Armageddon (5 page)

“Are you out of your mind? You idiot! They’re going to tear her apart,” the doctor growled. “I’m sounding the alarm.”

With a growl of rage, the guard took a running step, caught the doctor by his lab coat and lifted him clear of the floor. “If you ain’t got the stomach for it, go!” he snarled.

“But just so’s you know, if you open your mouth, or touch that fucking alarm, it’ll be the last thing you do.”

“Let go of me, you animal,” the doctor said in a strangled voice.

The guard shrugged, allowed the doctor to slide to the floor, and then planted his

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fist in the middle of the man’s face so hard the doctor’s skull ricocheted off the bars behind him. Blood spurted from his nose and lips. His eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped slowly toward the floor.

Someone grabbed Lena by her hair. She locked her arms around the bars and held on for all she was worth, squeezing her eyes closed against the pain shooting across her scalp.

“I owe this bitch one,” a new, vaguely familiar voice ground out behind her. “Let her go. She’s mine!”

A loud, meaty thud emphasized the demand. The hand that was tangled in her hair was wrenched free, yanking strands from her scalp. Something heavy fell across Lena’s back--an arm or leg, she was certain, because if that huge brute had landed on top of her he would’ve crushed her like a bug.

Ignoring the pain and the scuffle going on just above and behind her, Lena gripped the bars and struggled up again. “Let me out!” she babbled. “I’ll talk. I swear….”

The last word left her as an unintelligible grunt when someone grabbed her around the waist from behind and lifted her from the floor, forcing the air from her lungs in a loud woof. Instinctively, her fingers tightened on the bars, but she lost her grip after the second hard yank.

Darkness closed in around Lena as the man holding her dragged her, kicking and screaming, toward the back of the huge room. The world spun. Flickering, indecipherable images flashed past her vision as he shifted her abruptly and tossed her away from him.

The scream she’d drawn breath to utter came out as a grunt as she landed. She cringed, expecting an explosion of pain, but realized almost at the same moment that she’d landed on something relatively soft.

A bunk.

She dragged in another breath to scream, but held it as he sprawled on top of her.

Gritting her teeth, she slapped and grabbed at his arms as he tore at her clothing. Chilling air licked across her bare skin, pebbling it. The man caught her wrists, forcing them to the mattress on either side of her head. “Be still, little fool!” he growled next to her ear.

“I’m trying to save your neck.”

She didn’t believe it, not for one moment, but there was something about his voice that tickled at her memory. Unclenching her eyes, she peered at the man as he levered himself above her. Even with the shadows cloaking him, the little light that penetrated so far gleamed off of the gold in his long hair. As her eyes focused, recognition slowly sank into her.

It was the man she’d seen with Morris, the same one she’d glimpsed, or thought she’d glimpsed several times in the city since.

She’d been right. He
was
a rebel.

“Lena! It’s me, Dax. We’ve got to make this look good, so scream!” he said low near her ear, his voice ragged, his breathing harsh.

Lena’s eyes widened to saucers as she felt something long and hard glide along her cleft. She needed no further encouragement to scream like a banshee, but there was more anger in it than fear. The bastard had lulled her, offered protection, and he had every intention of raping her!

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The loud smacking of an open palm on flesh jerked her eyes open again.

Expecting to feel pain, Lena cut off mid-scream, staring at the man in confusion.

He’d slapped his arm!

He’d missed?

He began shaking her. “Stop fighting it, bitch!” he growled in a loud voice.

He’d missed the ‘spot’, too, Lena discovered, her confusion deepening when he began thrusting and heaving over her, his cock plowing a wide furrow along her cleft and sending keen shards of indescribable pleasure through her.

What the hell?

She’d been shoving frantically against him, but the fight had gone out of her. The moment she’d recognized him some totally different emotion flooded her. He was bloodied from the fight, grimy from the cell--he looked like hell. He looked twice as delicious with all that manly grit and sweat according to the heat meter in her body which erupted into an inferno.

He settled his upper body weight against her, flattening her breasts. “Scream! I’m raping you!”

She managed a guttural groan, partly because he was squeezing the breath from her chest and partly because the stroking along her nether lips was rapidly generating a lot of heat that wasn’t friction. Her sex clenched. She tried to ignore the rising awareness of pleasurable sensation, but the drug worked against her as much as her own body.

His mouth covered her ear. The heat and moisture sent a stab of full fledged desire through her. “Help me escape, and I’ll take you with me,” he murmured when he ceased driving her crazy with his mouth and tongue.

She registered the harshly whispered words. Her brain refused to decipher them, however.

“Sounds to me like you’re enjoying it way too much!” a voice yelled abruptly. “I think I’ll have to give you to Black Stew after all.”

It was the guard. Galvanized, Lena ceased groaning and began struggling to scream instead, arching and wiggling beneath the man who had called himself Dax as if she was fighting to thrust him off. Bucking was a mistake.

She managed to curl her hips upward at the same moment he thrust. The head of his cock grazed the mouth of her sex, generating pain for both of them if his sharp hiss was any indication.

Or maybe not.

“Keep that up and I’ll finish this the way I’d like to,” he muttered.

Lena was surprised at how tempting it was to pretend mindless incomprehension.

She stopped abruptly, but she couldn’t resist the urge to shift against him until his thrusts were rubbing against her clit maddeningly. Breakers of delicious sensation rolled through her, making it nearly impossible to focus on uttering ‘frightened, pained’ cries.

The desire to feel him inside of her grew as he teased her clit. She could feel tension coiling inside of her until she could hardly draw breath to utter any sound at all.

Abruptly, he began to shake. He ground his teeth together, began thrusting faster.

Lena almost felt like crying when she felt his cock jerking and his seed spilling along her cleft.

He was still gasping hoarsely, supporting himself on one arm, when he began

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searching the bedding beside Lena’s head. Grasping something, he shoved it into the next of her tunic, tucking it beneath one breast. “It’s in the food.”

She didn’t get the chance to ask him what he was talking about. She hardly heard the comment that accompanied his stranger behavior, for a loud, metallic clicking noise filled the area almost before he’d finished coming. Twisting her head, Lena saw metal sheets rising from the floor like closing teeth. Still confused by the drugs in her system, fear coursed through her, not understanding. As the metal sheets locked into place, however, she realized the room had shrunk.

The man dabbed at her face with one finger and then stroked the finger along her thighs. “For good measure.”

That comment was as cryptic as the previous one.

“Fun’s over,” the guard growled, one hand curling around Dax’s shoulder. With a snarl, Dax swung a backhanded blow at the guard. Lena screamed as a jolt went through Dax and entered her where his body still touched hers. Grinning down at Dax’s convulsing form, the guard grabbed her arm, hauled her from the bunk, and dragged her from the room.

It wasn’t until the guard had shoved her into her own cell that Lena had the chance to try to put together what had just happened. Wilting to the floor, she stared at her bloodied thighs uncomprehendingly for several moments. Blood? He hadn’t penetrated her. How could there be blood?

She realized after a few minutes that he’d dabbed at the cuts on her face.

He’d transferred the blood--
for good measure
.

Still thoroughly rattled and bewildered, it was a while before Lena remembered the man calling himself Dax had shoved something inside her tunic. Shoving her hand into the neck of the blouse, she curled her fingers around the strange, small object and pulled it out to study it.

“Bread?” she murmured, more baffled than enlightened.

It’s in the food.

Realizing after a while that she’d begun to ache and throb all over, most particularly her face, Lena struggled to her feet, and looked around the cell. The tiny room contained nothing but a double bunk and a toilet. After staring down at the revolting bowl of the toilet for several moments, she gave up the search for cool water to sooth her throbbing face and moved to the bunk.

Her cellmate was gone, dead and disposed of like garbage. The idea of lying on the woman’s bunk made her feel ill, though, and finally she climbed up and settled on the top bunk.

It’s in the food.

He’d given her a small chunk of bread.

She dozed off still trying to make sense of everything that had happened. When she woke later, her head had ceased to swim and the pain she’d felt earlier had dulled.

Once she’d shaken off the dregs of sleep, though, she realized she was hungry--and more clear headed than she could remember being in a very long time.

After staring at the squashed piece of bread in her hand for several moments, she lifted it to her mouth and took a bite, remembering her cellmate had beaten her to the food the last time it was brought and eaten both her own portion and Lena’s.

And her cellmate was dead.

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She sat up abruptly as it dawned on her that that was
why
her cellmate was dead.

She hadn’t choked on the food. She’d overdosed on the drug injected into the food. Fear and anger surged through her at that thought. She was lucid, probably for the first time since she’d been thrown in prison and that meant she had nothing to shield her mind from the horror.

She didn’t particularly welcome full consciousness. As disturbing as she’d found it to feel as if she was swimming through some strange nightmare, it beat the hell out of knowing it was completely real!

What the hell was she supposed to do now? They would come for her again. She had no confidence that she could fake being drugged out of her mind and beyond that, she was going to feel every blow keenly without something to dull her senses.

Some fucking favor he’d done her!

Tamping her fear and anger with an effort, she tried to think why he’d done it. He must have had a reason.

Why had he acted like he knew her? He’d seemed to think she knew him, too.

Why?

He thought Morris had told her. That was why he’d expected her to recognize his name.

Was that why he’d protected her? Faked the rape to convince the guard that she was getting what he’d thrown her in the cell for--a lesson of what she could expect if she failed to cooperate.

Her thighs were still sticky with semen. Blood had been smeared through it and that, too, had dried. With revulsion, she studied her thighs, wishing she had some way to clean herself off.

She wasn’t touching the water in the bottom of the toilet bowl. It made her flesh creep just thinking of all the germs and bacteria swimming in it, as if they were, even now, climbing out and crawling across the room to reach her.

She was going to lose her mind if she had to stay in this horrible, filthy place very long.

That thought touched off a dim memory. She’d still been too drugged when it was happening to grasp much, but she finally remembered he’d said he would take her with him if she helped him to escape.

Maybe her memory was faulty? Because that just didn’t make sense to her. If she escaped, why would she need him to help her?

Her face where the guard had hit her wasn’t the only thing throbbing. Her head was pounding as if someone were hammering on it. Massaging her head with both hands, she struggled to piece together errant bits of memory into something that made sense to her.

She’d been questioned, daily, or almost daily, since she’d been incarcerated.

Unless her mind was completely unreliable she thought she remembered enough details to separate one session from another into a half a dozen.

Which meant she’d only been in this hellhole for about a week?

She was not going to survive much of this!

Pushing that thought from her mind quickly, she tried to focus on what she’d been searching for before and remembered that each time the man interrogated her, he had become more furious and frustrated until he’d begun threatening … something. She

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hadn’t been certain at the time what he was threatening to do to her that he hadn’t already tried until she’d seen where he was taking her. She hadn’t been completely clear on what was about to happen even then. It had been more of an instinctual fear of being shoved into a cell full of men than a clear idea of the guard’s intentions that had made her fight him.