Page 23

Sean

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m so fucking fucked.

Lou’s admission jacked me up. I couldn’t get out of that playpen fast enough, sending Jace in to clean up my mess, as I beelined straight for the roof for a smoke. These damn cigarettes may not be the healthiest coping mechanism, but it’s this or yank on my cock for what’d probably be the thousandth hour in months.

Any semblance of calm doesn’t return until my second cigarette. I knew her “ yes” was in response to everything, and it hit my dick like a lightning rod. I wanted to thrust into her right then and there. But I had— have —no business fucking her, especially since she’s not really mine. Normally, that wouldn’t bother me, but for some unknown reason, I want her to be mine if I’m going to slide between those perfect thighs.

She doesn’t belong to me; she’s property of the United States. Sure, the argument could be made that, as a representative of the government, she’s mine for the moment. But I don’t want her like this. I want her mind, her body, her fight, her trust, her loyalty. I want her outside of these concrete walls. I want her of her own volition. I want her to want me because she wants me .

This hellhole isn’t an environment conducive to getting what I want.

I let her rest for more than a week after finding her falling apart on the floor of her cell. It was all I could do to hold back the resentment and anger I felt at myself for getting her to that point. The self-loathing and regret have chewed me up this week, and I’m still waiting to be spat back out. I’m a disgusting animal that deserves to be locked up along with the prisoners below my feet. I’m no better than Kazi.

But Louhi is.

She’s got a dark allure to her that reels you into her snare, trapping you there as you wait for her to feast on you. And, fuck, if I don’t want to get swallowed whole.

Bringing her in for a session today was too soon—for both of us. I shouldn’t have done it, even if her screams seemed to be drenched in sugar. I’m still fighting the erection she left me with, but I refuse to touch myself, no matter how much I want to. I want to bathe in the sound of her screams, letting them bubble around me, but I don’t want them this way, not anymore. I want them solely for me. I want them because she wants to give them to me.

I only chose the whips today because I wanted to see if I could match the whip to the scar on her side, and I knew the second I trailed the snake whip up her torso that it was the culprit. She made a valiant attempt to hide her apprehension, but it still swam in her chocolatey gaze. It was that glimpse of tension that had me picking up the knout instead. I wanted so badly to reach into her mind and wrench the memories out, one by one, uncovering the source of her pain.

I’ll find my way back to Lou’s cell later with salve for her welts and gashes. I can’t let her suffer, even if I’m supposed to. Even if I enjoy inflicting pain when it comes to Lou, the guilt still edges in, clouding my head in a blanket of thick fog.

Lou isn’t a job for me anymore, despite the way I’ve been treating her. Fuck, I don’t even think she belongs here. I don’t want to be breaking her hands, stuffing her in small iron boxes, nearly drowning her, or anything else. I want to be done. But you don’t tell the government you’re done. I’ve signed a binding contract and there’s no escaping until I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain. Too bad for me that won’t be for another three years. However, Lou only has a matter of weeks until her months are up, not that she knows that.

I’m still waiting for Major Thompson to show his damned face so I can talk to him about Lou. I’m growing restless and anxious to share my suspicions regarding Lou to Command.

What will they do with her? Will they transfer her away, or let her rot here?

I’m powerless to kill her, though I haven’t shared that with anyone. I’m past the point of being able to hold my Glock to her temple and pull the trigger or slice into her vein and watch her bleed out. I can’t — won’t —watch her bright, beguiling light blink out of existence.

The sturdy metal door bangs against the wall as Jace appears, the rooftop access slamming shut behind him with a resounding boom . He slumps into the chair beside me, slipping a cigarette free from the pack on the armrest. It’s a good thing he brought more of those when he came back from the mainland, because we’ve been flying through them lately as we try to puzzle out what the hell landed Lou here. We’re no closer to answers though, just sootier lungs.

“Just got word that Thompson will be here tomorrow afternoon.” Smoke billows from his mouth, briefly dancing with my own before a breeze whisks it out to sea.

Anxiety blooms in my chest. Thompson could either have my head—Jace’s, too—for not getting the answers they require, or he could hear me out, seeing things from my point of view.

The blue of the ocean stretches as far as the eye can see—then beyond that—as the waves crash against the rock face below us. It’s difficult to imagine other islands and continents existing when you see the world from this vantage point. It’s isolating out here, cut off from the world, stuck in an inaccessible place that no one knows about. You truly are an exile here, even if you aren’t locked in a cell.

“Fucking finally,” I mutter.

“He’s going to be pissed she hasn’t broken.”

Silence falls between us like snow that I haven’t seen in years as I exhale a puff of smoke. Eventually, I admit, “I think she’s beginning to.”

He faces me, his mouth parting in surprise, transforming his round face into more of an oval. His dark eyebrows crease and his amber eyes appear murky with confusion. “What do you mean?”

“She’s not breaking for us . She’s breaking for herself.” And that’s far more dangerous than shattering for me , I add in my mind. A cold shiver runs down my spine as the revelation blooms to life with my breath .

“How do you know?”

“Her eyes told me. She’s hurting.” I don’t tell him about the way I found her in her cell. Something about seeing her broken on the floor felt far more intimate than anything we might have done alone together in the playpen, for my eyes only. It’s why I immediately deleted the footage of her breakdown.

He scrubs his free hand over his mouth a couple of times, grumbling, “Fuck, man, she can’t break like that right now. I don’t—” He falls silent, sucking on his cigarette for a moment. “If she breaks right now, she’s fucked. She’s not giving you anything , even in…private?”

Gazing out at the horizon, I shake my head before dragging my attention back to him. “I don’t think there’s a single thing anyone could do to that woman to get her to talk.” I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees as I dig the heel of my palms into my eye sockets. “I thought if maybe I changed things up, started fucking with her—literally—she might be caught off guard enough to give me something to work with. Well, that’s what I told myself, anyway. ”

Deep down, I know that’s not why I stripped her bare, desperate to see what was underneath her tough exterior. Regardless of my motive, things have backfired epically; the beautiful woman with a steadfast resilience beneath her solid facade only enthralling me further.

His smile is conspiratorial, and I know what Jace is about to say before he ever opens his mouth, but I force myself to hear it anyway. “You like her.”

“So do you,” I argue, pinning him with a flat look.

He scoffs, but amusement dances in his gaze. “Yeah, I do, but not in the same way you do.”

Silence swims between us, as quiet, yet thick as a school of a thousand fish gliding through the ocean beyond us. Eventually, I murmur, “She needs a chance.”

He nods slowly, as if he’s thinking. “How do we play this?”

If she wants to live, she needs to stay stronger now than she ever has before, giving me and Jace a chance to get to the bottom of things on her behalf. After all, it’s almost January.

Time is slipping away like particles of sand through a sieve.

I hope, for both Lou and myself, that she takes my advice, turning me into her enemy.

It might be the only way we both survive this.

“We help her.”

“Let me get this straight. You think we have the wrong person and she isn’t a terrorist?” Major Thompson asks, working through the, albeit limited, information I just laid out for him. His brow pinches as he paces the length of the small, shitty office space we’re gathered in.

“That’s correct, sir,” I state, twisting my mask between my hands clasped at my back.

“And what do you think, Marshall?” Major Thompson questions Jace, who’s standing next to me, his stance wide, mirroring my own. I asked him to join me in this meeting today since he knew almost everything I did at this point. But the thing we haven’t discussed is whether Jace agrees with me entirely. He was skeptical at first, and while I got the impression that he had become firmly on her side by now, I can’t say for sure.

My breath becomes trapped in my lungs, the weight of my oxygen growing heavier, until he reveals, “I agree with him, sir.”

I resist the overwhelming urge to allow my shoulders to slump, my relief palpable. It’s as if Jace just pulled some bricks from the invisible backpack I’ve been carrying. There are plenty of bricks left, but the removal of one or two is enough for me to breathe easier.

“I see,” Thompson says, and I wonder if he does, in fact, see. “I need to run this up the chain of command. I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, sit tight and find out everything she knows, by whatever means necessary .” He stares me down as he makes this last statement, and I’m smart enough to read between the lines.

What Thompson doesn’t understand is that Lou won’t be telling me shit. If she hasn’t started talking at this point, why the fuck would she start now?

We spend the next half hour debriefing him on a few of the other prisoners, and he feeds us the orders to terminate Solomon, an international weapons dealer and complete menace housed in Block One.

Thompson dismisses us, taking Stuco’s body with him back to the mainland when he leaves on the chopper. We all went to the helipad to watch Stuco leave for the last time.

I tried to take responsibility for Stuco’s death, but Thompson waved me off, telling me that he should’ve known better than to engage with an inmate. I don’t agree, but there’s no point in arguing over who owns the fault. Especially considering that the blame lies squarely with Lou and she certainly won’t be apologetic.

Borman has been particularly moody since we got back—not that I blame him—and Jace is forced to order him to chill the fuck out.

This is going to be a long week.

“Maybe we should get Lou to do this for us. I bet she wouldn’t have any problem with it. Shit, she’d probably be excited,” Jace mumbles from beside me. I grunt an affirmation as we pull on our masks before heading into the playpen to deal with Solomon.

While Louhi doesn’t seem to wrestle with cold-blooded murder, Jace and I do. It’s the least savory part of this job, yet a necessary evil, according to the government. Jace and I take turns with the eliminations so neither of us shoulder the burden alone, though that only goes so far. I’ve never had issues with killing people who are threats to me or those I love. If you come for me, I’ll come for you tenfold.

Nevertheless, the thing with the executions of the prisoners here is that it feels murky. Every inmate housed here, including Lou, are absolute fuckheads and have all done things that should guarantee them a death sentence. Things get gray when you develop relationships—however bizarre—with those fuckheads. Solomon is one of those cases. He’s been here for six years, and though I’m not particularly fond of him, he doesn’t disgust me like Peter or irritate the shit out of me like Carlos.

But we’ve wrung Solomon dry of any information he may have at this point, so I understand the orders.

It’s Jace’s turn, and I lean against the back wall as he explains to Solomon what’s going to happen, and the prisoner nods curtly. I’m dying to know what’s going through his mind as Jace injects him with the cocktail of potassium dioxide, midazolam, and vecuronium bromide. He doesn’t speak again but closes his eyes as the cadence of his breaths becomes slower, more ragged. Forcing myself to watch, as I do with every prisoner, his chest eventually ceases to move.

After helping Jace and Martinez take Solomon’s body to the freezer in the infirmary, I find myself stalking down Block One. Pausing at Soloman’s cell, I linger for a moment, thinking about the fact that the amount of blood on my hands is becoming so thick that I can no longer glimpse my skin. I’ve killed more men than an avatar in a fucking video game.

The sonorous boom of Spite’s “Kill or Be Killed” saturates the prison as my feet move of their own accord, transporting me farther down the corridor, and I find myself standing at the gate to Lou’s cell, salve in hand. The second I lay eyes on her gorgeous, grimy face, my somber mood lightens a skosh. Every time I’m near her, the ivory bars encasing my heart both tighten and loosen simultaneously, like being around her is a paradox. She’s a delicious poison that you know will hurt you in the end, but that possibility doesn’t stop you from desperately wanting to guzzle down the venom.

She lifts her head to look at me, a dazzling smirk blooming on her face, but I don’t miss the way she’s lying on her stomach, her knees bent and ankles crossed as she rests her head on her elbows. No matter how hard I went at her thighs, it had nothing on the way I attacked her back and ass. Even a few days later, I’m sure it’s still stinging, even with the balm I’ve been applying.

“Just couldn’t stay away, could you, Digs?”

I don’t reply as I step inside her cell, shutting the door to her cell behind me, but leaving it unlocked this time. She’s right, though—I couldn’t stay away, and I didn’t want to. I’m so sick of the recent plague of bitterly anxious thoughts I’ve been hit with. No matter what I try, my mind won’t shut the fuck up these days.

However, when I’m with her, there’s a mellow calmness that quiets my thoughts. Being with her is like shooting myself with a small tranquilizer. I’m sated and happy, not that I’d admit that aloud.

Crouching beside her, I carefully roll up the hem of her shirt and tug down her pants to access her wounds. She hisses as the cool salve makes contact with the gashes slashed across her pale, olive-tinted skin. She rests her head in the crook of her elbow as I apply the balm to her perfect round ass before rolling onto her side, looking up at me with eyes that sparkle with playfulness.

Having convinced myself that I needed this, needed her, to help clear my muddied thoughts, I disregarded my better sense to stay away. From the jump, there has been nothing clear about this woman, but as I tend to her now, my mind has as much clarity as a perfect diamond under the microscope, free of flaw.

I would do anything for her.

She has me wrapped around her finger like a ring that she wears every damn day, yet doesn’t seem to realize it. She may be locked away from the world, but it’s as if her blazing mysterious fire burned like a distress signal that only I seemed to answer.

Yesterday, I had her cell cleaned again, and it’s a good thing because once I finish, she stretches out on the floor, like a housecat waking up from a nap, her shoulder-length onyx hair shifting with the movement. I don’t know how someone can seem so at home in a maximum security, torture facility in the middle of the ocean on an unknown island, but she does.

With a content sigh, her bright, mischievous gaze drops to my hip, making me swallow hard as I’m slammed with the realization of how vulnerable—and reckless—this position is for both of us. Especially with my Glock so close to her hand and my tactical knife at my thigh. She could gut me or send a couple of rounds into my chest without a second thought but, for some reason, I don’t think she will.