Savage Bond (The Fallen) (13 page)

"You want me to believe in destiny." Her expression said it all, didn't it? That wasn't the ecstatic smile of a lottery winner that she was wearing. "That someone's been waiting three thousand years for me to come along? Comparatively speaking, Vkhin, I might have been born yesterday, but I'm not that stupid. No one has ever wanted me like that. I'm not some predestined mate for a Fallen angel. None of that is even remotely possible. Your damned wall has probably malfunctioned. That, or you got it wrong and no one—human or paranormal—can cross over it. Which means, we're stuck waiting here for rescue."

She
was
special. He'd known that from the first moment he'd felt her watching him. He wasn't handling this right, but that was no surprise. He was a fighter, not a damned poet.

"We have another choice. I want you," he growled. "We both know that."

Of course, he wasn't going to bring soul mates up in conversation with her. He wasn't stupid. She was already too wary and he'd made his dislike of the bond damned clear. So, if he changed his tune too fast here, she'd be on to him. And this was too important to fuck up.

"Bond with me."

"No." Clearly, she didn't have to think twice and that just proved his point, didn't it. She dropped her pack on the ground and followed it down.

"I'm not asking," he said. "I'm telling." Of course, the bond wouldn't happen if she didn't agree, but he didn't have time to tap dance around this. The rogues would be catching up all too soon, and he didn't see another way out.

"Really." She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. "That was perfectly obvious, thank you. You told me you don't do bonds. You said, no way in hell."

Unfortunately, her memory was working just fine. He crouched down on the ground next to her, slapping his hands down around her. "Look up," he growled. "You see anything
friendly
flying around up there?"

Her head tilted back, looking straight up. "Not a thing, Vkhin."

"Right." He leaned into her, but she didn't budge, so he ended up chest to chest with her. "All that clear blue means you and me? We're royally fucked, baby. There's no chopper up there right now, MVD or the Fallen. We've got nothing—except a pack of rogues who are going to show up here anytime now and then all hell breaks loose. You need to get out of here now and, for that, you need me."

She looked at him like she wanted him to be different. Like he'd somehow disappointed her. He told himself that didn't matter. He was doing what had to be done to get her out of here.

"This is all about your deal, isn't it?" She shoved him away and he went. He figured he'd made his point and she'd get with the program quickly enough. Ria Morgan was one of the smartest women he'd ever met, even if she didn't know it.

"Yeah. This doesn't have to suck, Ria. Trust me," he said, feeling the biggest bastard around. His kind seduced and they both knew it. He didn't have to tell her the forever part of being a soul mate—that was a little secret he could take with him right to the grave.

"Bond with me, Ria Morgan."

"This doesn't bother you at all, does it?" She waved a hand at the blades. "Killing. Being on the run. This is just another job for you."

His eyes watched her, but she knew he was aware of their surroundings, too. Anyone, anything came out of those trees, he was ready.

"That's what I am," he said calmly. "You knew that, Ria. And I made no bones about it. I've been fighting for millennia. It's who I am. I kill."

Just the thought made her queasy. How could anyone live like that, day after day? For
centuries
? Fear had her stomach knotted up right now.

"It's not who I am," she admitted.

"Of course not."

The anger was a welcome change. "I'm scared, Vkhin. Scared all the time. I can Ôt do this, can't live like this. Going up in that chopper, I thought I was being so damned brave. That maybe I'd finally conquered all this fear I had inside me. Earn a little respect. Instead, here I am, stuck inside a prison and we're arguing over who is going to rescue me because I can't do it for myself."

He muttered a curse. "Who told you that you weren't brave?" he asked finally.

"Some things don't need telling." She shrugged. "My dad.  The trainers at MVD. Lieutenant Reece." When Vkhin raised an eyebrow questioningly, she added, "The woman who had to push my ass out of that chopper because I couldn't jump on my own."

He stared at her and she got the sense he'd rather be anywhere. Taking on a pack of rogues he understood. This conversation thing? Not so much. "It's okay for you to be scared," he said carefully. "Point is, you got out of that plane. If you couldn't do it for yourself, you made the arrangements to get someone else to take care of business for you. That's just smart."

"You're never scared."

"Baby," he growled. "I don't feel emotion like that. Not since the Fall. Feeling scared isn't something I can do."

"But you don't like this, don't like being forced to bond with me."

"You're different," he said and she wanted to believe him. She searched his face, looking for something, anything, because all her instincts were screaming that this wasn't a male who didn't feel. He didn't wear those emotions on his sleeve, but they were there, buried deep beneath the surface.

"Let me help you," he said. "Let me get you out of here. Maybe, MVD gets their act together and they send another chopper after you. Maybe, that new bird gets here before the rogues catch up with us. That happens, they come for you and they make it, I'll bow out and you can go home with them."

"You don't think that's happening anytime soon."

"No." Clearly, he wasn't going to bullshit her. "I think that if MVD was capable of hosting a successful rescue mission, that first chopper wouldn't have gone down. Plus, MVD would have been waiting here for you. They'd have been watching for movement at the wall, would have sent in one of those UAVs you pilot for them. They didn't do that. They sent a rescue team and that team went down."

"What happens?"

"If we bond?" He stood up and eyeballed their surroundings. "We have sex." Yeah, he definitely wasn't going to sugar-coat this. "I ask you to name your favor. You do that. Then we have ourselves a connection. I can sense your emotions, feed off of them, and whatever favor you ask for gets taken care of. In this case," he hesitated, "I think I'll get my wings back."

"Since I'm a soul mate?"

"Yeah. So," his eyes bored into hers, "Question is, will you do it?"

She shouldn't. Making a bargain with a Fallen angel was about the most unsafe choice she could make. He was a killer. Ruthless and hard and unfathomably older than she was. Worse, he'd just said he pretty much wasn't capable of feeling anything.

So why was she so certain he was a good man? An honorable soldier. He'd keep his promises because his sense of right and wrong was unbending. Vkhin's world was all black and white—he didn't do grey, even though he lived in a world of shadows. God, that was sexy. And he deserved more, so much more. He hadn't wanted her
before
. Hell, she had only a passing acquaintance with telling the truth. She'd lie and cheat and steal to get her job done because, at the end of the day, she was going to do her part to keep the human residents of M City safe.

And to keep Vkhin safe, too, because she didn't want to watch him die and she didn't want to leave him behind here. "Yes."

"Then we go over there," he said, indicating a tumble-down building tucked close to the wall. Maybe, before the Fallen had taken over here, that building had been a hunting lodge. Maybe, it had been part of the princely estates that had dotted the Russian landscape for the last thousand years. Now, the building had decayed, was a mere shadow of what it had been. Russia was a sybaritic empire that had eaten itself up and collapsed when the underdogs had finally risen up and demanded their own day and their own turn at fucking things up royally. All that was left here were ghosts and whispers of power-that-had-been and that was just too fucking perfect.

She'd fall there.

Chapter Eight

Taking her indoors was the gentlemanly thing to do, but Vkhin hadn't been a gentleman. Ever. He'd been bred to be a fighter. A cold-hearted, cold-blooded killer whose only redeeming grace was that he fought for the Heavens.  Remaining outside was more defensible. Outside and you didn't end up trapped beneath four walls and a roof when they came for you.

But, damn it, he was going to do this right.

Even if he only had a half hour tops.

He kicked aside what was left of the door and shouldered his way inside. The lodge was full of dust and antiques, the bones of former splendor. And a huge bed. That bed could have held two Russian empresses and half their court and it worked just fine for him. The cover was almost gone from age so he tossed his duster over the top. Would have to do. Didn't matter how much he wanted more for her. This was all he had to offer tonight.

He just hoped to hell it would be enough.

"You bond with me," he said, wrapping his hands around those slender fingers exploring his face, "you won't ever forget it. You give me those words, let me in, and you're going to see the marks on your skin every single morning that we're bonded. You ready for that?"

"You're talking about the bonding marks."

She'd have seen the tattoo-like markings in MVD's files and on the images her drones had shot. Those marks were black bands around the wrists of both the human and the Fallen angel. Patterns varied, as did the thickness of the markings, but every single Fallen-human pair was marked like that. The greater the favor, the darker the markings. Like a really big
paid
sticker or a cosmic receipt.

"Does it hurt?" She toed off her sneakers, reaching for the zipper on the jumpsuit. With her hair tangled around her face, she looked impossibly sexy. The loud rasp of the zipper coming down took his gaze with it. The jumpsuit parted, revealing a pale vee of creamy skin and the lilac tease of her bra. She bent over, pushing the heavy material down her legs and that simple movement had his blood pounding in his ears as he drank in the erotic sight of those long, slim legs and the cheeks of her ass cupped by the thin cotton of her panties.

Something inside him came alive, reacting fiercely to the thought of her in pain, being hurt.

"No." His fingers clenched on the gold bracelet in his pocket. He should give it back to her, but he wanted that piece of her. The fragile links had been next to her skin, warmed by her skin. Carried her scent even as they'd been caught and torn and broken in the chopper crash.

She wasn't going to end up broken like that bracelet. He'd done everything he could to keep her safe, both from the rogues hunting them in the Preserves and from himself. He couldn't be trusted. He knew that, even if she didn't. It was why Zer, the leader of the Fallen, had agreed to let him be the one to come here. To hunt
her
. Get in, get her pics.

If he bonded with her and she was, as he suspected, his soul mate, their bonding would restore his wings. The only way out of the Preserves was up and over, so that math was simple. He'd do what it took.

He'd take her. Hold her.
Have
her. And, if he couldn't control himself, couldn't control his demon side and the soul thirst, he'd kill her. Just like his last bond mate. It was a chance he had to take, he reminded himself, because she'd die if the rogues got their hands on her.

But at his hands would be worse.

She trusted him.

Barefoot, she moved towards the bed, then hesitated. Reaching down inside one of the pockets on the leg of her jumpsuit, she took out the vidstick.

"Here," she said. "You take this for now. Keep it safe for me, okay?"

The plastic case was warm from her skin. His fingers closed over it. He could destroy it. Could leave her here to face the rogues or simply snap her neck, if he was feeling charitable. That knowledge was in her eyes.

"Okay," he answered and wondered what exactly he was promising her. Because this was becoming more than a simple exchange of favors. He knew that. Hoped like hell she did, too.