerns about Lev’s death are being relayed from the White House. But two things before I do. First off, something about this Lev situation doesn’t add up. The man was assassinated, plain and simple. There was no attempt at capture. That doesn’t fit with my brother’s behavior. If Adam knew about Lev, he’d want him for his nuclear technology.”
“Looks like Adam didn’t want him to fall into our hands,” he said.
“That doesn’t add up to me,” Caleb said. “Adam knows I’d never risk the fallout of human life associated with nuclear weapons. There was no attempt to capture Lev. This was cold-blooded murder. Another red flag is Sabrina’s involvement. Women as GTECHs is another. The one person who might be able to give us answers, maybe even a location where Chale might have been taken, is right there with you. If you’re going to gain her cooperation, now would be the time, before we find out there’s a bomb somewhere—before it blows up in our faces.”
Right. They needed Lara’s cooperation. The same woman who believed the Renegades had killed her family. The woman he’d been foolish enough to almost have sex with, which might or might not have been her attempt to kill him.
“Right,” he said, resting his head on the wall. “I’m on it.”
“Just remember, Damion,” Caleb said. “Trust and loyalty are earned.” He hung up.
With those words vibrating through him, Damion stood there, facing the wall, a ball of anger in his chest. Trust and loyalty—Chale had earned both from him many times over, been there for him when no one else had. His younger brother was dead, and his mother didn’t speak to him, let alone claim him, any more than his older brother did. But where had Damion been when his closest friend among the Renegades was getting shot to hell? Trying to get naked with a woman who hated his guts, who was somehow involved in the plot that had led to Chale’s shooting. Could the knife twist any deeper?
Rage ripped through Damion, and he unleashed it with a hard punch against the concrete wall. “Damn it to hell.” Pain vibrated up his arm, stickiness clung to his knuckle, but he didn’t care. Not when it had been his plan, his orders that had backfired on Chale. He wanted to roar with the injustice of it. He reeled back, ready to blast the wall again, and suddenly he found his arms captured.
“Don’t,” Lara ordered roughly. “Are you trying to break your hand?”
He whirled around to face her, barely contained anger vibrating through his nerve endings. She was dressed now, in all black—jeans, shirt, boots—with loose tendrils of soft, half-dry, brown hair around her face. Her pale skin was bruised around the left eye and cheek, a reminder that Sabrina had attacked her. She softened him ever so slightly.
He wanted to trust this woman, wanted to trust her despite logic, and it made him angry at himself and at her. He wasn’t a fool. He looked at facts, the right and wrong of actions. He wasn’t logical about her. She was unraveling him.
So easily, she could be working him; so easily, she could be a part of the plan that had led to Chale’s capture, maybe to his death. He wouldn’t let anyone else die. He couldn’t risk being wrong about her. He couldn’t give her time to come around. He had to know what she was made of, and he had to know now.
“Isn’t that what you want?” he demanded. “A chance to weaken me? To kill me? Isn’t that why you tried to get me naked and out of my armor?”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I was the one naked and unarmed. And you offered me your gun. I didn’t take it.”
“Then take it now,” he said, bending down and yanking his pant leg up. He removed his gun, then grabbed her hand and pressed it into her palm, trusting his instincts that he wasn’t writing his own death sentence. Maybe, on some level, that is what he wanted. He was raw, an open wound, dripping blood. “Now you have no excuses. Kill me or trust me. Now. You choose.”
“Are we really doing this again?” she challenged.
“You bet we are.” He let go of her hand. “Do it.”
She held the weapon, unmoving, aimed at his head, but there was a small quiver to her bottom lip, and the slightest shake to her hand. “And how do I get out of here once you’re dead?”
He didn’t flinch at the inference she was going to take him up on his challenge and kill him. If he died, he died, but he had to know where she stood, what she was made of. “The password for the security panel is 1850,” he said. “Then enter my birthday, 8-8-1976.” He held out his hands. “You’re free. Do it.”
Lara stared at Damion, telling herself to pull the trigger. He was a Renegade, a GTECH, a murderer. But there was a dull throbbing in her head, and she kept getting flashes of images, like a TV station being tuned in and out. Nothing about her past, her memories, made sense. She didn’t know what was real and what was fiction. In the midst of it all, Damion was what felt real. Kissing him, touching him—she’d felt so much need for him. As if he were her past, her present, her… life. It made no sense, but there were those moments in the shower where there had been brief instances of clarity, of his tenderness. She wanted to scream in confusion. Everything was one cloudy mess inside her head, but when she’d kissed this man, the clouds had faded, as the dull throb in her head had disappeared. Reality had been present, and she desperately needed reality, to know she wasn’t hallucinating. She had no way of knowing if he was causing the
hallucinations, and then offering the cure—himself.
The idea that Renegades were masters of deceit scared her, and the fact that she wanted to trust him, scared her even more. But so did the idea of killing a man over a perception that she couldn’t be sure was real. Not when the here and now was the only thing she was certain was real. He wasn’t trying to kill her. He wasn’t doing anything to make her feel in jeopardy. But Sabrina had tried to kill her, and Sabrina was in these flashes of memories in a very dark way, as someone involved in the murder of a man named Skywalker, who had meant something to Lara. Decision made, Lara flipped the gun around and pressed it to Damion’s palm—God, he was Damion to her now, not the “GTECH.”
“I’m not in the mood to kill you right now,” she said flippantly, as if she weren’t aware that her world seemed to be shattering around her. It resonated straight to her soul. He resonated straight to her soul. She couldn’t let him see that, couldn’t let on how he was getting to her. “Keep pushing me, and I might change my mind. And demanding trust… does that work for you often? Because it darn sure doesn’t work with me.”
Black eyes flickered to hazel, a hint of satisfaction in their depths, before he pulled her close, his hard body absorbing hers, his free hand sliding down her back. “I just trusted you with my life,” he said, low and rough. “I think that deserves a little trust in return.”
Her palm flattened on his chest, heat radiating up her arm, realization washing over her. The hum in her head was suddenly gone. When she touched him it was as if he healed her. She needed his touch, his connection, to stay sane and work through whatever was happening to her. Which could be his plan, she reminded herself.
She tilted her chin upward, met his stare, and thought about his lips against hers. It was better than replaying an image of Skywalker with a gun to his head, Skywalker going limp from a bullet wound. “I handed the gun back to you,” she reminded him. “That’s as much trust as you’re getting.”