Page 83 of Lethal Torture
It’s fast, hard, and utterly unstoppable, a storm that explodes with an almost unbearable intensity into a shaking, shattering release that wipes everything else from my senses. It’s a timeless, pulsing force that rushes between us in the darkness, an ocean tide made entirely of physical sensation, and while I’m there, the whole world could go to hell.
Then the dogs bark again, and the world settles slowly back into place around us.
Zinaida, eyes closed and face back against the steel wall of the container, her mouth still swollen and her body limp as a kitten in my hands.
Our bodies still wet with blood, water, and the scent of death.
Men outside who are still trying to kill us.
“Zinaida.” My lips move against her temple, inhaling her scent.
Her eyelids flutter open. The dark storm still raging in the cobalt depths makes my cock pulse. I press my mouth to her ear. “We need to get out of here.”
And yet I still don’t move. I’m half hard inside her, still wanting more, and when she moves against me I almost throw caution to the winds and throw her down on the floor. She pulses around me, then her eyes widen with a shock of self-awareness as reality hits her, too. I slide from her reluctantly, and she turns her head away.
I want to pull her face back, take her mouth again, pull us both back into the ocean and to hell with whatever is waiting for us outside the container. Instead I turn away and pull on my clothes, hearing the soft rustle as she does the same. I pack everything away, focusing on the task, allowing the methodical job of survival to take precedence over the turbulence surging between us.
Whatever this is, now isn’t the time to make sense of it.
I ease the door open a crack. Distant flashing lights are still turning the night to a carnival, but the men are nowhere close, and the dogs have yet to discern our scent from the jumble of blood and fury.
When I finally turn back, Zinaida is dressed in the set of Charlie’s sweats I threw in on a hunch we might need them.
Some fucking hunch, Luke.
They’re far too large for her, which somehow serves to make me want to tear them right off again. Zin is staring at me, her wide eyes and glistening lips nearly completely undoing whatever common sense I have left.
Get it together. Fast.
Putting a finger to my lips, I tilt my head to the door. She nods.
We exit the container silently, Zin dropping the last six feet into my waiting arms. I take her hand and move her swiftly through the containers to where the fence meets a gate, leaving just enough room for Zin to slip through. I scale the gate, then lead her through the streetlight shadows to a small alleyway where I’ve hidden my Ducati. I throw our soiled clothes into the dumpster behind which the bike is hidden, then wheel the bike through the alley to the back of a nearby service station. I hand Zin a helmet and my leather bike jacket. She puts on both, climbing on the bike behind me without asking questions.
Luckily.
I’m in no fucking mood to answer them.
I wait until a truck is approaching, then under cover of its roar kick the bike into life and pull onto the motorway behind it.
As we leave Avonmouth a helicopter flies overhead, spotlighting the storage yard beside us, and sirens fly past us to the entrance in a steady stream.
The motorway is mercifullytraffic free. I stick to the speed limit, hoping like fuck we don’t get pulled over, given the amount of weaponry stashed in the carriers. Zin’s slim body pressed against my own is a constant reminder of how close I just cameto losing her completely—and of how comprehensively I’ve just broken every rule in my own fucking book.
I’m no stranger to the adrenaline-filled aftermath of combat. There’s a reason trainers constantly push recruits to the very edge of endurance, then allow them to feel the euphoria that results from surviving. It’s an addiction, one the army hands out like a dealer handing out fucking candy, until operators start to crave it. By the time a professional soldier hits open combat, they want blood so fucking badly they can taste it. The resulting edge, and the high afterward, are an aphrodisiac that no pill can ever match.
I’ve felt it before, many times. Years and experience temper the edge. They make you a better operator, one able to resist the dangerous high of killing. The reality is that nobody wants a blood-hungry idiot on their team.
I learned long ago to channel the rush rather than be taken by it, to maintain focus no matter how fierce the bloodlust, nor how terrible the darkness.
But that was before I saw an entire fucking army coming for Zinaida Melikov and realized that there isn’t anything I won’t do to keep her safe.
It was only years of training, experience, and preparation that saved both of us tonight.
I’m uncomfortably aware that even if I’d found myself in that yard with nothing more than my bare hands, I’d still have faced them all without a second’s fucking thought.
And that disturbs me, almost as much as my utter loss of control in the aftermath.
Almost.
