One Breath, One Bullet(The Borders War book 1) (9 page)

Armise’s lip tipped up at my admission. “It seems our governments both have a vested interest in getting that useless chip in their hands. If it even exists.”

If his words had been said to elicit a reaction from me, then they had worked. “Useless?” I found myself asking him without consciously framing my intentions before I spoke out loud. The other side of his mouth twitched, full lips tugging into a slow smile at my misstep. I continued, “Interesting choice of words. Care to enlighten me?”

“That chip is a fool’s journey. The Holy Grail of our time. But the solution is never that easy.”

I sneered. “Says the man also risking his life to get his hands on it.”

“I just do what I’m told.”

“Even if it means your life?”

“Makes it all the more engaging.” Armise took one last step. He had been slowly advancing on me and was now only inches away from the barrel of my rifle. I didn’t worry about him using it against me though. The customised security mechanisms kept anyone besides me from firing it.

His hands were still raised and he watched me with cold calculation. Studying me, as if he had the ability to strip me bare.

“What do you want from me?” I found myself asking, not sure why I was even asking the question.

Armise cocked his head. “I’ve seen you on other missions.”

His confession startled me, but I restrained a physical reaction.

A hank of black hair fell onto his forehead that he swiped back casually, but kept his palms facing me. “I can’t pick you apart. Not like the others. You… fascinate me.”

“Spent the last five years thinking about how you weren’t able to kill me?” I scoffed.

“So you do remember me,” he drew out. The set of his shoulders eased as did the features of his face. As if he was satisfied with my answer. “Put the rifle down, Merq,” he prompted.

He said my name as if we were old friends and the sound of my name on his tongue—with a shortened ‘r’ and a clipped ‘q’—heightened my awareness of just how close he was to me.

How long had it taken him to discover who I was? His knowledge of me, his admitted fascination with me, should have kicked my overdeveloped sense of self-preservation into action. Instead it made me more curious about him. I didn’t know what to do with that.

I noted the strong set of his shoulders. The obvious strength in every twitch of his muscled form. The crispness of the black fabric that clung to his powerful body. There was no way he’d been the one to beat Jegs into near-death. There wasn’t enough blood on his uniform. And his hands, his palms still facing me, were clean and uncut.

“Then what?” I ground out in reply to his ludicrous request. I was losing my patience with whatever game he was playing.

Before I knew it he had his hand around the barrel of my rifle and had yanked it off my shoulder and out of my hand. It clattered across the concrete, and I immediately went for the sonicpistol at my side and brought it up to his head. He didn’t flinch, instead taking one large step that eliminated the space between us, amping up the tension. I could feel his warm huff of breath as, again without any warning, he brought his lips to mine.

Shock was too tame of a word to encompass my reaction. I bit down on his lip with force, tasting his blood. My finger tightened on the trigger but didn’t follow through with what would have been a fatal sonicbullet to his brain.

Then he was pulling back from me. He swiped his hand across his chin, wiping away the bead of blood that trickled from the gash on his lip. “The infochip isn’t in Singapore.”

I didn’t respond. I hit the button on the transport chip on my uniform and was back in the States before I had to consider why Armise had kissed me. And why there was a part of me that had wanted more.

* * * *

Twelve years later and he, unlike anyone else in my life, still held the power to set me off balance.

Armise had me trapped in his iron grip in one swift motion, his forearm tightening around my carotid artery, blackening my vision. He picked me up from the tunnel floor as if I weighed nothing and slammed me against the wall. He pushed my face against the steel and I could hear the sonicbullets ricocheting through the pipes, just inches from my face. The sound kicked up my adrenaline response, speeding up my heart and shallowing my breaths. His shoulder pinned me to the wall, his legs were set wide and low to give him the leverage he needed to trap me there. I pushed against his unbreakable hold, even as I fought to stay conscious, but he had always been stronger than I was. And without room to manoeuvre I didn’t have an angle on him.

I wanted to know what President Kersch had told him. And why Armise had laughed in response. I couldn’t understand why he wanted that first bullet so badly. Why he wanted to keep the President alive. It was the only reason for him agreeing to take on this task that my oxygen-starved, addled brain could take in.

But then I felt the hardness of his cock against my thigh and realised his heart was pounding in his chest where it was pressed to my back. This was how every encounter with us began. Violent, demanding, his muscles tensing, flexing, his body primed for my counterattack.

I tentatively pressed back, testing, and was immediately met by the force of his hips pushing me into the wall.

That was when I knew this wasn’t about the President’s death or that bullet, at least not right now.

“Don’t make me fuck you harder than I’m already going to,” Armise ordered. His voice was raspy, words pushed out in a frenzied whisper, confirming my thoughts. My body immediately responded—as it always did for Armise. The sheer insanity of the moment—pinned against my will, my cock hardening in response to the man I’d been preparing myself to kill—could only be matched by the intensity of my need. Armise tightened his grip on my neck.

I was wheezing for breath and somehow that made me harder.

I let my body relax by the tiniest of fractions. It was a show of submission that Armise would be able to feel only because he was crushed against me, the insistence of his hands unrelenting. I pushed my ass back against him, the movement barely possible with how immobilised I was by him.

“Then do it already,” I gasped, teeth grinding together with the force to get the words out.

Armise didn’t release the arm around my neck, but he moved his left hand from my shoulder to my hip, circling it, digging his fingers into the hard muscle, the bruising immediate. Blood rushed to the brand he left on my skin. His fingers slipped beneath the waistband of my pants and I felt him shiver against my back. His lips brushed my neck so softly I wondered if I’d imagined it. My body remained tense, ready to strike, but I was now meeting his touch, pushing back harder, driving him back on feet that were becoming unsteady.

“Get to it, bitch,” I spurred him on. “Then kill me. It’s time for this to be over.”

I knew the idea of killing me appealed to him on more than one level. While I appreciated pain, he found satisfaction in death. I was glad I couldn’t step inside his mind at this moment to see just how happy my vulnerability was making him. He would have been the perfect Peacemaker, if only he fought for the right country.

He tugged at my waistband, pushing my pants to the floor, stripping me, letting my straining cock free. He pushed his own pants to the ground and rutted against me, his thick length sliding against the crack of my ass. He smashed my cock against the frigid steel. I saw stars from the sudden agony and the arm still at my throat, choking off the flow of blood to my head. But the pain grounded me in a way that a beating never would, and I felt my head clearing.

Armise was the lightning strike in my storm. He appeared without warning—a violent burst, and brilliant flash, lighting up the night sky—then retreated in a cacophonous crash, leaving me dazed, unsteady and blinking back stars from my vision.

He was unpredictable. Unstable.

Deadly and hypnotic.

And yet it was like I stood defiantly in the storm, rifle lifted towards the churning sky, and challenged him to strike me.

As if I came alive in that moment of impact.

Armise thrust our bodies together. My lips were cracked, bloodied, the knuckles of my hands split and aching. My shoulder pinned to the wall was losing all sensation, but I wouldn’t let him fuck me. That hadn’t happened in any of our years of negotiation, and I wouldn’t allow it to happen now. Armise wouldn’t win this fight.

He drew back, removing his shirt, and I spun, setting him off balance. My right arm was too weak to take him on, so I used my left shoulder to turn him as we tumbled towards the opposite wall, and ended up in a position that was almost an exact mirror to how we’d been before, except this time it was me pinning him to the wall.

My left forearm was against the back of his neck, crushing his windpipe into the cold stone wall, and my right hand sought out his dick. I gripped it harshly and then teased at the head with my thumb. Armise groaned and I loosened the pressure on his neck. He leaned his head back on my shoulder in a sign of surrender. His eyes were closed, his breath coming in gasps that matched the pumping of my fist on his cock, and I knew for certain this was what he had been hoping for. His body was now mine to use.

“You won’t be fucking me at all,” I growled into his ear.

Then Armise gave me a wicked grin that broke the last of my control.

I spit into my hand, coated myself and thrust into him, nearly dry. I imagined my cock, driven inside him so harshly, must have seared, like the hot kiss of a knife. But Armise didn’t make a sound besides a rushed exhale of breath. I pulled completely out, spit again, slicking myself and him, and then forced myself back inside, his tight heat fighting the intrusion. He was still for a moment and then ground back on my cock, driving me deeper into his ass until I couldn’t control the moan ripped from me.

Armise could take this. He’d been created by his government to withstand pain, to keep standing when anyone else would bend and give in.

He pushed back with just as much brutality as I gave him. I put my right hand on the small of his back, and forcefully pressed his spine into an arch so I could pull his ass closer to me. His skin was slick beneath my palm, his muscles shifting in the fractured light. He threw his head back and groaned, a sound that rumbled from his chest and filled the air around us. Every nerve in my body responded to the guttural noise and I pounded into him, completely abandoning the soldier in me. There was no mission, no double identities, no war and no enemies.

For this moment I was just a man, my cock heavy for a man who could take the punishment I was giving him. A man who wanted to be taken by force as much as I wanted to claim him.

“Fuck me harder,” he commanded, his rough voice careening me closer to the edge.

I bent my knees and took him at a different angle. My legs were shuddering, threatening to give out, but the pleasure was too good for me to let go. Armise’s body was so strong and masculine. All edges and hard planes, skin that was scarred, covered in the all-black twists and solid letter block tattoos, inked over each permanent wound marking his body. Many of them, wounds that I had given him.

He fought me to control the pace, slamming himself down on me over and over again, until neither of us could maintain a rhythm anymore and his body spasmed around me as he grunted and came. His body shook as the waves of his pleasure rippled down the defined muscles of his back. The sight sent me over the edge and I was spilling inside him, gasping for breath, inhaling the scent of his sweat into my aching lungs.

I braced my left hand on the wall and dropped my head into the groove between his shoulder blades as we struggled to catch our breath. I licked at the droplets of sweat falling down his spine and he shivered. When I pulled out of him he sighed and sagged against the steel wall and I could see just how rough I’d been with him. He had fingertip-sized bruises on his hips, his neck and arm. Matching bite marks on his shoulders that I couldn’t remember giving him. A line of blood trickled from his eyebrow, where I’d pushed his face into the wall.

But Armise was smiling.

The fucker who the President had chosen to mutilate me was smiling.

It was only then, when the real world began to intrude, that I realised just how close Armise had come to being able to kill me. Again. This was too dangerous of a game. I had to stop giving into my baser instincts. Giving into him. I was stronger than this. I had to be stronger than him.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” I said out loud, the words tumbling from my mouth in a frustrated accusation that mirrored what I’d said to him the first time he kissed me.

And I froze. Realised I was asking the question more of myself than I was of him.

Armise didn’t turn. Didn’t answer me.

I slammed my hand into the stone wall then dropped my forehead into the crook of his neck.

He sighed deeply, and my chest, pressed to his wide back muscles, moved with him.

I didn’t know how to disengage myself from him.

Just like every other time I’d found myself in this position, my body wrapped around his, shuddering with the brutal release only his body could give me, a thought flashed through my mind—
this man will be the death of me.

Chapter Eight