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 what 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.”
“And if it’s not enough?”
“It’s all I have to give,” she said softly, but it wasn’t the truth. She wanted to give him her trust. She wanted to believe he was a friend. Her heart, even her instincts, said he was that person. Her training, her conditioning, told her he was the one causing her confusion, her physical illness, her dependency on him, and only him, to make it go away. He whirled her around, pressed her against the wall, and tucked the gun back inside his boot before he released her, his hands framing her face.
“Again with the trapping me against the wall?” she challenged him, knowing she didn’t want to escape, and she should. The hum in her head had returned, and she barely contained the urge to reach out and test the theory that touching him would make it go away. Or maybe, she just wanted a reason to touch him again.
“You’ll climb on top of me naked and kiss me, but you won’t trust me,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.
She shrugged and crossed her arms in front of her, trying to seem unaffected by his words, when she was anything but. “That pretty much sums up the last hour.”
He studied her, his stare probing her with far too much intensity for comfort. “You do know that’s completely illogical.”
Her chin lifted, and she tried not to notice the warm whiskey color of his eyes. “You don’t have to trust someone to get naked with them.” But she remembered all too well the trust she’d felt being naked in his arms, remembered the raw hurt in his eyes when he’d told her he knew what it was like to lose someone. How much she’d believed him, how much that didn’t fit the perception she had of Renegades. How much she’d burned to lose herself in him, to hide from something in her subconscious that was trying to surface. It was why she’d kissed him then, and why she wanted to again—right now.
A muscle in his jaw flexed. “So that leaves us with an agreement not to kill each other.” He paused. “For now, at least.”
“I guess so.”
“You talk big for someone who’s in so much trouble. Adam will have you killed for defying him. What has he done to earn that kind of loyalty?”
He was talking about Adam, but she was dealing with Powell. “He saved my life and gave me a way to fight back.”
Something dark glinted in his eyes. “And lied to you about what you were fighting for and why. We can protect you, offer you sanctuary. Offer your family sanctuary.”
Emotion ripped through her, and she tried to push him away, but he was as solid as the wall behind her. “They’re dead,” she ground out, every nerve scraped raw by the irony of a Renegade offering such a thing. “They don’t need sanctuary.”
“So this is all about vengeance to you,” he said. “Not about saving anyone’s life.”
“Of course, I want vengeance,” she agreed. “And don’t expect me to be ashamed of that. Not when vengeance means stopping your kind from killing innocent people, like my family.” Those damn images flickered in her head again—a flash of Skywalker tied to a chair, a flash of her under the steps when her family was slaughtered.
“My kind,” he said. “You keep saying ‘my kind,’ not the Renegades. Why?”
“You’re all monsters to me,” she said quickly, not about to let him corner her.
“And yet you didn’t kill me when you had the chance,” he said, his expression calculating.
“I might need you,” she said honestly, not allowing herself to think of any reason that might be true, beside the need to control the hum in her head that was growing louder. His touch could make it go away.
His gaze darkened. “I thought you didn’t want my protection.”
“Who said anything about protection?”
He leaned in, his lips close to hers, his breath warm on her cheek, his body aligned with hers, but not touching, the air thick with sexual tension. “Then what, little Lara, would you need me for?”
Despite the hard bite of this man being a Renegade, every inch of her body screamed with awareness, with the need to touch him, and not just because of the hum in her head. She reached out and pressed her hand to his chest, testing her body’s reaction, relieved by the instant silence in her head, the relief when all that was left was hot fire and need. “I think we both know what I need you for,” she said, her voice raspy, affected, despite her efforts to be calculating, to try and get him to admit some sort of mental and physical manipulation.
The air spiked with electricity, heat, and mutual desire, before he turned his gaze upward and made a sound of frustration. His jaw set, his mood shifted, and his hand slid to hers, holding it over his chest.
“Do you watch the arena fights, Lara?” He surprised her by asking, his tone soft and lethal. “Do you sit and cheer when men and GTECHs alike, who have proven to be Adam’s enemies, are ripped to shreds by his pet wolves until their bodies are beyond repair?”
“What?” she gasped. “No. Of course not.” She’d heard of the coliseum, and it made her skin crawl.
“Sabrina took one of my men, Lara, someone who is like a brother to me,” he said. “If you weren’t here, if you were back in Zodius City, would you watch, would you cheer, when the wolves attacked him?”
“No.” She repeated the one word with emphasis. “I am not a part of the arena games. I’ve never been to one, nor do I ever want to go to one.” His hard eyes chilled her to the bone—eyes that were cold as ice, unforgiving, disbelieving, eyes that left her desperate to convince him of the truth. “My team isn’t stationed in Zodius City. I’ve never even been there.” It was an admission she shouldn’t have made. She knew even before his next question.
“Where then?” he demanded instantly.
“You know I won’t tell you that.”
His hands went to her arms. “My man could be at your team’s facility. I need to know where it is, and I need to know now.”
“They wouldn’t take him there,” she said, and that was the truth. “No one outside the team is allowed inside that facility.”
Disbelief shadowed his face.
“I’m telling the truth,” she said.
He studied her a moment and pushed off the wall, hands on his hips. “So that’s it then. I just sit back and wait for Adam to send us pictures of Chale shredded to pieces by those wolves.”
Lara’s heart twisted at the anguish in him; unnaturally, in an almost physical way, she felt this man’s pain. He was a Renegade, her enemy, but… “No,” she said quickly. “He won’t be in Zodius City. I’m sure he’s not in Zodius City.”
He stiffened. “How would you know that if you don’t know where he is?”
How? How would she know that without exposing Serenity? Lara repeated the question in her mind again. “My team is meant to operate off the radar,” she said. “No one knows we exist. Anything we touch stays with us.”
The phone on the wall rang again, shrill and loud, but for several seconds he didn’t respond, then with a frustrated sound, he grabbed the receiver and listened. She saw his hand tighten on the phone, his knuckles white, and knew something was terribly wrong. She fought the urge to go to him, to comfort him, to touch him. Renegade, she repeated in her head.
Murdered. No. That felt wrong clear to her soul. Damion wasn’t her enemy. Seconds ticked by like hours as she battled with herself, forcing herself not to touch him, until he slammed the receiver down again, and without a word, stormed out of the room.
“What just happened?” Lara called, racing after him. “Damion, please…? What’s happening?”
She caught up with him at the computer where he punched a few buttons and brought the middle screen to life, showing a view of a man tied to a chair, his face swollen and bloody, his head slumped forward. Sabrina stepped into view and yanked his head back. The bloodied man’s eyes lifted as Sabrina said, “Tell Damion why you brought me here, Chale honey.”
“Fuck you, bitch,” Chale said. Someone shoved a woman in a maid’s uniform to the floor at Chale’s feet. She was young, twenty-something, tied up, with a gag in her mouth and crying. Sabrina smiled at the camera, but didn’t let go of Chale.
“I’m going to kill her while you watch,” Sabrina said. “And another one like her every fifteen minutes until you bring me Lara. Oh, and if you’re thinking of calling for backup, don’t. If I get even a whiff of a breeze that makes me think wind-walker, I’ll put a Green Hornet in his head. In fact, he’s a Renegade, and I hate Renegades. I’ll kill him first. I’m going to give you exactly three minutes, not one extra second, and if you’re not up here by then, I pull the trigger.”