Unholy Promises (29 page)

I awaken to a very naked woman straddling my chest and purring in my face. I react out of instinct, rolling, pinning, crouching. When I hear Fyre’s command to halt, I do; however, it is after Kitten and I are both off the bed and she is pinned with my knee in her gut and my elbow across her larynx.

“Eva? Is that any way to treat my pet?”

I glance around the room, seeing that, no, I haven’t fallen into some new rabbit hole.

We are still in the all-black bedroom of Lewd Larry’s Attic. I remove myself from Kitten’s person slowly, as if she is a bomb about ready to explode and back into a corner.

She rubs her neck and crawls onto the middle of the bed.

“Pet?” I query, feeling suddenly very naked, realizing that we are all naked, and Fyre acts as if this is very normal and that we’re preparing to serve high tea to a visiting diplomat.

“Kitten belongs to me,” Fyre says, as if explanation enough. He leans against a far wall, shoulders and buttocks snug against the cool black surface, legs crossed at the ankles, semi-hard. He’s posing!

My face wrinkles with concentration, and I am sure that next to Kitten’s youthful beauty and freshly applied make-up, my frown wrinkles are far from attractive.

“I’d like for you to get to know one another.”

“What?” I shake my head, trying to remember what came after the rabbit hole. It wasn’t good, I do remember that.

“Climb onto the bed. Talk to Kitten. She’d like to get to know you, and since she is a very big part of my life, I agree, you should get to know one another.”

I’m still struggling with climbing onto the bed to talk with the naked beauty when I realize exactly what he is saying. She is his.

“Oh!” My mouth drops and I feel betrayed suddenly. When he summoned me … I thought … oh fuck. Can this really be happening? I respond with anger and sarcasm, so much safer than jealousy and doubt. “How many pets do you own?”

“One pet,” he answers. “Two, now, if I include you; but then I am also in a committed relationship with Garrett.”

“And you just now decided this was information I needed to know.”

“Yes, now, it became pertinent.” He walks forward. “Will you disobey me? I asked you to join Kitten on the bed.”

“You want me to make small talk with your slut?” I stand, searching the room for something I can wear out of here. Killing Thomas no longer seems a problem. I do not know this man.

He is on me before I can respond, throwing me down, straddling me. I start to roll out, but I am already restrained, at least my hands are, with plastic quick ties. “Get the fuck off me!”

He slides down my body, quick-looping my ankles in inescapable plastic ties.

“Damn you!”

“Was there any doubt before?” He smiles, picking me up and tossing me onto the bed beside the woman. “The first rule here is that I am always obeyed, without question. I will be back to punish you. Have a nice chat.”

“Where are you going?”

He keeps walking. He opens the door and leaves me. With her. I struggle to escape, wriggling on the bed. “I have to get out of here. Let me go.”

Kitten straddles me and I try to buck her off, but she manages to pin me with her knees, holding my shoulders down tight. My sternum, not yet healed completely, screams from her weight and my struggles.

“Just let me go and I won’t kill you,” I tell her.

She sits there, looking at me, and smiles.

“I’m not kidding.”

She reaches out to stroke my face, pushing back my hair. She gazes into my eyes and my discomfort level increases tenfold. “He loves you.”

I close my eyes against hers, feeling invaded. Her thumb traces a small scar that crosses through my eyebrow. “You almost died.”

I struggle under her weight, determined to buck her, but the sharp pain in my chest makes it impossible.

“He loves me too, and Garrett. I wonder if you can accept that? He’ll need you to.

We all will.”

Her voice creeps me out and I wonder if she is the psychotic queen. Does she have the power in this world to scream, “Off with her head!” and have that order followed?

“I’m glad you decided to cooperate.” She bends over and plants a kiss in the middle of my forehead. “But then, if you love him even half as much as I do, you would do anything for him. That’s why I’ve decided to fall in love with you too.”

Okay, someone get the weird, crazy woman off me now. “You are insane!”

“Tell me that you love him,” she demands, pinching my nipple so hard that I scream out.

“Get the fuck away from me!”

“You don’t, do you?” She smiles but it is a sad, scary smile.

Her smile matches her voice and I am terrified. This woman is the most dangerous person in this place. Can no one see that? I really wish I had my gun.

“I knew you didn’t. Your eyes tell the truth … and the truth is, you don’t. So, why are you here? Why did you answer his summons?”

I look at her, deciding I will not answer her questions. What’s she going to do?

Torture me? I start laughing. I can’t help it. This is just too weird for words. I have been in some tight situations. I thought I would die more than once, and honestly believed when I boarded the plane in Paris that this too was a suicide mission, because that’s what makes me so valuable as an agent. I get sent into situations no one can survive and I always come back to them, sometimes a little more black and blue and broken, but always alive.

“Have you ever been in love?” she asks me and something inside of me breaks. I hope she can’t feel the quaking. I ignore her.

“Falling in love is treacherous,” she continues. “I should know. I’ve been in love three times, the first almost killed me, but I guess I’m a survivor. Then I fell in love with Master. You met him, Garrett Lawrence, and honestly, I thought that his love, or at the time, the absence of it, would kill me too.”

I shiver, remembering meeting her Master, remembering submitting to him without even a fight. It is embarrassing how easily I fell to him. I look away, trying to figure out how to escape, realizing that she is still talking.

“I hated Lord Fyre. He terrified me, but there was something about him, something I needed…” She leans down to kiss my cheek and I bite her face. Hard. Not letting go. Her hand slides between our bodies and her bony knuckles dig hard into my barely healed breastbone. “…do you need what only he can give?”

“Fuck!” I buck, trying to get away. She pushes harder. “God damn! Oh, fuck!” I convulse under her, wishing I would pass out from the pain, but I don’t, and she doesn’t quit. “Please, please, please!”

“Please what?”

“Don’t fuck with me!” I growl.

She digs deeper and I honestly believe that bones are separating under the pressure.

“What do you fucking want from me?”

She stops pushing and looks at me. I make eye contact with her and our gazes lock.

“I want you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“He has waited his lifetime for one such as me, though he has yet to understand how much I love him.” Her face moves closer and my vision readjusts to stay focused on her face. “I will be the one who heals him after you break his heart.”

I swallow hard, knowing that this woman could and would kill me if given a chance.

I’ve had a lot of practice reading people and if my eyes tell her that I do not love Thomas, her eyes tell me that she would not give killing me a second thought. I respect that and, without thinking about it, insist, “I do love him.”

She sits back, assessing me, measuring the weight of my words against what she originally read in my eyes, nodding, “I think that once … you did.”

I blink, swallowing several times, dredging up well-practiced emotion until finally I am blinking back tears. I insist, “I still do.”

She laughs at me, bouncing up and down on my chest, clapping her hands.

“Stop!” I cry out, hating my weakness, hating the pain.

She stills, looking down at me. She blinks, her face changing to one of immense grief, and suddenly tears are falling down her cheeks, big, wet, drops, and her bottom lip sticks out as she mocks me, “I do love him.” Her tears end as quickly as they started and she claps her hands, smiling triumphantly. “I know that trick too!” Then she leans in and growls in my ear, really growls, sniffing me like a dog would. “You really don’t want to mess with me.”

Climbing off my body, she lies down next to me, lying down on her side so that she faces me.

“I’m usually the one who says that line,” I tell her, turning my head slightly to look at her, putting my lips so close to hers that, if we weren’t threatening each other, we could be kissing. I can see in her what made Thomas love her and I don’t doubt that he does. My curiosity about them compels me to ask, “How long have you been together?”

“Nine months.”

“Really?” I’m shocked and don’t try to hide the fact. I roll onto my side, facing her.

“It seems you’ve been together years.”

She smiles and our noses bump, making her giggle as she answers, “We make a good fit.” Our beasts rub together and I fight hard not to find it erotic.

I assume she means her and Thomas. I twist my hands, testing the plastic zip ties, knowing freedom is impossible. My fingers tingle. I try to put it from my mind that this woman may become a casualty, the undercurrent thought constantly being my true purpose for being here. Looking into her blue-green eyes, I decide I won’t be responsible for her death. I rub my forehead against hers. “What are we doing?”

“Getting to know one another,” she replies. Our lips touch but I don’t think either of us meant for it to happen. Not a kiss, just a touch. I pull my face back slowly, so hoping that her idea of getting to know each other doesn’t include kissing.

She strokes the side of my face and her touch feels to me more erotic than she intended as I realize she is only brushing my hair out of my face. “Tell me one truth about yourself, something that you think is important for me to know, a secret that has nothing to do with Lord Fyre.”

I almost laugh out loud. We are both naked, lying as close as two lovers, she has threatened me, and I have threatened her … she wants to share secrets? I wonder what game we are playing now, but decide that since I am in no position to escape, I might as well play along. “A secret?”

“Yes, something you’ve never told anyone, and in return, I’ll share a secret of mine.

Our pact being that we never tell anyone else.”

Seriously? This woman is insane. I search my brain for a single secret that I’ve never told anyone. Nothing comes to mind, even though I rack my brain trying to think of something entertaining enough to make her leave me alone. I finally settle for, “I tried to drown myself last week in ten inches of bathtub water. Now, you tell me a secret.”

“What?” She gasps. “You tried to kill yourself? As in you don’t want to live anymore?” She strokes my cheek again and this time there is no doubt about the erotic jolt that courses through my body, or the fact that she intended the touch to be so. She trails soft kisses along the line she stroked. “Why would you not want to live?” Her fingers draw a line down the side of my neck, down the center of my chest over the scar.

Her kisses follow. “Wasn’t this enough pain to make you want to live?” Her eyes roam over my body. Her fingertips travel from scar to scar. Then her touch, then her kiss. So many scars, so many kisses, and as she moves, I become aware of a warm wetness hitting my skin, her tears. She is crying for me, for the past pain that has marked me so.

My eyes follow her body as she blazes her trail of kisses, and I see on her the marks left on her flesh by the men who love her, her bruises and a few very thin white lines that I would bet were made by a switch or cane. I am intrigued by the brand on her forearm.

Thomas has one too and I did not notice until Garrett rolled up his sleeves to tie me in rope, but he as well is scarred. These marks on the three of them are recent, still pink with healing.

It crosses my mind that if I stayed with them, became a part of their love-nest, that they might want to brand me in a similar fashion, but just as quickly I dismiss the thought as insane. The brand ties the three of them as One and anyone else allowed in their group would always be less, would always be separate.

Her mouth returns to my face, kissing my eyelids closed, and to my embarrassment, hot tears roll over my cheeks. She licks the evidence of my emotion away before taking my mouth in a kiss that leaves me breathless. She pulls back and seeks my eyes, I look back at her and our gazes catch. “You are so much like Thomas, but his pain has not led him to seek death. If anything, he craves life.”

“Maybe he just hasn’t seen enough death yet,” I say meanly, not having meant to speak at all. I close my eyes, not understanding what is happening, why, suddenly, with this woman, my heart is crashing through my chest as secret after secret springs to mind.

Secrets that bring with them a shitload of pain, regret, and heartache. I swallow hard, fighting it all back as I grit out, “You owe me a secret.”

“First, promise me that you won’t try to die again.”

“I can’t do that,” I answer.

She trembles against me. “Fine. Die. I don’t care. Why would I care if you decide to go through with it?”

“It shouldn’t matter to you at all,” I tell her and realize for the first time that there is probably no one who would have cared before. Maybe Thomas, but I had thought him dead. For a moment, this woman, this stranger cared whether I live or die. I fight back tears, suddenly wanting her to care again … wanting someone to care so badly, I will take hers. I will choke on the pain building in my chest. I cover my emotion with anger.

“Now, tell me your secret.”

She looks at me long and hard, for a moment making me believe she will renege on our deal. “I’m pregnant, but I may not have this baby … I may abort it—and then get sterilized so that this never happens again.”

I blink at her, a sudden new flood of emotion wrenching my gut. She will choose this? I wasn’t given a choice. The Agency decided that I would be sterilized and so it was so, without any thought given to what I wanted, and afterward I felt violated in the worst way. They’d taken away any hope I’d ever have of a normal future, but then I guess the first time they gave me a kill order, they took away my normal everything.