Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) (13 page)

Michael

Suraya's first transmission came sooner than I'd anticipated. I had planned on at least several days passing before she felt secure enough to risk communicating. Weeks, even. Gaining the trust of such jaded men took time. I hoped this message was a good sign, but it could just as easily be a bad one.  Something could have gone wrong.

Fuck, something probably
had
gone wrong.

I glanced at Christina, who was fast asleep. A strand of hair was hanging in her face, fluttering with every exhaled breath.

I quietly rolled to my feet, walking to the balcony where the glow of the screen wouldn't disturb her. The message was short, almost curt in its brevity.

Consider the messenger shot
.

That was all. Nothing else. Nothing to signify how she was settling into her role.

Nothing.

Messenger shot.

Cliff's man must have been killed.

I didn't like that, but I'd been prepared for that eventuality. Human trafficking was a despised industry, by cops and felons alike, forcing its perpetrators to scurry around in secrecy: they were the very dregs of the morally bankrupt, and conducted their acts with the paranoia and ruthless efficacy of those who know that they have no sympathizers.

It stood to reason that the traffickers would not want to leave any witnesses behind. I'd expected that as well. The drug runner had served his purpose, and having done so there was no reason to let him go. Not only could he spill incriminating secrets, he was money out of the bank. I would not have been surprised if they had killed him just so they wouldn't have to pay him. That's what I would have done, in their position. But then, I like to cover all my bases.

Suraya was alive, though. That was something.

I leaned against the railing. Moisture in the air beaded on my face and the glowing screen of the phone, distorting the pixels into a smeary glowing blur. She had made it this far. I'd give her that. Her prissiness in the office had been an act, like so much else; she had a core of steel. Had to, to get this far.

Suraya was a tough woman. If anyone could handle the job, I knew it would be her. The story she had told me about how she had met Adrian Callaghan seemed true, but I suspected the details she had given me were just a scratch on the surface. Maybe she blamed herself for getting involved with him when her gut instinct was to say “no.” But her gut had probably been saying a number of things, considering who she'd been dealing with, and if Callaghan really had tortured a man in front of her, if he had raped her, working with the bastard might have seemed like the lesser of two immediate evils.

Consciences can atrophy like any other living part of the human body, curling up and withering away from disuse. Even good people can go bad when their morals are left to fester. I walked back into the office suite, shaking my head. And like other parts of the human body, remediation could coax life back into that numb and deadened space.

I knelt down on the floor. In lieu of a bed, Christina was sleeping on our discarded pile of clothes, her hand curled into the folds of my jacket. My chest tightened. I slid a few strands of hair out of her sleeping face. She mumbled and shifted away, and I let my hand fall to the floor. Consciences. I scoffed. What a lark. What had they done for me lately? Made my life a damn sight more difficult.

Christina stirred and blinked her eyes. She brushed the hair out of her face that had caught my attention earlier. “Michael? What happened?”

Developing a conscience had also gotten me the woman I loved.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing happened. Go back to sleep.”

“I felt a draft. Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “Just outside.”

Her mouth pursed. “Why?”

“Suraya messaged me.”

“She did?” Christina struggled to sit up. Her breasts wobbled a bit with the movement, and she folded her arms, hugging herself. That self-conscious act had pushed her breasts up, and I could see the erect nipple of the left one peeking out from over the back of her hand. I had to force myself to look away. “What did she say? Is she all right?”

“They killed the man who sold her, but she's still alive.” For now.

“Killed?”

“In that line of work, you can't afford to leave witnesses.”

She pressed her full lips together, thinking that over. As she unfolded her arms, she drew my conscious attention to the fact that she still wasn't wearing anything.

“Did she say anything else?”

“No. Probably couldn't afford to. Not at this point.”

I pressed her back, straddling her bare hips to keep her pelvis pressed against the floor. She felt as stiff and unyielding as a tree. Nothing like the pliable woman I had fucked the night before. I flicked the nipple that had captured my attention with my tongue and felt her shudder, and yield. Better. I closed my teeth lightly around her skin before sucking her into my mouth and kissing her hard enough to make her buck beneath me.

“Michael — ”

Much better.

“Shh.” I stroked her other breast with my fingers, and her breathing faltered. I knew if I felt between her legs she'd be ready for me. My cock was pressing against her pubic bone through the too-thick barrier of my pants, and jerked at the thought of plunging inside her, and feeling her tighten around me as I made her come again and again. “Don't talk.”

Thrusting into her was like jerking off during a hot shower — arousing, relaxing, familiar. The added resistance of her tight pussy, the sweet smell of her skin, and the look on her face as I fucked her to orgasm added to the experience, and made my balls tighten with pleasure, and my thoughts go dull. There's a reason sex can be dangerous; when you're fucking a beautiful woman, there isn't a whole lot of room in your head for anything else.

But she was trembling, and I knew from that expression — that expression I knew far too well — that she was on the verge of tears.

Exasperated, I said, “What's wrong?”

“She's all alone out there somewhere, doing God knows what, in the hopes that she'll lead us to Adrian. It's not even a sure thing, Michael, and yet to put her through what we did — well, it's wrong.”

“We've been over this before. You couldn't have gone, even if you'd wanted to — which I know for a fact you don't. You wear your thoughts on your face as plain as day. You can't hide a single thing. You're not sexually confident. You think you could fuck for money? You fucking blush when I say 'cock.'”

But she didn't. Not this time.

“Who am I to send her to her death?” she whispered. “If Adrian finds her, he'll kill her.”

“Would you rather he killed you?” I pulled away from her breast, knotting my fingers in her thick hair instead. “Do you even know what he'll do to you if he catches you?”

“Yes,” she said, “you gave me a pretty good idea the other night when you listed out all my weaknesses for me. Thank you for that.”

“You're the bullet in his leg, darlin, the constant reminder that on at least one occasion, the prey got the best of the predator—and trust me, he fucking hates that. He will hurt you, hurt you bad, hurt you in ways you can't even imagine. Whatever he might do to Suraya will be one hundred times worse for you, because you showed the bastard, and all of his men, that he's still capable of bleeding.”

She drew in a shuddering breath. “That's true,” she said, “I did do that, didn't I?”

“At this point, I think he might hate you more than he hates me.”

Her mouth twisted into an unhappy smile. “I should put that on my list of accomplishments.”

“Very funny. Look, I'm getting real tired of having this conversation with you. What do you want from me? You want me to send you on another suicide mission? You want to be trafficked through to an unlicensed whorehouse where you'll have to fuck men who hate women, and do it with a smile? Is that what you want from me?”

“You know that's not what I want.”

“Then accept things the way they are,” I said.

“Fine.” She put my hand back on her breast. Her eyes were still dangerously bright, but there was something else behind them — a hardness that was new, that I wasn't sure what to make of. She slipped my pants down my hips, pulling it out from the waist so it wouldn't catch on my erect cock. “I'll accept it.”

Her behavior disturbed me a little, as anything did that was beyond the norm. She had initiated sex before, but it was unusual, and she was rarely so…blunt. “Promise me you'll stop bringing this up.”

“Make me forget,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“I want you to make me forget how to think.”

“Your confidence in my prowess is flattering, darlin,” I said dryly. “I'd hate to disappoint.”

Her smile was a thin crescent. “Then don't.”

Christina

I did not think of myself as brave. Bravery, to me, meant being fearless; it meant standing up to those things in life that terrified you, and striking them down. It meant approaching life in a take-charge way, being daring, taking risks. Fearless. Dauntless.

Reckless.

Fear was made for a  very good reason — to keep you out of harm's way. If you felt afraid, there was generally a good reason for it. Despite a high rate of recidivist dare-devils, we wouldn't have evolved such a trait if there weren't an evolutionary basis for it. Life was short enough without taking unnecessary risks, so why flirt with death to prove a point?

No, I was not brave. I was a survivor, but being a survivor is different from being brave. Being a survivor means that you managed to weather through some unpleasant experiences; it meant you were tenacious, living through what other people threw at you instead of seeking out those situations to confront them head-on.I never signed up to be a revolutionary, I was forced to become one against my will when I made the IMA's hit list.

I was tired of people calling me 'brave.' It made me feel as though I had to live up to their expectations. It made me feel as though I were weak when I inevitably failed.

Despite Michael's assurances, and his threats, I couldn't help but feel that I should have gone in Suraya's place. I didn't have much sexual experience, but I knew enough to suspect that the men who frequent a brothel of sex-trafficked women aren't expecting a pampered and world-weary courtesan. Men like that, they get off on the fear and the taboo. They want powerlessness in their women, not experience. They want slaves.

Michael had been like that in the beginning. He had known I was at his mercy, and he was willing to exploit that if it meant keeping me under his thumb. That was why he had known all my weaknesses. Once, it had been his job to make people feel miserable. To make people feel as though they hadn't a hope in all the world.

He was a better person now, but I could still see who he had been like a dark overlay looming over his current persona. And there were times — like when he used his body to get what he wanted, or when he listed off all my vulnerabilities — where he seemed to be reverting back to that dark self, which made me respond to him in all my old ways.

Saying that would cause the tenuous bond of trust between us to splinter, but I was thinking it hard, because I wondered if that was the reason for his adamant refusal to even consider me for the mission. If it brought back memories he didn't want to face of how he had treated me when we first met. I knew what it was like to be forced to have sex with someone against your will. I may have offered myself up to him in a desperate sort of plea bargain, but it had been his job to say “no,” to put space between us, to be the better man — and he hadn't. Maybe because, in some ways, he was weak, too.

I kept expecting that the fighting between us would dissipate, but it never did; when we tired of one subject we simply found another to argue about. He could be conversing with me and being pleasant one moment, and then a storm cloud would descend, and I could see it in his face as that hesitant sense of openness closed off, leaving only hard, indomitable stone in its place.

I loved Michael, and I wasn't quite sure why because he gave me so little recourse in this twisted excuse of a relationship. Was it because I wanted to fix him, or because the sex was good? Was it years of Catholic repression rearing its head, or was it because he had loved me first, and I loved the idea of being loved more than I actually loved the man?

He'd said it before, that he wasn't a love letters and candlelight kind of man. He didn't do romance. He was boorish, and temperamental, and had a striking lack of education that often made him seem unpolished. He had plenty of money, but a lot of it was tied up in material assets and property holdings; he was far too conspicuous to ever live large. He couldn't sing, and wouldn't be playing me any moonlight concertinas on a baby grand piano. He was the antithesis of everything I had ever been taught to see as romantic.

As I watched him get dressed against the backdrop of the sunlit bay window, gilding his profile in liquid gold, I wondered whether romance was something that existed entirely in your head. Love was almost a form of craziness — it could make you see things that weren't really there.

How much of his redemption was illusory? How much of what I loved about him was only there because it was what I wanted to see?